Jermaine Williams, 45, has been president of Montgomery College since 2022. He lives in Gaithersburg with his wife, Maggie, and their two sons, Jackson and Malcolm. He’s proud of the achievements of the community college’s overwhelmingly diverse student body, half of which self-identifies as first-generation college students and 36% of whom report food insecurity issues. Helping those young scholars succeed drives this lifelong educator, but of all the students he has taught, the most important one is the most surprising.
It starts with something I see every day, and that’s my name. Jermaine F. Williams. That ‘F’ is the middle name of my father, so it’s a family name. What a lot of people don’t know, and I’m about to share with you, is my middle name is actually spelled wrong. Yes, it’s my father’s middle name, but it’s spelled incorrectly. Because when I was born and it was time to give me a name, my father thought that’s how it was spelled.
My middle name is supposed to be Francis. But it is spelled F-R-A-N-C-I-A-S.
My father was illiterate. As a middle schooler, I and others helped him learn how to read. It didn’t hit me as much as a young person, helping your father learn how to read, but it hit me harder when I was older and I found my path. Why did I have this desire to be in education? Why do I do what I do? What’s this desire to help others leverage education as a way to obtain individual economic and social mobility and ignite intergenerational mobility?
In those moments, I think about supporting my father. I think about this Southern Black man who came up from North Carolina during the Great Migration, married a Northern white woman, and had to traverse so much of what our society has to offer in terms of race and socioeconomic status—in terms of everything that is said, and unsaid. And I think about how he earned a bachelor’s degree and two master’s degrees.
I think about the level of importance my parents put on education—neither of them were college graduates by the time I was, so my brother and I were first-generation [college students]. There’s a reason why I’m at a college where 50% of students are self-identified as first-gen.
The impact teaching my father to read has had on me, how it resonates, is something that has stayed with me even before I realized it and could name it. It is embedded deep within the fabric of my ethos, and I truly believe it drove me to make life-changing decisions as I became more educated and I could finally put a name on it.
This story appears in the September/October 2024 issue of Bethesda Magazine.
