Braxton Hobson’s Journey from Student to ‘Mr. B’

Braxton Hobson can pinpoint the exact moment he realized he wanted to be a teacher.

He was a senior at McKenzie High School, watching his teachers interact with him and his classmates, when a thought suddenly struck him: those same teachers had taught and inspired hundreds of students before, and they would continue impacting hundreds more even after he left the school. Somewhere in that realization, Hobson knew he wanted to be part of that legacy.

Six years later, now nicknamed “Mr. B” by hundreds of McKenzie Middle School students, Hobson stands at the front of a seventh-grade English classroom in the same school he once attended, just down the hall from his former teachers. He now bears the same responsibilities as his mentors, but he has a slightly different perspective.

Hobson grew up surrounded by people who understood what it meant to invest in others. The youngest child of Craig and Renee Hobson, he learned from an early age that investing in the people around him wasn’t a choice so much as a way of life. His father preaches at St. John Baptist Church and works in human resources. His mother worked for years as a special education teacher and still runs a local tutoring program at Webb School, called Two Sisters and a Book.
Hobson’s parents also made sure he and his siblings understood his family’s proximity to slavery and Jim Crow Laws.

Hobson’s great-grandfather was enslaved. His grandfather, Ralph Tate, lived through segregation. Hobson’s parents taught him to treat his family’s history not as a source of fear, but as vital information that has shaped his family’s story and affected how he carries himself through the world.

“We were taught from a very young age that the black experience is very different from others,” said Hobson. “We knew we needed to be really conscious about how we handled things.”

Knowing how to carry oneself is a lesson Hobson brings into his classroom every day, and one he hopes his students will carry out of it.

When it came time to choose a path after high school, Hobson found one that aligned with the values his parents had instilled. The Call Me MiSTER program at the University of Tennessee at Martin gave Hobson a path to becoming an educator. The program recruits young men of diverse backgrounds into the teaching profession on one foundational belief: that representation can help students connect in the classroom. Hobson joined the Call Me MiSTER program in 2020, fresh out of McKenzie High School, alongside a handful of other prospective teachers.

“When you put a whole bunch of new guys in a room together, you start realizing the ways you’re different. You grow together. It was a very different feeling of motivation,” said Hobson. He and his cohort grew into a brotherhood.

The program opened him up to a side of his culture he’d never experienced. Growing up in McKenzie, close friendships with other young Black men had been rare. At UTM, surrounded by his cohort and later his brothers in Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc., he encountered spoken word poetry, new music and new perspectives on what it meant to be a young Black man in America. His uncle had been a member of Alpha Phi Alpha before him, and the organization, whose members include Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., gave him a model of Black manhood rooted in service and community investment.

It was in that space that literature began to take on new meaning for Hobson. Poetry became key to his identity. In college, Hobson and his fraternity brothers would sit together and work through poems, searching for meaning between the lines. He began to see literature as something alive, something people had always used to make sense of struggle, joy and survival. “Invictus,” written by a man on his deathbed claiming mastery over his own fate, landed differently once he understood the story behind it. Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou took on a new weight. Hobson returned to books he had loved as a child and found entirely different stories living underneath the ones he remembered.

That widening of his own world is precisely what he now wants to offer his students.

He plans to meet his students exactly where they are. He wants to teach them that the songs they listen to on the way to school, the lyrics they have memorized without thinking about why, are forms of poetry, that they come from the same tradition. He wants his students to see culture as something to be understood, not overlooked.

“At the end of the day, we’re all people,” said Hobson. “But just because we’re all people doesn’t mean we need to ignore our own history and our differences. I think that’s part of what makes us great as a people is understanding each other’s differences.”

After a brief teaching stint in Fulton County, Ky., Hobson returned to his hometown in 2025. He considers the 2025-26 school year his true first full year teaching. He is candid about still learning the craft, still figuring out what sticks and what doesn’t, still leaning on mentors and listening to his students when something isn’t working. He wants his classroom to become a safe space for his students.

“I tell them to be completely honest with me 24/7,” he said. “I tell them, ‘If you don’t like what I’m doing, let me know. Let’s talk about it.’”

But his purpose has never wavered. He was poured into — by this community, by his family, by his fraternity, by the long line of people who came before him and carried far heavier burdens. Now it’s his turn to be a role model for the children in this community.

“History is the past, but right now we’re here,” Hobson said. As he continues his teaching career, Hobson wants to focus on making a difference in the present, encouraging his students to do the same.