Weekly Report 2-22

Family of Black Doctors Has Social Media Buzzing

By Stacy M. Brown NNPA Newswire Senior

Wr. Herbert Oye is a Board Certified Endovascular and Vascular Surgeon, specializing in invasive and non-invasive treatment of vascular diseases.

Dr. Oye received his medical degree at the University of North Texas Health Science Center, according to his official biography.

His General Surgery residency was performed at Wyckoff Heights Medical Center in Brooklyn, NY, an affiliate of Albert Einstein Medical Center.

Dr. Oye completed his fellowship training in advanced vascular and en-

dovascular surgery at the Arizona Heart Institute in Phoenix, Arizona.

Perhaps most impressive is that each of Dr. Oye’s four children followed in their father’s footsteps.

David, Monique, Michelle, and Melissa Oye, each said they were inspired by their father and all have become doctors.

“Our dad, Dr. Herbert Oye, is a Nigerian immigrant. Upon moving to the United States, he attended medical school and has worked tirelessly to build his own Vascular Surgery practice,” the young physicians wrote in a statement

on Facebook.

“Dad has since opened a hospital back in Nigeria and splits his time between the United States and Nigeria. We are all currently in the medical field as a second-, third- and fourth-year medical student and a first year Internal Medicine Resident.”

Each are attending or have attended the West Virginia School of Medicine. Monique, the eldest of the family, graduated in 2018. Michelle is in her fourth year, while Melissa is in her third year.

David, the only son of Dr. Oye, is in his second year.

Their success has social media buzzing.

“Sending congratulations to your amazing family of wonderful world citizens,” Kathryn Stollmeyer Wright, wrote on Facebook.

Another Facebook user, Patricia Combs, wrote: “Well done. Congratulations for excellence in your drive, motivation, and ability to accomplish such a great and momentous feat. You all are wonderful and blessed,” Combs stated.

Source: NNPA

Photo Caption: Dr. Herbert Oye (center) and his children, who are also all doctors.

“Our dad, Dr. Herbert Oye, is a Nigerian immigrant. Upon moving to the United States, he attended medical school and has worked tirelessly to build his own Vascular Surgery practice,” the young physicians wrote in a statement on Facebook.

Mark A. Malveaux Shares His Personal Journey to HBCU Giving

By Mark A. Malveaux

iving is universal, possibly ingrained in our DNA as an essential trait to human survival. Familial bonds, teamwork and the tautological concept of “community” encompass offering oneself, through time, money, or property, to help people or causes, generally, for those in need. From billionaire philanthropists to people living check-to-check putting money in the red kettle for the Salvation Army, we, Americans, are the most generous people on the planet, with China being the least generous, according to the 2019 World Giving Index.

Like a fingerprint, each journey to giving is a singular tale. My journey to giving to my historically black college and university (HBCU), Southern University, was a long, winding road. I was in high school and wanted to attend a debate camp far away from home. My parents, only one of which obtained a high school degree and like many parents, had little to no understanding what “debate” really meant. My parents, their parents and siblings had moved from some of the most rural, impoverished areas of south Louisiana to the big city of Lafayette, Louisiana. They were all sharecroppers with no material wealth and went to one-room, segregated schools. For some, French was their primary language. Like my mother, her siblings worked the fields to provide a sustainable life. Picking cotton is not easy. Picking cotton and other crops as a black sharecropper in south Louisiana: perilous.

As teenagers sometimes do, I did not think about the cost of the camp. In fact, my life was one where my siblings and I never went without. My father, an Army veteran, got a good paying union job at a delivery company and had income producing side businesses. My mother, like many of her sisters, began doing domestic work for wealthy families. This time, however, I learned that cost was a factor. My family simply could not afford for me to attend.

On a particularly balmy Saturday near the bayous, I remember seeing my aunts bringing food to cook. Before I knew it, our modest home looked like a cafeteria. Of course, this cafeteria had some of the finest creole cuisine in the world—fried sac au lait, oyster and shrimp cornbread dressing, shrimp etouffee, etc. People from the neighborhood and beyond bought plates of food. Those women, my aunts, and neighbors, had given of their time, money, and food to raise funds for me to attend debate camp. I went to that camp – my first time on a train -- won my division and went on to obtain a law degree from a top law school. I never forgot about these amazing women who gave for my betterment.

I did not choose to attend Southern University; rather, like inertia, something was set in motion and it simply kept moving. Southern University, the only university system among HBCUs, has three campuses with a student population of approximately 15,000, the largest student population of any HBCU. The school was started in New Orleans in 1880 because of post-Civil War Reconstruction and Radical Republicans. Reconstruction and the federal government’s efforts to ameliorate the lives of and protect the newly freed slaves formally ended in 1877. During this brief period from 1865 to 1877, black people were able to vote and vote they did. Louisiana had the first black governor in US history, P.B.S. Pinchback. Pinchback would later be instrumental in sponsoring one of the most important and infamous civil rights cases in history: Plessy v. Ferguson, which enshrined Jim Crow “separate, but equal” and for which the near unanimous Court stated that the Fourteenth Amendment “could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based on color, or to enforce

social, as distinguished from political equality, or a comingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.”

