Carver CASPER volunteer, Joshua Zhang, performed a solo piano concert on Monday, April 10th in the Saugatuck Congregational Church Sanctuary for the benefit of the Carver Foundation of Norwalk and the children he cares for here. Here Joshua is standing with our (K-5) CASPER Program Manager, Waid Ramsubhag, following the concert.
THANK YOU, JOSHUA!
By Sidney Waterhouse. The first of a series of reports by the students on the 2017 Carver College Tour.
If you are a student looking for a diverse school and an intimate setting, then Memphis College of Arts is the school for you! With a small campus, a student body of about 420 kids and a 10:1 student teacher ratio, this school is it's own little community.
Memphis College of the Arts has a lot to offer such as a “family life” school climate. There is a sense of pride at the school seen in the artwork displayed by current and former students. Former students Fidencio Fifield-Perez and Sziksz Eszter offered the most compelling artworks. Their exhibits reminded me of the times when my parents proudly displayed my artworks on the refrigerator.
Our tour guide, Anna Roach, is a Tennessee native who is a recent Memphis College of the Arts graduate. Anna’s enthusiasm was well received by my peers on the tour, even though many had no interest in pursuing art careers. With an acceptance rate of 85% and a graduation rate of about 80%, the school has maintained a good reputation and is deemed safe although it's located near an area that has seen incidents of violence. The beautiful campus is located near the Memphis Zoo and frequently plays host to national and international artists.
Most students need to have a GPA of at least 2.2 and an ACT score of 18, if they hope to gain admission. Students with higher GPA’s and ACT scores can expect an automatic scholarship. Since this is an art school, you must also provide a portfolio showing 10-20 pieces of art that you completed. Art majors include painting, design, graphic design, metals, photography and sculpting. All of those majors have internship opportunities that are available to both underclassmen and upperclassmen and may even result in a permanent position.
Memphis College of Arts’ annual tuition is $33,000 (including parking fees, dorm fees and meal plans) and offers merit based financial aid. So there's no way for you to go wrong! This arts college requires one science, one math and one art history course for graduation. Underclassmen have access to lockers to hold their art supplies and upperclassmen have studio access. The working areas are always open and there is a late night shuttle that will return you to your dorm safely. The school is located in the middle of midtown Memphis, which is where late night social opportunities thrive!
All in all, the school provides a “home away from home,” not only through its family like school climate but through its connection to the community. I would recommend this school to anyone looking to pursue a career in fine arts.
Carver students and their chaperones boarded their bus on Saturday at the Carver Community Center, and now the 2017 Spring College Tour begins! Follow their progress here as the students send us there reports from the college campuses they visit.
Academic careers will be born in the next few days as students discover whole new worlds of opportunity that inspire them. This 47th annual tradition never fails fulfill the Carver mission of BUILDING LIFETIME ACHIEVERS!
The first year of Carver's annual Child of America gala, we honored the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, journalist and activist Roger Wilkins with our Child of America award. Mr. Wilkins died on March 26th at the age of 85. Here is his obituary in today's Boston Globe by Adam Bernstein.
“The struggle of life is not won with one glorious moment like Reggie Jackson’s five straight home runs in a recent World Series — wonderful and thrilling though that was — but a continual struggle in which you keep your dignity intact and your powers at work, over the long course of a lifetime.”
WASHINGTON — Roger W. Wilkins, a ranking Justice Department official during the 1960s who later composed Pulitzer Prize-winning editorials about the Watergate scandal for The Washington Post — and wrote unsparingly about the conflicts and burdens he experienced as a black man in positions of influence — died March 26 at a nursing home in Kensington, Md. He was 85. The cause was complications from dementia, said his daughter, Elizabeth Wilkins.
In a career that traversed law, journalism and education, Wilkins made matters of race and poverty central to his work as an assistant attorney general in the Johnson administration and later as one of the first black editorial board members at the Post and The New York Times.
By kinship or friendship, he was linked to many black leaders of the civil rights era. Roy Wilkins, who led the NAACP from 1955 to 1977, was an uncle. In law school, Roger Wilkins was an intern for Thurgood Marshall, then director-counsel of the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund and later a Supreme Court justice.
