The 2011-2012 academic year opened with a hurricane, literally. Hurricane Irene was bearing down on New Jersey just as we were set to open campus for welcome week, and most of August was spent on contingency plans instead of celebration. I didn’t know it yet, but that storm was only the first of several transitions converging on me that year.
I was also quietly and intentionally beginning a job search. It was my third year at The College of New Jersey, and I wanted room to grow and a way back into graduate school. Neither was available to me there: the mid-level ranks were full, and the institution had no funding to support my continued education. So I started looking, the way you do when you can feel a change coming before you can name it. What I could not have known was that the search I was starting and the academic year I was opening would become the anchor for the next twenty years of my career, for reasons that had nothing to do with a job offer.
Where this began
Long before that, at Otterbein College (now Otterbein University), I was told to get involved on campus. That instruction led me to the Professional Learning Community Diversity Committee as a student representative, where I worked alongside my Dean of Students and a group of faculty and staff who helped me find my calling: not just student affairs, but the specific work of lowering the barriers that keep historically marginalized students from making it through our institutions. My master’s program at Old Dominion University sharpened that calling. Dr. Gwendolyn Lee-Thomas taught our Diversity in Higher Education course and, memorably, walked us through the bias baked into our assigned textbook, a study conducted in Fairfax County, Virginia, one of the wealthiest and whitest counties in the country.
In 2009, I brought that lens to The College of New Jersey, a campus that took equity and inclusion seriously. During the 2010-2011 academic year, working alongside Jamal Johnson, Dr. Manisha Ford-Thomas, Lynette Harris Love, Dionne Hallback, Ivonne Cruz, Nevolia Ogletree, and the Staff Council through the Minority Executive Council, I developed and led the implementation of our inaugural Legacy Ceremony, rooted in what Black Baccalaureate had meant to me at Otterbein.
The transition I didn’t choose
As I opened the 2011-2012 academic year, ready to figure out what came next for me, another academic year was beginning for someone else who would not live to see its end: Trayvon Martin.
Technology in 2012 was nowhere near where it is now. Camera phones existed, but recording and sharing video in real time was still clumsy, and Instagram, launched in 2010, was still photos-only. We were still learning how to find out what was happening in the world in real time, let alone document it.
On the night of February 26, 2012, in Sanford, Florida, George Zimmerman took Trayvon Martin’s life. The country was heading into an election year, deciding whether to return its first Black president, Barack Obama, to office. Public pressure led to the release of Zimmerman’s police call on March 16. A week later, in the Rose Garden, President Obama was asked what he thought of the recording. His answer has stayed with me: “When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids… If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”
That answer landed differently than anything else said that year, and I think I know why. For the first time in our history, Black people were watching a president who didn’t just sympathize with the brutality against Black bodies. He understood it because he had lived it, in his own body and life. That’s not empathy borrowed from a distance. That’s lived truth speaking. It hit in the gut, the way a punch from Mike Tyson or Evander Holyfield hits, not a graze you shake off, but a blow that rearranges something in you.
That June, I moved from central New Jersey to northeast Texas to join Texas A&M University-Commerce, now East Texas A&M University. Leaving an urban support system for rural Texas was, in the language of Nancy Schlossberg’s Transition Theory, a transition I chose but did not yet know how to navigate. Schlossberg’s framework asks four questions of anyone moving through a transition: what is the situation, who is the self moving through it, what support exists to carry them, and what strategies will get them there. My situation was a cross-country move into a doctoral program and a new job, at once. My self was still forming, still asking what kind of scholar-practitioner I wanted to be. My strategies were the ones I’d leaned on since Otterbein: find the people already doing the work and do it alongside them.
My support, though, is where Commerce surprised me. It’s a town with two stoplights on the main road, a Walmart to welcome you, and a Taco Bell and a gas station to see you on your way, with not much else in between. But the colleagues I found there, Dr. Christina Wan, Michelle Wan, Dr. Zachary Shirley, Dr. Gregory Shirley, Danielle Davis, Dr. Robert Dotson, Dennis Koch, Dr. Denise Golden, Dr. Mary Hendrix, and so many others, all under the leadership of President Dan Jones, our fearless leader who will forever be remembered, gave me a kind of community I haven’t found again anywhere I’ve worked, before or since. They didn’t just support me. They wrapped their arms around me because, in a place that small, we were all we had.
