Raising Ivy: FAITH, FAMILY, AND FOOTBALL ON OUR JOURNEY TO YALE AND BACK

By Greg Manora

Raising Ivy is an amazing true story of faith, hope, and love that chronicles one family's journey from the cruelty of slavery, poverty, and segregation in the fields of rural Alabama to prosperity and triumph on the football fields and in vaunted halls of the Ivy League. Raising Ivy examines the power of education, faith, family, and football to lift and transform the family from illiteracy to a fifth generation descendent becoming an Ivy League graduate and only the fifth black man to be captain of the Yale Football Team. The journey is filled with murder, intrigue, secret societies, and tales of glory on the grid iron. Raising Ivy combines simple faith-based lessons with humorous anecdotes, powerful true events, and poignant revelations that take the reader along on this the incredible journey to Yale and back.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781645691044

Book preview

1

Nightmares and Dreams

And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as people, will get to the promised land.

—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

As we journeyed along the winding back roads of Montgomery County Alabama crossing into Pike County, my passenger was one of my most favorite people in the whole wide world, my grandmother, Willie Mae Barnett Dear Manora. Even at the advanced age of eighty at the time, her mind was sharp, and she knew all the back roads and how to get us to our destination. This was one of many journeys I took with my grandmother over the years. While this trip was a physical one to visit the grave of her mother, my great grandmother Rose Barnett, I had taken many other trips in my imagination as I listened to her recount the challenges of life in the rural south in the early 1900s.

Our lives are strung together by an intricate web of journeys, some physical and some emotional, that shape and define who we are as we wind our way through this earthly existence toward our final destination. It’s been said that those of us who achieve great things along this journey often stand on the shoulders of giants, but we stood on the shoulders of ancestors who were considered insignificant, unworthy of equal treatment, and often destined to end their journey with many of their dreams and aspirations still inside them. This is the story of the faith, hope, and love that guided my family’s journey from the harshness of slavery, illiteracy, racism, segregation, and poverty in fields of rural Alabama to the football fields and the halls of the Ivy League.

We never intended to raise an Ivy League football captain. There was no master plan to enroll our son in all the right schools, hire tutors, and study for the SAT from the time he turned ten so he could get into an Ivy League school. I’m almost ashamed to admit that neither his mother nor I really knew much about Ivy League schools at all. I had heard of Princeton once when I was in high school because one of my teammates received a scholarship to play football for them back in 1979. I remember people making a really big deal about it, but I had no idea why. Schools like Princeton, Harvard, and Yale were not part of our vocabulary back then and barely scratched the surface of our vernacular at the beginning of this process. Our youngest son, Darius, was a gifted athlete, and like most parents of gifted athletes, we had visions of Division-1 football scholarships at schools like Stanford, Virginia Tech, Virginia, Wake Forest, Boston College, Duke, or Rutgers. All of these were very good schools, and all of them recruited our son at one point. But none of them was interested unless he could run a 4.5 forty-yard dash on the football field. Our goal, originally, was tuition-free college, but we also understood that it was more important to raise well-adjusted children, who love God, respect all people, and demonstrate good character. We taught our children to value education and understand the power of reading as a tool to level the playing field. I often shared with our sons that if you read the material, you will know what they know, and no one will ever be able to enslave your mind.

When Darius started being recruited by colleges to play football, the Ivy League was the furthest thing from our minds, but the first school to offer him a position on their team was the University of Pennsylvania. I must admit when we first saw the letter we thought it was Penn State, and it took a bit of research to figure out that Penn was an Ivy League school, and they didn’t offer athletic scholarships. Two of the primary reasons Darius never made it to one of those non-Ivy League schools were really quite simple. First, he refused to join the military, so an offer from the Naval Academy fell by the wayside. I’ll never forget trying to convince him that that he would only have to wear the uniform for five years after college if he did not like it. He quickly replied that it was really nine years because he would have to wear the uniform for four years during college as well. Also, he did not feel too guilty about turning down an appointment to the Naval Academy since his older brother had already followed in my footsteps and was serving in the United States Air Force. In his mind, the legacy was safe, and one son in the military was more than enough. Second, he was a running back who could not run a 4.5 forty-yard dash. I often joked that he had deceptive speed because he obviously deceived the recruiters into thinking he was not fast enough to play running back at the major college level. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, but I never thought I would be so thankful that my son was not considered fast enough to get into some of those other schools. These seemingly unfortunate turn of events began to align the stars in the right formation for serious consideration of the Ivy League schools who were now all calling and visiting on a regular basis. While these events provide a window into how the journey ends, to understand how we ended up raising a son who became only the fifth black man to be captain of the prestigious Yale Football team in its 144-year history of playing Division-1 football, we have to go back to the beginning, at least the beginning that I remember.

