From “Dropout to Doctorate: Breaking the Chains of Educational Injustice” By Terrence Lester, PhD
Yet the harsher sides of our reality were never far away. During Little League football and baseball practices, Coach Kool-Aid (who played football for Grambling State University, a historically Black college and university – HBCU) used to say, “Not everyone is lucky enough to make it out.” What he meant was that not everyone escapes the neighborhood with a solid education, a successful career, or the kind of personal growth and confidence that would enable them to transcend an environment riddled with poverty. In fact, he once told a few players from the team, “The reality is that some of you might not finish school or have the best path out of the hood. That will depend on how you take what we are teaching you and use it to overcome.” He understood trauma awareness long before any of us had sophisticated language to identify it, recognizing the deep emotional impacts of living in poverty and how it shapes one’s mental and emotional well-being. But I understood exactly what he was talking about.