I was still relying on those strategies the following July, deep into my second year at TAMUC and preparing to begin my first year of doctoral coursework, when George Zimmerman was acquitted on July 13, 2013, after sixteen hours of jury deliberation, for killing a teenager who had walked to a corner store for Skittles and lemonade. Beyoncé, mid-show on her Mrs. Carter tour in Nashville, paused for a moment of silence before singing “I Will Always Love You” into “Halo.” Protesters gathered at a New York vigil, where Jay-Z, Sybrina Fulton (Trayvon’s mother), and Al Sharpton stood together and called for justice for Trayvon.
A pattern, now on video
By the time I started the 2013-2014 academic year and began my doctoral coursework in earnest, camera phones had caught up to the moment. In July 2014, the world watched Eric Garner die as the person recording was close enough to hear him say “I can’t breathe” eleven times. Weeks later, cameras were rolling again in Ferguson, Missouri, after police killed Michael Brown. The region already carried the weight of Anthony Lamar Smith’s killing by officer Jason Stockley in December 2011, a case that would not reach a verdict until 2017.
The names kept coming. Tamir Rice, twelve, killed in Cleveland that November while holding an airsoft gun. Laquan McDonald, killed in Chicago that same October, his death not seen by the public until dashcam footage surfaced more than a year later. Walter Scott in North Charleston and Eric Harris in Tulsa, both in April 2015. Nine parishioners killed that June at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, including a state senator who was also their pastor.
Out of that period came #SayTheirName, a hashtag and a demand, one that Kimberlé Crenshaw and the African American Policy Forum helped bring into the world, alongside the Black women who built the Black Lives Matter movement. Its purpose was simple and radical at once: do not let the names disappear into statistics.
What I found in the literature
It was in the middle of this that I found Nancy Schlossberg’s 1989 concept of marginality and mattering. Most of the research I’d read up to that point asked why Black students failed to finish college. Almost none asked why they stayed or what let them persist. Schlossberg’s answer was that people need to feel they matter, that they are noticed, needed, and depended upon, and that when institutions push people to the margins, exclusion becomes the stronger force. It became the question my dissertation would spend years trying to answer.
At the same time, I was watching something else unfold around me: people who looked like me were being killed by police during the presidency of the first Black man to hold that office. That was its own kind of evidence. It confirmed what marginality theory had already told me: that belonging in a space and mattering to that space are not guaranteed by status, visibility, or achievement. President Obama says as much in A Promised Land, and Michelle Obama says it even more directly in Becoming and The Light We Carry. They worked twice as hard to be seen as fully belonging, and even now they are blamed, misrepresented, and picked apart, sometimes by people who look like them. Mattering does not come with proximity to power. Neither does its opposite.
Why I say their names
I tell this story because my consulting practice isn’t separate from it. It’s built on the belief that people matter and that a more just tomorrow is possible. That belief shows up as equity, inclusion, and belonging, and as the deliberate construction of environments where people can feel they matter, not just in higher education but also in corporations and organizations of every kind. Schlossberg’s Transition Theory describes the arc of moving in, moving through, and moving out of an experience, carrying it forward rather than leaving it behind. I’m still moving through this one, and I suspect I always will be.
Each year, I say the names. Trayvon. Eric. Michael. Tamir. Laquan. Walter. Eric Harris. The nine at Mother Emanuel. I say them because the women who built Black Lives Matter and #SayTheirName understood something Schlossberg had already shown in the research: naming someone, remembering them, and insisting they mattered is itself an act against marginality. Forgetting is how a society tells people they never counted in the first place.
This is not a call to end policing in America. It’s a call to do the harder, slower work of building a society where everyone can feel a sense of mattering and belonging, where we can see one another fully: understand each other’s hopes, the weight we carry, who depends on us, and what we still have to give. Mattering is not a slogan. It is researched, lived, and, for far too many people, denied.
I still think about Trayvon. If George Zimmerman had understood, in that moment, that Trayvon’s life mattered as much as his own, maybe he never would have gotten out of the car. Maybe Trayvon is still here.
References
Schlossberg, N. K. (1989). Marginality and mattering: Key issues in building community. New Directions for Student Services, 1989(48), 5-15.
Anderson, M. L., Goodman, J., & Schlossberg, N. K. (2012). Counseling adults in transition: Linking Schlossberg’s theory with practice in a diverse world (4th ed.). Springer Publishing Company.
Dr. Kyle R. Williams 
Leave a comment