50 and 503. What relationship do they have with each other? Well without the 50, there wouldn’t have been a 503.

It was 50 years ago last month that I entered Alcorn State University in Lorman, Mississippi, rural Mississippi in the Black Belt near the Mississippi River in between Vicksburg and Natchez. My likfe has been a series of coincidences and opportunities linked together in some divine plan. I say that because  at times I don’t think I had any say in the direction my life has taken. It has been a matter of walking through one door of opportunity after another searching for truth as best as I could discern it. I learned long ago that at the times when I thought I had the truth, I was sadly mistaken. It was like a mirage on a highway, always receding into the distance.

While I had been going to Mississippi for several years as a part of Project Self-Help and Awareness, had been involved in anti-racist groups on the UW-Madison campus like INCAR and took several classes from the UW-Madison African American Studies Department, I felt my life was a bunch of theories and no substance. Yes, I could argue against racism, but did I really understand it on a personal, lived level?