Harlem to Harvard

IN 1967, Arnold Kemp was a veteran of the Harlem streets; he had already finished seven years in state prison for armed robbery. Last week, holder of three fellowships, he was studying at Harvard for a Ph.D. His poems have appeared in an anthology of young black poets; his first novel is in the hands of a publisher; he is well on the way to teaching English to ghetto kids. For all this, Kemp mainly credits City University's SEEK, program. "I probably would have written a book without it, but to be at Harvard? To teach later on? Never. For me, SEEK was the instrument for making it."

Kemp, now 32, knows all too well what it is to be down and out. During his brief career at Manhattan's High School of Commerce, he was put in the honors program, but his eagerness met discouraging stereotypes. "Whenever I had the audacity to mention drama to anyone, they thought I was nuts. They'd say 'Why don't you do something practical?' " College was out. Scholarships were unheard of in Kemp's world; his parents were separated and his mother, a garment worker, earned hardly enough to feed the family. At 15, he dropped out of high school--bored, seeing no future, Kemp hustled numbers and ran dope. Later, he enlisted in the Air Force and became a communications specialist. When he got out, the personnel offices at the New York airports had nothing for him.

Toy Pistols. "My criterion for success," he recalls, "was money--money made you a big man." As a result, he and a buddy enlisted a young woman employee of the New York Telephone Co. as their accomplice and pulled off a $23,000 payroll holdup at one of the company's Bronx offices. There was no violence; they used toy pistols for the job. Six weeks later, Kemp was arrested for the first time; the girl, questioned about her sudden big-spending habits, had talked.

The only benefit of the crime, which he now calls "dumb," was that Kemp got a pretrial mental exam at Bellevue Hospital, where he became good friends with Novelist Norman Mailer, who was in for stabbing his wife (she later refused to press charges). Given a sentence of ten to twelve years, Kemp began smuggling short-story manuscripts out of prison for Mailer's comments and corrections. He trained himself partly by rewriting passages of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in his own words. He also learned French and earned a high school equivalency certificate. "Somewhere around the age of 15, I had declared war on America, but I'd chosen all the wrong weapons. I decided to write and continue my fight with more effective tools." Just before his parole, a SEEK recruiter wrote to suggest that Kemp become an undergraduate.

"I was suspicious," Kemp recalls. "No one had ever given me anything in life--why now? But what did I have to lose?" He got a job with an antipoverty project in Harlem and attended school at night. Soon he qualified for a $50-a-week stipend and began attending during the day, taking an accelerated 50 credits a year instead of the usual 30. "I was skeptical about the SEEK program lasting," he says. "I don't believe in white altruism, and I thought it would be just another crumb, a token. At the end of every year there was a rumor that there'd be no more money." He found SEEK counselors basically helpful, though some of them were liberal whites "who were overpermissive," and others were middle-class blacks "who had pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps and were in a way resentful of us." Kemp earned a bachelor's degree in three years and an average of A minus.

New Models. "The university never played down to us," Kemp says. "What SEEK has brought is not a lowering of academic standards but a lowering of standards for opportunity, and there is nothing wrong with that. The university is no longer a castle.

"Kids all want to be a success. Unfortunately, on the streets our models have been athletes and singers. We really didn't see the lawyers and doctors, and when you looked at your best friends, they were hustling. The SEEK kids will be bringing in a new type of success. By seeing me do it, people can say they can do it too--if they want to. It would be bad if SEEK kids left for suburbia," he says. "They should go back to the community and work with the SEEK generation. I'm going back to teach, and I don't care at what level."

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