URBANA — His heart is as big as the Double Dutch Boom Bus he drives from ghetto to ghetto around the country in search of geniuses.

He’ll be recognized by the CU Schools Foundation next month as a 2024 Distinguished Alumnus for his dedication to helping young people find their inner genius — what Patterson refers to as “ghetto genius.”

But there’s more to Will Patterson’s story.

He’s been keeping some of the details to himself for many years. Until now.

The big reveal isn’t that he once went to prison for stealing tires. That’s no secret.

It’s not about what he did, but rather what happened to him in third grade — and how that incident changed his trajectory.

“I too often fear that I see young people walking the same paths that we did. The cycle has got to be broken somehow,” Patterson says. “I’ve been there and done that. God has put me in a very unique position to see and also to be able to tell.”

But before going back in time, let’s start with who Patterson is today. Above all, he is a person of faith. He is also a husband, a dad and, most recently, a granddad.

He’s the founder of the Ghetto Genius Universe. Director of the Hip Hop Xpress Double Dutch Boom Bus Innovation Lab & Data Center. Clinical associate professor in the UI College of Fine and Applied Arts. Director of community scholarship at the newly formed Hip Hop Innovation Center in the UI School of Music. Co-director of STEM Illinois. Chief teen officer at the Don Moyer Boys & Girls Club.

Or just plain “Dr. P,” as his students at the University of Illinois like to call him.

All of Patterson’s work centers around helping kids find their inner creative genius.

“A ghetto genius is someone who iterates in spaces and places that have limited resources but are steeped in cultural wealth,” Dr. P says. “A ghetto genius can emerge from any space, it’s not ZIP codes.”

‘Feed my geekism’

Patterson emerged from 61801, attending Webber Elementary, then Urbana Middle and High School. He graduated early, but college seemed out of reach. He had a prison sentence to complete first.

“I was a kid who wanted to feed my geekism, but there was no avenue for that, and that’s what got me in trouble,” he says. “Hip hop spoke to me, but nobody really knew what it was. It was always what I wanted to do, but there was no pathway.”

Patterson admired his older sister, Nina. She and her friends talked about this cool radio program at Urbana Middle School. Patterson couldn’t wait for seventh grade. But when he got there, the district had defunded the program, leaving him heartbroken.

“They killed the program, and that killed my connection to the school,” he says.

Instead, he connected with a group of friends who understood how he felt.

“We all lived a disengaged reality. We disengaged from mainstream society and created a different reality of what mattered to us.”

Patterson started taking pride in getting in trouble. It gave him an identity.

“I prided myself on being the bad kid. Everybody pointed their finger at me when some bad swent on. The badder you are, the more clout, the more street cred you had,” he says.

But it wasn’t always this way.

Patterson loved elementary school, specifically his third-grade teacher, because Nina had loved her too. He hadn’t taken on the “bad kid” label yet. Quite the opposite. He went to school “bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.”

“It’s the space I wanted to shine the most,” he says.

But one day when he was “being silly” in the back of the classroom, the teacher got mad at him and called him to the front of the class.

“She slapped me open-handed in the face,” he says.

He was stunned. Humiliated. But mostly hurt. He was told to go back to his seat and sit down. It was then that he “stopped trusting the learning process.”

He had never been treated this way before and didn’t know what to do. He didn’t tell his mother about the incident because he was afraid she’d get in trouble if she confronted the school.

“I didn’t want my mother getting taken away,” he says.

It didn’t completely kill his spirit for school — it took defunding the radio program and then being “invited off the football team” to solidify it.

Patterson directed his years of hurt back at the place that he felt disowned by — the school. He overheard the principal scolding a student “for talking that jive” to him.

Soon after, he broke into the school and vandalized the principal’s office. He got caught and spent a long Thanksgiving weekend in juvenile detention.

It was like solitary confinement for everyone. No talking, no cellmates, complete silence, everyone alone in their cells. If you talked, you would get more time in the cell. So Patterson stayed silent.

‘I was ashamed’

He didn’t find his voice again until years later, when he enrolled at Parkland. He had just gotten out of prison, where he was serving a three-year sentence for stealing tires for his girlfriend, Lori, who is now his wife.

Patterson served his time at the Joliet Correctional Center, alongside people who’d been convicted for rape and murder.

“She was the one who was about community service and about serving humanity and being an asset to the community,” he says. “And I was not doing that. And I was ashamed.”

He also thought about his father, who showed him the importance of family.

“In those moments, I had real honest conversations with myself. I quickly decided that I needed to improve my situation academically because most of the guys I met in prison were not as literate as they could have been.

For more information on Will Patterson’s work, visit steamgenius.org. If you have an extra 18-wheeler sitting around that you want to donate or share, call 217-288-2111. Dr. P will take your call.

“I used to write Dear John letters for them and so I never got gang-affiliated because of that skill set. So even the guys in prison respected education. People understood what education was worth.

“As soon as I got out, I knew that I had to do something academically. I had to change my situation. I was now a felon — and a convicted one and formerly incarcerated. I had all these Xs on my back and I knew that if I didn’t have something that would cover me, society was not going to give me a chance. A young Black male with a felony conviction — it was going to be a mess.”

