ST. LOUIS — Jordan Hughes strode to the lectern and looked around.

The eyes of hundreds of his fellow St. Louis Community College graduates were on him. He’d been practicing his valedictory address for weeks, but it still felt unreal.

“If you had told me five years ago that I could be the commencement speaker today, I probably would have asked what you were smoking,” Hughes told the audience at Chaifetz Arena on a Sunday evening in late spring.

Hughes, 26, had an improbable path to earning his associate’s degree. He grew up in public housing, one of 11 siblings. When he was in sixth grade, he was injured in a drive-by shooting while hanging out with his brother and some older friends. During high school, he was suspended dozens of times — “never for anything too crazy,” he says — and barely scraped by.

Then, he foundered some more.

“For a while, I was just lost,” said Hughes, who lives in north St. Louis. “I had given up on myself.”

A renewed purpose — sparked by a victorious court case — led him two years ago to St. Louis Community College at Forest Park. He quit his job and moved back in with his dad to devote more time to studying. He would become a top scholar, earning a 3.95 GPA, and the student chosen to address the commencement audience in May.

“I stand here now,” he told the audience, “a testament to the transformative power of education.”

Next up would be a bachelor’s degree in political science, then law school at an Ivy League institution.

Since he outlined his post-grad intentions in that speech, Hughes has hit another roadblock. He won’t be leaving for the University of Wisconsin in August because he can’t come up with the tuition. But he’s only postponing, not abandoning his goal. He wants to be a role model for other young Black men who were raised in circumstances similar to his.

“You don’t see doctors and lawyers around here,” he said of his father’s home, a couple of blocks south of Fairground Park. “My biggest thing is: If I can do this, you can do this as well.”

He’s already had an impact on at least one person. During high school, 18-year-old Lorenzo Gordon, a family friend who lives nearby, would come around with homework questions once or twice a week. The two sometimes exercised together. They would shoot baskets and talk about the future.

“He helped me with everything,” Gordon said of Hughes. “Jordan gave me a lot of inspiration.”

Gordon graduated this year from Hughes’ alma mater, Clyde C. Miller Career Academy. He will start classes at the University of Missouri-St. Louis next month.

A changed trajectory

Hughes excelled at a young age, his family says. When he was 3 or 4, he taught himself to read. One day, he walked into the kitchen holding a piece of mail and told his parents what it said.

They laughed.

“Who put you up to this?” his dad remembers asking.

“I’ve always preached education to my kids,” Gibb Hughes said. “Jordan was exceptional.”

At age 10, he won a poetry contest at Peabody Elementary and had lunch with the mayor.

He was shot the next year.

His family was at a block party at the Clinton-Peabody housing complex south of downtown, where they used to live. Hughes’ mom was leaving to take the younger kids to see the hot air balloons in Forest Park. Her 11-year-old son was not interested.

“I just wanted to hang out with the older kids,” Hughes said.

He fibbed to his parents about what he was doing and caught up with the group of teens. As the streetlights came on, they were sitting on the side of a hill, eating snacks and joking around.

A car sped by. Hughes could see the silhouette of a gun sticking out of the window, almost like something he’d watch on TV. His brother took off running, and Hughes tried to follow. That’s when he realized he had been hit.

“It was dark, but I could see the blood,” he said.

He had been shot once in each leg, and his jeans were becoming saturated.

He spent a few days in the hospital and left with scars and nerve damage. His mom made her kids cut off contact with everyone they had been with that night.

Hughes turned into a homebody. He spent hours in his bedroom, and he didn’t like going anywhere after dark.

He never talked about the shooting. In retrospect, his dad wishes they had pushed him to.

“After he got shot, he just didn’t care as much,” Gibb Hughes said. “He probably needed some counseling.”

By high school, Hughes’ main focus was on enjoying himself. He developed a reputation for clowning. He cut class — a lot — but usually stayed on the Miller campus to socialize. Once in a while, if he was bored, he’d pull the fire alarm. For a “senior prank,” he joined a group of students who filled balloons with ketchup and mustard and pelted the building with them.

At one point, his mom drove him past juvenile hall.

“Do you want to end up here?” she asked him. “You’re so smart. Why don’t you do the work?”

‘All the right stuff’

After Hughes squeaked through high school — his GPA when he graduated was 1.8 — he headed to Missouri Southern State University in Joplin. That lasted a semester.

But a minor annoyance that happened during that time ended up becoming a pivot point: Someone stole his ID.

Hughes was back living at home, spending his days babysitting nieces and nephews, when he got a summons to court. Whoever had swiped his ID had racked up a few tickets.

He was nervous to appear before a judge but discovered he liked organizing evidence and arguing his point. He won the case, and the charges were dismissed.

“I had given up on myself before,” Hughes said. “In that moment, I knew I had to go back to school.”

He enrolled at St. Louis Community College in the fall of 2023. His family would tease him for sneaking up to the attic during get-togethers to finish his homework.

“I’d call him to do something, and he’d say, ‘I got class today. I got to study,’” his older sister, Dorothy Edwards, said.

Hughes threw himself into campus life, too, joining the honor society, the student leadership board and Black Male Achievers, now called the Scholars Program, an organization that aims to increase retention and ensure academic success.

“He was doing all the right stuff,” said Mysha Clincy, who runs the Scholars Program.

She offered him the same advice she gives all her students: “Begin with the end in mind. Where do you want to go?”

Hughes picked the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which boasts one of the top political science programs in the country.

The out-of-state sticker price comes to almost $60,000 a year, but Hughes believed he would qualify for in-state tuition through a reciprocity agreement; he had already locked up grants and scholarships.

His acceptance letter arrived in April, around the time he was selected to speak at graduation.

“I was so proud of him,” said Clincy. “He had a story that resonated with everyone in the room.”

It wasn’t until after the flurry of end-of-the-year celebrations that Hughes realized he didn’t qualify for in-state tuition at Wisconsin. He was $30,000 short. And he had two months to come up with it.

He held onto hope for a little while, but by late June, he knew he wouldn’t be moving anywhere in the fall.

His dream will be delayed. He has asked Wisconsin to defer his admission and is also looking into an alternative: Washington University, which would allow him to live at home.

He will finish his bachelor’s degree, he insists. He will become a lawyer.

“I can be slow,” said Hughes. “But I can’t be stopped.”

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