"Black Is Beautiful!" was the cry 20 years ago. Now it's an unabashed declaration: "Black Is Smart!" And proud of it.
At the University of Maryland Baltimore County, a major movement is on to to identify, reward and push onward young black scholars in science, mathematics and engineering.
The idea is to bury the notion that it isn't cool -- that it's a "white" thing -- to be smart and black. It is also to counter the idea that blacks succeed only as pro athletes and drug merchants.
Put aside for the moment all theories of how these warped notions came to be. Maybe they are part of the white conspiracy to keep blacks down. Think, rather, about the reality: Although on a national scale the gap between white and black academic achievement has narrowed (actually, black test scores have increased while white scores have stagnated), in the nation's metropolitan areas, blacks (and particularly black males) have fallen shockingly behind, so far behind that the real achievers are as scarce as. . . well, as scarce as white professional basketball players.
Blame it on society, blame it on a drug culture that affects so many young black men, blame it on a way of life that places little value on academic achievement. Those trying to reverse it aren't blaming anything or anyone. They're spending their energy trying to turn things around.
One of them is Freeman Hrabowski, the black executive vice president of UMBC. Three years ago, Hrabowski approached Robert and Jane Meyerhoff, of the Baltimore philanthropic family, with a proposition: Let me bring Maryland's brightest young, black high school graduates to my campus with scholarships, let us give them the best education they can get in science, mathematics and engineering and let us see what happens.
The Meyerhoffs agreed, laid out an initial $541,000, and other private and public money followed (including more from the Meyerhoffs). The Meyerhoff Scholarship Program is now a multi-million-dollar enterprise, and Hrabowski recently turned down a college presidency in California to continue running it.
Hrabowski started with 19 young men two years ago and expanded to 70 last year (adding about 26 young women). By now the number of Meyerhoff scholars at UMBC has become a critical mass. It has pushed the average Scholastic Aptitude Test score of blacks at the school to near 1,000, an unheard of accomplishment. (UMBC's overall SAT average is pushed up, too.) After two years, the Meyerhoff students are averaging 3.5 (of a possible 4.0) grade point average, and not one has dropped out.
