Major League

As a Harvard freshman from Randallstown, Md., Brandon Terry was a nobody.

People thought he was angry, reclusive and scary. Aside from a few allies who have remained his closest friends, they approached him cautiously and skeptically. White girls, he says, would run the other way when they saw him walking home through the Yard at night. Outspoken and homesick, he turned to the Black Men’s Forum (BMF), where he found a group of friends who felt just as alienated. By the end of his junior year, Terry had become president of the organization, transforming it from a relatively small social network into one of the college’s most active clubs. His rap group Tha League opened for Fabolous and Busta Rhymes. Everybody knew his name, in other words, and they weren’t running away from him anymore.

Kwame Owusu-Kesse ’06, a member of Tha League and the current president of BMF, calls Terry the “most influential undergraduate at Harvard,” referencing with admiration his friend’s popularity, reputation among faculty and general prominence on campus.

But during the first months of freshman year, Terry says he was shocked by people’s expectations.

“Whenever a black student comes to Harvard, you’re going to be asked to talk about race and racism,” he says. “And if you don’t study that stuff, you don’t know anything about it—even if you are black.”

Now, Terry is graduating from the African and African-American Studies Department with a joint concentration in Government, and although he says his post-Harvard plans are a “secret,” his ultimate ambition is to come back as a professor and teach in the Af-Am department.

It’ll be a milestone for the Western School Of Technology and Environmental Science, the Baltimore magnet academy from which Terry was the first to ever attend an Ivy League school. When news of his acceptance leaked out against his will, he recalls, a gleeful announcement was made over the school-wide intercom.

His neighborhood, Terry says, was 80 percent Jewish when he was born, but by the time he was in high school, it was populated mostly by African Americans.

“I saw the realities of white flight and the dynamics of race in America first hand,” he says. “My friends from elementary school kind of disappeared before my eyes.”

The experience seems to have informed every part of his life—from his academic passions to his lyrics for Tha League. Facebook fame behind them, the rap group is now wrapping up their debut album, which they plan to shop to major labels.

Although Terry’s verses on the three songs currently posted on their website are made up largely of boasts and jokes (“I can’t understand why I’m the rapper they hate on / I’m not quite the best but not wacker than J-Kwon”), they also hint at his back-story, making occasional references to his brother’s incarceration and his upbringing in Baltimore.

For the time being, Terry intends to leave the past as far behind him as he can—and between all the travel grants and fellowships he has applied to for next year, his top priority is to travel to Ghana before the end of 2006.

“If Professor [Skip] Gates would hire me,” he jokes, “I would very much appreciate it.”