Author Natasha Alford shares advice Nottingham High School student Kiely Cooper. Credit: Mike Greenlar | Central Current

Wayne Grevelding, a stalwart of the American Legion Dunbar Post 1642, couldn’t make it to last week’s lecture by Natasha Alford, who returned to the city where she grew up as part of the Friends of the Central Library author series at the John H. Mulroy Civic Center.

While Grevelding, 77, dearly wanted to attend, he told me he’s been having some problems with his legs.

Still, he did have one request.

If I had a chance to talk with Alford, he wondered if I could ask if she remembered the pin.

And she did. Of course she did.

In a larger sense, that kind of connection explains why she came home.

Alford is a senior vice president and chief content officer with TheGrio, where she runs a national digital newsroom focused on matters of particular imperative to the Black American community. She also makes regular appearances on CNN, and she received the invitation to the FOCL author series because of her memoir, published by HarperCollins in 2024:

“American Negra” – at its core – is a Syracuse story. In the book, Alford describes her childhood odyssey toward full identity, straddling cultures as the daughter of an African-American dad and a Puerto Rican mom. Raised a few houses away from Interstate 81, that journey would take her from Nottingham High School to degrees from Harvard, Northwestern and Princeton.

She quit a straight-out-of-college job making big money with a hedge fund to instead enter a classroom with Teach for America. She returned to journalism, hit some roadblocks that could have made her quit — and instead pushed on to eventually achieve this national profile on CNN.

The statement provided by her presence in Syracuse — offered both specifically and through conversations with the young people she took the time to see — was put beautifully by Theresa Harper, a retired city schools administrator who introduced Alford at the Civic Center:

The soul and talents and love of so many caring people in this community, as Harper put it, “poured into her.”

Natasha Alford at Nottingham High School: A homecoming that hit her with her first step in the parking lot. Credit: Mike Greenlar | Central Current

That was certainly a major part of Alford’s address to a downtown crowd that included many students from the city schools. Their tickets were covered through a community fundraising campaign led by Nottingham graduate Brenna Richardson, a member of FOCL’s marketing committee — an effort FOCL officials say they’d love to see become a larger template.

Alford also paid a visit to Nottingham on the same day as her talk, speaking with dozens of students in the school library. After catching a ride from Elana Van Patten, a FOCL officer, she climbed out of the car near the school entrance on an unusually mild March afternoon.

For a moment, the emotion of it all drew her hands to her chest, almost as if she had been struck by a gust of wind.

“Like a dream,” Alford said, of being back.

Forgive me, for a moment, as all of this leads me somewhere else: While Alford is not quite 40, I’ve known her since she was maybe 14. My own kids, a few years younger than Alford, also took part in the Syracuse city school district’s longtime oratorical competition, a celebration often steeped in the power and cadence of the great African-American oratorical tradition.

In the 2000s — a time when the city schools had some memorable teenage oratorical heavyweights — those showdowns were an extraordinarily moving thing to witness.

On my way to Civic Center the other night, all those memories were already going through my mind when — by sheer chance — I encountered Debra McClendon-Bodie, a longtime Syracuse educator and mentor and one of the founders of that oratorical program. I bumped into her as she worked with some young children at the Salt City Market, where she recalled how she met Alford at the absolute beginning of the events that launched Alford, like a rocket.

Alford, a young teen nervous about being alone on stage, was at her first oratorical practice. McClendon-Bodie said veteran teacher Ronnie Bell — a co-founder of Syracuse Shakespeare in the Park — helped her relax by suggesting she try singing a few words, before she spoke.

Nottingham High School students are locked into the message from Natasha Alford, a Nottingham graduate who’s now a regular presence on CNN. Credit: Mike Greenlar | Central Current

In the following weeks, months and years, McClendon-Bodie watched as Alford became a commanding and masterful orator.

Alford describes the life-altering impact of that program in her book, and she mentioned it again on the Civic Center stage. She joined “the oratorical” almost as an afterthought, as a means of preparing for a separate speaking contest. The program turned out to be intense and demanding, allowing little room for error: Intertwined with a national American Legion competition, it required a lengthy, original and fully memorized address, followed by specific questions on stage about the U.S. Constitution.

