NOTE: Photos of Dr. Belle S. Wheelan and the Rev. Dr. Joseph Lowery are attached and cutlines follow end of release.

TROY – Today’s African-American youth have limitless educational opportunities available to them and they should have a “network of people who care” making sure they take advantage of those opportunities.

That was the message Dr. Belle S. Wheelan delivered as the keynote speaker for the closing session of the sixth annual Leadership Conference Celebrating Black History Month, sponsored by the City of Troy and Troy University. Dr. Wheelan is president of the Commission on Colleges, Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, the first black woman to lead SACS.

She urged conference attendees to get involved in their community schools as volunteers. Dr. Wheelan also urged them to direct their children and grandchildren to the local library.

“Learning is hard work, but ignorance is so much harder,” she said, speaking Saturday at the closing luncheon in the Trojan Center Ballrooms on the Troy University Campus.

Dr. Wheelan recalled her youth in Texas prior to the widespread desegregation of public schools in the South. She said millions of black children benefited from a community that valued education.

“We had a network of people that cared about us,” she said. “They cared about us enough to tell us that education was a privilege and not a right.”

Dr. Wheelan, who served as president of two community colleges in Virginia and as the Virginia Secretary of Education, said children need to be engaged in the classroom and encouraged to ask questions.

“Students are afraid to ask questions for fear that they will look stupid,” she said. “Let me tell you it’s all right for them to be stupid coming in the classroom as long as they are not stupid when they go out.”

The conference entitled “Leadership by Design: Ensuring our Legacy” opened Friday evening with an address by the Rev. Dr. Joseph Lowery, founding president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Dr. Lowery played a major role in the U.S. civil rights movement as contemporary and adviser of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and led the famous Selma-to-Montgomery March in 1965.

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Dr. Belle Wheelan, the first black female president of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, addresses attendees to the sixth annual Leadership Conference Celebrating Black History Month, sponsored by the City of Troy and Troy University Saturday. Listening are conference chair Shelia Jackson, the City of Troy’s public relations director, and State Rep. Alan Boothe. (TROY photo/Kevin Glackmeyer)

The Rev. Dr. Joseph Lowery offered opening keynote remarks Friday at the sixth annual Leadership Conference Celebrating Black History Month, sponsored by the City of Troy and Troy University. (TROY photo/Kevin Glackmeyer)