Prepping for the Future: Two Black Experiences
Posted By The Editors | July 15th, 2011 (4 hours ago) | Category: Education | No Comments »
Print This PostBy Kenneth J. Cooper
The only time I’ve interviewed Deval Patrick, after his 2006 election as governor of Massachusetts but before his first inaugural, I began by noting “you and I have a lot in common.” He gave me a puzzled look so I quickly added, “though I haven’t been elected to anything.”
I told the second black governor elected in the country that we both came to Massachusetts in the same year, 1970; at the same age, 14, and “for the same purpose—to go to prep school.”
“Really? Which one?” Patrick inquired, his interest piqued.
“Andover,” I replied, using the informal name of Phillips Academy about 25 miles north of Boston. Patrick attended Milton Academy in a suburb along the city’s southern border.
Though we never met in our youth, the governor and I were on the back side of the first wave of large numbers of black students to attend New England boarding schools, until then the predominant preserve of the sons and daughters of elite white families. Patrick arrived from an impoverished family on Chicago’s South Side; I from a struggling working-class one in Denver. We both won scholarships, his from the nonprofit A Better Chance, mine directly from Andover.
Governor Deval Patrick
So I was most interested in what Patrick says about his Milton Academy experiences in his recent memoir, “A Reason to Believe: Lessons from an Improbable Life.” Fortunately, he writes a lot about Milton, much more than
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