By Mike Pearson
FightingIllini.com

In 2017, the Council of Opportunity in Education (COE) and the Center for First-Generation Student Success launched the inaugural First-Generation College Celebration. On Monday, Nov. 8, the Center encourages universities, non-profits and K-12 schools to celebrate the success of first-generation college students, faculty, staff and alumni.

This past August, a record 8,300 freshmen began classes at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. According to national statistics, an estimated 50 percent of them are first-generation learners, i.e. students who are the first in their families to attend a higher education institution.

Thirty-two years ago, back in the Fall of 1989, former Fighting Illini basketball star Deon Thomas became a pioneer for his family. He knows first-hand the trials, tribulations and pressures that thousands upon thousands of first-year undergraduates endure, including some 60 Illini varsity freshmen in 2021-22.

Now at age 50, the path to Champaign-Urbana for that then teenager from Chicago's Simeon Career Academy High School was anything but easy. Thomas and his younger brother Clifton had navigated numerous hurdles and consequences as youngsters growing up in the Windy City's Englewood and Chatham neighborhoods. Family elders mandated that they be in their apartment when the street lights came on at dusk.

"We grew up in the projects, so it wasn't a place where you wanted to be hanging out at all times of night," Thomas recalled.

At one point, his father had left the family and his mother was suffering from drug dependency, so the boys were separately dispatched to stay with grandparents. Deon spent several of his teenage years with his father's mother, Bernice McGary. Paying attention to his education was an absolute requirement.

"We didn't dare mess up in school," Thomas said. "If they got a phone call from anybody at the school saying something other than how great we were doing, we were going to be in a world of trouble.

"My Grandmother Bernice would always tell me, 'Baby, you're bigger than the village' (the village was what his community was called). She was the one who was always looking ahead and looking for more and saying that there was more out there for me that what was in our 10-block radius."

As a youth, Deon was an above-average student.

"I was on the honor roll all through elementary school and basically all through high school," he said. "Fortunately, I had great teachers in elementary school as well as in high school. Mr. Bledsoe, Miss Plummer and Mr. Collins were three of my teachers in elementary school who did their best to keep me focused. When I got to Simeon, it was Miss Washington (a history teacher); she was like a mom to me when I wasn't at home. She really cared about her students."

Thomas respected her so much that he sacrificed a good portion of the time he spent on UI's campus during his official visit as a basketball recruit.

"I'll always remember sitting in the library at the University of Illinois and writing my history paper because Miss Washington wanted it on Monday," he said. "She said she didn't care that I was going on a visit; she wanted her paper done by Monday."

Thomas said that his coach at Simeon, Bob Hambric, "also steered me in the right direction."

"You couldn't play basketball at Simeon and get in trouble or miss class or do any of those things," he said. "I understood that I could change my life through playing basketball and that it would give me an opportunity to go to college. This will be hard for people to believe, but I didn't go to the University of Illinois to play basketball or to make it to the NBA. It was never basketball centered for me. It was academics centered. I wanted to graduate from the University of Illinois and go on to become a lawyer. Even when I got drafted, I wanted to play long enough so that I could earn enough money to go to law school and eventually become a judge. That was my sole reason and focus for playing basketball."

Deon knew that he was blessed to receive a college scholarship, so he went to great lengths to share his experience in Champaign-Urbana with his brother and other members of his family.

"My time at Illinois was huge for me," he said. "I was able to bring my brother down to campus and several of my cousins were able to come to my games with my grandmother. That was their first exposure to a college campus."

He is particularly proud of his younger brother's accomplishments.

"After Clifton finished high school in South Haven, Mich., he went into the Marines, then he became a police officer for 10 years," Thomas said. "Now he owns his own security company and he's working on his second master's degree in cyber security."

It was a special day for Deon when Clifton and Grandma Bernice attended his U of I graduation ceremony.

"I knew my grandmother was proud that day," Thomas said. "It wasn't so much about what she said; it was the look on her face. She didn't have to say anything."

Today, the Illini Hall of Famer and basketball program's all-time leading scorer serves as his alma mater's associate director of development in Chicago. He says he sought the position so that he could pass on his life lessons to current and future Illini student-athletes.

"One of the things I love most (about my job) is that I can raise money to help kids who are like me," Thomas said. "They're exactly like me. If it wasn't for the donors and the development officers to raise money and cover scholarships, I wouldn't have had my scholarship. If I hadn't had that scholarship, I couldn't have brought my brother and cousins down to Champaign. They would have never seen the campus at the University of Illinois. If I hadn't played basketball at Illinois, things would definitely be a lot different for me."

As the Thomas clan's first college graduate, Thomas says he's gratified he could break the ice for his family.

"Well, as least I made a chip in it," he said. "Several of my younger cousins have gone on to college and I'm sure their kids will go on to college when they grow up."

"I don't want people to think that I'm special," Thomas continued. "I was given opportunities. What I hope all universities will do is to not form opinions about people in terms of where they're from. If you give people an opportunity and you show them something that's different than where they live, people can do better. It doesn't have anything to do with whether you're black or white. There are white people who live in rural areas that go through some of the same things that I went through. If this is supposed to be the land of opportunity, then we need to do a better job of providing those opportunities."