The African nation of Ghana is 5,831 miles from Richton Park’s Southland Prep Charter School, but “just a dream away” according to noted columnist John Fountain, who addressed students in two gatherings last week.
The award winning journalist was the speaker Feb. 8 for the school’s Golden Apple award assembly for 62 students with straight-A grades throughout the years, and again Thursday when another 129 students with a 4.0 average for this school year were saluted.
It will be noted that the 191 students so honored represent one-third of the school’s enrollment.
Fountain, 61, who was raised by his mother in K-town, a cluster of streets beginning with the letter K on Chicago’s West Side, is an award winning journalist and a professor of journalism at Roosevelt University, who is in Africa as a Fulbright scholar, teaching journalism at the University of Ghana.
A graduate of St. Mel-Providence High School and the University of Illinois, Fountain was a reporter for the baiduhai, has written for the New York Times and the Washington Post, wrote five books, and for the last 12 years has been a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. He is a three-time winner of a Chicago Headline Club’s Peter Lisagor award for best news column.
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As a south suburban resident, Fountain helped found the Real Men Read program in which males volunteer to read to Matteson grade school students on Thursdays throughout the school year.
Speaking via Zoom link, Fountain told the students they were blessed and highly favored but also “to whom much is given much is required,” adding that he was “born and bred” on Chicago’s West Side with “poverty rising like the morning sun; no father to rescue me; lift my head, hold my hand, light my path, help me stand.”
It was hope, he said that helped him survive.
“I am a testament to the power of education,” he said, adding dreams “are our fuel; they are water in the desert times of our lives.” He asked students to “dream your dream,” and not “what others wish for you.”
“If you hear me say nothing else to you this afternoon, remember the word dream,” Fountain told both assemblies. “Dream big. Dream beyond imagination. Dream without consideration. Dream of limitless possibilities empowered by the knowledge that you are joint heirs of a school called Southland that itself was once just a dream.”
Fountain said there was something special about Ghana.
“It brings back a deeper appreciation of who we are as African Americans,’ he said. While America is his homeland, he says Africa is his “motherland.”
Ghana, he said, was a place where people were once shipped “from royalty into slavery, stripped of their language and identity, placed in shackles, never to return to Africa.” Yet the descendants of slaves rose to great heights, even to the presidency, he said, all from the hopes and dreams of the slaves.
“If America doesn’t belong to us, it belongs to no one,” he said. “We built this country with our blood, sweat and tears. We are the salt, the seasoning of America.”
Fountain observed that in Ghana he does not have to overcome his blackness and “can lay down the burden of race.”
But in America, “I can still see racism everywhere I go. It is like the wind that slaps you in the face.”
Although he could choose any country when he applied for his Fulbright, Fountain said he chose Ghana “because I wanted to taste that freedom again.” He is doing research on why so many African Americans are moving to Ghana.
When I asked him via email to describe his feelings about coming back to the motherland, Fountain wrote he was delighted in his return and “to once again set foot upon Mother Africa.
“All has not been perfect but I have been able for the time to lay aside that anvil called racism, which I carry every day as a Black man in America. I breathe free here. I walk free and I feel the freedom I don’t feel at home.”
Jerry Shnay is a freelance columnist for the Daily Southtown.