Now I Can Dream: Adult Black Males and the Mentors That Saved Them
CHAPTER 1 THE AWAKENING To be conscious of how difficult the European has made one’s life is to be conscious at a very elemental level. It is like waking from a long sleep. ix
I remember it as
if it were yesterday, when it frst happened. I was scared that people would think I was crazy, hearing voices, making claims, accusations; it’s all kind of surreal now that I look back, but it was life altering. Yes, that it was. So, two years ago, almost to the day, I was attending class for my doctorate, fulflling a dream I’d had for quite some time, my own sense of self-actualization, you know? Anyway, I was attending classes towards my doctorate in Adult and Continuing Education at National-Louis University (this is a shout out) and I recall leaving class on a Friday evening and walking along Adams Street in downtown Chicago, the Loop district to be specifc, towards my hotel with four members of my class cohort: Delores, a brown skinned, athletically built baby boomer from Northern Virginia; Bryce, a short in stature, but long in ideas, silverhaired Canadian from Nova Scotia; Morris, a 40 something, dark haired stout gentleman from Tennessee; and Kaitlin, a blond in her 60’s, with pale skin and a Dutch boy haircut, from the Chicago suburbs. Fall was in the air, and people were beginning to dress with a few more layers, but the weather was really nice, cool and crisp, and you could see the richness of the fading blue sky overhead. As we walked back to the hotel, we chatted about general topics and talked about the 1