They’ve come early, packed into cars with congratulations painted on windows and balloons bobbing inside. Two hours before the big event, police officers and parking attendants direct traffic through a vast lot. In navy gowns, graduates head for the Show Place Arena with their parents and spouses, children and neighbors, colleagues and friends—the many who helped them reach this night.
Streaming across the gravel and grass, grandmothers push walkers, grandfathers grip canes. A sister comes straight from work, in her McDonald’s shirt. A mother inflates a balloon shaped like a No. 1 finger. A professor lights a charcoal grill as colleagues set plates of pasta salad and brownies on a plastic tablecloth. Stopping, a woman straightens her husband’s bow tie, the same red as his suit.
Each spring hundreds of thousands of college students participate in commencements large and small, elaborate and simple. For many of the nation’s graduates, the occasion is just another milestone, a moment they always saw coming; for some, it’s an event to skip. But the Prince George’s Community College Class of 2013 marks its commencement as a triumph, and supporters can’t help but honk their horns to celebrate.
After all, graduating was hardly a given. Roughly 20 percent of those who first enroll full time at community colleges across the country earn an associate degree within three years. At Prince George’s, that completion rate is 7.2 percent.
Tonight’s graduates succeeded through hard work and will. Yet theirs is also the story of a supporting cast who pleaded with them to enroll, helped pay their tuition, gave them a place to stay, counseled them on marriage, asked them “No, how are you really doing?,” joined their late-night study sessions, looked after their children, walked them to tutoring, helped them before class, found them scholarships, high-fived them when they passed tests, urged them to speak up, and wouldn’t let them quit.
Nadirah Aasim, 50, walks to the arena with her grandson, husband, and son, who snaps photos of her on his phone. She enrolled at Prince George’s after being released from prison, hoping to earn a bachelor’s degree, get a good job, and buy her first house.
Juanita Y. Artis, who graduated from high school with a 1.2 grade-point average, arrives with her aunt and sister, wearing gold-studded pumps, checking her teeth for lipstick. Tonight the 22-year-old will receive two associate degrees, and give a speech she’s rehearsed for a month.
Earle Briggs Wilson III, who for years has drifted, bouncing from job to job, climbs out of his 2000 Chevy Impala. He pinches his gown, pulls it away from his chest, and lets it drop. “It’s kind of weird to be here and see this,” says Mr. Wilson, 29. “I kind of thought this didn’t happen for people like me.”
Yet here he is, on a Thursday night in May, following signs that point the way for graduates, several hundred of whom gather outside a tunnel leading into the arena. Some suck down cigarettes before lining up by last name. Waiting to march, many stand quietly, checking pocket mirrors and sending texts. But then a few begin to cheer, and the cheer grows louder as more students join in. A few minutes before 7, the concrete tunnel rumbles with claps and whoops.
Nadirah Aasim is dancing. As “Boogie Shoes,” by KC and the Sunshine Band, plays on the loudspeakers, she stands at the very front of the line, swaying from side to side, jostling the blue tassel on her mortarboard. Tonight she will receive an associate degree in general studies; she plans to enroll at Trinity Washington University in January. As the song fades out, she takes a deep breath and surveys the crowd. The tassel has come to rest between her eyes and her glasses.
Just then Darlene Brown walks up. She’s the budget manager for technology services, but Ms. Aasim calls her “sister.” They hug each other for a half-minute. “I love you,” Ms. Aasim says. “I love you, too,” Ms. Brown says. “I’m proud of you.”
When Ms. Aasim first met Ms. Brown, she saw a confident woman, the kind she had once imagined becoming. And when that woman told her she would accomplish great things, she believed it. They discussed everything—self-esteem, relationships, how nobody succeeds alone. They bonded through a campus program called Women of Wisdom, which taught Ms. Aasim goal setting, time management, and, she says, “how to unclench my fists.”
