On a recent weekday morning, Daniel Jean stood on a stage in a conference room at Montclair State University and asked the crowd to stand.
Before him were dozens of rows of young Black and Hispanic boys bused in from high schools in nearby Paterson, Jersey City and Newark.
“They believe one out of three of us will go to jail,” Jean’s voice boomed from the microphone, reciting an often-repeated, decades-old statistic about Black men. “One. In. Three.”
Jean, an assistant provost at Montclair State, then asked the roughly 300 young men to loudly repeat two motivational phrases: “I am unstoppable. I will achieve.”
