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About The Onyx Renaissance (Unabridged)

Excellence, with no regrets... “Chill Will”, “Benji”, “Big Mel”, “Juice”, and “Ice”. Will Appling, Owen Benjamin, O. J. McDuffie, Mel Jones, and Marcus Teague. Before the Michigan “Fab Five”, there was the “Juice Crew All-stars” of Hawken. Melvin L. Jones, the author of the critically acclaimed Park Dreams , presents his newest project - a narrative of his personal experience in high school with four of his closest friends titled The Onyx Renaissance . In the fall of 1985, five freshmen from the Cleveland area - two young men from Cleveland's Woodhill Park neighborhood and three from Warrensville Heights - began their high school experience at Hawken School, a private school on the outskirts of Cleveland in Gates Mills. In the three years that they attended, the “Juice Crew” changed the way that people looked at the school as a whole - athletically and socially. While at the same time, these five young men saw civic, cultural, and economic differences - things they never dreamed of experiencing while living around the inner city of Cleveland. In the era where social media was relegated to newspapers, radio, and television, the “Juice Crew” brought notoriety to a school that widely was considered to be a “school for bookworms”. The Onyx Renaissance chronicles the story of how these five young men came together and forged a brotherhood that allowed them to express themselves athletically and socially, and their acts had long-lasting effects on the school located in Gates Mills - effects that are still being felt today. In a phrase, the “Juice Crew” made Hawken “prime time”.