Ms. Aasim graduated from high school in 1981. For a while she worked as a clerk for the federal government, but soon she was selling crack out of her basement apartment. Over time she became her own best customer. She fell into abusive relationships. Sometimes she slept in homeless shelters. For many years she held down jobs, driving buses, but she kept selling. She celebrated her 47th birthday, in beige fatigues, at a federal penitentiary in Hazelton, W.Va., where she served a two-year sentence for drug distribution.
After her release, in 2009, Ms. Aasim was ready for change. She had three children, and she wanted a good job. She completed a mortgage-loan-processing certificate program, but, as she learned, many employers won’t hire convicted felons, especially those without a degree. She thought about enrolling at Prince George’s yet worried she wasn’t ready. She feared being around younger students. Her friends encouraged her, and then one day she rode the bus to the campus to register.
Ms. Aasim did well on her reading placement test. When told she would have to take a developmental math course, however, she cried. “This math is gonna kill me,” she told her adviser. In Math 0031, she had failed several tests when the instructor, Bruce Weidele, made her an offer: If she would come in an hour before class, he would do the same. So each Saturday morning they met at 7:30, and the tutoring sessions paid off. She got a B on the next test, a C on the final exam. She passed.
Now, standing in the threshold of the tunnel, Ms. Aasim watches another graduate kick off her flip-flops and slip into heels. She had given much thought to her own footwear, ultimately deciding on sandals. Not that it matters, she says: “Girl, I would walk across that stage barefoot.”
Finally, it’s time to march. A five-piece brass ensemble plays “Pomp and Circumstance.” Laura R. Ellsworth, an associate professor, carries the five-foot-tall commencement mace—a black staff knobbed with a silver eagle—and leads the marshals onto the floor.
Charlene M. Dukes, the college’s president, stands at the end of the tunnel, clapping as the students file past. “You all good?” she says. A young man high-fives her. A young woman wearing a hijab gets out of line to hug and kiss her.
The graduates settle into their seats amid a flurry of flashbulbs. From the top of the arena, the stage is visible on hundreds of small screens. Spectators hold cameras, smartphones, and tablets, filming away. An older man in the stands says he isn’t recording—just using the zoom as binoculars, to watch his granddaughter.
Milledge A. Mosby Jr., a pastor and associate professor, delivers the invocation, thanking parents and spouses, family and friends for supporting tonight’s graduates. The college’s Voices of Triumph Gospel Choir, which was to perform a song titled “When You Believe,” instead sings “The Climb,” made popular by Miley Cyrus: “The struggles I’m facing/The chances I’m taking/Sometimes might knock me down/But no, I’m not breaking.”
Ms. Dukes presents the distinguished alumnus award to Joseph L. Wright, associate judge of the District Court of Maryland, who earned an associate degree from Prince George’s. He later received a bachelor’s degree from Howard University and a law degree from Tulane University. Prince George’s, he says, “gave me a soul.”
After more speeches, Ms. Dukes, the president, takes the podium, surveying the graduates before her. “Oh, come on,” she says, urging them on. “We can’t hear you!” She asks them to rise, and shift their tassels from right to left. “You are now official"—a roar rises from the students—"you are now officially graduates of Prince George’s Community College.” Several graduates jump and pump their fists. One leaps onto his chair and points to the rafters.
In Section 125, Ms. Aasim’s son Gerald stands and claps hard as he watches her cross the stage. He was still in high school, taking Advanced Placement courses, when she enrolled at Prince George’s. He teased her about what she didn’t know, but he encouraged her, too. When she talked about taking a semester off, or said she was done with college, he would shake his head. “No, Mom,” he would say, “you’ve got to keep going.”
“It’s stressful, but we have to continue to do this, so we can change everyone’s opinion of us.”
Her husband, Ronald Wright, encouraged her in his own way. Some nights when she would bring all her books into bed with her, he would go sleep on the couch. Some mornings he would get annoyed when she got up early to study. “I just wanted her to relax,” he says. But he would hold his tongue and roll over, he says, because he knew how much she wanted a degree.
