Building Brotherhood - Brief Article

During his years at a predominantly White suburban high school in Garland, Texas, Joseph Silas had little faith that his Black male schoolmates could be counted on to place a high priority on academics.

Instead of seeking study partners or spending social time with other Black males, Silas, who is African American, stuck largely to himself and forged his own way as an honors student at his high school.

"A lot of the guys weren't taking care of business," says Silas, who is now a first-year student with sophomore standing at the University of Texas-Austin.

This past fall, Silas joined a college organization that was established to bring African American male students on predominantly White campuses together to build an academic and social support community. The organization, known as the Student African American Brotherhood (S.A.A.B.), has chapters, or are in the process of establishing them, at 40 colleges and universities around the United States.

Silas, who will chair the UT-Austin S.A.A.B. chapter for the 2001-02 academic year, says the group has enabled him to interact with Black upperclassmen and to learn the ins and outs of the university.

"S.A.A.B. appealed to me as a group of African American males banding together to support one another," Silas says.

In 1990, Dr. Tyrone Bledsoe, then an administrator at Georgia Southwestern State University, founded the first chapter of the organization after seeing that Black male students had terribly low retention rates and low grade point averages at the campus.

"The young brothers were struggling horribly," Bledsoe says. "It really disturbed me."

Instead of merely attributing the low retention rates to poor academic preparation, Bledsoe drug deeper at the problem by hosting meetings of Black male students. He recognized the young men were failing to get the academic and social support they needed to perform well in their classes.

"These guys needed some guidance," he says.

After launching S.A.A.B. at Georgia Southwestern and speaking about it to other student personnel administrators during conferences,

Bledsoe began getting inquires from other schools about the possibility of setting up new S.A.A.B. chapters.

"When we began this organization at Georgia Southwestern, I had no intention of taking it beyond that campus," Bledsoe says.

Bledsoe, who is currently the associate vice president for student services and dean of student life at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, says academic administrators have been the driving force behind the growth of new S.A.A.B. chapters. Administrators, who are expected to provide leadership for the chapters, see S.A.A.B. as an organization that can potentially boost retention rates of Black male students, according to Bledsoe.

S.A.A.B. chapters are intended to focus primarily on academic performance of its members. The organization is not designed to compete with the Black male fraternities, Bledsoe says.

Bledsoe adds that Black female students have started their own organizations at S.A.A.B. campuses because they wanted to benefit from the experience of banding together with other Black women for academic excellence.

Bledsoe believes S.A.A.B. is effective because it affords young Black men the opportunity to bond together. Even though some chapters have admitted White and Hispanic members, Bledsoe says the all-male environment is critical for the candor and trust building among the members.

"When sisters enter the room of Black men, a wholly new dynamic is created," Bledsoe says.

Dr. Kevin Rome, assistant dean of students at UT-Austin, based his doctoral dissertation on documenting the S.A.A.B experience at campuses in three states. Rome founded the UT-Austin S.A.A.B. chapter and serves as its adviser.

"I conducted a qualitative study and concluded that S.A.A.B. made a difference in the academic lives of the members. It affected the retention of Black male students," Rome says.

Bledsoe says S.A.A.B. will be the subject of additional research that will ascertain quantitatively the difference it is making for Black male students.

For more information on S.A.A.B., visit <www.2cusaab.org>.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Cox, Matthews & Associates
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group