Emanuel Scarbrough Named National Mentor of the Year: It’s About the Youth (Part 2 of 2)
Above: Emanuel “Manny” Scarbrough (l) and members of the Madison Junior Investment Club at the New York Stock Exchange
Below: Scarbrough with his 100 Black Men of Madison, Inc. Mentor of the Year award.
by Jonathan Gramling
Emanuel “Manny” Scarbrough has been a fixture in Madison’s Black community and beyond for over 50 years. Lately, Scarbrough has been receiving some awards for his service including the 2023 James C. Wright Human Rights Award and 2024 100 Black Men, Inc. Mentor of the Year, a national award.
But for Scarbrough, it’s never been about the recognition or honors. It has clearly been about the youth in the community and their future. During his early years at UW-Madison, Scarbrough ended up becoming a mentor to a young man.
“When I first got here in 1967, there was a young man who was 12-years-old,” Scarbrough recalled. “He came over and would eat at our place. He didn’t have his father around. I did the cooking. One of the guys who ran track washed the dishes. We would cook a big batch of spaghetti and he would eat, lay on the sofa for a while and then eat again. About 10 p.m. one night, we went to a party and he was there. I said, ‘Get out of here. You don’t need to be here with these adults.’ To make a long story short, I told him, ‘I don’t want you running around here drinking and doing all of the things that I see these young kids do. If you want to drink, come to my house and we can sit down like adults and do it.’ He came back 30 years later and told me, ‘You know, I never did that because I knew that I could go to your house and do it.’ That made me feel really good. 30 years later, he said he didn’t do it because he knew he had a place to go. He still calls me for my birthday.”
As Scarbrough got involved in the community even as he immersed himself in being a full-time researcher at UW-Madison, he kept staying involved in the “Movement” and working with youth a personal priority. It all stems from his upbringing growing up in rural Alabama.
“It really started with what my father did, how he was invested in the community and the kinds of things that it brought him, the joy that it brought him,” Scarbrough said. “When I was coming up as a kid, we were told by the adults that once you get to a certain age, the elders expect you to step up and be a part of the community and be leaders in the community. If you don’t do that, who is going to do that? I had an obligation to do it.”
In the early 1980s, Scarbrough was called to leadership with the NAACP Madison Branch.
“Oscar Shade and I play golf together,” Scarbrough recalledby Jonathan Gramling
Emanuel “Manny” Scarbrough has been a fixture in Madison’s Black community and beyond for over 50 years. Lately, Scarbrough has been receiving some awards for his service including the 2023 James C. Wright Human Rights Award and 2024 100 Black Men, Inc. Mentor of the Year, a national award.
But for Scarbrough, it’s never been about the recognition or honors. It has clearly been about the youth in the community and their future. During his early years at UW-Madison, Sc
“When I first got here in 1967, there was a young man who was 12-years-old,” Scarbrough recalled. “He came over and would eat at our place. He didn’t have his father around. I did the cooking. One of the guys who ran track washed the dishes. We would cook a big batch of spaghetti and he would eat, lay on the sofa for a while and then eat again. About 10 p.m. one night, we went to a party and he was there. I said, ‘Get out of
here. You don’t need to be here with these adults.’ To make a long story short, I told him, ‘I don’t want you running around here drinking and doing all of the things that I see these young kids do. If you want to drink, come to my house and we can sit down like adults and do it.’ He came back 30 years later and told me, ‘You know, I never did that because I knew that I could go to your house and do it.’ That made me feel really good. 30 years later, he said he didn’t do it because he knew he had a place to go. He still calls me for my birthday.”
As Scarbrough got involved in the community even as he immersed himself in being a full-time researcher at UW-Madison, he kept staying involved in the “Movement” and working with youth a personal priority. It all stems from his upbringing growing up in rural Alabama.
- If you don’t do that, who is going to do that? I had an obligation to do it.”
. “In the late 1970s, Oscar asked me, ‘Why aren’t you a member of the NAACP?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ He said, ‘You need to join.’ Oscar was a past state president. And so I joined. After joining, I moved up. I was vice-president and then when Betty went to the Urban League, I moved into the presidency.”
As president of the branch, Scarbrough focused on advocacy and youth. The advocacy took the form of sitting on several community-wide committees.
“One of our members had been Hal Harlow,” Scarbrough said. “He was asked to redo the rules and regulations of the State of Wisconsin like cosmetology and health care. I was on the committee redoing those, which was very interesting. Also I got asked to be on the personal responsibility committee of the Ninth District for WisBar. When complaints are brought about lawyers, they bring them there. The committee is a large group of lawyers and they have three non-lawyers on the committee and I was one of them. That was interesting. For example, we were at a meeting. And this rural couple filed a complaint against this lawyer. For some reason, they had lost $10,000. And so this lawyer on the committee got up and said, ‘We don’t need to be bothered with this. $10,000 isn’t that much.’ He wanted to dismiss it. It made me angry. I told them that may be the reason why the couple didn’t make a profit that year. And it got as quiet as it could be in there. I heard later that the chairman of the committee said, ‘That’s the kind of people that we want on the committee.’ If you are dealing with people who have a lot of money, evidently you don’t really care about the little person.”
