Walk into Baltimore Collegiate School for Boys on any weekday morning and you feel it immediately: a sense of purpose. Ties are straightened, hands are shaken and young men are greeted as “scholars,” not as problems to be managed. This is not cosmetic branding; it is a deliberate counter-narrative to what too many Black boys in Baltimore have been told about themselves.
My understanding of the value of all-male education began long before my career in leadership. As a student at Cardinal Gibbons School—a Catholic, all-male, college-preparatory academy that served Baltimore from 1962 until its closing in 2010—I walked hallways built intentionally for boys: academically, athletically and spiritually. Expectations were clear: work hard, be accountable and grow into a man who serves his community. That formation mattered. It shaped me deeply and became one of the reasons I later co-founded Bluford Drew Jemison STEM Academy for Boys.
Baltimore has a long, proud tradition of male academic institutions shaping generations of young men. Baltimore City College, founded in 1839, operated as an all-male school for roughly 140 years. During that period, its graduates became doctors, lawyers, judges, mayors and members of Congress—including figures such as the late Congressman Elijah Cummings and Sen. Charles E. Sydnor III. “City,” as it is known, proved that when boys learn in spaces built for them, they rise.
Baltimore Polytechnic Institute (“Poly”) offers another example. Established in 1883, Poly built its reputation as a rigorous engineering and technical high school for young men—producing STEM professionals long before the acronym existed. Alumni include patent owners, professors, judges and civic leaders. Dr. Carl O. Clark, Poly’s first African American graduate in 1955, went on to become the first African American to earn a physics degree from the University of South Carolina. Alumni such as former Judge William “Billy” Murphy and former City Council President Nick Mosby further illustrate the school’s impact…