If UGA wants a more diverse student body, it needs to start working with elementary school children, said Janice Mathis, vice president of the charitable research and educational organization Citizen Education Fund, at the seventh annual Black Faculty and Staff Organization’s Founders Day Luncheon.
“My mother had a prescription for everything: If you did good, she’d say ‘You’ve been a good girl, I’m going to buy you a book.’ If you had a headache, she’d say ‘If you go back and get one of your books it’ll probably make you feel better.’ If you’d been bad, she’d say ‘I’m just about tired of you, you need to go get a book and read,’ ” Mathis said. “I wish that more young people had that kind of parenting. By the time y’all get them, they’re baked. They’re done. I really believe that what’s going to happen to young people is determined by the time they’re 8 years old.
“If they’re reading on their own grade level when they’re 8 years old, they’re not going to need criminal defense lawyers. If they’re reading on their own grade level by the time they’re 8 years old, they’re going to wait until they’re grown to have children. They’re going to avoid drugs and all the bad things that can happen to them. You have to change them when you can change them,” she added. “If you want a more diverse student body, we have to do more with the public schools in Athens-Clarke County. It’s not that the children are not able. If they can learn hip-hop and all this foolishness, they can learn trig. If they can play basketball and football the way they do, they can learn anything we want to teach them. What we’ve got to get over is this attitude that there’s something wrong with them. There’s nothing wrong with them, except that they haven’t received the benefit great parenting, some of them.”
The Founders Day Luncheon began in 2002 as a means to provide scholarships to African-American students at UGA. This year, the organization awarded $750 scholarships to three students: undergraduate Christine Akoh, graduate student Jasmine Nichole Mathis and professional student Briana Worthy. Funds for the scholarship come from tickets to the event.
Mathis, who graduated from UGA’s School of Law in 1980, said that she owed her entire career to the founders of BFSO, whose guidance and encouragement helped her. Since graduation, she’s achieved national recognition for her efforts on behalf of fairness and education.
In 2005, she planned and oversaw “Keep the Vote Alive,” the largest civil rights demonstration in Atlanta’s history. She’s negotiated inclusion pacts with companies like General Motors and Nationwide, and was named one of Georgia’s 50 most influential women in 2007 by Georgia Informer. Currently she hosts two radio programs: “Truth to Power” on Athens’ WXAG radio and “Sisters-in-Law” on WAOK.
Her focus on education comes not only from her mother, a fifth grade schoolteacher, but from a belief that it can cement not only the children’s welfare but the nation’s as well.
“Our futures are all tied up together whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not,” she said. “We can let these children waste their talents and their brains running around hip-hopping and doing the wrong things if we want to, but we are all, as a society going to pay the price for it.”