Marc Clarke, host of 92Q's Big Phat Morning Show, was having considerably less than a big phat morning.
Clarke stood in the foyer of one of the Charles Theatre's several movie houses, wondering if he'd been out of line and gone too far with some comments he had made only moments before. The movie house was packed with scores of boys -- nearly all of them black -- who had been brought to a screening of The Pact, a documentary about three doctors from Newark, N. J.
That's just part of the story. In fact, if the three were just doctors from Newark, there'd be no story. But Rameck Hunt, Sampson Davis and George Jenkins are three black men who grew up poor in Newark's ghetto. At 16, Hunt was arrested on an attempted-murder charge and might have dodged a bullet when the charge was dropped. Davis served time in juvenile detention for robbing drug dealers with three of his friends. (Davis said in the documentary that two of those friends are now dead, and the third has AIDS.)
It was Jenkins who came up with the idea that the trio should form a pact, an agreement that they wouldn't let Newark's mean streets suck the life out of them. They agreed to become doctors instead.
Today Hunt is on the staff of the University Medical Center at Princeton. Davis is an emergency room physician at two Newark hospitals and works at a violence prevention center, and Jenkins is a dentist who recently became the director of minority affairs at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.
Three organizations arranged for different groups of Baltimore boys to view The Pact in November. Richard Rowe of the African American Male Leadership Institute, David Miller and LaMarr Darnell Shields of the Urban Leadership Institute, and Imam Earl El-Amin, co-host with Rowe of the radio show Dialogue with the African American Male on WEAA thought the message in The Pact was so powerful that the film warranted a third showing in Baltimore.
Clarke personally footed the bill for the theater rental. He also paid for the projectionist. Most of the boys in the theater sat quietly, taking in the film's message. But there were a few knuckleheads. Some talked while the film was on. Some talked and snickered. Clarke made it a point to publicly dress down the knuckleheads when the movie ended.
"Some of you wanted to act like asses," Clarke thundered at the knuckleheads. He reminded them that Hunt, Davis and Jenkins came from environments virtually a mirror image of their own, which was the purpose of showing them the documentary in the first place.
