Longtime Madison community leader and mentor Emanuel “Manny” Scarbrough is the recipient of the 100 Black Men of America’s Mentor of the Year Award. The 100 Black Men of America, Inc., one of the pre-eminent African American-led youth mentoring organizations in the country, honored Scarbrough, who is a longtime member of the 100 Black Men of Madison, at the 100 Black Men of America’s 38th Annual Conference hosted in Atlanta in June.
“I was honored that I was awarded the National Mentor of the Year. It is the highest award that the 100 Black Men of America bestow on its members,” Scarbrough tells Madison365. “I’m grateful for the people that really mentored me and the students and volunteers that helped me do the kind of work that would actually merit that type of award …. this is something I’m very proud of.
“Mentorship is very important. Some of the kids, because of my age, they look at me as kind of an old granddad,” he continues. “And one of the things that I learned in my years on this earth is that if the student or the kid knows that you really are invested in him or her and you want what is best for them, you can tell them things that they don’t necessarily want to hear … and they will listen.”
The prestigious national award, called the Thomas W. Dortch Mentor of the Year Award, was also presented to David Bowers from Greater Washington D.C. 100 Black Men at the four-day conference. The Mentor of the Year Award was created “to recognize an outstanding 100 Black Men member who is committed to Mentoring the 100 Way® to make a verifiable difference in the lives of youth to help them become future mentors, contributing members of society, and a viable part of the economic fabric of our country.”
“What I love about mentorship is that the mentor grows just like the mentee,” Scarbrough says. “If I am going to talk to a young man or a young woman about something, I need to think about it in a way that it makes sense to them. I have to really basically do research. In your mind, you think about what you are going to say. Is that the proper thing to say? Why is that the proper thing to say? When should you say this? You have to think about all of that.
“So this process really helps me, too. And I love it,” he adds.
Scarbrough has mentored over 500 young people in his life and has served as a mentor and strong role model for middle and high school students at Whitehorse Middle School, Sennett Middle School, Toki Middle School, Wright Middle School, and LaFollette High School here in Madison. He has played a significant role in several important community mentorship programs including the 100 Black Men of Madison’s annual Back to School Celebration; Helping Those Who Help Others, a program that helps provide groceries around the holidays to low-income families; and Christmas For Children With Responsibilities, who support local high school students who have “adult” or “parental” responsibilities in caring for younger siblings or their own children.
A member of Mount Zion Baptist Church for over 40 years, Scarbrough also worked with Mount Zion’s Genesis Development Corporation, starting in 1999, to educate young people on the dangers of drugs and alcohol. His work at Genesis led him to become one of the few certified prevention specialists in the state.
Recently, Scarbrough was a mentor in a financial literacy program, the Junior Investment Club, a partnership between 100 Black Men of America and Wells Fargo Bank, that helps teach young people about finances and introduces kids to investing and the stock market.
“So for the last three to four years, I have been doing Junior Investment with students here in the school system. Last year, we won first place competing with 140 teams from 100 Black Men chapters throughout the United States,” Scarbrough says. “It was so exciting for us to win first place.
“We were able to go to New York in October, and we were on the [New York] Stock exchange. That was amazing. Very few people get a chance to go to the stock exchange. We then went to Wells Fargo headquarters [in Manhattan]. That was exciting,” he continues. “After that, we went to Broadway and we saw the Michael Jackson play [MJ the Musical], which was unbelievable. So these students were exposed to a lot of things.
“This year, we won second place in the Junior Investment competition. So I don’t know if we are going to be able to go to New York again this year … hopefully, we are because we had about three students who were not on the team last year,” he adds. “So we can get them to have that kind of experience that we had last year.”
Growing up in rural Alabama in the ’40s and ’50s, Scarbrough says that he learned the importance of mentorship from his dad.
“My father, when I was growing up, he was really the mentor in my community. We lived in a rural area,” Scarbrough says. “In that mile-and-a-half radius, I’m guessing that you had 20 of 30 young kids, and if my father would be sitting on the lawn, just relaxing, the kids would come around and play around him, because he would always listen to what they had to say. And I saw that.”
When Scarbrough got to Madison in the ‘60s to attend UW-Madison, he began his first endeavor in mentoring … the first of what would be over 500 mentorships in his life.
“There was a young man here that had just his mother and his father was not in the home. He was from a single-family home and for some reason, he took up with Ricky Poole and myself. Ricky was a track star at UW and he and I would cook enough food for the young man, and he would come in and eat and do all kinds of things,” Scarbrough remembers. “So when he got to be maybe 14 or 15 years of age, I told him, ‘Now look, I don’t want you out in the streets getting drunk and doing the kind of things that young kids your age do. If you want to drink, come here and we will prepare a drink for you, and we will sit down and drink it like men.’
“Thirty years later, he came to me and told me, ‘You know, I never did do that. The reason I did not do it is because I always knew I had a place that I could go and drink because you will allow that.’ That was mind-boggling to me. I had no idea that I had that kind of effect on him.”
Almost 60 years, and hundreds and hundreds of mentorships, later, Scarbrough prefers to go about his good work with Madison’s young people quietly, but it’s getting harder to maintain his low profile. Last year, he was honored with the 2023 Rev. Wright Human Rights Award by the City of Madison. Now he has won a prestigious national award.
“People will joke and say, ‘Well, Manny, you got old. And people are just giving you awards because you’re old,'” Scarbrough laughs. “And, I say, ‘Well, maybe!’
“But, seriously, I don’t do the work that I do because I want accolades or that I want people to know that I did this or that. The work is rewarding in itself,” he adds.