Scarbrough retired from UW-Madison in 1999 and went on to be an AODA prevention and intervention specialist at Genesis until 2005. One of the programs that Scarbrough worked on was a state-supported program called Parenting Wisely. He felt it focused on deficits and so he changed things up to focus on the parents’ assets.
“There are programs where the government says they are acceptable and they can be used in prevention and intervention,” Scarbrough said. “One was called Parenting Wisely. I did not like that. Telling Black people they don’t know how to parent is not the thing to do. I said, ‘Okay, what we are going to do is we are going to talk to Black parents about where we were in our past, how we got through Jim Crow and all of these problems we had in the society, where we are now and what is the future that we want for ourselves and our kids.’ We provided food. They would come and eat and we would talk. It was outstanding.”
Scarbrough also worked on some statewide prevention programs. One was Smoke Free Wisconsin that reached out to Wisconsin’s communities of color.
“You had the African American group,” Scarbrough said. “You had the Hmong group. You had the Hispanic group. And you had the Native American group. The state gave each one a certain amount of money. What we wanted to do was lump all of the funds together and have the groups come together. We did this. We distributed money equally among the groups. Dr. Jimenez is a really outstanding woman in Milwaukee with the Black Health Coalition. She was the first president. And then the Hmong person, we voted him to be the vice-president. He said he wouldn’t do that. He said he would take it if Dr. Jimenez and he were co-directors of the organization. We did a lot of things. Put stuff out to the different communities that were specific to each community. Later on, a new person came to the state. He decided that he wanted to divide us up again. It was unbelievable. As successful as we had been, he decided to break the group up and that is what happened. This is government. Not all government is like that. I don’t know why he wanted to do that, but that is what happened.”
While Scarbrough retired from being paid to do community work, it hardly meant that he wasn’t involved with youth. One of his main vehicles was 100 Black Men of Madison through which he mentored young Black men at a number of middle schools including Toki and James C. Wright. He became involved ion the program Dollars & Sense. But the program he really latched onto was Junior Investment, which has expanded the horizens of Madison youth to the national level.
“Wells Fargo has been a partner with this program for five years or more,” Scarbrough said. “It teaches kids how to invest. I’ve been doing this for three years. In those three years, we have won first place and second place. Last year we won first place. This year we won second place. Last year, we were able to go to New York and the kids were actually on the New York Stock Exchange. We were on the floor when the exchange opened. We were able to view everything when the bell rung. And then we came down on the floor when we got ready to leave. It was unbelievable. One of the executives of Wells Fargo was sitting in a training room with me. He said, ‘Manny, I have been trying to get on the floor of the stock exchange for years. And could not. These kids allowed me to be able to do that.’”
And the youth got the chance to hobnob with some high-profile investment bankers.
“We went to Wells Fargo’s national office and we went to see the room where they were trading. That was unbelievable. And like I said before, while we were at Wells Fargo, two of the top executives spoke to the kids. To give you a sense for how impactful this was, SIFMA, the Secutities Industry and Markets Association, which actually has the platform with the investments, has their fundraiser at that time. It’s a big banquet. One of our students, Pierre Nichols, was a guest speaker at the banquet. We talked to people after dinner. You made contacts with individuals. People at SIFMA and Wells Fargo were interested in talking with the kids.”
And the impact of the New York trip was that it inspired some of the youth to think of themselves as leaders and having a positive impact on their community.
“One of the students after we got back from New York came up to me and said, ‘I really want to do what you did,’” Scarbrough said. “’I really don’t like what is going on with young kids these days.’ His sister was going into sixth grade at Toki. “I want to do what you did.’ I said, ‘That’s great. Should I help?’ He said, ‘No, I’m going to do it and you just be in the background because I don’t even know whether or not these kids will relate to you now. I don’t know if they will relate to me.’ He went in and talked with the principal and got everything ready. But he moved away from Madison and couldn’t do it.”
There is an impulse in human beings to want to be able to live on forever. In Scarbrough’s view, you live on through the impact that you have on others.
“One of the things that I thought about — and someone said it to me — is that everyone talks about how they want to live after you are dead. We as regular citizens live through the people we knew. With him setting that program up at Toki, this was like me living forever.”
Emanuel “Manny” Scarbrough will indeed live on through the positive impact that he has had on children in Madison’s Black community and beyond.