RE Log Spring 2019

SPRING 2019 Ransom Everglades LOG 11 On most morn- ings during his sophomore year, Gordon Myers ’92 emerged from his family’s home on a quiet, leafy street in Morningside, a beautifully preserved, historic neighborhood near Bayshore Drive. He would stroll past his mother’s silver Mercedes as senior James Weaver ’90 pulled up in a beat- up, old-model Chevrolet Cavalier with a trio of classmates from Miami’s Liberty City area. Once Myers hopped in, the car’s occupants – which included John Walker McGee II ’91 , Stephanie Chandler ’92 and Monique “Yatrell” Roundtree ’92 – represented a signifi- cant portion of the school’s Black Student Association, which had been launched the previous year in 1988-89. “It was five Ransom Everglades students going to Coconut Grove,” Myers recalled. “They’d be fine in their neigh- borhood, but as soon as they picked me up, we’d get pulled over by the police. We kept getting stopped until they finally realized: ‘OK, one of those kids lives on Bayshore.’ “That was an education for me,” said Myers, a professional singer in Sunset Beach, Calif. “Those car rides were amaz- ing. We ended up talking about what was going on in school, so many things. For me, that was as much of a black-student meeting as anything we did on campus.” Ransom Everglades’ Black Student Association, celebrating its 30th anni- versary this spring, was populated in its earliest days by students who had little in common besides the color of their skin. Some came from prominent Miami families, many hailed from Jamaica or elsewhere in the Caribbean, others were mixed-race students who more strongly identified with other parts of their heri- tage, and some were brainy kids recruited out of the city’s toughest neighborhoods. During their years at RE, they devel- oped a bond through shared experiences on and off campus. They were small in number – McGee recalls being the only black student in his graduating class – but several maneuvered successfully through the challenging dynamics of high school to become among the most re- spected figures on campus. The formation of the BSA created a network, a venue for personal discovery and an outlet for education even as some white students questioned the need for the group. “It was about having solidarity and helping the campus be more culturally and socially aware,” Weaver said. “We engaged with parents, teachers, the headmaster and administration.” Years later, spread across the country from California to Oregon to Texas to Ohio and beyond, as lawyers, engineers, military officers, non-profit executives and musicians, RE alumni who popu- lated the earliest incarnations of the BSA look back at Ransom Everglades with a mix of appreciation, fondness and an almost parental concern. Many recall their years at RE as some of the best of their lives, but they also remember peers whose experiences at RE did not match theirs. Those students, despite the pres- ence of the BSA, never felt at home and eventually left RE for other schools. The BSA’s founding members know the current generation of RE students is surrounded by diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives (see page 16) and more out-in-the-open discussions, yet some still worry that substantive change comes slowly. After all, it took more than 15 years after the arrival of the Ransom School’s first black stu- dent – Wendell Graham ’74 , now a Miami-Dade County Court judge – for a black-student association to launch. Gordon Myers ’92 1989 First BSA yearbook photo in 1989 L-R: Stephanie Chandler ’92, Stacy Palmer ’89, Ms. Fribley, Erica McKinney ’89, Lazaro Kindelan ’89