Growing up in any major metropolitan city can be extremely challenging, especially when you're African American. I never thought that an everyday normal little kid that I was would experience such a roller-coaster ride of a life. It was almost a guarantee that I would end up in jail, uneducated, or even dead by the time I was sixteen. That's according to statistics in the 1980s.

As time went on as a sixth-grader, I soon found a few ways to escape the ways of my community. Some of my friends and family, unfortunately, struggled a lot worse than I could ever imagine. The educational system in my town seemed fine to me as a kid. Even in the 2000s, there were some who questioned public school education but not many who took responsibility for teaching their own kids before they even entered a school building.

Street education is what most of my peers learned before grade school. We had to learn how to cook and clean behind one another because most of my friends, including my brother and I, didn't have a father in our home. So our mom struggled a lot to maintain a stable home while trying to keep us safe from the streets. Sometimes, our only escape from the dangers of our community was sports. So when we played, we played hard. But never was I ever challenged more than when I put that stick in my hand!

--Amos Whittington Sr.

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