Debra McClendon-Bodie, founder of the PGR mentoring foundation – and one of the founders of the oratorical competition in the Syracuse city schools.
Credit: Sean Kirst | Central Current

I vividly remember Alford and many other students doing that work at regular practices on quiet weeknights, always attended by white-haired mainstays from the Dunbar Post. Alford still describes those Syracuse elders as her “grandfathers” — guys like Tommy Seals, Al Stokes, Billy Moore, Keith Colston, and Grevelding.

They were intensely proud of Alford, devotion that only grew as she began discovering she had a powerful and compelling stage presence. She won two consecutive state championships and went on both times to the national finals in Indianapolis.

Still, she often faced some of her toughest opponents in the earliest rounds in Syracuse, which had an extraordinary lineup of student speakers.

Her victories put her in the Central New York media spotlight and “affected my entire trajectory,” as she wrote in her memoir. She was startled when people began to recognize her on the street for her oratorical wins. That “took me from being invisible to being seen, a higher standard rising before me,” she wrote.

Nottingham teacher Don Little asks a question of Natasha Alford – the student who successfully embraced his advice to pursue Harvard. Credit: Mike Greenlar | Central Current

Flipping that switch — the realization that she had specific and unique meaning and value — changed everything.

Seals, Colston, Moore and Stokes were all deeply accomplished members of the local Black community. They were warm, passionate and profoundly funny guys, and they are all gone now – and eternally missed. Watching Alford Wednesday, all I could think about is how elated they would be.

Grevelding, their old friend, spoke with affection of them all, and he recalled handing the young Alford a pin — commemorating those lost in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — as a powerful talisman of meaning.

Alford wore it on stage, as she competed. Years later, when the legion guys attended her high school graduation party, she insisted that Grevelding take it back. But he showed up again when she had a book signing in 2024, and this time he told her it was hers, to keep.

When I relayed that story to her at the civic center, a burst of emotion again swept across her face.

In the school library, she told the students that Syracuse is an extraordinary place, a crossroads of compelling family stories, and that every teen in that library inherits a distinct and important role. She handed a microphone back and forth with Anab Ali, a teenage moderator fielding questions from her peers. Alford stuck around to listen to such students as Kiely Cooper, who sought advice about her own dream of a career as a therapist.

Alford was introduced at Nottingham by Don Little, a longtime history teacher who summarized her talents as “spectacular.” He was the guy, years ago, who passionately told her Harvard was absolutely the place she ought to go when she defied the staggering odds against being admitted to the school.

Several times, she mentioned the symmetry of coming home during Women’s History Month. She spoke to the teens about her knowledge of the heavy scholastic realities so many city students carry silently, the way “elements of the streets … worked their way into the halls.” She asked them to address that emotional turmoil, to express it, to seek out the help of adults who understand — and to not be drowned by circumstance that, faced alone, can be devastating.

Harper, for Alford, was one of those adults, a key figure at several points in Alford’s education. She joined with old friend Carol Charles in bringing many children to the Civic Center from the Delta Academy — an initiative to build educational and leadership skills coordinated by Delta Sigma Theta, an historically Black sorority, dedicated to service.

Natasha Alford hands the microphone back to Anab Ali, a student who moderated Alford’s Q and A at Nottingham High. Credit: Mike Greenlar | Central Current

In her book and again in this journey home, Alford mentioned many educators and mentors who impacted her life. Harper sees her as a fierce and burning reminder of potential not only for the children of Syracuse, but for the grownups who interact every day with those kids.

“Teachers don’t realize the impact they have,” Harper said.

Alford, time and again, emphasized her journey is not simply a “feel-good story” about success in the city. She broke out because of her parents and her teachers and mentors like her “grandfathers” from the Dunbar Post, the people “who didn’t let me let go of the dream.”

In part, she came back to say she is grateful for every second of time and faith provided in Syracuse by so many people who saw the what-could-be in one uncertain child.

Her larger message, a harder one, is meant for all of us. Alford is proof of the staggering youthful treasure in our own city, every day, that is all too often lost — and the only way to truly honor her is by bringing a similarly collective love, belief and energy to so many children out there now, capable of the same heights.

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Sean Kirst is a columnist with The Central Current. He has been an Upstate journalist for more than 50 years. He held his first reporting job as a teenager and worked for newspapers in Dunkirk, Niagara...