For the Love Of Ballou

Back then, their achievements made them standouts -- Wayne would graduate from Hart as valedictorian and Jachin as salutatorian -- and they wanted to remain standouts in high school.

All through middle school, they had assumed that high school would be Ballou, but then came scholarship offers from DeMatha Catholic High School in Hyattsville, which caused tensions and divisions in both boys' already divided families.

Everyone "thought I was crazy to have that boy going to Ballou," said Jachin's father, John Leatherman. A white man who has been married to and divorced twice from black women, Leatherman is a cosmetology teacher at Ballou who once styled the hair of songstresses Dionne Warwick and Nancy Wilson. He has primary responsibility for Jachin. At Ballou, Leatherman could keep an eye on his son. But he also wanted Jachin to develop an identity as a strong black male, something he thought would have been more difficult at a school where whites make up about 70 percent of the student population.

"I don't like black people who don't like black people," Leatherman said. "I'm not having some yellow mug in my house think he's better than somebody else."

And so a decision was made -- one that Leatherman would second-guess only once in the ensuing years, when he had to call security to deal with a student who had barged into his classroom and was screaming at a girl. As security took the student away, he threatened to come back for Leatherman -- and for Jachin, too -- and after that, Leatherman would include in his daily prayers a wish that "my son will not get shot, not get cut, not get in a fight."

Meanwhile, a similar debate about Ballou vs. DeMatha had erupted in Wayne's home between Wayne's father and grandfather.

Wayne's father, Wayne White, had graduated from Ballou in 1981. Now a single parent raising Wayne and another son, Ricardo, Ballou is where he wanted both of his sons to go, but the patriarch of the family thought differently.

" 'You crazy, why you letting him go to that school?' " White recalled his father admonishing him. "He was mad -- he cursed me out. His whole thing being from Southeast is whenever you have an opportunity when somebody will pay for something for you, you go."

But, like Leatherman, White held firm and stayed firm throughout Wayne's time at Ballou, even when Wayne and Ricardo were walking home from a football game and suddenly found themselves surrounded by 10 neighborhood thugs. As Wayne described that night, "the guy had a shotgun and pointed it at my face. He asked me for my coat."

Coat given, that was the end of it, and as frightening as the experience was, it didn't change White's mind about sending his sons to Ballou.

"A lot of times, our brightest students get taken [by private schools] and don't get to go to Ballou," he said. "They'll take those schools to a higher level while you'll hear negative things about Ballou."

And so a second decision was made.