The tenth

Boston itself was a problem for prospective black students and for local universities that were trying to recruit them. The city’s court-mandated school desegregation, administered through busing in 1974, had fueled protest, violence, and white flight. In the fall of 1986, while the Talented Tenth was being founded on Chestnut Hill, some black residents in the Boston neighborhoods of Roxbury, Mattapan, Dorchester, Jamaica Plain, and the South End were campaigning to secede and form their own city, to be called Mandela.

“In the mid-1980s it was tougher for black [Boston College students],” says Bunch. The majority had been raised in impoverished communities and were first-generation college attendees. And aside from the Black Student Forum and a campus chapter of the NAACP, Boston College offered few social, political, or cultural “safe havens.”

Of the 29 men in the Talented Tenth, five were recruited to Boston College as athletes, and most of the others had chosen the University because they were Catholic or were referred by the Catholic high schools in which they were educated. About half came from troubled urban areas in the Northeast.

Cliff Isaac, raised in Harlem, who came to Boston College from a Catholic high school, remembers that whenever he returned home on semester break his neighbors assumed he was back from prison. The crack epidemic was at its apogee, and “jail made more sense than college,” he says. Michael Sanders ’90, from Baltimore, had two brothers who were killed in gang-related shootings. The father of Jayson Taylor ’89 was shot to death one night while closing his Brooklyn grocery store. The absent father was a common affliction. “We became our own examples of manhood,” notes Martin Pierre, a Trinidad native who was raised in Brooklyn, and had been referred to Boston College by a priest at Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School, where Pierre was class valedictorian.

For many of these men, Boston College was the first predominately white community they’d engaged with. When Harlem native Kyle Edmonds ’90 arrived at Upper Campus and looked out the window of his taxi, he was, he recalls, “terrified. I had never seen that many white people before in my life.” Dwayne Royster, of Philadelphia, who arrived in the fall of 1987, remembers entering his room in Xavier Hall and “seeing the panicked look on [his roommate’s parents’] faces as they realized their son was going to live with a black guy.” Cliff Isaac recalls being the only black person in virtually all his classes. “You were viewed as an authority on race,” he says, “but you’re just a student.”

Steve Pemberton ’89, a New Bedford, Massachusetts, native who had salved a Dickensian childhood through a habit of reading books, recalls being questioned by two faculty members about papers he’d submitted. Pemberton began turning in handwritten papers, he says, so “faculty would no longer ask, ‘Whose work is this?'”

Late in the 1985 fall semester, freshman Martin Pierre went to seek assistance and counsel from Dan Bunch and Donald Brown, director of the Office of AHANA Student Programs. A preternaturally mature young man, Pierre was already active in the University’s NAACP chapter and a quiet leader among black freshmen, and he was aware of some of the racial issues they’d encountered. And he had his own story, a run-in with five hallmates he thought of as casual friends and who, late on Halloween night, visited his room wrapped in white bedsheets and carrying a rope. “I had felt that I had a connection [with them],” he says today, “and I was trying to understand where they were coming from. They thought it was a joke. I felt that once they were educated, they would appreciate how damaging that sort of behavior is.” He visited each of the five students in the days that followed to explain how hurtful the prank had been, and why. Each apologized. He then invited them to a showing of The New Klan: Heritage of Hate, a 1978 documentary that Pierre had arranged to screen on campus. (The Halloween experience would play a role in moving Pierre’s professional ambitions away from medicine and into clinical psychology, which he now practices with a specialty in black male trauma.) When Pierre saw Bunch and Brown a few weeks after Halloween, it was to ask if they would help him form a supportive community of Boston College’s black men. Bunch and Brown did not discourage Pierre, but they told him he first needed to make an effort to meet and get to know as many of the University’s African-American undergraduates as possible.

Pierre soon waved down Robert James ’89, a light-skinned, mustachioed psychology student who “talked funny, which is to say he didn’t have an urban swagger,” says Pierre. James grew up in a suburb of Pittsburgh, his father a physician, his mother a teacher, and he brought a middle-class savvy to their friendship—at one point helping Pierre acquire a credit card. When Pierre’s first purchase arrived, a fast-food delivery from a local restaurant for the two of them, the novice was shocked: “Oh, this is real money!”

