News Highlights

Graduate student mentors local high school students of color

Graduate student Namibia Little is an inspiration and a mentor for students at Mankato's East Senior High -- she's the only faculty mentor of color in the local school system.

2006-04-09
By Dylan Thomas, Free Press Staff Writer [published in The Free Press, Mankato, MN, 1/16/2006]

MANKATO — When Namibia Little walked into East Senior High School recently, a few of the students she has been meeting with once a month since October ran up and gave her a hug.

It was a good feeling for the 24-year-old, who volunteers as a mentor to a group of 15 to 20 students. Little, who is black, approached a school guidance counselor with the idea a few months ago, inspired by the mentor she met with at her Minneapolis high school.

"It started off as an idea just to provide some form of mentorship to young students of color, because there are no faculty or mentors within the school district who are of color," she said.

"I went to a majority white high school, so I know how it is," she said. "You don't really have someone older to look up to, to understand how it is to be a young woman of color — just a young person of color, period."

What Little found when she walked into a meeting of the high school's diversity club was a group of very focused and motivated teens.

Teens like senior Kassim Busuri, whose family fled civil war in Somalia to come to the United States.

"We know to ourselves that we are going to succeed and we will succeed if we try our best," Busuri said. "That's what Namibia tells us."

Little — who completed her undergraduate degree at Tuskegee University in Tuskegee, Ala. — is a second-year graduate student in urban and regional studies at Minnesota State University. Her message to the students is simple: Keep learning, whether in college or somewhere else.

Senior Issaim Amaro, who emigrated from Mexico with her mother, said Little is a role model.

"I've seen my brother who dropped out of school," Amaro said. "He didn't have a degree, and it's really hard for him to find a good job."

"(Little) teaches that you don't have to give up, and to keep going no matter what," she said.

During her meetings with students, Little also has them talk about experiences with other students and faculty.

Busuri said there is little outright racism at East. Still, he said, some students may underestimate the abilities of peers who come from other countries, or do not speak English as well.

Little also explores the bonds that tie the students together.

"I think they probably feel comfortable, a Somalian and a Mexican working together, because they both know their parents came over here to get a better life," she said. "Or whether they be from Somalia or Sudan, they know both their parents came over here to get away from civil war, so they have a common bond."

When asked a few days before Martin Luther King, Jr. Day about her role models, Little said she did not have to look far to find inspiration.

Her mother, Azania Little, was a member of the Black Panther Party who worked alongside Kwame Ture, born Stokely Charmichael, a prominent figure in the civil rights movement.

Her grandfather, Matthew Little, represented another approach to black empowerment as president of the Minnesota chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in the 1990s.

Little said her role models came from "two extremes," but both struggled for equality in a diverse world. She wants to pass on that message to a generation that is growing up in increasingly diverse Mankato.

"I think the young people are really embracing the changes and diversity, and that's all that matters, because the young people are going to be the ones to run this city, basically within the next 10 to 15 years."

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