The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
After loss, gifted D.C. student aims to empower his ‘village’
WASHINGTON — When RuQuan Brown and his father met with an Ivy League football coach in December, he recalls his father making a striking statement, one that shapes the way the teenager views the successes he has already achieved.
“He said it’s important that I’m not a unicorn,” Brown said. “It should be that there are enough black boys, black girls, whoever, who have experienced this so I’m not the only one experiencing it.”
At 17, Brown’s list of accomplishments is long — and poised to grow longer.
Brown is student body president at Benjamin Banneker Academic High, a prestigious application school in the District of Columbia. He owns a clothing business that aims to help stop gun violence.
The way Brown sees it, he shouldn’t be considered extraordinary. His childhood circumstances and adolescent ambitions aren’t all that unusual among his friends.
Neither is the way gun violence has punctured his high school years. In September 2017, his friend and football teammate, Robert Lee Arthur Jr., was fatally shot in D.C.
A year later, the stepfather who introduced Brown to football was shot and killed at age 38.
But here’s Brown, visiting Columbia University one weekend, Harvard the next, and juggling meetings with football recruiters from colleges across the country in between.
His ambitions, his coaches and teachers say, go beyond the NFL, beyond a six-figure salary. They land instead on ensuring more teenagers from communities like his have the opportunities that stretch ahead of him.
“It’s important that we work toward me not being the only kid who is experiencing this,” Brown said.
On a recent school day, he’s wearing a hoodie with his clothing company’s logo, Love1. Robert Lee Arthur Jr. wore No. 1 on his jersey, and the logo is a tribute to him and to Brown’s stepfather and other victims of gun violence. Twenty percent of the proceeds go to an organization that buys guns off the streets and transforms them into art.
Because Banneker does not have a football team, Brown plays as a speedy cornerback and wide receiver for Theodore Roosevelt High, a neighborhood school a mile-and-ahalf north of Banneker.
Coach Chris Harden said Brown, the team captain, is friends with all his teammates, although they sometimes rib him for his constant reminders that they should all do the right thing.
“It’s almost as if he was born into a grown man’s mind,” Harden said. “He thinks bigger than how most kids think.”
The high school senior does not yet know which college he will select.
“My biggest goal is to go to college and continue to impact the communities that have impacted me,” he said.
Whatever he decides, his family and “the village,” as he calls it, that raised him will be a part of his future.