How a $5 bill opened opportunity to hundreds of Morgan State University students

By Deborah Weiner

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    BALTIMORE (WBAL) — It was $5 that changed his life and set him on a path to success.

Morgan State University’s president has led an extraordinary life, and the small gift from his sharecropper father launched a million-dollar scholarship fund.

The $5 Scholarship Fund traces its history to a shanty in rural Alabama and the sharecropper father of David Wilson. It’s a remarkable story that began with a gift of $5 — all that his father had saved.

“Who I am is the kid who was raised in abject poverty in rural Alabama,” Wilson told 11 News.

Wilson was in seventh grade before he attended school five days a week because his father needed help in the fields. When a schoolteacher told him he was smart enough to go to college, Wilson was both honored and confused because he had never before heard the word “college.”

Wilson, now president of Morgan, keeps a jar of dirt, from what he calls “the old homeplace,” and a sample bail of cotton from McKinley, Alabama, on the fifth shelf of a bookcase in his office.

“You can’t forget your past,” Wilson said. “My hands picked it when I was on my knees crawling up and down cotton fields.”

A framed $5 bill sits on the same shelf to remind him what his father gave him when Wilson — the youngest of 10 children — left for Tuskegee University, as the very first in the family to attend college. It was a moment that left his father, who could not read or write, in tears.

“He said, ‘This is all that I have and I am investing in you. I want you to make good of it and get me a return on it.’ And, when I walked out the front door as the sun was coming up and I opened my hand, there was a crisp $5 bill — that was all that he had been able to save for five years,” Wilson told 11 News.

As many times as he has shared this story, on this day, it brought tears to the eyes of the university president, a man who also went on to Harvard University to earn his master’s and doctorate degrees.

“While I have four college degrees, I have been around the world four or five times, who I am is the kid that was raised in abject poverty in rural Alabama,” Wilson said.

That is why, when Wilson was inaugurated as Morgan’s 10th president in 2010, he announced a new scholarship, the $5 Scholarship Fund to help pay for tuition, books and even study abroad for Morgan students in all majors and at all levels. Since its inception, almost $400,000 has been awarded to more than 350 Morgan students.

“I have an obligation to keep the door of opportunity opened for so many bright kids who may not have the last $1,000 or $5,000 to keep them going,” Wilson said.

Wilson said the framed $5 bill on his bookshelf isn’t the same bill his father gave him.

“I wish I had the foresight to have kept the original,” Wilson said.

But he revealed to 11 News that he would like to see the scholarship fund, which, at one point, had reached $4 million, grow to $10 million.

It’s a fund in honor of a father called “uncommonly bright” even though, when he died in his 80s, he still could not read his own name.

“He was such a powerful influence on me, and I miss him dearly,” Wilson said.

Wilson has personally contributed $150,000 to the $5 Scholarship Fund since its launch. There have also been recent and sizable gifts from top Morgan donors, including the president of CareFirst

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