Oakland Teen from Troubled, Fatherless Home Pledges Future Success

OAKLAND — For a long time, Dalvin Butler Jr. heard he was headed down the same doomed path as many other young black men in Oakland. Like others, he grew up with a lot of trouble and not much help from role models.

"When you look who's walking down the streets of Oakland," Butler said, "you see prostitutes, gang members, drug dealers. Lack of leadership is a perpetuating epidemic in African-American males. The vast majority of African-American families are living with one parent, and many youths are living with their grandparents and other family."

Butler said his father died when he was an infant, leaving him in the care of a mother he describes as both negligent and abusive.

"My mother had abandoned me. She told me I was not going to be anything, that I'd be a drug dealer in Oakland," Butler said. "That hurt my feelings, and robbed my motivation to success. But then I had to prove her wrong."

The first step came when his extended family stepped in, Butler said.

"Other people, friends of the family, my grandma who passed last year, they all played a role in rehabilitating me emotionally," Butler said. "It's sort of an emptiness within you. I've always had to be independent, but I just gave up. I didn't care about a lot of things. You lash out. That's what happened to me.

"But others will change your outlook on life, your passions. I first wanted to major in psychology, for example, to help people endure abuse as well,"

Butler said. "My perspective on life, my longing for people, could help to understand people, because you really understand them on another level when you share suffering.

"I walk around and I see homeless people, and I know a little about it: I've went to bed without eating many nights because of how my mother was."

Now 18, Butler has graduated from Leadership Preparatory High School on the Castlemont campus in East Oakland, interned in Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums' office and completed his first semester at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

"About a year-and-a-half ago, Mayor Dellums and I were going to Castlemont for a community town hall, and Dalvin approached us and told me his story," said Marisol Lopez, Dellums' chief of staff. "I was impressed, and we encouraged him to intern in our office. ... He's the guy everyone's excited to see. He's a breath of fresh air in the office. There are a lot of kids that come from broken families that don't have hope, and he shines the light on some possibility."

Butler loved to talk about policy, to think about the idea that it can directly change people's lives, Lopez added.

"I want to major in government and come back to Oakland to run for something," Butler said. "If you're in government, you can deal with all the issues. My senior year (in high school), I started watching city council meetings on TV. I was just flipping channels and they can be very colorful. And the more I watched I realized how many different issues Oakland is facing."

Butler wasn't always a good student, he admitted openly.

"It was Ms. Maultbsy," he said, asked when education finally clicked for him. "She totally embraced me."

A history teacher on the Castlemont campus when Butler was a student there, Mary Maultbsy's generosity and the curriculum were key in Butler's turnaround, he said.

"I used to stay after school a lot, write papers for her every day," Butler said. "I bombarded her with questions, and I could see her getting frustrated sometimes, but she knew she had to help. She knows the community is in need of help; that was her passion. Sometimes she'd stay until 8 o'clock with me and give me a ride home."

Butler ended up getting three A.A. degrees from Laney College by doubling up his class load while he was in high school, taking on Laney teacher and BART director Carol Ward Allen as a mentor.

"He's an inspiration, because he's gone through some hard times," Ward Allen said. "Every time I talk to him he's doing something new. I'm just impressed with him.

"For Oakland, you keep seeing in the news: Two black men died today, one yesterday, and this makes the back page of the paper. ... In terms of news items, Oakland needs to have Dalvin Butler. We need to know about him. We need to know more about him than the Tupacs and the MC Hammers. They're great, but when we have scholars, we need to know about them as well."

By Sean Maher
Oakland Tribune