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*AAA is not just a reference to the Auto Club; it also is a nod to Hill Harper, the actor, author, and activist.
*AAA is not just a reference to the Auto Club; it also is a nod to Hill Harper, the actor, author, and activist.
While his most recent foray into the public eye is through his role as Sheldon Hawkes on the television show “CSI: New York,” but he’s been acting since he was just 7 years old.
Since then, he’s locked in memorable performances in Spike Lee’s 1996 film “Get on the Bus” and 2000’s “The Visit.” He’s also written two critically acclaimed books “Letters to a Young Brother” and “Letters to a Young Sister: DeFINE Your Destiny.”
Harper led the United Negro College Fund’s HBCU Empower Me Tour, serves as a Big Brothers Big Sisters mentor, and has also launched a social network called ForRealSolutions.com, and established the MANifest Your Destiny foundation, a non-profit youth organization. Whew.
But Hill Harper is not looking to slow down. The ivy-leaguer is preparing his third book, filming the CSI series -- fresh off the campaign of his Harvard schoolmate Barack Obama, where he served as a member of the Obama for America National Finance Committee.
“It’s become famous now, but he’s been community organizing for years; doing a lot of work in the community in Chicago, helping out steelworkers that have been laid off in the Southside and in Gary, Indiana, doing voter registration work, working out of the basement a church on the Southside for about $13,000 a year,” Harper told EUR's Lee Bailey of his good friend, President-elect Barack Obama. “So, he came with a great deal of life experience, whereas a number of us, myself included, came straight from undergrad to grad school. So I was younger and still trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life. Was I going to go on the artistic side, or into government? There were a lot of intelligent, super smart, super committed people at Harvard Law School at that time.”
Harper continued that he and a number of Harvard Alums helped work on the campaign and are currently apart of Obama’s transition team.
“It’s just wonderful to look back and see that so many people were so committed to wanting to change the world have been able to work together in ways to support and help facilitate – hopefully over the course of the next eight years there can be real substantive change in terms of the US and policy. We’re going to see some shifts,” he said.
“There’s a great transition team working extremely hard to make sure they hit the ground running come January 21st and really focus on that first hundred days. There are big elements of this campaign that he talked about that I think are going to be the initial focus; certainly getting the economy back on track to a place where people are less fearful about their jobs and about losing their homes.”
Harper shared that the Obama he knows today is not so different of the Obama of his Harvard days.
“It’s very interesting. There’s not much difference between the person he is now and the person he was then. He’s fundamentally the same person. At Harvard Law School, he was extremely committed to public service and working to improve the lot of life of people. Period,” he said. “And this is a really important part. When we graduated – there are four classes of students, as far as honors – there’s Suma Cum Laude, Magna Cum Laude, Cum Laude, and, I like to joke, Thank-you-Lawdy. No one had been Suma Cum Laude in 30 years and no one was our year. Barack was one of three or four that was Magna Cum Laude. I was in the Cum Laude, which was about 20-30 people, and then there was everybody else. So even if you were in the everybody else category; even if you were the lowest graduate from Harvard Law School, you had the opportunity to clerk for amazing level courts, you have the opportunity to work in six-figure salary paying jobs, let alone being the top graduate and also the president of the Harvard Law Review, which he was. He could’ve clerked for the Supreme Court, he could’ve clerked for the Appellate Court, he could’ve taken any number of amazing high-paying jobs.”
He also reminded that Obama, as well as most law students, graduated with student debt, so the attraction to take a high-paying job would be even greater.
“What did he do?” Harper asked, “he went back Chicago, to continue doing work for people that he certainly could have done without having attended Harvard Law School. Just like they said I was crazy, too, ‘This guy is graduating Cum Laude from Harvard Law School with a Masters in Government from the Kennedy School and he’s gonna go be an actor. He’s crazy.’”
“Barack did not let his experiences at Harvard change him. He knew why he was there. He came there with a purpose and even though he excelled there and had all this new opportunity come his way when he graduated, he left having that same purpose. He’s been on purpose and on his purpose his entire career, which I think is brilliant. I am so happy that the American public could see through the rhetoric during the campaign.”
Meanwhile, Harper recently filmed the 100th episode of “CSI: New York”, but the hard worker said that the success of the show hasn’t necessarily turned into more Hollywood opportunities.
“Being on a great show that is part of, arguably, one of the most successful franchises in television history is fantastic. It offers a platform of reaching a large amount of audience,” he said. “As far as opening doors career wise, that doesn’t happen so much because it takes up so much time that it’s very hard to do other things that fit into the window that you have, which is the three months off that we have. There are certain movies that have come up that I’ve found to be incredible projects that I would have loved to have done, but I just couldn’t do. There’s a real blessing to doing the show and it’s helped for this campaign and it’s also great for the books that I’ve written. So there’s a wonderful ancillary benefit to the show in that way, but as far as for pure career stuff and doing big movies and things like that, it’s very difficult.”
On the other hand difficulty doesn’t seem to be a word in Harper’s vocabulary. With his hectic television schedule, he’s on to his third book.
“It’s a book on relationships. It’s a challenging book to say the least,” he said of the not-yet-titled tome. “It’s kind of about how a guy like me, (is) working through and trying to figure out how this whole relationship stuff works. I’m excited about it. It’s for adults. It’s definitely a departure from the first two books that were for young people. I’m going to have to put across the book in big red letters ‘For Adults Only.’ Hopefully, it’s going to be a pretty provocative book because I want to promote a conversation.”
For more on Hill Harper, check out his MySpace page or website at www.manifestyourdestiny.org.
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