SAAB Tackling the Black, Brown Male Crisis
By David Pluviose
Increasingly, dropping out of high school is a one-way ticket to prison for Black men. Recent research conducted by sociologists Becky Pettit and Bruce Western indicates that 3 percent of Whites and 20 percent of Blacks born between 1965 and 1969 had served time in prison by their early thirties. Among the Black men in the group, 30 percent of those without a college education and 60 percent of those who had dropped out of high school had gone to prison by 1999.
The crisis among Black and Hispanic men mobilized Dr. Tyrone Bledsoe to found the Student African American Brotherhood Organization, or SAAB, on the campus of Georgia Southwestern State University in 1990. SAAB’s mission is to foster academic excellence and a spirit of community service among its members, who are primarily Black men, and its growth has been explosive. SAAB chapters, sometimes called Brother-to-Brother when serving Hispanics, can be found at more than 50 universities and colleges across the nation. However, community colleges are now the fastest-growing segment of SAAB, Bledsoe says.
“Engagement, particularly at the two-year level, is a real important piece, particularly for young men of color who come into these two-year situations and don’t have a real sense of direction and guidance,” Bledsoe says. “They’re stopping in, they’re stopping out and so forth, so I think the community colleges are really embracing SAAB because we provide an opportunity for these young men to be connected to something immediately.”
Many of the community colleges that have started SAAB chapters serve Black and Hispanic students from impoverished, inner-city neighborhoods. Many of these students grew up without a sense of how to navigate the world of higher education, raised by parents who may have dropped out or didn’t go to college. Stephen Mitchell, the advisor for the SAAB chapter at two-year Foothill College in California, says many of these parents are “just so proud that their kid is not dead, that he’s not out there gangbanging. They’ll accept that. [They say,] ‘He’s in school, he’s doing great.’ No, he’s not. He’s playing college.
