Now seven years old, the Call Me Mister program has placed 20 Black male teachers in South Carolina schools. So how are they doing?
About six years ago, Mark Joseph found something he had been seeking for some time: a sense of purpose. A native of Greenville, S.C., Joseph had been a standout football and basketball player in high school, but he lasted just one semester at the University of South Carolina. Realizing that he just wasn’t ready to buckle down, he says he drifted.
But Joseph, 31, says he finally found his calling when his church asked him to help with an after-school program.
“I was there one minute, and I realized I connected with the kids, and they took to me,” he says. “I seemed to be encouraging to them. I was making a difference.”
That experience was the impetus that led Joseph to Call Me Mister, a seven-year-old program designed to train Black men to become schoolteachers and role models. Joseph is now in his second year at Westcliffe Elementary School in Greenville, where he teaches fifth-graders. The school’s principal, Carolyn Morgan, says Joseph is “a charismatic leader” in his classroom and around the school.
Call Me Mister focuses primarily on the lower grades. The name is borrowed from a line in the 1967 Sidney Poitier movie, “In the Heat of the Night.” In the film, Poitier, playing Black Philadelphia homicide detective Virgil Tibbs, is confronted by a Southern sheriff played by Rod Steiger. When Steiger’s character asks what the Philadelphia police called Tibbs, he responds with the now-classic line. The line later became the title of the 1970 sequel, “They Call Me Mister Tibbs.”
