David CookLast Saturday, as their parents pushed back dinner plates and settled into their chairs, 66 young men from across this city – nearly all of them African-American or Hispanic – stood shoulder to shoulder near the front of a Highland Park gymnasium at the end of their weekend retreat and recited – no, shouted – one of history’s most epic poems.
“It matters not how strait the gate!” they began. “How charged with punishments the scroll!”
The poem is Henley’s “Invictus,” which helped fortify Nelson Mandela during his years in an apartheid South African prison. Many of these boys, too, live inside their own prison: of poverty, normalized trauma, city violence.
“I am the master of my fate!” they continued.
On Aug. 2, these 66 boys will shape their fate in historic ways, becoming the first to walk through the doors of Chattanooga Preparatory School, the newly established all-boys’ charter school.