The Anthony Reeves Experience

We talk a lot about getting to the “next level.” It has become one of those phrases that we use almost automatically. We want to take our careers to the next level. We want to take our businesses to the next level. We want to take our relationships, finances, education, or personal development to the next level. But I have often wondered whether we actually recognize the moment when it happens. Because sometimes the next level does not arrive with an announcement. Sometimes there is no promotion. There is no graduation ceremony. There is no award. There is no moment where somebody walks up to you and says: Congratulations. You are now a different person. Sometimes you only recognize it years later. For me, one of those moments happened during the summer of 1990 at Army ROTC Advanced Camp. I Thought I Knew What Success Looked Like When I returned to the University of Tampa in the fall of 1989, a lot of things in my life were changing. I was 20 years old. I had recently pledged the frate...

Recently, I had a conversation with a young fraternity brother who was 25 years old and beginning to become active with our graduate chapter. As we talked, I shared my own experience. I told him how out of place I felt when I attended my first graduate chapter meeting at the age of 22. I went to the meeting, sat through it, left—and never returned. It would be another four years before I became active with a graduate chapter. Another brother who was listening to our conversation stopped me and asked a simple question: “Did any brother reach out to you while you were at the meeting? Did anyone engage you or try to talk to you?” I thought about it and answered honestly. “No.” He responded, “That was the problem. You just needed one brother to reach out to you.” That statement stayed with me because it was true. One Brother Made the Difference When I was 26 years old and stationed in the military, I met a fraternity brother who would eventually become one of my mentors. He remains a mento...

One of the greatest lessons I've ever learned about growth didn't come from winning. It came from losing. During my time as Step Master for my chapter at the University of South Florida in the mid-1990s, we had earned a reputation. Locally, we were one of the strongest step teams around. We knew our audience. We knew the stages. We knew how to perform in an environment where people expected us to succeed. But there was one thing we had never really done. We had never taken our success on the road. Some older Alpha brothers kept encouraging us to compete outside of our area. Looking back, I realize they weren't just encouraging us to enter another competition. They were encouraging us to test ourselves. Eventually, we decided to do something that, in hindsight, was probably a little crazy. Instead of entering one out-of-town competition, we entered two on the same weekend. On Friday night, we competed in Fort Lauderdale. Then we immediately got back on the road, drove to Gai...

When people think about Black Greek Letter Organizations, the conversation almost always begins with college. We remember crossing. We remember the step shows, chapter meetings, community service projects, homecoming, and lifelong friendships. Even our songs reflect those memories. As members of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc., our hymn speaks of "college days swiftly passed, imbued with memories fond." Every Divine Nine organization has traditions that celebrate those years. But here's something we don't talk about nearly enough. What happens after graduation? When Your Chapter Isn't There Over the past thirty-plus years as a member of Alpha Phi Alpha, there have been several times when I lived in communities that didn't have a local chapter. Sometimes the closest chapter was an hour or more away. Other times, there simply wasn't one. That forced me to think about fraternity differently. If I couldn't regularly attend chapter meetings, where would I ...

When people ask me about my time at the University of Tampa, I usually tell them it was the best three and a half years of my life. What I don't always tell them is that I almost never got to experience those years. If you've followed my Black Generation X stories, you've probably heard me talk about my first semester in college. It was rough. I dealt with overcrowded dorm rooms, roommate issues, culture shock, loneliness, and even found myself hitchhiking home after getting stranded in Orlando. Every new challenge made me question whether I had made the right decision by leaving Arkansas. By the end of that first semester, I wasn't just homesick. I was evaluating whether I even belonged there. Then Spring 1988 arrived. Sometimes Your Environment Changes Before Your Mind Does One of the biggest changes wasn't academic. It was my living situation. I moved out of the tiny room that had been designed for one student but housed three of us. Instead, I became roommates w...

As a member of Black Generation X, I often have to remind people that the way many of us moved into predominantly white spaces was not always as deep, strategic, or emotionally prepared as people might assume. When I attended the University of Tampa in the fall of 1987, I did not get on the road thinking about the fact that I was heading to a predominantly white institution. I was not sitting there processing that it was a private school. I was not calculating that I might be one of the few Black students in most of my classes. I was not thinking that I might be the only Black student in my biology courses, the only Black cadet in my freshman ROTC class, or the only Black person on my dorm floor. All of those things turned out to be true. But none of those things crossed my mind before I got there. Looking back, that is interesting to me because today we often talk about representation, cultural fit, racial isolation, and the emotional weight of being “the only one.” Those conversa...