Audio File
Transcript
My name is Calum Brown. I’m 14.
My name is JaVon Clark. I’m 15 years old.
My name is Kenyon Walker. I’m 11 years old.
We interviewed Malik Bankston on August 14th, 2014.
I’m the oldest of 6, so I have three brothers and two sisters. I grew up in four different neighborhoods and I claim all of them, so I grew up in Manchester, which is on the north side, and then moved to the Hill District, and then my family moved to what we euphemistically used to call the East End over in the Lincoln/Lemington neighborhood. And we lived in that area all the way up until my family had moved to Homewood. But by that time, I was pretty much grown. Interestingly, every house I grew up in as a kid is actually a vacant lot now, it’s an empty lot.
And I went to public schools, you know, I went to Manchester Elementary school. I went to Madison. We called it Madison Monkey School because it had all these ornate carvings on the outside of the building, still there, of all these different, like, monkeys, I don’t know what that was about. I went to Lemington, and I attended high school and graduated from Westinghouse High School. I did my undergraduate work at what is now Gannon University, did some graduate studies, and attended law school at the University of Pittsburgh.
Growing up then as a student, I was a pretty good student until I went to college. It had nothing to do with the academics. Going away to college was like a big adjustment for me because the environment was a very different environment in terms of the folks that I was around, folks who I didn’t relate to and who did not relate to me at all, seemingly. And I had a tough time in school for the first couple years. At the end of my first semester in school, I got a letter, registered letter from my Dean, and the registered letter said that I wasn’t welcome to come back to school the next semester, and then I was socially undesirable and I didn’t really think anything of it. And the reason I didn’t think anything of it is because I said, well, I’ll just go to another school cause I had applied to 50 some odd colleges and universities and I got accepted in all of them. So I kind of felt like, OK, well, I’ll just go somewhere else. And I went down to Westinghouse to see my guidance counselor, Doctor Mary Stone.
And I told her what happened because I was going to see her to talk about transferring and going somewhere else. And she looked at me and she told me to sit down. She picked up the phone and she called up to the college and she got the president of the college on the phone. And she told him that if they didn’t readmit me, that she would see to it that they never got another black student out of Pittsburgh at their school, and that’s when it kind of hit me that I had to go back to school there and I had to finish no matter what kind of obstacles or hurdles I had in front of me that I had to actually, you know, finish school there. And my freshman class at Gannon, there were about 75 African American students in my class. Four years later, when we graduated, there were only like about seven of us that graduated out of 75. I was one of those seven.
Then I attended law school, and I attended law school because I had a fellowship to attend Pitt Law School. In the end, I decided that that really wasn’t what I wanted to do because, really, at a very young age, even in high school, I got involved in things that were going on in our neighborhood, in our community, in our school. So organizing around issues and concerns that people in our neighborhoods have, it was something that just resonated, you know, something that that that I just identified with. And so it was something that I probably knew I was going to always be involved with in some form or fashion. Obviously it turned into a career. A vocation is what you do for a living. Advocation is what you believe in. So in in my case, those two things turned out to be pretty much one and the same, and not everybody can say that.
I had dreams and aspirations, like we all do. I wanted to be an architect, an engineer, an attorney, a pilot. I think things worked out the way I needed for them to work out. You don’t know what’s around the next corner. You can’t be afraid to take on the challenges the way they come to you. You just have to push your way through them towards whatever the conclusion is, which is not to say that you always succeed because you will fail, but it’s important that you set goals for yourself and figure out what your own path is. I think that might be the most important thing to realize. You have your own path to follow in order to try to accomplish the things that you set out to do.