Education

USF Honors Alive & Free and Dr. Joseph E. Marshall Jr.

Published

8 years ago

March 9, 2017

By Mary McInerney, USF News

The University of San Francisco is honoring Alive & Free and its co-founder and executive director Dr. Joseph E. Marshall Jr., Class of ’68, with the 2017 California Prize for Service and the Common Good.

Alive & Free, based in San Francisco, offers a community of support to young people, empowering them to avoid peer pressure and situations that can lead to violence, incarceration, drug addiction or dropping out of school. And, it sets them up to be good citizens and build strong families.

Focusing on violence prevention and education through its array of programs, Alive & Free has supported thousands of young people and given hundreds the opportunity to attend college.

To date, 218 young people from the program have graduated from college with funding support from the club’s scholarship fund. Of them, more than 60 have received graduate degrees.

“We are proud of Dr. Marshall and the work his team at Alive & Free is doing for the youth of our city and the world. We honor Alive & Free for sharing the USF mission to create new opportunities for bright and ambitious students who will go on to create a more just, sustainable, and humane world,” said USF President Paul J. Fitzgerald, S.J.

The 2017 California Prize award gala and dinner is April 27. The gala benefits the African American Scholars Project at USF.

The award is particularly meaningful this year: Alive & Free, originally known as Omega Boys Club, celebrates its 30th anniversary in 2017, and Dr. Marshall is the first USF alumnus to receive the California Prize.

There is a “prescription, ” as Dr. Marshall calls it, for keeping young people safe from violence and free from incarceration. He has shared it in dozens of cities across the United States, and in countries around the world including South Africa, Canada, Nigeria, Botswana, Thailand and Haiti.

At the heart of the Alive & Free prescription is the idea that violence is a disease. The prescription helps cure the harmful framework of actions and feelings that contribute to violent behavior and put young people at risk.

Education is Alive & Free’s core response to violence. It offers a Leadership Academy that serves hundreds of young people each year, ages 14 to 24, providing rigorous college-prep classes each week in mathematics, research, and writing.

The students also attend a weekly “Family Meeting” after class during which Dr. Marshall and the Alive & Free staff provide support and answer questions in a group setting.

Many young people say Alive & Free has saved their lives.

“I’m living proof that Alive & Free is not just a name — it’s what they did for me,” says Marcus Byrd Ray. “Thanks to Alive & Free, my mom is not going to bury me, and my kids aren’t going to grow up with a father in prison.”

Instead, he is currently enrolled in college and is a man who his children can look up to, he says.

Bryanna Santee says she hadn’t found herself when she first started at Alive & Free. “I sat in the back and didn’t talk much, but the club challenged me to find my voice.”

That changed everything. She went to Howard University in Washington, D.C., and received her master’s degree in education from San Francisco State. Today she is a special education teacher at A.P. Giannini Middle School in San Francisco’s Sunset District.

In 1968, he was a member of USF’s newly founded Black Student Union. USF, Today, Marshall is a trustee emeritus at USF. He has been awarded the MacArthur Genius Award, the Children’s Defense Fund Leadership Award, the Essence Award, and the Use Your Life Award from Oprah Winfrey. He is a contributing writer to the Huffington Post, and a member of the San Francisco Police Commission.

He also hosts “Street Soldiers” on 106 KMEL FM in San Francisco, a commitment for the past 24 years. His book, Street Soldier, One Man’s Struggle to Save a Generation, One Life at a Time, was published in 1996.

For 25 years, he was a teacher and administrator in the San Francisco Unified School District. In 1994, he left teaching to become an anti-violence activist full-time.

He has a saying, “The more you know, the more you owe.” It’s something his grandmother taught him when he was 6, and it became the foundation of his life’s work. He still likes to repeat it today to the teenagers he works with.

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Richmond’s Women of Impact Celebration to Honor Local Business Leaders

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Activism

Actor, Philanthropist Blair Underwood Visits Bay Area, Kicks Off Literacy Program in ‘New Oakland’ Initiative

These community activations were coordinated with the San Francisco-based non-profit program “Room to Read.” Ray said he is also donating his time to read and take pictures with students to encourage their engagement and to inspire them to read more. The inspirational book “Clifford Ray Saves the Day” highlights Clifford Ray’s true story of saving a dolphin.

Published

4 weeks ago

February 18, 2025

Oakland Post

Blair Underwood (left) and Barbara Lee (right). Courtesy photo.

By Paul Cobb
New Oakland Series
Opinion Part 3

The Post mentioned three weeks ago that a number of our local luminaries were coming together to support the “New Oakland” movement. As this current national administration continues to eliminate our “legacy” institutional policies and programs left and right, most communities find themselves beyond “frozen” in fear.

Well, esteemed actor, long-time Bay Area supporter, and philanthropist Blair Underwood returned to Oakland this week to speak with city leaders, community trust agents, students, the Oakland Post, and local celebrities alike to continue his “New Oakland” initiative.

