‘Black College or Die’ a new part of the game plan

Darren Sands

On a recent afternoon, George “Chip” Greenidge Jr. was sifting through e-mail, dressed casually in his corner office. It is a generous space that he fills with pictures of his students, African art and stray dollar bills. Greenidge is a tall, dark-skinned man who has degrees from Morehouse and Harvard — and 250 friends on the social networking Web site Facebook.

He has another couple hundred friends on MySpace, and even more on AOL Instant Messenger. Asked how often he is on these sites, Greenidge doesn’t flinch before replying, “Daily.” His is an e-reality fitting a Boston socialite.

The 34-year-old Greenidge is a Facebook user on a mission. He is the executive director of National Black College Alliance (NBCA), a Boston-based nonprofit that helps high school students explore colleges and careers while inspiring them to give back through community service. His “friends” lists consist of a host of people who are members of the organization as students and volunteers. “We used to stay in touch the old school way — phone calls,” he said.

Started in 2000, NBCA has a staff of only five, but boasts “an army of volunteers and mentors,” Greenidge says. His “soldiers” staff events with titles like “College Survival 101,” just one way that Greenidge reaches out to members of Boston’s professional and student community. In 2006, NBCA mentored more than 300 students despite external challenges that affect the city at large.

The organization’s offices are located in Roxbury’s Dudley Square, an area long regarded as the cultural and economic heart of black Boston. Once the epicenter of the worst kinds of drug activity and violence, the area is in the throes of a transformation, and NBCA is helping to lead it.

Joining the organization allowed Morehouse College freshman Thony Ferdinand to mentor students at Boston’s Catholic Memorial, an all-boys high school. He went to a private school and saw a gap between what he learned and what was available to students in the city.

As a mentor, Ferdinand helps students complete federal financial aid forms and college essays, and tutors them with their homework. But mostly, he answers questions about what it’s like to go to Morehouse.

“They want to know about parties, mostly,” Ferdinand says, laughing. “They want to know what the different schools have to offer. And they want to know about the brotherhood, too. They see the bond that we have, and how special it is.”

But NBCA’s task of recruiting and keeping students is not always easy. The organization thrives despite the challenges of supporting students in the inner city, some of whom come from broken families and disadvantaged backgrounds. In 2005, Boston had 75 homicides, nearly matching that total with 74 in 2006. A 14-year-old was killed on New Year’s Day. Shootings like these jolt residents because, with just under 600,000 people, Boston’s population is relatively small among major cities.

The events inspired Greenidge to start “Black College or Die,” a campaign that will take 25 to 30 young people from Boston’s most troubled neighborhoods on several tours of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

Even NBCA has been affected by the rampant gun violence. Morehouse sophomore Michael Williams was shot in the face while riding in a car in Roxbury.

“I realized that my life can be taken at any point in time,” said Williams, a political science major.

Williams said two people, both of whom are NBCA volunteers, helped him to challenge his ideas and encouraged him to put things in perspective during his recovery.

“My family here gave me the support I needed to understand things a little better, and gain a better sense of the state of the black community,” Williams said. “I can’t wait for things to change. It’s up to me now, because there’s a lot of work that needs to be done.”

“It put the whole organization on alert that everyone is a target,” said Greenidge. “We said that we needed to do more to take matters into our own hands and start being more active as mentors and volunteers. Here’s a kid who did all the right things and someone is shooting at him? It didn’t make sense.”

Williams is one of the student organizers of NBCA’s well-known T-shirt campaigns. Originally started in response to popular T-shirts bearing the phrase “Stop Snitching,” NBCA students wore and distributed shirts that read “Start Studying.” Other shirts play on expressions from hit rap songs popular with urban youth.

“The idea is to use urban youth culture to send positive messages,” said Greenidge. “We can tell them about making the right choices, but it’s our goal to put as many of the opportunities in front of them [as possible] so that they can make the right decisions for their own career path.”

The organization has overcome perhaps its biggest challenge: trying to draw support in a city without a vast pipeline of African American leadership in politics, business and higher education. Places such as Washington and Atlanta not only have that pipeline, but well known HBCUs, Greenidge said. In Boston, some students have never heard of HBCUs. NBCA is part of that exposure.

“I always wanted to go to an HBCU because I knew a black school would give me something I never experienced before,” said Brittany Pennywell, a resident of suburban Lexington, Mass., who is double majoring in biology and mathematics as a freshman at Hampton University.

“It’s really good to see people who have gone to black colleges who can tell you what that experience is like. It motivates you to do better,” she said.

Greenidge and his staff continue to reach out to a growing network of college students and young black professionals, many of them HBCU alumni, who help volunteer and sometimes mentor NBCA students.

Greenidge is hopeful that support from the Charles Hayden Foundation will bring the nonprofit’s model to cities everywhere, an accomplishment that has always been one of its goals.

“If an organization like ours can work in a city like Boston,” Greenidge said, “then it can work virtually anywhere.”

(Black College Wire)