From a young age, he once wrote, he was compelled to spend his life ‘‘blasting through doors that white people didn’t want to open.’’
Wilkins said he lived at times with a painful duality as an African-American who had risen to positions of leverage in white-controlled halls of power.
He felt an obligation to serve the black community but that he also desired an identity independent from it — ‘‘my own personal exemption,’’ he said. In New York, he could feel at home in Harlem, in the bohemian Greenwich Village, and in a tony apartment on Central Park West.
He spent periods of his life at the Ford Foundation, where he awarded grants from its luxurious New York offices, and on the riot-ravaged streets of Detroit, where he was confronted by gun-wielding state troopers unaccustomed to encountering a black federal authority. At checkpoints, he learned to hold up his hands and shout, ‘‘Department of Justice, Department of Justice!’’
Intense and sensitive, Wilkins described himself as restless, given to heavy drinking and susceptible to bouts of despair and deep depression. He saw himself as a microcosm of high-achieving black America at a time of limited new opportunity amid still-festering historical bigotry.
‘‘I was a man living in a never-never land somewhere far beyond the constraints my grandparents had known but far short of true freedom,’’ he wrote in his 1982 autobiography, ‘‘A Man’s Life.’’ ‘‘I knew no black people — young or old, rich or poor — who didn’t feel injured by the experience of being black in America.’’
After an early career as a welfare caseworker in Cleveland and an international lawyer in New York City, he came to Washington in 1962 as a special assistant to the administrator of the US Agency for International Development.
Four years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson tapped Wilkins to lead the Community Relations Service, an agency established under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and eventually overseen by the Justice Department.
In an era of urban rioting, Wilkins, then 33, became one of the administration’s point men on inner-city rage that exploded from Washington to the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles.
The three years he spent in the job, he recalled, were a ‘‘blur of pain and glory.’’ His resources were meager and the need monumental.
Wilkins said he frequently was received during his travels as an outsider from official, white Washington. He felt betrayed by Justice Department colleagues who, amid the race riots in Detroit, dined with a city powerbroker at a segregated club. Wilkins was not invited.
After Richard M. Nixon became president in 1969, Wilkins left government service for the Ford Foundation, where he oversaw funding for job training, drug rehabilitation, and education for the poor. He described the job as a glass prison, a well-funded, well-intentioned endeavor that was constantly stymied by internal politics and a leadership that was disproportionately white, elite, and out of touch with minority struggles.
Compounding his frustration was his ambivalence about the glittering social life he led. Through a relationship with the MCA heiress and writer Jean Stein vanden Heuvel, Wilkins moved in a high-society circle that included Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, and Leonard Bernstein.
‘‘I loved it, but it tore me apart,’’ he wrote in his memoir. ‘‘It was as if, by entering that world at night, I was betraying everything I told myself I stood for during the day.’’ He came to think of himself as ‘‘an ersatz white man.’’
In 1972, he left the Ford Foundation to join The Post, which two years earlier had published a commentary by Wilkins, titled ‘‘A Black at the Gridiron Dinner.’’ The essay excoriated the organization, a club frequented by Washington journalists and politicians, for applauding gross displays of racial offensiveness — including a sketch that featured Vice President Spiro T. Agnew singing ‘‘Dixie’’ as a tribute to Nixon’s effort to win white votes with his ‘‘Southern strategy.’’
Wilkins said he and then-Washington Mayor Walter E. Washington were the only blacks among the 500 media and political leaders in attendance.
‘‘There were no Indians, there were no Asians, there were no Puerto Ricans, there were no Mexican-Americans,’’ he wrote in The Post. ‘‘There were just the Mayor and me. Incredibly, I sensed that there were few in that room who thought that anything was missing.’’
The piece struck like thunder in Washington and impressed editorial page editor Philip L. Geyelin. From his place on the editorial board, Wilkins later told an interviewer, he wanted to ‘‘help make The Post speak more precisely and more powerfully to the needs of the poor and the outcast, whoever they were.’’
But his brief tenure was consumed by the unfolding Watergate political scandal that led to Nixon’s resignation in 1974.
When The Post received a 1973 Pulitzer Prize for public service for its Watergate coverage, Pulitzer board members cited the investigative work of reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the editorial cartoons of Herbert L. Block, known as Herblock, and the newspaper’s editorials, many of them written by Wilkins.