Pierre also grew close to Steve Pemberton, a humorful, intense, and knowledge-hungry political science major. The son of a black father and white mother he never knew (as an adult, he learned his father was murdered and his mother died in a house fire), Pemberton had spent most of his youth in the charge of abusive foster parents. When he was in seventh grade, a guidance counselor gave him a Boston College admission brochure, and he was struck by the photographs of the Collegiate Gothic campus. In his 2012 memoir—A Chance in the World: An Orphan Boy, a Mysterious Past, and How He Found a Place Called Home—he recalled that he entered Boston College with his clothes in a “small, beat-up” suitcase, looking for “a future . . . and a family.” (He found both: The head of human resources for the international firm Globoforce, Pemberton received an honorary degree from Boston College in 2015 and was named a trustee in 2016.)

In January 1986, Pierre returned to Brown and Bunch to say he wanted to found a campus club, in which black men could be at ease, and teach and support one another. It was Brown who suggested Pierre call the group the Talented Tenth. Pierre set about recruiting members.

Personal matters were also on the agenda, though it took time for the young men to become comfortable talking about their lives. Said Michael Gaines ’91, “Eighteen-, 19-year-old African-American males with our backgrounds aren’t just going to open up to someone, let alone a fellow kid.” Black men, says Pierre, have been “taught to keep our guards up at all times to prevent ourselves from being racially profiled. So we assume a defensive demeanor of cool. The downside of cool is not being able to connect.” Meetings, says Cadet, were “no-judgment zones. . . . It was therapy.” He adds, “We talked about the fragility of life. We navigated through the land mines, and kept each other on course.”

The Saturday meetings would often end with an exercise Pierre called “areas for growth,” when a member would volunteer to have his strengths and weaknesses assessed by the group. The Tenth “molded me as a clinician,” says Pierre. “How I sit with black males in therapy I learned in meetings with the brothers. It’s a way of being, an emphasis on shared experience.”

Membership grew. “It was contagious,” recalls Dan Bunch. “Students saw the Tenth’s camaraderie, how they carried themselves with confidence, and they wanted in.” Applicants had to submit essays to Pierre on their “life goals” and “leadership potential,” and maintain at least a 3.0 GPA. “People are more invested when they have to work for something than if it’s free,” Pierre says.

Members of the Tenth wore blazers and ties to their meetings. They subscribed to Jet, Black Enterprise, and Ebony Man (a GQ for black professionals), and were receptive to Malcolm X’s call to business lives, “wherein we will actually be able to create employment for the people in the community.” Seven members majored in political science and 14 were in the School of Management. A majority are in private business today, working for large corporations. Pierre says, “Growing up in single-parent homes, most of us didn’t feel we had the luxury to major in the arts. We were compelled by the need for financial stability, the accumulation of wealth to counteract oppression and racism, and [a responsibility] to give back to our families.”

Their friendships came to extend beyond the weekly meeting. Members studied together in O’Neill Library. They lived together on campus and after graduating. They pledged to city-wide African-American fraternities that met at Boston University, Harvard, and Northeastern, which offered “a way out of campus life, a chance to have a life beyond,” says Dan Bunch. They crammed into Pierre’s rusted red Ford Tempo to get their hair cut at a Dorchester barbershop. They ate at Bob the Chef’s in the South End. Over ham hocks, chitterlings, grits, and sweet potato pie, “we’d sit for hours, just to feel like we were in the community we grew up in,” says Michael Sanders.

Says Michael Gaines, “If you haven’t formed this kind of group during college, forget it. After college, you’re just trying to do work and go home. But we were boys pushing each other to grow to men.” Reggie Cadet says, “To this day, when most people call me out on something, I push back. When someone in the Tenth calls me out, I listen.”

The Tenth, says Kyle Edmonds, “gave us confidence to open our wings.” He and Darren Kirton ’90 brought turntables and a mixer from New York and formed the DJ duo Kool Kyle and Destiny, playing hip-hop each weekend for parties that grew larger and more integrated over the years.

