Khadijah Williams, 18, overcomes a lifetime in shelters and on skid row

By Esmeralda Bermudez, condensed from the Los Angeles Times, June 20, 2009

Khadijah Williams stepped into chemistry class and instantly tuned out the commotion.

Quietly, the 18-year-old settled into an empty table, flipped open her physics book and focused. Nothing mattered now except homework.

Around here, Khadijah is known as "Harvard girl," the "smart girl" and the girl with the contagious smile who landed at Jefferson High School only 18 months ago.
What students don't know is that she is also a homeless girl.

As long as she can remember, Khadijah has floated from shelters to motels to armories along the West Coast with her mother. She has attended 12 schools in 12 years; lived out of garbage bags among pimps, prostitutes and drug dealers. Every morning, she upheld her dignity, making sure she didn't smell or look disheveled.

On the streets, she learned how to hunt for their next meal, plot the next bus route and help choose a secure place to sleep -- survival skills she applied with passion to her education.

Only a few mentors and Harvard officials know her background. She never wanted other students to know her secret -- not until her plane left for the East Coast hours after her Friday evening graduation.

"I was so proud of being smart I never wanted people to say, 'You got the easy way out because you're homeless,' " she said. "I never saw it as an excuse."

"I have felt the anger at having to catch up in school . . . being bullied because they knew I was poor, different, and read too much," she wrote in her college essays. "I knew that if I wanted to become a smart, successful scholar, I should talk to other smart people.

"Khadijah was in third grade when she first realized the power of test scores, placing in the 99th percentile on a state exam. Her teachers marked the 9-year-old as gifted, a special category that Khadijah, even at that early age, vowed to keep.

She finished only half of fourth grade, half of fifth and skipped sixth. Seventh grade was split between Los Angeles and San Diego. Eighth grade consisted of two weeks in San Bernardino.

At every stop, Khadijah pushed to keep herself in each school's gifted program. She read nutrition charts, newspapers and four to five books a month, anything to transport her mind away from the chaos and the sour smell.

In 10th grade, Khadijah realized that if she wanted to succeed, she couldn't do it alone. She began to reach out to organizations and mentors: the Upward Bound Program, Higher Edge L.A., Experience Berkeley and South Central Scholars; teachers, counselors and college alumni networks. They helped her enroll in summer community college classes, gave her access to computers and scholarship applications and taught her about networking.

When she enrolled in the fall of her junior year at Jefferson High School, she was determined to stay put, regardless of where her mother moved. Graduation was not far off and she needed strong college letters of recommendation from teachers who were familiar with her work.

This soon meant commuting by bus from an Orange County armory. She awoke at 4 a.m. and returned at 11 p.m., and kept her grade-point average at just below a 4.0 while participating in the Academic Decathlon, the debate team and leading the school's track and field team.

Khadijah graduated Friday evening with high honors, fourth in her class. She was accepted to more than 20 universities nationwide, including Brown, Columbia, Amherst and Williams. She chose a full scholarship to Harvard and aspires to become an education attorney.

She tried her best; she never smoked or drank, never did drugs, and she never put us in abusive situations. However, that was the best she could do.

She knows she was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., to a 14-year-old mother. She thinks Chantwuan might have been ostracized from her family. She may have tried to attend school, but the stress of a baby proved too much. When Khadijah was a toddler, they moved to California. A few years later, Jeanine was born.

She has chosen not to criticize her mother. Instead Khadijah said she inspired her to learn. "She would tell me I had a gift, she would call me Oprah."

When her college applications were due in December, James and Patricia London of South Central Scholars invited Khadijah to their home in Rancho Palos Verdes to help her write her essays.

She won't be the first homeless student to arrive at Harvard.

Julie Hilden, the Harvard interviewer who met with Khadijah to gauge whether she should be accepted, said it was clear from the start that Khadijah was a top candidate. But school officials had to make sure they could provide what she needed to make the transition successful.

"I think about how I can convince my peers about the value of education. . . . I have found that after all the teasing, these peers start to respect me . . . . I decided that I could be the one to uplift my peers . . . . My work is far reaching and never finished."

In the last six months, she saw her mother only a few times and on Thursday tried to find her. Khadijah headed to a South-Central storage facility where they last stored their belongings.

Proudly, Khadijah modeled her hunter green graduation cap and gown and practiced switching the tassel from right to left as she would during the ceremony.

"Look at you," her mother says. "You're really going to Harvard, huh?"

"Yeah," she says, pausing. "I'm going to Harvard."

The up side of autism

I enjoy thinking of ways that people within the autistic spectrum help humans evolve. I know it's not your usual perspective but with the increasing numbers of children identified, you know they will have an influence on life. What are the good parts?

My experience with children who have ASD shows me that there are many sensory issues that negatively affect them such as noises that are too loud, transitions that are too sudden and textures that are too rough. I suspect that many of these same issues negatively affect us all but we have learned to ignore them. Ignoring them is not validating their existence. They still have their effect on us.

How else to explain our ability to live, for example among the noise pollution of a big city. The honking cars, screeching sirens, noisy jackhammers are all tolerated on one level but add to our unease and irritability on a more unconscious level.

Children within the Spectrum won't tolerate or ignore and might have a meltdown if the situation isn't changed. For example, we might go to a crowded restaurant and be slightly uncomfortable with the lack of elbow room or continual chatter. Instead of realizing the sensory source of our discomfort, we might, instead, see faults with the waiter or get annoyed with some aspect of the conversation when, really, the main issue is that we, too, are in sensory overload. Spectrum children will instead insist on leaving or just "lose it" until taken outside. They will eventually need to learn methods to help them cope such as wearing headphone or purposely choosing quieter environments.

The lesson is that we all would benefit from learning what our individual unique sensitivities are. Do we need more time in nature than we are getting? Would we be more comfortable in our bodies if our clothing were softer to the touch? Would we do better in a noisy crowd if we had on an ipod with comforting music? Do we need more time to ease into our day?

People within the Spectrum are learning to understand and honor their sensitivities and limits. Perhaps one of their contributions is that they are showing us that we need to do the same thing.