CEO: Power through racism, don't let anyone deny your dream

PHILADELPHIA – Growing up, Miles Wilson, 43, remembers waking up at in the middle of night in the small row house he shared with his single mother and two siblings.

"You'd hear something downstairs, come downstairs and you see your mom crying at the dining room table," said Wilson, now chief executive of EducationWorks, a nonprofit provider of after-school services.

It's a story he tells often. His mother — smart and ambitious with dreams of being a lawyer — was in one of the first classes at her Philadelphia high school that included black students.

There she learned that a smart girl like her would make an excellent bank teller, the lowest position in banking and an example of the limited horizons presented to many inner-city youth. So, a bank teller Wilson's mother became, working in a check-cashing place.

Until, Wilson said, "she woke up one day in her 40s, with three kids, by herself, and said, 'I have been bamboozled. I deserve better. I'm going back to school.' So, I actually watched my mother, after years of not being in school, go back to college," powering through the struggle.

Q: What lesson did you learn?

A: That encouraged me to persevere, to show strength and not be denied in certain ways. When you are living in the world we live in, that's filled with institutional racism, classism, you have to be willing to power through.

A: That's one way. The other is not being denied. There are certain things you deserve and you have the right to. You'll be surrounded by individuals who maybe don't like you. When I went to Lincoln University, they taught us because of these conditions, you may have to be two or three times as good as whoever you're competing against in this world. It empowered me to push through, to become better at a particular thing or skill set so you cannot be denied.

Q: It's an emotional effort as well, right? How do you keep from becoming so deeply resentful that you become crippled psychologically?

A: It's a mental toughness. You have to decide that's what you want. You have to exercise all of that, all of that resiliency. As a human being, you face those things. One thing that I share with young people or with the staff, 'you will never hear me get on you for being angry or being disappointed.' The conversation has to be about how you manage those emotions, and then how you persevere and push through.

Q: EducationWorks is a nonprofit that operates after-school programs in many of the city's public schools.