Members of the Tenth also made themselves a campus presence, cofounding the Caribbean Club and the Imani Temple, the latter a nondenominational African-American church group. They addressed racial bias in person and in the pages of the Heights. When the undergraduate government offered Oliver North $25,000 to speak on campus, Dwayne Royster countered with a letter to the editor suggesting UGBC instead invite Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. They helped each other campaign and win presidencies of the AHANA Caucus, the NAACP campus chapter, the Black Student Forum, and senate positions in UGBC. They brought Malcolm X’s daughter Attallah Shabazz to campus to speak on civil rights complacency; invited black history scholar Manning Marable to discuss the dearth of minority faculty in higher education; and sponsored Afrocentrist psychiatrist Frances Cress Welsing to speak on “Racism and Mental Health.”

Tenth member Jayson Taylor, along with Glenda Green ’90 (now director of the Peace Corps in Swaziland), also created Project 2000, aimed at preparing minority students to enroll in college in the then-distant year 2000. On Saturday mornings members of the Tenth escorted some 40 black and Hispanic fourth-graders from Dorchester to campus, tutored them in math, reading, and leadership, and facilitated discussions modeled after Tenth meetings.

Their confidence buoyed, the men sought allies and friends across the University. Pierre invited Rev. Howard McLendon ’75, a campus minister, to speak at Tenth meetings on how spirituality could counter oppression. Wayne Budd ’63, H’13, the U.S. Attorney for the Commonwealth who would later go on to a noted career in business and private law, counseled them on negotiating corporate culture. Many members minored in black studies, where the late Amanda Houston, program director, showed them “our people’s hands in history, and how we could shape history,” says Kirton. Steve Pemberton found a personal guide in John Mahoney Jr. ’79, director of undergraduate admission, for whom he would work as an admission officer for five years after his graduation. And when Pierre visited the infirmary one day seeking help for migraine headaches, he met Arnold Mazur, MD, then the director of Health Services. “He took a genuine interest in my story,” says Pierre, “my fears of failure, my anxiety over letting my community back home down.” Mazur’s home in Newton was the first white person’s house to which Pierre had ever been invited, and over the next years Mazur tutored Pierre in his science courses and encouraged him in his aspiration to become a counseling psychologist.

But racial issues arise in the present as in 1985. Last October, two “Black Lives Matter” signs taped to student doors in Roncalli Hall were altered one night by a person who wrote “Don’t” above the space between “lives” and “matter”; and late one night soon afterward a student posted a soon-to-be-infamous Snapchat image of a charred sandwich, with the caption, “I like my steak and cheese like I like my slaves.”

“What’s happening now has always happened to black students in this country,” says Dan Bunch. “But two things are different today.” One, news spreads instantly. And, notes Bunch, whereas black students led most protests in the 1980s, today there’s a “concerted response.” Follow-ing the incidents in October, more than 2,000 students, faculty, and staff participated in a “solidarity march” across Middle Campus and down Commonwealth Avenue, followed by a rally and speeches on Corcoran Plaza.

At the Tenth’s September dinner in New York, the conversation went on into the early morning hours, flowing naturally from buoyant to solemn to comic and back: in one moment, careers; in another, taunts over a legendary 1989 pickup basketball game in the Plex; in another, inside jokes about escapades during a shared vacation 25 years earlier. The men talked about their children, saying that their sons and daughters live in a more disturbing racial climate than they themselves experienced when they were young. Racial strife “wasn’t as front and center then as it is now,” said Francois. He cited social media, mandatory minimum sentences, the 2016 election of Donald Trump, and the rising voices of white supremacist groups. Francois’s two sons attend suburban New Jersey Catholic schools, “but they are not sheltered,” he said, recounting that in the wake of a recent police shooting of an unarmed black teenager, his 13-year-old son had asked, “Dad, should I go to school today?” Many of the men around him nodded silently. “Damn,” said James Jean-Pierre ’90, the father of a nine-year-old boy.