Let's work hard to pack Kennedy-King College to capacity

City Colleges of Chicago, community and elected officials should be proud after yesterday's ground-breaking on Kennedy-King College's $200 million campus.

While it's great to talk about all of the African Americans who will be hired as a result of the project, it is also vitally important that those same community, elected and educational officials work their tails off to ensure that the halls of the new college are filled to capacity when it opens in fall 2007.

There is no way African Americans can demand construction jobs if our people are not trained to do them. It doesn't make sense to complain about the scarcity of Black-owned companies in receiving contracts unless they have the knowledge in finance, team management and processing in order to take advantage of the new business.

Far too many of our communities are filled with Black men and women -- young, middle-aged and old -- who don't have the necessary skills to compete in a changing workforce. Why be limited to an $8 or $9-an-hour job when you can attain some additional skills that makes you more marketable? Will it be free? Absolutely not. It will cost you. But with financial aid and payment plans widely available, there is NO EXCUSE for any African American who wants to learn a new skill to not do so.

If you don't have a car, fine, take public transportation. If you can't afford a day-care center, fine, use the one on the campus. If you didn't get your high school diploma, then enroll in the many GED classes that are offered and put that in your past.

It's time that all of the excuses that are typically given are thrown out the window. There is no white man with a bullhorn and a German shepherd preventing any of us from walking through the KKC doors -- or that of any city college campus -- and enrolling.

You don't have to spend all four years there. Enroll and learn a trade, be it a plumber, electrician, carpenter or nurse, and provide for your family.

The future development of Black Chicago will be based on whether we as a community embrace higher learning.

There are far too many able-bodied men and women who are languishing on street corners, in front of fast food restaurants begging for some spare change, or working in dead-end jobs with no prospect for advancement. They need to look inward and decide that they are sick and tired of being sick and tired.

If you have been looking for the motivation to turn your life around and put it on another track, this is it. You can't say that no one ever told you that you can be more than what you are today. Encourage a friend, neighbor or church member to go to the next level. And if no one is around, encourage yourself.

We should be so on fire about the prospects of this gleaming new campus that when the doors open, the conversation shouldn't be about how we're going to fill the classrooms, but what plans Mayor Richard Daley, Chancellor Wayne Watson and KKC President Clyde El-Amin have to build a much larger campus to accommodate the overflow crowds.

That's when we will know that this project has made a difference in Englewood and the South Side of Chicago.

Article copyright REAL TIMES Inc.