Overcoming: How Faith, Family and Friends Helped One Black Man Beat the Odds

Overcoming

By Willie Dean, Ph.D.

If we don’t share our stories, who will? Indeed, the stories about Black men who have made a powerful difference in the lives of so many are out there. They are out there in abundance, but they aren’t getting the attention or the energy they richly deserve, due to the skewed perceptions, profiling, stereotyping, and vilifying of Black men. This memoir is one of those stories—Dr. Willie Dean’s Overcoming: How Faith, Family and Friends Helped One Black Man Beat the Odds.

“Faith, family and friends” is interwoven throughout Dean’s story. Born in 1951 in Potts Camp, Mississippi, he is the second child of four born to Eddie and Mattie Dean. He was blessed with a close-knit, loving, faith-filled family, with his father being one of the two major male role models in his life. A game-changing moment came when his father was hired as a truck driver, thus taking his family out of the bonds of sharecropping to homeownership in West Memphis, Arkansas and later, Memphis, Tennessee. Though neither of his parents had an education beyond eighth grade, they produced children who went on to obtain graduate and post-graduate degrees.

Growing up in the segregated South, he was witness to the unfolding events of the Civil Rights movement and the glaring disparities in housing, education, and employment, something that would show up throughout his life in different degrees, either personally or in the people he served. Dean reminds us that such disparities aren’t limited to the South, as his experiences with racism in other regions of the country bear out.

When it comes to education, Dean stresses the importance of having a teacher or counselor that supports and encourages Black boys, and he had that during junior high school with his basketball coach, Robert Terrell. Terrell became his second major male role model, an example that inspired his success as an adult.

His successes during his 35-year career in the YMCA, becoming one of its top Black executives, was not without the prices he paid as a Black man. His dissertation, “Barriers to Upward Mobility: A Case Study of the YMCA,” is comprehensive in its breakdown of the “glass ceiling” that disenfranchises women and minorities in regard to advancement opportunities—the YMCA’s failure to address slavery in its early years, treatment discrimination, and social reproduction (the practice of white employers to hire and promote employees who look like them socially), to name a few.

He is candid about his challenges as well as his successes—divorce, the death of a wife, health issues, being a caregiver, and his life as a Black man in America. Of the utmost importance is his relationship with God, his spiritual roots, and his church family, through the good and the bad in his life as a son, a brother, a father, a husband, a grandfather, and an executive. His commitment to a life of service is exemplary and inspiring—“without a test, there is no testimony.” As a contemporary, I can relate to many facets of his life, and I acknowledge and appreciate his success against the odds. Another theme that stands out for me is not the circumstances and challenges, but how he handled them; he proposes long-term solutions to the problems. Also, he takes time to illustrate the role of balance in his hobbies and time with his family.

Dr. Dean will be having a book signing of his memoir on Saturday, December 3 at St. Peter’s AME Church, 401 E. 41st Street, Minneapolis, Minnesota from 10:00 a.m.-noon in Fellowship Hall.

Overcoming is available through Amazon and Austin Brothers Publishing. Many thanks to you, Dr. Dean, for sharing your amazing memoir, one from the heart and from the spirit.