He can relate to that. Also a convicted felon, Mr. Wright has been taking courses at Prince George’s, in drywall repair, ceramic-tile installation, and electrical wiring. He hopes to get a contractor’s license.
Ms. Aasim, who has been working as an office manager for the college since January, plans to keep her job while pursuing a bachelor’s degree in business administration. Mr. Wright took care of their bills and expenses while she concentrated on her classes, and now, she has told him, it’s her turn. “It’s stressful, but we have to continue to do this,” she says, “so we can change everyone’s opinion of us.”
As he watches his wife accept her diploma, Mr. Wright, in a White Sox cap, nods slowly, as if absorbing the sight, and for a while he remains quiet. “She’s my baby,” he says a few minutes later. “She finally did it.” Money’s tight, but he plans to take her to a movie to celebrate. Not tonight, though. They both have to work in the morning, and there are about 500 more graduates to go.
Commencements are the sum of many small details. To decorate the stage, Prince George’s procured 12 large bouquets of white flowers and another full of blue and yellow ones, plus 40 mums. It hired one company to project the college’s seal onto a suspended screen, and another to handle the sound. Based on attendance estimates, the college allotted seven tickets to each graduate here, and requested 965 chairs for students, faculty members, and adjuncts.
Perhaps no detail’s more important than getting graduates’ names right. As they cross the stage, graduates hand Clover Baker-Brown a card with their name printed on it. She reads each one quietly to a dean, who then repeats the name for all to hear.
Ms. Baker-Brown, a professor of communications who studies speech and phonetics, knows some names are hard to pronounce. As a native of Jamaica, the professor says she’s familiar with African names—and careful to emphasize each syllable correctly. Oluremi Omotunde Aiyedogbon. Parfaite Kock-Charite Ketekou. Carlson Nchiazeh Nkemnkeng.
Some names elicit shouts from the stands. When Esteban Contreras’s name is read, a handful of small cow bells ring out. Crystal Thomas’s family greets her name with foot stomps. Terrice Jenkins’s grandmother, mother, aunt, and sister shriek as they wave the banner they had made from a full-size bedsheet. The large contingent that rises for Fatuma N. Aden, a Kenyan immigrant, includes her husband and the two daughters he has often plucked off her lap, so she could host study sessions in peace.
Several graduates strike dramatic poses as they cross the stage. Jerrod Stephen, in black aviator sunglasses, spreads his arms wide, nodding, like a rock star delivering an encore. He points to one side of the arena, and then to the other before high-stepping his way down from the stage. He had practiced the moves after the previous night’s rehearsal, saying, “It’s not for me—it’s for them.”
Mr. Stephen wanted to salute those who had helped him, including his parents, friends, and the financial-aid officer who told him about the scholarship that enabled him to stay enrolled. The salute was also for a family friend known as “Mr. Tony.” The man, who lives near the college, had let Mr. Stephen sleep on his couch on the nights before his 8 a.m. classes. That way, he didn’t have to make the early-morning drive from his home, an hour from the campus.
The last student to receive a diploma is Juanita Y. Artis, who was chosen to deliver tonight’s student address. Not long ago, she couldn’t have imagined speaking before even a few people, let alone a few thousand. “It used to be that a handshake was too much for me,” she says.
Ms. Artis earned good grades during her first quarter in high school. Her parents took her to the Silver Diner to celebrate. Later that night, her father died of a heart attack. After that, she lost interest in school. For a while she stopped going to classes, staying home to take care of her mother, who has fought cancer and was often bedridden with back pain.
After she returned to school, Ms. Artis couldn’t concentrate. “A zombie,” she says. She worried about her mother getting up to get a drink of water and falling down the stairs. One day, her mother insisted that she buckle down. “I can’t afford for you to drop out,” she said.
