Home: Newsroom: Newsletter: Student African American Brotherhood

Bledsoe, then the associate vice president of Student Affairs, declared a state of emergency on campus, invited all of the school’s 180 African-American males to a meeting and asked them what was happening. About one third showed up.

“The guys were so excited and so enjoyed getting together that we started meeting weekly,” he says. “After a while – we gave ourselves a name: The Student African American Brotherhood (SAAB).”

Initially SAAB’s only focus was meeting the needs of the students at GSW, a small state-supported school of 2,600 students in Americus, GA. “I had no intention of creating a national organization – we were simply trying to speak to the needs of the students on that campus,” Bledsoe says.

Today, the organization has 126 chapters on college campuses nationwide and eight in high schools, including Bledsoe’s alma mater in Grenada, MS. More than 2,000 members belong to the organization, which is now developing an infrastructure to give students a consistent SAAB experience across the country. Bledsoe, executive director of SAAB, brings to the organization 23 years of experience in higher education administration and a doctorate from the University of Georgia in counseling and student-affairs administration.

In the last two years, with the help of a Lumina Foundation grant, the organization has established a national headquarters at the University of Toledo in Ohio, developed a planning module to use for starting new SAAB chapters, and branched out to develop chapters at high schools and two-year community colleges.

“Our goal is to give African-American and Latino males a positive group to connect with and give them the support and resources that can fuel their success,” Bledsoe says. “The more involved they are on campus, the more likely they are to graduate.”

SAAB has the numbers to support Bledsoe’s assertion. In the last decade, SAAB has helped 80 percent of its participants persist from freshman to sophomore year and 86 percent to graduate from college. These numbers compare with a national freshman-to-sophomore retention rate of African-American males of 42 percent and a five-year graduation rate of African-American males of 55 percent.

Structuring the SAAB experience
SAAB has spent part of the last two years developing a uniform planning module for starting a chapter. “Everyone starts out the same way,” Bledsoe says.

The group selects a 15- to 18-member steering committee of diverse students – including athletes, fraternity members and commuter students. Steering committee members co-chair six different subcommittees focusing on academics, personal development, service, membership, spiritual enrichment/social activities and financial affairs.

Typically groups have a three-month training period during which they organize and develop a strategic plan. “We stress the importance of having a plan. We want to intentionally structure opportunities and experiences for the members,” he says. All
members are required to perform community-service work.

One of the cornerstones of the SAAB experience is instilling the spirit of caring in its members. “When I was growing up, my three brothers and I had both parents at home, and we learned to care from them. We valued our education because many of the family members who came before us didn’t have the opportunity to go to college. We were the first.”

Today, many African-American males grow up in households with one parent and multiple children, and many have not had the experience in learning to care, he says. “They have a tendency not to care about school, family or their community. At SAAB, we care about our members. Our motto is saving lives, salvaging dreams, and we take it very seriously.”

SAAB also firmly supports a three-pronged approach to mentoring. Members mentor one another and live by the motto “I am my brother’s keeper…and together we will rise.” Faculty and staff members on campus mentor students, and chapters mentor other chapters. Typically a chapter at a four-year university will mentor a chapter at a two-year community college or high school.

In the future, Bledsoe would like to see SAAB reach into the middle school level. “That’s a tough age, and it’s a critical stage in development for African-American and Latino males,” he says.

Bledsoe stresses that although SAAB focuses on African-American and Latino males, anyone can join the organization, and many chapters have Caucasian and Asian members.

SAAB differs from many campus organizations such as fraternities, he says. “Over the years, I’ve looked at what has worked and not worked in higher education, and I’ve used that experience to shape SAAB.

“Our organization is open to everyone. We don’t charge students a penny – institutions pay a chapter’s dues. And there are no academic or other requirements members must meet to join. We want the student with the 1.5 GPA because we want to help save him.”

Leave a comment:

Your name:
Your location:
Your comments:
Security check *

African-American students graduate college at lower rates than White students

Many students who begin postsecondary education drop out before completing a degree. Graduation rates are particularly low for minority students.  

During the last 20 years, more African Americans have been pursuing college and now go to college at about same rate as white students, according to The Education Trust. However, African Americans do not complete college at the same rate.

Consider the following findings from The Education Trust’s report, Promise Abandoned: How Policy Choices and Institutional Practices Restrict College Opportunities:

•  Forty percent – 47,485 students – of the 117,119 African-American freshmen that started full-time in a four-year college in 1998 graduated with a degree six years later.
•  Fifty-nine percent of White students who started college at the same time, graduated in six years.
•  Sixty-six percent of Asian students who started college at the same time graduated within six years.

The trouble is not confined to college completion. The Schott Foundation publishes the Schott Education Inequity Index (p. 6), which looks at high school graduation rates of African-American and white students. For 2001-2002 more than half – 58 percent – of African-American males did not earn their diplomas with their class compared with 29 percent of white males. A large part of the problem is concentrated in large cities:

•  New York City graduates only one-fourth of African-American males with their peers.
•  Chicago graduates less than one-third of African-American males with their peers.

Some areas with large African-American populations do much better than New York and Chicago, according to the Foundation. Three Maryland counties – Baltimore, Montgomery and Prince Georges – together enroll the third largest population of African-American males in the country, and students there show no achievement gap when compared to white males across the country.