Every journey has a beginning point; some physical place or significant emotional event that we can identify as the starting point of the voyage. Reflecting back now, I realize that our journey began on that fateful Sunday afternoon drive with my grandmother as she shared with me the oral history of our family. When I talk to my white colleagues about family history, they are always excited and proud to share how their ancestors immigrated to America from far off countries, like Germany, Spain, Scotland, or Sweden. Inevitably their stories end with a familiar refrain, My ancestors came to this country with nothing but a dream and a willingness to work hard. Not surprisingly, they seldom ask me where my ancestors came from. I typically smile and politely acknowledge how great it is that their ancestors worked hard to build a better life for themselves and their children. The conversation then awkwardly shifts to another subject. The history of black people in America is still one of the most uncomfortable conversations for well-meaning educated white people to address. The subject of the Africans’ journey to America is still taboo, and therefore, mostly avoided as if not talking about it will somehow make it go away. There seems to be an unexplainable and unreasonable fear that talking about slavery means admitting that it happened and will cause black people to hate white people and vice versa. We are either expected to understand how different things were back then or simply forget slavery ever happened. It is as if we are to believe Africans magically appeared out of thin air sometime in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

In some ways, I agree with the idea of not talking about slavery. I have often wished I could just forget the terrible blight of slavery and just wipe it from the history books too. Even if that were possible, I am convinced the souls and memories of my ancestors would still haunt me, longing for their story to be told and refusing to be forgotten. Their story is just as important as those of European immigrants and just as worth telling. Our black ancestors helped build America too and literally went through hell and back to secure a better life for their future generations. My ancestors came to America as part of an indescribable, unconscionable nightmare, but through centuries of struggle, iron will, and sheer determination to succeed despite the seemingly insurmountable odds, we prevailed and turned our forefathers’ horrible nightmare into a beautiful American dream. This story is part of the realization of that dream. My great grandmother was born a slave in 1864, just three generations before my birth. Rose Barnett died a free woman at the age of ninety-six in 1960, three years before I was born. Rose gave birth to ten children to include my grandmother, Willie Mae Barnett Manora.

Humble Beginnings

I was born at home to an unwed teenage mother in the 1960s in rural Montgomery County Alabama; at least, that is what I tell everyone. But the circumstances of my birth actually go far beyond the obvious challenges of being born poor and black to an unwed teenage mother in rural Alabama in the sixties. Just in case that was not challenging enough, I was actually born in a small community of about four to six hundred people. My best guess since there are no accurate records. It was known as Macedonia.

Macedonia was named for the main church in the community, Macedonia Baptist Church, and affectionately referred by its residents as the Dome. Macedonia was and is a poor community of all African American residents that appeared to be carved out of a rural farm picture, sprinkled with additional poverty for effect, and surreptitiously frozen in time. I remember thinking in the late seventies what a juxtaposition it was for me to be attending Jefferson Davis High School in the affluent section of Montgomery while living in a neighborhood primarily dissected by dirt roads where some, like my family, still did not have running water or indoor plumbing in the home. Parts of Macedonia in the eighties could have easily been confused with some poverty-stricken community in a third world nation. The entire community was built around what looked like about a three-mile unpaved oval known as Woodley Circle. Woodley Circle was the heart of the community, and other dirt roads darted out from the oval in various directions like arteries carrying blood away from the heart to the rest of the community in the sparsely populated, densely wooded surrounding area. The quality of the homes in the community ranged from primarily wooden structures in poor repair to a few with decent appearance that belonged to some of the professional people like the barber, teacher, store owner, and entrepreneurs in the community. Although we were all relegated to the Dome, it was interesting to see how families with fathers in the home appeared to live in better conditions, on average, than those where the male figure was absent.

In the summer, the dirt roads billowed out dust from passing vehicles and turned light-colored clothing a distinct shade of orange. Respectful drivers, familiar with this phenomenon, would slow down when passing people, especially older folks, on foot to lessen the dusty effect. This was especially important on particular Sunday mornings when the women of the church, like my grandmother, had to wear all white to church. Seemingly, as if by divine intervention, the ladies would always make it to church with their dresses still shining a brilliant white. I was never quite as lucky since the cars sped by us younger children at high enough speeds to completely cover us in a light layer of that distinctive orange hue from head to foot whenever we were caught out on the road. As a result, we often used alternate paths through the woods to get to our destination whenever possible. These foot-worn trails were a great detour unless it had rained recently. Since there were no underground sewage lines, the water often stood in low places to include flooding our paths whenever it rained. The rain forced us back onto the wet, muddy dirt roads and wreaked havoc with any footwear or outfit. Though the poverty in the Dome was severe for so many of us, there was an overall shared feeling of