During her senior year, Ms. Artis replaced D’s and F’s with A’s and B’s, but her transcript was shot: She finished with a 1.2 grade-point average. She sent an application to the University of Maryland at College Park, her dream school, just for the hell of it; the section for listing extracurricular activities and community service was blank.
“I was so scared of my own ability. ... I went from being invisible to someone people had to look up to.”
When Ms. Artis enrolled at Prince George’s, in 2009, she kept her eyes low and sat in the back of her classes. Then one day in her principles-of-acting class, the instructor, Gina Alvarado-Otero, called her over to the group. “We’re not contagious,” Ms. Artis recalls her saying. Never before had a teacher invited her to speak up. Later, Ms. Alvarado-Otero taught her how to fill her chest with air so as to project her voice, and how to carry herself, confidently, into a room.
One day, Ms. Alvarado-Otero asked her students to pair up for an exercise in which they were to stare into each other’s eyes for several minutes, without looking away. Ms. Artis fidgeted. She had always avoided eye contact, looking down at people’s shirts. “This was a huge moment,” she says. “It made me realize I had been doing this all my life. I had to ask myself, Why did I do that? I was so scared of my own ability.”
Had Ms. Artis not taken the class, she doubts she would have listened to her adviser, who urged her to join clubs, or to her colleague at her campus job, who encouraged her to participate in student government. She might have remained what’s known around the campus as “PCP"—a student who goes from the parking lot to class and then back to the parking lot each day. Instead, she starred in a production of “For Colored Girls,” a play by Ntozake Shange, served as president of the student government, and participated in several clubs. “I went from being invisible,” she says, “to someone people had to look up to.”
Just hours before tonight’s commencement, Ms. Artis went to a salon and told the stylist to cut away. When she felt the first snip of the scissors, she imagined what her late father would have said: She had always had long hair. When she got home, she paused, startled, before the mirror. At least six inches were gone.
Ms. Artis, who will pursue her bachelor’s degree in criminal justice and criminology at Maryland this fall, wanted to describe her transformation in tonight’s speech. Over and over she rehearsed the lines in her bedroom, standing before a poster of Marilyn Monroe, skirt blown skyward. One day, her mother knocked on her door and asked her to recite it for her. Although Ms. Artis was reluctant to ruin the surprise, she delivered the speech in her mother’s bedroom, and her mother cried. “It’s very beautiful,” she said.
Ms. Artis is glad this happened. Fifteen minutes before she was to leave for tonight’s ceremony, her mother, who gets around with a walker, told her she didn’t feel well enough to attend. So the graduate went without her, wearing the pair of diamond studs her mother had plucked from a jewelry box and placed in her hand.
In her speech, Ms. Artis describes how her mother, who’s watching the Webcast from home, instilled in her “the strong will to succeed.” She describes how two professors challenged her. “It takes a community,” she says, “to help students envision success.” She mentions her 3.48 grade-point average, and quotes Harriet Tubman. Her carefully paced crescendo, she had hoped, would bring the crowd to its feet, and though this does not happen, one graduate stands up and claps, and then a few more do, too.
Finally, the president of the alumni association leads the graduates in reciting the alumni pledge. The students, who have been given penlights, turn them on and hold them up like small torches.
When the ceremony ends, the spectators file into the concourse, where a flower vendor has sold all but a few of the 144 bouquets of roses he brought, and every last one of the teddy bears in caps and gowns.
In the lobby of the arena, Earle Wilson poses for pictures, crossing his arms and cocking his head, squatting low and flexing his biceps. He snaps a close-up of his diploma.
To hear his name read aloud tonight was strange, he says; he had gotten used to hearing it called for doing something wrong. For more than a decade, relatives and friends had worried about what would become of him. He’d finished high school in 2002 with an SAT score of 1200 but no plans for college. “I’m done with school,” Mr. Wilson says, “that was my attitude.”