This week, he kicked off his “Guess Who’s Coming to Read” literacy program in some of Oakland’s middle schools. Clifford Ray, who played the center position of the 1975 World Champion Golden State Warriors, donated close to 1,000 books. Ray’s fellow teammate Charles “The Hopper” Dudley also gave Converse sneakers to students.

Underwood also spent quality time with the Oakland Ballers ownership group and visited the amazing Raimondi Park West Oakland community revitalization site. In the 1996 TV film Soul of the Game, Underwood played the role of the legendary first Black Major League Baseball player Jackie Robinson and commended the Ballers owners.

“This group of sports enthusiasts/ philanthropists needs to be applauded for their human capital investment and their financial capital investment,” Underwood said. “Truly putting their money and passion to work,” Underwood said.

Underwood was also inspired by mayoral candidate Barbara Lee’s open-minded invitation to bring public-private partnership opportunities to Oakland.

Underwood said he wants to “reinforce the importance of ‘collaborative activism’ among those most marginalized by non-empathic leadership. We must ‘act out’ our discomfort with passionate intentions to create healthy change.”

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McClymonds High Names School Gym for Star Graduate, Basketball Legend Bill Russell

William “Bill” Felton Russell was born on Feb. 12, 1934, and died on July 31, 2022. He achieved fame as a U.S. professional basketball player who played center for the Boston Celtics of the National Basketball Association (NBA) from 1956 to 1969. He was the centerpiece of the Celtics dynasty that won 11 NBA championships during his 13-year career.

Published

4 weeks ago

February 18, 2025

Oakland Post

Bill Russell and Brian McGhee in McClymonds High School Gym, 2011. Photo courtesy of Brian McGhee.

By Ken Epstein

West Oakland’s McClymonds High School, “the School of Champions,” this week named the school’s gymnasium in honor of one of its most famous graduates, basketball legend Bill Russell (class of ’52).

Russell is widely known as one of the greatest basketball players of all time. In 2011, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civil honor, from President Barack Obama for Russell’s contributions to basketball and the Civil Rights Movement.

The McClymonds’ naming ceremony was held on Wednesday, the same day as Russell’s birthday. Oakland leader Bill Patterson, a longtime friend of Russell’s, was scheduled to cut the ribbon at the reopening of the gym, which had been closed for several months for renovation. Russell’s daughter Karen was scheduled to attend the ribbon cutting.

Russell’s name and signature are now printed on the gymnasium floor.

Patterson was working at DeFremery Park when he met Russell. “I befriended him as a boy and during his years at University of San Francisco” said Patterson. “We stayed friends for the rest of his life.”

Said McClymonds Principal Darielle Davis, herself a McClymonds graduate, “We are excited to honor Bill Russell for his sports accolades and because he broke color barriers. He is part of our legacy, and legacy is really important at McClymonds.”

Brian McGhee, community schools manager at McClymonds and former football player at UC Berkeley, said that Russell meant a lot to him and others at the school. “He was a beacon of light and hope for West Oakland,” he said. “He did a lot for sports and for civil rights.”

Starting in 2018, Ben “Coach” Tapscott worked with Patterson and other McClymonds grads, community members, and former coaches to encourage the Oakland Board of Education to endorse the naming of the school gym, which finally happened recently.

“We worked hard to make this happen,” said Tapscott. “He’s an important part of McClymond’s history, along with a lot of other famous graduates,” he said.

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Tony Thurmond Urges Educators to Stay Focused Amid Federal Funding Battle

In a statement and a letter to California’s local educational agencies (LEAs), Thurmond praised efforts to reduce chronic absenteeism and close achievement gaps, particularly for socioeconomically disadvantaged students. “Now is not the time to be distracted by external efforts to demean and divide,” Thurmond wrote. “Please continue to stay the course with local programs that are producing results. Our students need consistency, support, and community more than ever.”

Published

1 month ago

February 17, 2025

Oakland Post

Tony Thurmond. Courtesy of Tony Thurmond’s Facebook page.

By Bo Tefu, California Black Media

California Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond has urged educators to remain focused on student achievement following a court ruling that temporarily blocks the Trump administration from freezing federal funding for schools, health care, law enforcement, and disaster relief.

A U.S. District Court judge in Rhode Island issued a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) on Jan. 31, halting federal efforts to pause funding while a lawsuit led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta and 22 other state attorneys general moves forward. Thurmond, a declarant in the case, welcomed the decision and reassured educators that funding for critical school programs remains in place.

“Now is not the time to be distracted by external efforts to demean and divide,” Thurmond wrote. “Please continue to stay the course with local programs that are producing results. Our students need consistency, support, and community more than ever.”

Thurmond emphasized that state officials will continue advocating for stable funding to ensure schools can maintain and expand programs that help students succeed.