D.C. Success Story Gets Maryland Reading, Talking
Ballou Grad Urges Others 'to Be Better'

By Miranda S. Spivack
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 28, 2008; DZ12

The Maryland Humanities Council has launched a program to get everyone in Maryland on the same page -- literally.

At a kickoff event last week at Montgomery College's Rockville campus, the organization spotlighted Cedric Jennings, the protagonist in the book selected for the first One Maryland One Book program.

The 31-year-old Ballou High School graduate's tale of overcoming meager beginnings is poignantly recounted in "A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League," a nonfiction account by journalist Ron Suskind that was published 10 years ago. The humanities council selected the book from more than 80 others after a lengthy vetting process aimed at finding a book that would appeal to teenagers and adults.

Although some localities in the state have long had reading programs to encourage community conversation, this is the first time the Maryland council has decided to try to get everyone in the state reading and discussing the same book.

"There is the well-documented decline of reading in the adult population, and that is a strong inspiration for communities to do this," said Andrea Lewis, who is managing the project for the council. "The other thought is that it really is a great way to get people talking within their community. And it is part of our initiative to generate discussion around the state about race and race relations," during the 40th anniversary year of the assassination of civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

High schools throughout the state have made the book required reading. At Montgomery College, Esther Schwartz-McKinzie, director of the Paul Peck Humanities Institute, said students and faculty members will read the book this fall and discuss it in classes, small groups and other settings.

The community college's three campus libraries, in Germantown, Rockville and Takoma Park, also are sponsoring community conversations about the book.

"At the college, we are very excited to have that," Schwartz-McKinzie said. "Reading used to be much more of a communal experience. People don't read for pleasure anymore."

The book has special resonance at Montgomery College, where many students are the first in their families to attend college, are foreign born and, in many instances, are struggling financially.

"We are dedicating our lives to the social issues that underlie the book, providing equity in education," Schwartz-McKinzie said.

Jennings, an African American who was raised by his mother, Barbara, a U.S. Agriculture Department employee, spoke to a rapt audience at the college last week.

He described the complex decision-making when he was 16 that eventually led him to allow Suskind to examine his life for what was to be a single article in the Wall Street Journal. The first article led to a second and eventually the book.

"A Hope in the Unseen" chronicles in often explicit detail how Jennings was an outcast in his high school because he was bright and therefore uncool; his great good luck at having an empathetic teacher who often mentored him; how he and his mother struggled when the rent came due; and how despite these difficulties, he was usually confident in his ability to overcome challenges.

On his own, after a so-so summer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was told he was not MIT material, he applied to Brown University, determined that he could overcome mediocre SAT scores and the academic limitations of his high school. Once he sent in the application, he immediately told people at school that he was going to go to Brown, in the Ivy League, even though he had not heard from the admissions office.

"I don't know what I would have told folk if I had not gotten in," he said, his sense of relief palpable a decade later.

Agreeing to talk to Suskind was not an easy call for Jennings. "My first reaction was to distrust him," he told the audience, which included some students and many faculty members.

"I don't know if I am willing to share," he recalled thinking. Jennings's upbringing and his religious faith encouraged discretion. "You don't tell everyone your business. No one wants to have a pity party," he said.

And he doubted Suskind's sincerity.

"I didn't think he would have the guts to come to my neighborhood," Jennings said.

Eventually, he decided to open up his world to the journalist on the condition that Suskind would share his life with Jennings. The match seemed to work; the two remain friendly, as do members of their families.

Recounting events to Suskind, Jennings said, turned out to be "therapeutic. I was able to really heal from a lot of the past challenges I had," including making peace with his often absent, often disappointing father, who did time in the District's prison in Lorton.

When Jennings later was trying to figure out a career path, he made a brief foray into the world of big money, contemplating an offer at one point from Wall Street investment banking firm Goldman Sachs. "I visited and realized this is not me. I decided to follow my passion and not go for the money."

Now Jennings plans to turn another page. Having earned graduate degrees from Harvard and the University Michigan and worked for several years as a social worker in the District, he is about to move to a new challenge. He has agreed to run a youth pre-professional program for D.C. Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray (D).

"I want to propel the next generation to do better than we have done. You don't want to be Cedric Jennings. You want to be better than Cedric Jennings," he said to much applause and a few tears.

Jennings and Suskind are discussing the book in separate appearances in Maryland in the next few months. For details on their speaking engagements and information about the One Maryland One Book program, go tohttp://www.mdhc.org/programs/one-maryland-one-book.