Newburgh students arrived early for The Three Doctor's presentation.
By Nancy Peckenham
A roomful of role models was on hand Saturday morning at Newburgh Free Academy where nearly 500 people came to hear The Three Doctors’s message of overcoming poverty to succeed in life.
At 8:30 in the morning Joy Pittman, the director the city of Newburgh’s youth program and other adult volunteers were surrounded in the lobby of NFA by excited teens and younger boys and girls who wanted to hear The Three Doctors, Sampson Davis, Rameck Hunt and George Jenkins, tell how they made a pact to help each other make it to college and on to medical school, succeeding against the odds.
That success led the three to continue their pact after becoming doctors and to spread the word about how they grew up surrounded by poverty in Newark, N.J., unsure of how, or even if they wanted to, get out.
Sampson Davis spoke first, talking about his first arrest at age 13, followed by a second arrest for armed robbery just a few months away from his 18th birthday. Still a juvenile, he got a suspended sentence but the event proved a turning point. “That changed my life,” Davis told the crowd in the auditorium. “I realized the streets were going to kill me.”
The Three Doctors: Sampson Davis, George Jenkins and Rameck Hunt.
Painting a picture of life in poverty-stricken Newark, Davis said that the dream of becoming an NBA star or a rapper is an illusion for most kids. But the hard truth, he said, is that the way out comes through hard work and education. “You don’t want to be 40 years old in living in your mother’s basement, “ Davis warned the kids in the audience as a way of motivating them to focus on a realistic way to gain independence.
Elsa Kortright-Torres, the principal of GAMS Tech Mag, earlier told those in attendance that getting The Three Doctors to Newburgh was itself a dream of one of her assistant principals, Laura Giner Bair, who had worked with school and city officials for four years to get the support to bring them to town. A grant intended to prevent youth violence underwrote the day’s activities in which the young people and adults broke up into workshops designed to re-inforce the message from the keynote speakers..
The three doctors talked about the moment in their own lives when an opportunity to go to college slapped them in the face and they took it, relying heavily on the support of each other to succeed.
“We made a promise to one another that we were going to see each other through this,” Davis said, recalling how the three African American students in baggy pants at Seton Hall University ended up getting degrees when others failed.
Alize Shelby, Ryenne Scott and her twin sister, Raven, are already confident that they will be successful in life.
After the presentation, at least three seventh graders appeared ready to take the challenge. Alize Shelby, a student at Heritage Junior High School, said she had already read one of the book published by The Three Doctors and she was aiming to become a pediatrician herself. Her friend, Ryenne Scott, said that she wants to be a lawyer and said that she was impressed to learn that the sharp-looking doctors had once been poor and come so far.
To learn more about The Three Doctors, visit www.threedoctors.com.
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