So he went to work for a friend of his father’s who had opened a liquor store in Northeast Washington. It was a rough neighborhood, he says, and he picked up some bad habits. That fall, he got arrested for dealing drugs and sent to prison.
He spent lots of time there writing, spinning stories he’d heard from his workout buddy, William. Leaning on a book or stack of paper, he would fill blank sheets with tiny print, often at 3 o’clock in the morning, he says. “All I needed was just a sliver of light.”
He shared a chapter with an older inmate, who liked it. “Every couple of days, if I didn’t have something to give him to read, he would get mad at me,” Mr. Wilson says. The day he was released, in the spring of 2007, a few of his stories were circulating among friends, and he didn’t have time to collect them.
“The conversations with my father and her were, ‘You should go to school, you should go to school, you should go to school, you should go to school.’”
He went to work at Party City, then at a motel, then selling cellphones and accessories. With hopes of becoming a substitute teacher, he caught the bus one day to the local Board of Education, where he was told he needed an associate degree.
Mr. Wilson had grown up as a mama’s boy, he says, but when he was 10, his mother disappeared. His aunt Phyllis Wilson, a high-school art teacher, “picked up a lot of the maternal slack,” he says. Sometimes she got on his case.
“The conversations with my father and her were, ‘You should go to school, you should go to school, you should go to school, you should go to school,’” Mr. Wilson says. The repetition was necessary, his aunt says: “You have to constantly reinforce it, the idea that it’s possible.” Mr. Wilson’s sister, Leslye, registered for classes at a community college to set an example for him.
When Mr. Wilson finally enrolled at Prince George’s, his sister was so happy, she started sending him checks for books. That fall semester, he registered for a full 15 credits, performed in a play, and met the director of the Diverse Male Student Initiatives program, Brian Hamlin.
The director’s tattooed arms impressed Mr. Wilson, and so did his message. “He was talking about how do you change a mind state, a mentality,” the young man recalls. “This is coming from a guy who looks like that?!”
Soon, though, Mr. Wilson was struggling with overnight shifts at an office-supply warehouse and a rocky relationship, he says. He dropped a few classes, but didn’t tell Mr. Hamlin. The next fall, he finally leveled with his adviser. “He kind of got in my ear and was like ‘Earle, you can’t keep dropping classes. You’ll never finish,’” Mr. Wilson says.
He buckled down: got a job at Applebee’s with more manageable shifts, stopped answering calls and texts from his ex-girlfriend, and focused on his books. “I did a 180 by the end of the fall,” says Mr. Wilson, who plans to enroll at Bowie State University.
Here in the lobby tonight, he hams it up with his fellow graduates as a friend who hopes to graduate soon comes up to congratulate him. “I’ll be there in two semesters, man,” he says, hopefully. He’s been at Prince George’s for five years. It’s OK, Leslye Wilson tells him: She’s on Year 6.
At 9:40, an arena employee ushers lingering families toward the glass doors. The Wilsons stand outside for a while, trying to make plans. Dinner isn’t in the cards tonight, so they decide to celebrate on Saturday. Mr. Wilson’s new girlfriend, wearing his mortarboard, leads him by the hand through the parking lot as he chatters, clicking his penlight on and off in the darkness.
Since composing stories in prison, Mr. Wilson has not stopped writing. He’s working on a novel, the first in a series of four he’s calling the Urban Chronicles. In the book, a young man named Earnest Walker must choose between two role models: one who is into “a lot of shady things,” and one who is not. Along the way, Earnest wavers. “He leans more toward the negative,” the author says.
But good things are ahead for the protagonist. “When I get toward the third book, you’ll start seeing how he makes his way toward the positive,” Mr. Wilson says. “He has a beautiful arc.”
Correction (6/18/2013, 2:25 p.m.): This article originally described the tassel on Ms. Aasim’s mortarboard as gold in color. It was blue. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.
