Episode 40: Derrick Young, Jr. & Jonathan Allen
The Caped Crusaders
My favorite moving growing up was Superman II. The Christopher Reeve Superman II. I had every word memorized and I had the collector’s edition magazine that the studio released. I liked Reeve’s Superman of the 1980s. He wasn’t an overly chiseled, mutant body builder. His images hadn’t been retouched within an inch of their lives. He was just a slightly higher than average guy running around in tights and a cape, saving us from the machinations of Krypton’s worst baddies: General Zod, Non and Ursa. The three villains of the movie who, through an explosion in the depths of space, had been freed from their astronomical prison in the Phantom Zone. Because they too came from Superman’s Krypton, when they landed on planet earth, they were endowed with the same powers as Superman. How he defeats them? Well, you will have to watch the movie for that story to unfold.
Today, I like my superheroes of the human variety. Real folks, who more than fighting against menacing beings from other worlds, are fighting for human rights, equity, and expanding access for people this world consistently and sometimes actively neglects – black and brown people, gay people, trans people, poor people, and women.
Derrick Young, Jr. and Jonathan Allen are just such modern-day and unexpected caped crusaders. Through their nonprofit organization Leadership Brainery, they are on a mission to construct for black and brown people, LGBTQ+ people, and first-generation college students a road map from undergraduate schools to Masters and Doctoral Degree programs within the top institutions in America. Institutions like Harvard, like Boston University, like MIT. Derrick and Jonathan are contemporary Harriet Tubmans shepherding these underrepresented groups through the sometimes-tangled maze of admissions processes and finances required to obtain advanced degrees. They are also engaged in the heavy lift of ensuring that the communities where their candidates come from and the universities receiving their candidates are prepared to produce the sustained circumstances that will contribute to success for these students.
Jonathan received his law degree from Boston University. Derrick received his Master of Public Health from Tufts University. They are both products of the HBCU System. It was at Grambling State, where they met, fell in love, and began to nurture their inspiring relationship while laying the foundation of what would later become Leadership Brainery – advanced educational opportunities and access for underserved people. Their sophisticated thesis supports the belief that those students who are the constituents of Leadership Brainery can build financial security and generational wealth by accessing the quality education, lucrative leadership and managerial positions, and networking opportunities found through attending top ranked universities. Jonathan and Derrick are using their lives and platforms to confront one of the greatest cultural challenges of our times: the curse of low expectations and low graduation rates that many underrepresented people face in today’s educational systems.
Why do they take on this extraordinary challenge? Derrick references one of his favorite James Baldwin quotes, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
