Beautiful Struggle

Janssen Evelyn ’06L learned resilience early. He was 8 when he, his two siblings and their parents emigrated from Barbados. For more than a year, the family of five shared a queen-size mattress in an uncle’s basement bedroom in Prince George’s County, Maryland, where culture shocks were frequent at the outset.

For instance, Evelyn has vivid memories of an older white man yelling the “n” word at him from a blue pickup at an intersection in Riverdale, Maryland. He’d never heard the word and didn’t know what it meant, only that he was frightened.

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