BookBrowse Reviews The Promise by Oral Lee Brown, Caille Millner

BookBrowse:

One woman's promise to send a class of children to college. Memoir

From the book jacket: One morning in 1987 Oral Lee Brown walked into a corner store in East Oakland, California, to buy snacks for work. A little girl asked her for a quarter, and Brown assumed that she wanted to buy candy, but surprisingly she bought bread and bologna—staples for her family. Later that day she couldn't get the little girl out of her mind. Why wasn't she in school? Why was she out begging for money to buy food for her family? After several weeks of not being able to sleep, she went to look for the girl at the local elementary school and ended up in a first-grade classroom. She didn't find the little girl, but before she left she found herself promising the children that if they finished high school, she would pay for their college education.

Comment: To the naysayers who believe that they can't make a difference - that their few dollars in the charity box aren't worth it, or it's not worth voting because one vote doesn't matter - I offer you Oral Lee Brown. If she can put an entire class of students through college on an income of $45,000 a year what could we do? When she made her commitment to invest $10,000 a year into a college fund for the children, she didn't have a foundation to back her (in fact she only formed the Oral Lee Foundation when she realized that she couldn't deduct her own contributions on her tax return unless they were matched by money from others). 

She also didn't realize that she was taking on much more than just a financial commitment - but she stuck with it. A few chapters into the book I thought that she was going a little over the top with her focus on what she had done for the children, and I wondered why she had so sidelined the parents' roles. However, as the story unfolded, I realized that, in many cases, the parents (or more accurately the single mothers and grandparents - only 4 children had fathers living at home) really hadn't had a role and that she had effectively raised many of the children herself, giving them the support, guidance, encouragement and discipline that weren't available to them at home. Her commitment strained her marriage to the point that it broke down, and required her to work multiple jobs (9 a.m.-5.30 p.m. in real estate, 6-10 p.m. running her restaurant,10 p.m. onwards making pies for an army contract), but in 2001, 19 of her class of 23 children graduated high school, and she sent them all to college. Now she and her Foundation have adopted three new classrooms of first, fifth and ninth-graders, and have committed to sending a new crop of kids to college every four years!

This review first ran in the April 6, 2005 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.

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