Nov. 30, 2024
San Lorenzo High School senior Cordé August has always expected to become his family’s first college graduate. And he readily acknowledges being “in love with education.”
Nevertheless, the impending reality of admission requirements and tuition expenses had left him feeling less sure about his college plans. He had begun to consider a career in law enforcement or trying to start his own business.
But that was before August and about 30 other students from San Lorenzo Schools visited five Historically Black Colleges and Universities on Nov. 6-10 – a first-ever opportunity financed by the district and organized through the HBCU Making Moves Tour, which is offered by the Kids 1st Foundation.
Accompanied by an administrator, two teachers and two counselors, the students flew from San Francisco to Atlanta and toured the campuses of Tuskegee University, Morehouse College for men, Spelman College for women, Clark Atlanta University and Alabama State University.
Between college visits, which included learning spaces, residence halls and on-campus dining, they also stopped at a series of momentous and moving Black historical and cultural sites, including the place in Montgomery, Ala., where Rosa Parks was arrested after refusing to give up her seat on a bus and the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, which contains the tombs of both MLK and his wife, Coretta Scott King.
On their first night, they joined a gathering of Morehouse students to watch live election results. The next day, in addition to Clark Atlanta University, the girls visited Spelman, and the boys received a Morehouse campus tour from one of their own, 2021 San Lorenzo High graduate Hudson Osborne. He will graduate from the men’s college in Atlanta in 2025, with a degree in political science and international studies. Morehouse is the alma mater of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and also of SLZUSD Superintendent Dr. Daryl Camp, who remains passionate about his experience there.
The SLZUSD group included eight students from Bay Area Digital Arts, a Small Learning Community at SLzHS. They documented the trip on video that will be shared with various audiences in the coming months and years.
SLZUSD Director of Secondary Education Kai Dwyer, who led the group, said the combination of the college visits and historic sites was “a great cultural experience” and "a great use of resources,” adding, “I hope we can do it again.”
For August, the chance to spend quality time on multiple campuses revived his determination to complete a college degree, and specifically at an HBCU. The trip was also his first experience of air travel and traveling outside of California.
“Me, being a person of color and being in the midst of African American culture, I was like, ‘This is the best opportunity for me,’” he said, “because I know I’m going to get a lot of that culture and be surrounded by a lot of people who have my same interests and are the same nationality.”
Another SLzHS student on the trip, senior Za’Niyah Foster, said she had her sights set on attending an HBCU even before making the trip, having participated in two previous HBCU tours.
Now president of her school’s Black Student Union organization, Foster said her mother has long encouraged her to include HBCUs in her college planning, and she has her eye on Prairie View A&M University in Texas, with a goal of becoming a nurse.
On this trip, seeing the Homecoming celebration and rich student life at their final stop, Tuskegee University in Tuskegee, Ala., made a special impression, she said: “That realIy made me feel excited to be there and really proud of the things I’ve seen there.”
Arroyo High School students echoed Foster’s view that the trip also bridged a traditional rivalry relationship between Arroyo and San Lorenzo high.
“We still text on group chat,” junior Zamir Hudson said two weeks after the trip.
Both he and fellow 11th-grader Mark Martinez said the experience made them more likely to seriously consider attending an HBCU when they graduate from Arroyo.
Martinez said he’d been thinking more about attending a public university in Southern California, but the experience of touring campuses and seeing the South changed his perspective. “I want to go to one of the HBCUs,” he said. “It definitely opened my eyes to all the possibilities around the country where I can go.”
Zamir agreed that seeing students thriving on a mostly Black campus made a big impression, including their expressions of personal style.
“It’s very motivating to see people who look like me and also are trying to succeed,” he said.
The students also made a connection between the history of anti-Black racism they saw up close while visiting historic and cultural sites and the origins of HBCUs, which were established to provide higher education for Black students when they were excluded from predominantly White institutions.
For example, August of SLZHS was struck by the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Ala., which includes a six-acre field of steel monuments, grouped by state, each with the name of a county where a racial terror lynching took place – more than 800 in all. The monuments are placed progressively higher, forcing the viewer to look toward the sky, which August said was the last thing lynching victims saw before they died.
“I think it was very important,” he said, “because we could see where we’ve come from and where we are now, just like the Black colleges. The way it is now is not as it used to be. … Being in Atlanta and Alabama, I was like, ‘This is where it started. I’m stepping on the same soil they were stepping on.”