Nickelodeon Actor Attends Morehouse

By Danielle Johnson
Black College Wire

"Goo Punch, everybody, Goo Punch, everybody sing, Goo Punch!"

The Panther Ralph Woolfolk played the character Dee Dee Parker on the television show "My Brother and Me"

This may sound very familiar to fans of a Nickelodeon show called "My Brother and Me," which aired in 1994 and1995 and made history by becoming the first African-American sitcom to appear on the Nickelodeon network.

Ralph McKinley Woolfolk played the character Dee Dee Parker on the show. He is the fourth generation in his family to attend Morehouse and is currently a junior English major with a 3.9 GPA. He also is catcher on the baseball team and the team's captain.

"That was my show!" said Tyesha Richardson, sophmore at CAU. She, along with many other students at Clark and around the Atlanta University Campus, remember the show as a favorite growing up, but no one knew what happened to it.

When the show first began airing, Woolfolk was only eight years old. Now at 21, he is ready to reveal what really happened to the show.

"I pray that God bestows me with humility and understanding as I seek to provide the reader with the most truthful answer in an effort to persuade African-Americans to stop bringing validity to the 'crabs in the barrel' metaphor." Woolfolk said he remembers specifically when he received the news of the show's cancellation.

"One evening after returning home from Toys R Us with my parents, we received a phone call from the show's executive producers, Calvin Brown and Illunga Adell, informing us that they had made the decision not to return for the development of another season because the production staff had different opinions as to where they wanted to take the direction of the show."

Later Woolfolk and his parents found out that the creators of "My Brother and Me," had gotten into a heated debate that resulted in the production staff not wanting to speak to one another anymore.

Now looking back at it Woolfolk said, "I'm not as disappointed about the show being cancelled as I am in them contributing to the negative stereotype that 'Blacks can't get along.' It's shameful to know that a group of African- Americans, who had worked so hard, couldn't find it in themselves to swallow their pride and do what was best for not only the show, but for the African-American youth that had something positive to look forward to on Saturday and Sunday evenings."

Woolfolk is tired of things like this happening in the black community. "If it's not Clark and Morehouse fighting at the damn football game that was televised on ESPN in 2006, it's something else along the lines of this type of stupidity. We fail to realize that our battles are far beyond the circumference of the AUC, nor are they harvested within the African-American community."

Woolfolk wants to let all his fans know that all the other cast members are doing fine. His big brother, Alfie Parker, played by Arthur Reggie III, is currently pursuing a rap career in LA. Jimmy Lee Newman. (Goo Berry), is also doing well, along with Stephen J. Whirling (Darnell), Ashling Sistrunk (Melanie Parker) and Jim Coleman (Roger Parker). Woolfolk is currently pursuing admittance into either Harvard School of Law or William and Mary's law school in Williamsburg, Virginia.

In his free time, he is either at baseball practice or with his Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity brothers. And he hasn't entirely left his former career behind. According to the Morehouse student newspaper, the Maroon Tiger, Woolfolk was involved in the production of a local play, "M.J.: The Modern Job," written by Morehouse English professor Dr. Anne Watts.

Danielle Johnson writes for the Clark Atlanta University Panther, which originally published a version of this article.

Posted Dec. 2, 2007