Jamarius Strong-Williams has dreams of working in healthcare. The 19-year-old Georgia Gwinnett College (GGC) majors in biology with a concentration in biochemistry in the hope of someday becoming a surgeon. But Strong-Williams said that having grown up in the town of Covington, about 35 miles southeast of Atlanta, he felt that such big dreams were elusive for a small-town African American male, where the poverty rate is 21%, nearly double the average of the poverty rate in Georgia.
“Where I come from, there are not many people – really anybody at all – who say they want to be things; its more about money,” he said. “Surgery isn’t about that – it’s about helping people and giving them the effective care that’s needed.”
When Strong-Williams became a GGC student, he was invited to join the college’s African American Male Initiative/Elite Scholars (AAMI), where he met Harrison Clark, a student who had some big dreams of his own.
“When I came to GGC, I met Harrison through AAMI,” said Strong-Williams. “Harrison told me he wanted to be a lawyer, which gave me more confidence to be more open about what I wanted to be. I saw that everyone wanted to be something major that not a lot of African Americans wanted to be.”
Like Strong-Williams, Harrison Clark hails from Lithonia, a small town. An Atlanta suburb, Lithonia is a just a few miles northwest of Covington with a population of about 2,700 people, 16% of them with a college degree. Because Clark graduated from high school with a 1.5 GPA, he described higher education as a “bygone fantasy.” The son of an African American father and a white mother, Clark struggled with his identity and felt like an outsider in a predominately Black community. But Clark knew that his road to success ran through a classroom. So, he became a GGC student and subsequently joined the AAMI. There, he found not only support and understanding – he found brotherhood. Clark finally found where he fit…
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