From left are Jamarius Strong-Williams, Dr. Brandon Lewis, Gustavious Maddox and Harrison Clark. Photo provided.
By Jacqueline Todd
LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga. | Jamarius Strong-Williams has dreams of working in healthcare. The 19-year-old Georgia Gwinnett College (GGC) student majors in biology with a concentration in biochemistry in the hope of someday becoming a surgeon. But Strong-Williams said that having grown up in the town of Covington, he felt that such big dreams were elusive for a small-town African American male, where the poverty rate is 21 percent, nearly double the average of the poverty rate in Georgia.
“Where I come from, there are not many people – really anybody at all – who say they want to be things; it’s more about money,” he said. “Surgery isn’t about that – it’s about helping people and giving them the effective care that’s needed.”
When Strong-Williams became a GGC student, he was invited to join the college’s African American Male Initiative/Elite Scholars (AAMI), where he met Harrison Clark, a student who had some big dreams of his own.
“When I came to GGC,” said Strong-Williams, “Harrison told me he wanted to be a lawyer, which gave me more confidence to be more open about what I wanted to be. I saw that everyone wanted to be something that not a lot of African Americans wanted to be.”
Harrison Clark hails from Lithonia, near Covington, with a population of about 2,700 people, with 16 percent of them with a college degree. The son of an African American father and a white mother, Clark struggled with his identity and felt like an outsider in a predominantly Black community. But Clark knew that his road to success ran through a classroom.
The AAMI is an initiative of the University System of Georgia, launched to improve black male graduation rates in its 26 schools. GGC’s AAMI/Elite Scholars program, started at the college in 2011. It’s designed to meet students where they are, according to Dr. Brandon Lewis, who began overseeing the initiative in 2021. Lewis, an associate professor in GGC’s School of Education, sees the program as the catalyst that attracts historically marginalized students, gives them an outlet for their experiences and feelings and offers a way for them to navigate their college experience – and beyond – with purpose.
AAMI activities are plentiful and varied. The group hosts discussion sessions, where guest speakers who are GGC AAMI alumni return to the college to speak to group members. Students participate in peer mentoring, where older AAMI members mentor their first- and second-year counterparts. Recently, AAMI members participated in a luncheon event with GGC President Jann L. Joseph to share their thoughts and ideas about the school and its offerings.
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