Alumni Review Point

‘A Sense of Who I Am’

A Rochester project helped one recent alumna find a new appreciation for where she came from and where she wants to go.
By Spring Worth ’04

Last May, I celebrated my graduation from the University. For me, this was a major step in my life.

My pilgrimage to graduation was somewhat unusual, but I wish that many others could follow a similar path. Mine has led me to a whole new appreciation for my roots in inner-city Rochester.

I am an African American who happened to be born and to spend my first years of life in a rural area outside Rochester. However, as I was preparing to go to middle school, my mother remarried, and my world changed radically. Not only did my family change but we also moved to an area of the city called Sector 10, where my mother had been raised. Whereas most white people exit the city for the suburbs, my route was just the reverse.

I swapped the sound of hunters’ guns for the sharp cracks of Saturday-night specials. After the serenity of rural life, I had to adjust to city chaos.

My mother tried to protect me from the extremes of this change by placing me in an urban-suburban program. And so I went to Brighton High School in the nearby suburb. While the advantages were huge, so were the challenges to my identity as an African American in a predominantly white school.

Internally was I becoming a white person with black skin? Was I poor or middle class? Was I supposed to feel hope or despair? Did I belong in my nighttime community of poverty, drugs, and violence—or what I saw as a contrived, sterile environment of the suburbs?

In silence I struggled with these questions.

After high school graduation, I was admitted to Rochester, where I studied anthropology. At the University, which is not far from my mother’s home in Sector 10, I did not find a strong community of African Americans, but neither was it a place of complete white dominance. There were students from every race and corner of the globe—and a great deal of diversity on the faculty.

However, living apart from my home in Sector 10, I was still in denial as to my roots. But in my senior year, all that changed. I decided that for my senior project in anthropology, I would go home—I would study my old neighborhood, where my mother still lives. I still felt connected to the neighborhood and wanted to highlight its positives.

So I interviewed some of the residents—and let them tell the story of Sector 10 in their own words.

In the process, I uncovered the roots of the area’s poverty and violence, among them, white flight and urban renewal, which forced residents from their homes and into government- subsidized housing.

I also found that today there is energy in the neighborhood. People are not passive victims but active agents for change: forming block clubs to fight crime and violence; working with schools and businesses; writing letters to landlords. And making progress: gaining a sense of empowerment, getting their voices heard by police and others in power. The residents, while they may be anxious and fearful, are also filled with hope and kindness.

As for me, I gained a stronger sense of who I am—most importantly that it’s OK to be from Sector 10. In fact, it’s much more than OK.

Now that I have graduated, I am grateful for the love of my family and friends who led me to the University where I have put in place many of the pieces of my life.

I have been able to bridge the divide between where I was born and where I grew up, to overcome the conflict between my racial identity and my identity as a full human being in a diverse world. I have overcome my feelings of shame, and now I fully identify with my Sector 10 community.

And it’s where I hope to work—to help to strengthen the community that gives me strength.

Spring Worth ’04 works for a community planning project in Marketview Heights, an area of Sector 10 in Rochester. This essay first appeared in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.