A Victory of the Mind and the Heart: Chess Coach Salome Thomas-El Watched Three Young Men He Had Mentored for a Decade Graduate From Kutztown University
By Susan Snyder, The Philadelphia Inquirer
May 14–The skies turned black yesterday as the three young men in their Kutztown University graduation gowns and tasseled hats searched the crowd for their mentor and former middle school chess coach, Salome Thomas-El.
Just as Earl Jenkins, Demetrius Carroll and Nathan Durant reached the suit-clad Thomas-El and, one by one, embraced him, the skies let loose.
“It seems like it rains any time there’s a big event,” Jenkins said, as he, Carroll, Durant and Thomas-El scurried into a nearby university building, all dripping wet.
“You know what my mother always said,” Thomas-El told Jenkins. “Rain is a purifier. If it rains on an event, it’s positive. It’s a rebirth.”
An obviously comforted Jenkins nodded: “It’s like tears of joy.”
Indeed, for all four, yesterday was the joyful culmination of a decade-long journey that began when the boys were students at Vaux Middle School in North Philadelphia.
In the fall of 1995, Jenkins, then a sixth grader, was feeling dejected. He had just been cut from the basketball team for being too small. Carroll, whose father was in jail and whose mother was not around, wanted to find a way to use the smarts he knew he had. And Durant had just been in a fight at school and was waiting for his punishment to be meted out.
That’s about the time they all encountered Thomas-El, then a Vaux educator and chess coach.
He recruited all three to play chess, and by the next school year, they were part of the Vaux team that won the national middle school championship in Knoxville, Tenn.
Carroll would go on to become one of the highest-rated middle school players in the country.
Thomas-El, now a principal at Philadelphia’s Stoddart-Fleisher Middle School, has remained in the lives of the three young men, helping however he could when they needed it. None of the three had a father active in his life.
Thomas-El wrote a book, I Choose to Stay, about the chess team’s success and his decision to work in inner-city Philadelphia. The chess team story is on track to be made into a Disney movie for release possibly as early as the end of 2007, said producer Tim Chambers, who is working on the project with the Los Angeles-based Solaris Entertainment.
Thomas-El, 41, said he used chess to turn students on to education because it fosters critical thinking skills and discipline and teaches students to resolve conflicts with their minds. He was introduced to the game as a child by his brother and first used it when he taught special education at Vaux in 1989. The game helped students understand mathematical concepts, such as right angles, and gave them self-esteem: Students who doubted their own intelligence were suddenly playing the smart person’s game, he said.
He is helping the Philadelphia school system expand its chess clubs. This year, nearly 150 clubs are operating, with 5,000 students. In addition, 15 elementary schools are teaching chess in second and third grades.
Thomas-El made the journey to Kutztown yesterday with his wife, Shawnna, and daughters, Macawi, 5, and Nashetah, 2. He could only stay a half-hour because he had to get to Arcadia University, where he was participating in the Black Male Development Symposium and discussing his new book, The Immortality of Influence, with a foreword by Will Smith.
No one need look further than into the eyes of Carroll, Durant and Jenkins to understand the message of Thomas-El’s book.
“All these years, all this stuff we had to go through. I’m glad he chose to stay. Without him… ” said Durant, 23, a speech and communication major, his voice trailing off.
Durant recalled his first major interaction with Thomas-El after the fight with a classmate that day.
“He said chess players don’t fight with their fists, they fight with their heads. That stuck with me,” Durant said.
What stood out for Carroll was Thomas-El’s presence.
“I never met anybody like him… . He grew up on the same streets as us. He spoke well. He dressed well. He was educated. He was a young black man, doing good in his community. He was almost like a prophet,” said Carroll, a speech communication major.
Durant, Carroll and Jenkins said chess helped them study better. They also had to maintain good grades to stay on Vaux’s team.
“The discipline I learned playing chess back then got me where I am today,” said Durant, who grew up with five siblings in a single-parent home where money has always been tight.
A fourth chess student, Harream Purdie, is expected to graduate today from Morehouse College in Atlanta. Several others who made up the core of the team that year are in college, have left college, or are in the military, Thomas-El said.
Through their years at Vaux, then at George Washington Carver High School for Engineering and Science, and finally at Kutztown, Durant, Carroll and Jenkins continued to get help from Thomas-El as they negotiated hurdles.
When Jenkins’ 1995 Buick Riviera was about to be repossessed last summer, Thomas-El paid the bill. He knew Jenkins needed the car to commute from Philadelphia to school and to work.
When Carroll’s guardian, whom he calls his stepmother, died last year, Thomas-El opened his home to Carroll so he would have a place to stay over the summer.
During his junior year in college, Durant had a daughter and had to work more to help support the child and send money home to his mother, who is unemployed; Thomas-El helped.
Thomas-El has offered resume tips, bought shirts and ties when the students needed to appear at formal events, and even christened their freshman apartment — the trio shared a room — with a PlayStation.
“He constantly got me out of jams,” said Jenkins, 21, a criminal justice major. “He’s gotten us jobs, interviews… . Anything we ask for, he’ll try.”
Having Thomas-El at the graduation is “icing on the cake,” said Jenkins, who hasn’t seen his biological father in about 15 years.
“He will see us finishing out his dreams for us,” Carroll, 21, agreed.
Jenkins and Carroll are the first in their families to graduate from college.
The three young men weren’t the only ones who wanted to thank Thomas-El yesterday. There, too, was James Bolton, Carroll’s father. After 18 years in prison, Bolton was released in April and is reestablishing bonds with his son.
He embraced Thomas-El.
“I really appreciate your being there,” he told Thomas-El, as his son looked on. “You don’t find too many brothers like you, man.”
Thomas-El, who also grew up without a father in a family of eight siblings in Philadelphia, said he had remained active in the Kutztown trio’s lives and the lives of other students because he wanted to give back to youths what mentors gave him.
“It’s for all the teachers, coaches, mentors — people who chose to stay long before I made that decision,” he said.
Not all students make it. He can still see Willow Briggs, sitting at a chess table, sucking his thumb as he contemplated his next move. Briggs went with the Vaux team to the national championships in 1996. He was shot to death on the street before he graduated from high school.
“Every time I go to a graduation, I think about those young men who will never walk down the aisle. It just has motivated me to try and work as hard as I can to help these young people,” he said.
Durant, Jenkins and Carroll are all in the job market now. Jenkins wants a career in juvenile probation, while Carroll is interviewing for a marketing position, and Durant wants to do “anything where I can help somebody.”
The trio — who started a chess club at Kutztown University last year — all said they wanted to return to Philadelphia and teach the power of chess to other youngsters.
“If I can impact someone’s life, like [Thomas-El] impacted my life,” Durant said, “then I’ll consider myself a success.”
Contact staff writer Susan Snyder at 215-854-4693 or ssnyder@phillynews.com.
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