Ending Hunger in America, 2014 Hunger Report Full Report | Page 107

CHAPTER 3 Jackson, Mississippi Albert Sykes grew up in the same neighborhood as the slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers. Albert’s grandmother told him that she was home that day in 1963 and heard the shots fired that killed Evers. Albert was born in 1983. The civil rights movement has a daily physical presence in Albert’s life: the house where the Evers family lived. Albert has three sons: Aiden is 7, Ethan 5, and Christian 2. He named the youngest after a close friend, Chris Adagbonyin, who was murdered in 2007. “For every black male born after 2002,” Albert says, “there is supposedly a one in three chance of going to prison. I can’t accept that one of my sons is going to end up in prison. Not in my family.”25 Albert carries on the work of the civil rights movement through his leadership of the Young People’s Project (YPP) in Jackson. YPP uses math literacy as a tool to develop young leaders who want to radically improve the quality of education—and the quality of life—in their communities.26 High school students teach kids in middle school and by working together, the young people develop confidence in themselves to analyze and solve problems that go beyond algebra. They boost each other’s self-esteem and counter the low-expectations of their school, community, and families. They gain a stronger sense of being responsible for each other’s welfare, and they begin to come together to demand more from the education system, seeing improvements as mandated by their right to a quality education. Even though Jackson has one of the lowest high school graduation rates of any city in the country,27 95 percent of YPP students graduate and 75 percent go on to college.28 YPP’s genesis was in the work of Robert Moses, a civil rights leader who came to Jackson in the early 1960s with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to help ensure that black people could register to vote. In 1982, Moses founded the Algebra Project in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The idea was not only to teach at-risk children how to solve algebra problems, but also to apply principles he learned as an organizer in the 1960s. “Algebra is the gatekeeper,” Moses explained to an interviewer in 2010.29 Success in algebra is directly related to educational and economic empowerment. Mastering algebra in high school more than doubles a student’s chances of earning a four-year college degree.30 A child born into a family in the lowest 20 percent of the U.S. income distribution who goes on to earn a four-year college degree is 80 percent less likely to wind up in that same lowest quintile as an adult than a peer who does not earn a college diploma.31 Thus, algebra is directly related to economic mobility. www.bread.org/institute? Mastering algebra in high school more than doubles a student’s chances of earning a four-year college degree. ? 2014 Hunger Report? 97 n iStock