Karamo by Karamo Brown

Author:Karamo Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books

Homecoming court was not what we know traditionally—as in, being voted homecoming king or queen—but was more of a way to be a leader and a liaison between students and faculty, or students and people who were visiting the college. We had to be able to talk about the school in a way that was very clear and articulate.

Me with the homecoming court at Florida A&M University. We were ambassadors of the school, so we’d walk around the games in full suits or tiaras.

We were being trained to be these sorts of dignitaries. (Although, side note, the reason I joined the homecoming court was because of Tisha Campbell-Martin. That’s never left me. When I found out that the women got to perform but the men had to stand stoic in the back, it tore me up.)

Leadership just became what I was going to do, along with being a social worker. Still, it felt like a piece missing—and it was the vanity piece. I wanted to help people, but I also wanted people to know who I was. I ran for student government; I was popular on campus. I did this because I wanted to be seen, validated, and at the forefront. I didn’t want to just fade away into the background.

It was in college that I got introduced to politics. The first publication I was ever in was the Famuan, which was our campus newspaper. I was on the cover, which read, “Karamo Brown: Youngest Candidate for City Commissioner of Tallahassee.” This was because I decided one day, after doing a peer-counseling event where I was helping people, that I was going to run for office.

I had been reading about how the two main campuses in Tallahassee, Florida State University and Florida A&M University, made up 90 percent of the constituency in the city—yet all the legislation at that time was against students. They had the audacity to fight against us? It made me angry.

It was because the incumbent in town was being “a jerk”—that’s how I put it in my speech (I have better words now). I figured I could galvanize all the people on my campus and on the neighboring campus of Florida State to vote for me if I ran for office. That way I could still help people and do all the things that the current city commissioner didn’t do, but people would know who I was.

It immediately spread across the campus that a student was running for office. Getting involved in politics was a mix of all my passions. I was too far into my major at this point to change it to political science, but I didn’t care. I was going to run for office anyway.

As I started going to these events, I soon realized that I wasn’t prepared enough to actually run against this man. When you’re running for office, you have to really know what you’re doing and saying, and have a clear understanding of how you can help people on a larger scale than just having a one-on-one conversation.

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