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Let struggles push you to your dreams, speaker urges at YSU MLK event
By Denise Dick
YOUNGSTOWN
Rather than using your struggles as an excuse not to pursue your dream, use them to push yourself to achieve it.
“This life is not for wimps; it’s for warriors,” said Emma Fraser Pendleton, the keynote speaker Thursday at the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Diversity Breakfast at Youngstown State University.
The annual breakfast is sponsored by YSU’s Office of Student Diversity Programs and the Student Diversity Council.
Pendleton, a motivational speaker, was one of 11 children. They ended up in a series of what she called “cruel and toxic” foster homes after their mother was institutionalized for mental illness.
In one of those homes, Pendleton and one of her brothers were abused sexually, physically and emotionally.
She said she knows pain.
“It’s what you overcome that makes you who you will be,” Pendleton said.
There would be no hero in the movie without the villain, the speaker said.
But God doesn’t give you anything that you can’t use, she said.
Pendleton married at age 19, and by 21 she had two children.
“I had never been near a college,” she said.
Her foster mother directed her to pick her high school based on distance from the home because she would have to walk. The woman wouldn’t give her foster children car fare.
She lived in fear but said God was grooming her for better.
Pendleton’s husband, a bus driver, urged her to pursue her education when she was 26.
She graduated from a community college and went on to earn five degrees, including a doctorate, from Harvard University at age 45.
Pendleton said if the Rev. Dr. King were alive, he’d ask what people were doing with his dream.
The speaker urged breakfast attendees to cultivate friendships with people of other races and to visit their ancestral homes.
“My life changed when I went to Africa,” Pendleton said.
When she went back to school to get her doctorate, even though her tuition was paid for, it wasn’t free. She had to quit her well-paying job, buy books and pay room and board.
She didn’t let that stop her, though, and she urges others to follow.
“Don’t you let a student loan keep you out of school,” Pendleton said.
She now is recognized as a speaker on leadership development, group dynamics and women’s issues, and she also wrote a children’s book with her brother.
Life isn’t about arriving at your grave in a well-preserved body, she said.
“It’s about getting in sideways and saying, ‘Good God Almighty, what a hell of a journey, and I’m free at last,’” Pendleton said.