In his teens, Patterson met Walter Clifton, a local Black attorney who took him under his wing. Patterson’s mom worked in Clifton’s law office at the time.

“Reality set in,” he says.

He thought a lot about his mother and the values she instilled in her children.

“You know what you are supposed to be doing,” she would always say.

“He told me I needed to stop embarrassing myself,” Dr. P recalls. “‘You need to stop embarrassing Black people with your behavior. I can introduce you to U of I students who have Jheri curl in their hair like you — but they’re law students; they’re doing different things.’”

Now, Patterson understands what Clifton had been trying to tell him all those years.

“People don’t ask college students questions. They just focus on that you’re doing something good that society respects. People respect higher education,” he says.

So Patterson took Clifton’s advice and went to college. “I applied to Loyola and got accepted. It blew my mind.”

Then Patterson heard about a hands-on radio broadcast program at Columbia College in Chicago. He got accepted there too. He transferred into the program and started on the air right away.

His team produced mixed tapes with a “very unique style that they loved in Chicago — we kicked butt.”

Patterson interviewed superstars like Ice-T, NWA, Sir Mix-a-Lot, and 2 Live Crew. He was living his dream.

He graduated from Columbia College in 1990 with a degree in radio broadcasting, just five years after being released from prison.

And Dr. P was just getting started.

‘Kids love that bus’

Patterson went on to earn his master’s in curriculum and instruction from Illinois State in 1992, then completed his doctoral degree in education policy studies from Illinois in 2000.

Today, he’s teaching courses like “Decoding Dr. Dre” and “Hip Hop and Entrepreneurship” at the UI.

And he’s still thinking big about how to keep kids engaged in learning — like 18-wheeler size big, though his first grand idea was more the size of an Airstream trailer.

In 2010, Patterson transformed an Airstream — provided by the UI’s Grainger College of Engineering — into the Hip Hop Xpress, a prototype mobile music lab to engage kids through music.

A few years later, Patterson turned a second Airstream trailer into a mobile recording studio, with a focus on sustainable energy. Kids learned to make solar-powered boom boxes out of old stuff they could find around the house, like suitcases and toolboxes.

Then Dr. P had another big idea, inspired by Frankie Smith’s 1981 funk song “Double Dutch Bus.”

“We are going to build a Double Dutch Bus, but we are going to build the Double Dutch Bus through the University of Illinois with the spirit and ideas from Boys & Girls Club.”

And so he did. With a UI grant, Patterson transformed a school bus into the Hip Hop Xpress Double Dutch Boom Bus Innovation Lab & Data Center.

“It’s an amazing rolling art installation production facility — a cool-looking thing we can drive anywhere around the country to inspire people.”

The bus has been all over C-U and beyond — from East St. Louis to Chicago to Little Rock, Ark. The bus stops at Boys & Girls Clubs along the way, bringing cool technology and toys to share, like RC racing cars and drones.

“Kids love that bus. They eat the bus up,” Patterson says.

“That’s because the artwork on the bus was done by Professor John Jennings, who now works for Marvel, doing Silver Surfer. Professor Stacy Robinson, a graphic designer, and Kevin Erickson, a professor of architecture — his team did the full interior. The bus is an amalgamation of disciplines that have come together.”

At this point in the interview, Patterson paused. He’s been noodling over his next big idea.

“Maybe it’s time to unveil it,” he says.

‘Do the work’

“My uncle was a truck driver, my cousin is a truck driver, I always thought I was going to be a truck driver. Well, I am going to be a truck driver — but it’s going to be the Hip Hop Xpress 18-wheeler.

“The goal is to fill that trailer with technology and resources that will impact families around the country. We are going to travel city to city delivering love and understanding — and that’s our work, that’s the mission, that’s what I know I’m supposed to be doing.”

But, it can’t just be any 18-wheeler.

“It has to be slick. We’re building a badass truck.”

Lori Gold Patterson says her husband is not unique. “If you asked Doc to list others who have come from a similar background as him and who are achieving great things, he’d fill reams of paper with names,” she says.

That’s why they decided to tell Dr. P’s story — and include the parts he’s not proud of, as well as the parts that traumatized him. They hadn’t shared many of these details until now. But they thought it was important to do so.

They want the world to step up when they see a kid struggling and help them connect with their inner genius, instead of just labeling them as a “bad kid.”

“This isn’t a rags-to-riches story,” Lori says. “The message is that hearing his story could allow people to see the youth in front of them differently. Youth have an internal genius. They are just not being reached appropriately.”

And Dr. P wants society to stop blaming them.

“It’s like America eats its young — kids getting killed in the streets on the regular. And then everybody blames the kids. You can’t blame the kids for society’s problems. Adults haven’t figured it out — how in the hell is a kid going to figure it out?”

But mostly, he wants people to “do the work.”

“You gotta start somewhere. If you sit on the bench or sit on your perch talking about what you don’t have, you don’t do nothing but talk — and you don’t get nothing done. Get in the mix and then start fixing things as they break. You figure out what you need and you keep it moving. You gotta keep it moving.”