The fourth- and fifth-graders at Ferguson-Easley Elementary School already knew a little about Larry Rivera as he took the microphone Friday afternoon.

Eloise Melvin, parent facilitator, had told them Rivera was the co-founder and president of Project 2nd Chance, a youth outreach program, and Bright Young Minds Academy. He is a motivational speaker who talks across the country.

The man standing before them was unassuming, slim, courteous, wearing a bow tie and looked much younger than his 44 years — “29” was one student’s guess at his age.

“Don’t let it fool you,” he told the children about his neat, professional look.

For an hour, Rivera brought the heat. His speech for Black History Month took on the volume and urgency of a sermon as he told these children that they were brilliant and nobody could stop them from achieving.

The married father of five spoke to a school he himself had attended, and where the faces looking back at him were nearly all African American.

“I’m going to prove to you that you can do whatever you want to do,” he said. “You just gotta know how to do it. Don’t let anybody tell you, you can’t do whatever you can see in your mind!”

Rivera is the adopted grandson of Katherine G. Johnson, a mathematician made famous by the book and Oscar-nominated 2017 movie “Hidden Figures.” Johnson and other women did the mathematical computations that made possible astronauts’ missions to the moon.

Rivera wove her life story into the fabric of black history and used his life as an example of overcoming long odds.

He told the students he gives his life for them, and took a long pause.

He leaned down toward a girl in the front row and said, “Everybody can’t look you in the face and say, sistah, I give my life for you.”

One of the students apparently smirked, but Rivera was not having it:

“What’s so funny, brother?

“That’s REAL!”

He continued: “Everybody can’t say that because everybody ain’t walked that.”

Rivera told the students that as a 15-year-old he was No. 1 ranked in his weight division in taekwondo. He trained at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs.

Then he arrested the student’s attention and held it for the rest of the speech when he told them that, just a few years later, while still a teenager, he was charged with murder and bank robbery. He went to prison.

“That part of the story everybody might not want to hear, but I want to relate something to you,” he said. “Somebody came and made me an offer on a college campus. And because I went along with the offer, I ended up losing 10 years out of my life.”

Later he told the students not to hang around with “those who are doing bad.

“They will sell you out every time.”

In his three years in prison, Rivera earned a college degree from Shaw University, graduating magna cum laude. But he said a degree means nothing without character.

A mentor in prison helped him change his way of thinking, and his life, he said.

“Don’t you ever let nobody tell you you’re behind and you can’t get up. Don’t you ever let somebody tell you, you can’t make a difference, you can’t change.”

“If Mrs. Katherine G. Johnson believed that she couldn’t do it, she would have never did it. And you would never see, ‘Hidden Figures.’”

He talked about the advanced calculations that must have been involved to land a spacecraft on the moon. Johnson and the other women from "Hidden Figures'' did so while navigating the barriers erected by racism and sexism.

But Rivera knocked down one of the movie’s central dramatic scenes, where Johnson had to dash across the NASA campus to use a segregated bathroom. That didn’t happen, he said.

“Mrs. Katherine G. Johnson used their bathroom,” he said.

(Or as Johnson, who is 99, once told a reporter: “I just went on in the white one.”)

Rivera told the students that his grandmother excelled because she studied and worked hard, and if they wanted to succeed, they would have to work hard, too.

“She didn’t study the latest dance, all the time,” Rivera said. “She didn’t study the latest song.”

He told them that in 2010 Johnson visited nearby E.E. Smith, which instituted a Katherine G. Johnson Day that it still celebrates on March 3. A STEM program at the Alpha Academy on Raeford Road is also named for her, he said.

“She’s not just a movie,” he told the students. “She’s real. She’s you.”

Rivera’s message seemed to land.

Gianni Barber, a fourth-grader, said: “He taught us a whole lot of stuff to learn in life.”

Amyya Goodson, also a fourth-grader, said Rivera inspired her.

“It made me feel like a better person.”

Columnist Myron B. Pitts can be reached at mpitts@fayobserver.com or 486-3559.