During that oasis in time, former Governor Pinchback and other black leaders petitioned the State to establish an institution of higher learning for “colored people.” Of course, white institutions, particularly state institutions of higher learning, shut their doors to blacks in the South. With 12 students and $10,000, according to its published history, the course of history for millions black people changed for the better. Black people, with allies of all races, wedged an opening for uplift and have never looked back despite the absurdity of a society that sanctioned deliberate terror and sabotage. This was the milieu from which my ancestors survived and thrived.

Almost all my black teachers were graduates of Southern University or Grambling State University. Every black professional from the doctor to the dentist to the teacher to the university professor, were graduates of Southern or other HBCUs. I later came to realize that these avenues of black uplift and actualization were suffocatingly limited. You could either teach or preach or, to a lesser extent, become a lawyer or doctor. Working for city government or private companies was effectively impossible outside of menial labor. Raising capital or obtaining a loan to start a business was unheard of.

Because Southern was so entrenched in my life, attending it, to a certain and frustrating degree, became a fait accompli. I was recruited by predominantly white institutions of national prominence. Yet, I could not attend those schools because of the financial burden on my family. And I thank god for that burden, because going to Southern was one of the best things that ever happened to me.

Southern, like many HBCUs, takes many young kids who, for many reasons, are not exactly prepared to start college. Academically, many never received an adequate education. Such students are indistinguishable from the highly prepared students on campus. Yet Southern and many, if not most, HBCUs take these “diamonds in the rough” and turn them into computer scientists, engineers, accountants, and doctors. Every day, I see HBCU graduates, some of whom come from unimaginable poverty, move to the middle and upper middle class. Studies repeatedly show HBCUs are the engines to black upward mobility and integration into society. Sociologists would lament that black people are the canaries in the coal mine for societal woes. However, HBCUs are the oxygen for people who have been submerged underwater. They bring life to the country.

Nearly all my cousins who were attending Southern

were engineering majors. My paternal aunt was a mathematics professor there and a paternal uncle graduated from another school in chemical engineering.

Southern is one of the top producers of black engineers and feeders for black people receiving doctorates. Having tested out of introductory science classes, I decided to study engineering. That lasted two weeks! Taking a drafting class made it very clear to me engineering was not my path.

Instead, I studied economics. All my professors had doctorates in the subject. Most of my professors were black, American-born economists. Although, there were also professors from Nigeria and professors of south Asian descent. The talent was high, and they nurtured and pushed me in ways I am certain I would not see at other institutions. And like most HBCUs, they taught under less-than-ideal conditions: low pay, heavy teaching loads, sub-optimal infrastructure, and limited opportunities to conduct research. Many in the Black Community call what these professors sacrificed as tithing. They gave their time, energy, knowledge, and money to the uplift of those black kids who made the little-known second “Great Migration” from the cotton fields to education.

I won awards, some national, graduated, matriculated to the University of Virginia School of Law, and practiced at an international law firm. I moved to another firm where I have led public infrastructure transactions worth tens of billions of dollars over a nearly 30-year career. Along the way, I became a modestly successful investor in startups. I never forgot those aunts, however. Their dignity and their example of giving are indelible. I never forgot the late Dr. Fred Temple who was my most impactful economics professor at Southern University.

I pursued success, including financial success. By most accounts, my mission was accomplished, yet there is not a great deal of incentive to stop or, at least, detour from the somewhat solitary pursuit of individual success. I decided to no longer be one dimensional. Those aunts gave of themselves when they had so little to give; far be it from me to not balance my financial and professional goals with giving.

My wife, also an alum and who graduated in computer science, and I gifted Southern University with $1,000,000, which is one of the largest gifts from an alum in the school’s history. The money will provide scholarships to talented students and improve programming in the College of Business. To my surprise, the University will name its MBA program in our honor. Behind that honor will be the strongest, hopeful, and hardest working people I know. My personal journey is, in fact, not personal at all. It is notably an accumulation of the investments made by others and this country, combined with opportunity and work.

I hope to give more as there is no comparable feeling. More importantly, I hope other HBCU graduates give back. I hope the most fortunate in our country, like McKenzie Scott has already done, direct some of their fortunes to HBCUs. I hope corporations use their altruism and selfinterest in the same vein. What is good for HBCUs is good for America.

For me, it was a most satisfying journey.