In 1974, he received an overture from the Times and spent a few years on its editorial board before working as an urban-affairs columnist from 1977 to 1979.
As he did at The Post, Wilkins had disagreements at the Times with highly educated, liberal-minded white colleagues who assumed his sparkling credentials and pedigree made him a voice of what they considered moderation on race and social issues.
In his memoir, he wrote that his years-long attempt to gently enlighten colleagues and political leaders had little impact, and that he had come to believe in ‘‘groin fights’’ as the way to achieve progress.
Roger Wood Wilkins was born on March 25, 1932, in Kansas City, Mo., where he began his schooling in a one-room, segregated schoolhouse.
His father, Earl, a business manager of the Kansas City Call, a black newspaper, died of tuberculosis at 35. His mother, the former Helen Jackson, was instrumental in the racial desegregation of the national YWCA and eventually served as its first African-American president.
After his father’s death in 1941, Wilkins lived briefly in Harlem near his uncle Roy, whom he recalled as a ‘‘distant, dignified man.’’ He moved with his mother to Grand Rapids, Mich., after her marriage in 1943 to a doctor, Robert Claytor.
The family lived in a racially mixed neighborhood, where Wilkins said he had many white friends but where interracial dating would have been unthinkable. He graduated from the University of Michigan in 1953 and its law school in 1956.
He left the Times in 1979 and remained involved in public affairs as a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, a professor of history and American culture at George Mason University, a commentator in print and broadcast media, and a publisher of the NAACP’s journal, the Crisis, from 1998 to 2010.
In 1980, Wilkins and Post columnist William Raspberry became the first black members of the Pulitzer Prize board, which Wilkins later chaired.
In 2001, he published ‘‘Jefferson’s Pillow,’’ a well-regarded historical study addressing the contradictions between the ideals of the Founding Fathers from Virginia and their ownership of slaves.
Wilkins’ marriages to Eve Tyler and Mary Floy Myers ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife of 36 years, Patricia King of Washington, a law professor at Georgetown University; two children from his first marriage, Amy Wilkins and David Wilkins, both of Washington; a daughter from his third marriage, Elizabeth Wilkins of Washington; two half-sisters; and two grandsons.
‘‘I’ve always thought that if I had 15 lucid moments before I die, I’ll want to look back and see that I tried to act with honor, 15 minutes by 15 minutes throughout my life,’’ Wilkins wrote in ‘‘A Man’s Life.’’
He added: ‘‘The struggle of life is not won with one glorious moment like Reggie Jackson’s five straight home runs in a recent World Series — wonderful and thrilling though that was — but a continual struggle in which you keep your dignity intact and your powers at work, over the long course of a lifetime.’’
Khalaf Jerry donated a series of his mono-prints to the Carver Community Center. Here are a few of the framed pieces hanging on the walls of the community center's multi-purpose room. We are so grateful to him and to so many others for continually refurbishing and updating the learning spaces for Carver kids! Thank You!
Hour photo / Chris Palermo. Artist Khalaf Jerry greets Pierre Antoine Jr. at the “Holiday Social Fiber Fabric Arts & Makers” pop up art show presented by Pop City Saturday in Norwalk.
See all the photos here at Carver's Facebook page.
See all the photos here at our Facebook album!
Danielle Robinson, PhD, Director, Alcohol Policy and Corporate Reputation Management at Diageo, who also serves on the Carver Board of Directors, brought a team of co-workers to the Carver Community Center to redecorate two classrooms!
Diageo North America, Inc. is headquartered in Norwalk and is a longtime supporter of Carver’s educational programs. Diageo was formed in 1997 from the merger of Guiness and Grand Metropolitan. Like another Carver donor, Xerox, the name Diageo is an invented name. The name is composed of the Latin word "dia", meaning day, and the Greek root "geo", meaning world, and is meant to reference the company giving pleasure every day, everywhere.
Diageo employees were true to their company’s name when they brought bright colors, beanbag chairs, new shelving, wall hangings and bright artwork to the Carver community. Carver students immediately appreciated the gifts and the new sense of joy our friends at Diageo invested in their space.
Thank you, Diageo!
