In 1995, Wall Street Journal writer Ron Suskind won a Pulitzer Prize for his two-part series about Cedric Jennings, an intelligent student trapped in a high-crime, inner-city school, and Jennings’s struggle to succeed out of that world.

As it turned out, those high school years were only half the story. Once out of his Washington, D.C., neighborhood and in his freshman year at Brown University, Jennings had to fight once again to keep up, understand, and be understood in a mostly white world he knew little of.

Suskind kept in close contact with Jennings after the initial stories and the result is A Hope in the Unseen , a thorough biography of Jennings’s drive and rise out of the inner city into the Ivy League and the renewed struggle he faced there.

Though it took an almost preternatural level of ambition to escape the inner city, Jennings didn’t do it alone. His mother, Barbara, was a constant motivator and supporter, as were his minister and his chemistry teacher.

This excerpt, from almost the middle of the book, shows Jennings on his first day of college, moving into his dorm room and watching his mother drive away.

Publish Date : 1998-05-18