Touring schools of Oprah, Common, Spike and Chadwick
Just for a few seconds, Angela Edwards re-enacts a defining moment she had with her father more than 30 years ago. He was persistent, she was resistant.
William E. Edwards was a bus driver and part-time cop in Stamford who wanted his daughter to revive bus tours of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) for high school students. She launched the initiative in 1986 while working for CTE, then stopped organizing them as she moved on to other jobs.
“You need to go back and start doing the tour again,” he suggested.
“Naah, I don’t think so,” she responded.
Angela returns to the present to reflect.
“You know how young people are with their parents,” she says. Then she flips back to her 1990 identity: “Naah, I’m good.”
He didn’t stop asking. As hundreds who have taken the tours can testify, William Edwards won that argument.
So Angela planned another bus trip for April 1991. “And my dad died that March,” she recalls. “A month before I left. So he did not get to see it physically, but I know he is with me spiritually.”
It’s been a long ride since Angela named the annual trip the William E. Edwards Academic College Tours (WEE-ACT) in honor of her father. A gala and awards ceremony was held at the Stamford Marriott Friday to celebrate the 30th anniversary.
I ask Angela to take me even further back, to when she was about to graduate from Stamford High School in 1974 and was considering colleges. Her dad did not go to college, and she was initially thrilled to be accepted by the University of Connecticut and University of Bridgeport. Then an opportunity came to take a church bus trip to visit Shaw University in Raleigh, N.C. She had heard of HBCUs such as Morehouse College (which Martin Luther King, Jr. attended) and Howard University, but had never been to a campus. As she recalls those days, she sounds like a teenager again (a modern one at that).
“When I went on the (Shaw) campus, I was like, ‘Oh my God! This is where I want to go. I’m feeling this.’ ”
She was thrilled to be accepted to Shaw. After another drive that fall, she arrived at the school with her parents.
“It hit a spot in my dad’s heart,” she says. “There were so many students who looked like me. And to look up and see professors that looked like me. And the president of a college ...”
Angela admits there have been times over the past three decades that she nearly ended the tradition for high schoolers. Among other things, she is not paid for the work.
Then she’s back on a campus, looking at bus mates and embracing the sensation of feeling like an incoming freshman again. A feeling of opportunity. A feeling of life pivoting.
“So I never stopped.”
The intention has never been simply to recruit high schoolers to one of the 107 HBUCs. It’s to expose them to a variety of possibilities (hence the motto “One Ride, Many Choices”). The trip, which rotates colleges each spring, showcases large and small schools, urban and suburban.
I ask Angela to make her typical pitch. She starts by asking about five-year goals, noting that “I don’t know” is a common response. She asks about familiarity with HBUCs. The boilerplate answer is similar to her own as a teen. She mentions bold-faced names that graduated from the schools, the ones that don’t require mention of a surname, such as Oprah, Common, Spike, Toni, Thurgood and Chadwick.
She tosses in a few more history lessons, noting New Haven land around Yale University that might have become the nation’s first Black college, “but they were told no because their property value might go down.”
That happened at a town meeting on Sept. 10, 1831. Michael Morand of Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library delivered a compelling lecture on the topic with period documents earlier this month (see it on YouTube). Slavery was still legal at the time in Connecticut, which was slow among Northern states to abolish it.
Angela’s trips revisit the past to seize the present and change futures. She remains surrounded by her own history. I remind her the students of those first trips have lapped 50 years.
“As I tell them, ‘You have caught up with me now.’ ” Regardless of age, she calls them “my WEE-ACT babies.” Three of her former charges asked her to be godmother to their own children.
They aren’t all from Stamford. Students from as far away as Los Angeles have joined the tour. Atlanta parents sent their kids to meet the WEE-ACT group upon their arrival in Southern states.
Those who come along for the ride are required to follow strict dress codes with the understanding they are on a business trip. That means the boys, who have caught up in numbers with the girls over the decades, “do the tie thing.”
After skipping the tradition during the 2020 COVID crisis, they returned with a smaller group of 15 (down from about 50) in June. It was also the first trip since the deaths of two of WEE-ACT’s biggest supporters: her mother, Peggy, and Jack Bryant, one of the state’s earliest prominent victims of the coronavirus. Bryant, former head of the Stamford NAACP and a Board of Education member, was WEE-ACT’s vice president and male chaperone on the tour for 23 years.
To honor him, she has created “The Jack Bryant Community Award.” It echoes her decision to name the organization 30 years ago after the man who wouldn’t take “Naah” for an answer.
“I needed to do something to show my gratitude for his persistence,” she says of the inspiration for WEEACT.
Angela Edwards is pretty persistent as well. But then, she is her father’s daughter.