Open Secrets: A Poor Person's Life in Higher Education

by Betty Brown-Chappell

Open A Poor Person’s Life in Higher Education I have been blessed. Not because I was born into the good life of wealth and luxury - quite the I was blessed by birth into the hardship of poverty, the hatred of racism, and the prerogatives of sexism. I was the love child of African-American parents who were not married at the time; the fire of their passion proved to be the spark that created a loving family life for eight children, each of whom would finish college and beyond. Poverty meant that my parents’ children achieved often without the benefit of routine medical or dental care, often while wearing rummage-sale or hand-me-down clothes. Franklin and Lucille Brown struggled to provide us with books and supplies during the first weeks of class. When they tried and failed to shield us from the racial slur nigger, yelled at school by white class-mates, they taught me how to fight for myself and later to protect my siblings. Although women generally took a subservient role to men when I grew up in 1950s and 60s, my parents stressed higher education, especially for their five daughters, as a way to ensure the “good life.” My personal journey grounds this book as the first in my poor and working-class family to graduate from college and earn a doctorate. My story of social and economic mobility begins with my out-of-wedlock birth, moves to detail racial violence that I was subjected to as a child, and offers an instructive instance of sexual harassment (later featured in a nationally-distributed video). I employ these instances plus vignettes of work-place problems and successes to discuss the rewards and outcomes that are possible with one of the few assets available to a poor person - self-discipline - to achieve educational goals. Teachers, guidance counselors, or social workers may be able to use the lessons and study questions that I provide at the end of several chapters to generate discussions with students and their families. Below are several excerpts from chapters 3 and 8. Chapter 3 — The Nuts and Bolts of Gettin’ Over Childhood to Grad School Listen, little girl I didn’t go too far in school so . . . You got to go out and change your chances, Get an education. Don’t depend on no man for your money! Use your brain – then you won’t have to sweat and hurt like I did. My father, Benjamin Franklin Brown, told me this when I was a teen. My grandfather, a sharecropper, moved to rural Michigan on a long run from the law in Kentucky, where family lore has it that he killed someone in the early 1900s. Grandfather’s wife and children followed him by rail in such haste that the oldest, a teenage boy, was accidentally left behind and neighbors had to help him to board a separate train; the youngest son was my dad, Benjamin. Chapter 8 — Lessons from the Second Generation Aisha – Sittin’ Pretty in New York City “I know where I am. “I know where all my possessions are—right next to me. There is no need for all this fuss, Mom,” stated my calm and reasonable daughter as she enunciated every word as if to reach me more precisely over the several hundred miles which separated us. . . . President Mary Sue Coleman handed a tall (6’1”), handsome young man (called “Brown Sugar” by his Grandma Brown), Michael Jahi Chappell, his doctoral degree from the University of Michigan on a beautiful sunlit day in May 2009. To read Chapter one in its entirety, Betty Brown Chappell Open Secrets.

194 pages, Paperback

First published October 29, 2013