And then my friend Eddie Young from Itta Bena, Mississippi and a couple of his friends from Alcorn State University came to stay with me during Alcorn’s spring break. School calendars of the South are usually a few months early than schools in the North. I had a one-room apartment on Brooks Street and all four of us — Eddie and Robear and Pedro who were on Alcorn’s marching band — lived in close quarters. I was trying to focus on my studies while Eddie and Company perused campus. I met up with them one day at the UW-Madison School of Music where Eddie found a piano and dove into Elton John’s ‘Bennie and the Jets.’ No offense Elton, but Eddie was so much better because he put some soul into it.

When Eddie and Company were set to return to Mississippi, Eddie suggested that I visit Alcorn and I said that I would. During my spring break, I caught a ride on the Project Self-Help and Awareness bus and Eddie’s friend Ren picked me up and we took the Natchez Trace and Seven Mile stretch to Alcorn.

It was an incredible experience and along the way, I found myself being recruited to enroll at Alcorn. And I said that I would.

As luck would have it, the rooming house that I lived in was the site of the future UW-Madison Teacher Administration building. And since I was going to be displaced by a project using federal funds, they had to relocate me and give me funding to maintain that residence to a period of time. I rented a nice apartment and let me former roommate and his fiance use it for the summer. And I collected my payment from UW-Madison and headed for Alcorn after bumming around with another former roommate and his significant other across the West. After climbing part of Mt. Shasta, California, I left the others, climbed down to the parking lot and hitchhiked back to Madison via Kansas City, Missouri where my brother Jim worked for Legal Action.

I was the best man in my friend’s wedding in Madison, made some preparations and headed for Alcorn State University. And there I was looking like a hippie — I had long curly hair in those days — entering Alcorn State University, an HBCU that had about an enrollment of 2,500 students.

I was told there were five Euro-American students on campus including me. But two of them who lived in the dorm I stayed in left after about two weeks and the other two studied in the agriculture department and our paths never crossed.

After one week, I hitchhiked back to Madison, attended my brother Steve’s friend’s wedding, bought a motorcycle and drove it back to Alcorn during the Labor Day weekend. I found out quickly that you needed wheels to get around that area of Mississippi. The closest Pizza Hut was in Natchez, 40 miles away.

I was also 23-years-old and had already lived in the dorms and so my dear friend Eddie Young and I found a shack on Hwy 61 and got permission from the owner — I think he was the local drug dealer. Lord knows he was high 24/7 — to renovate this shack sitting on concrete blocks. So Eddie and I proceeded to renovate the shack, putting up drywall and painting it. It was pretty comfortable.

You could say that once a student activist, always a student activist. At UW-Madison, I continuously marched against the Vietnam War. I entered UW-Madison in September 1970. I remember my mother waking me up the previous month and told me that they were blowing up the university. Sterling Hall had been bombed early on a Sunday morning because the Army Mathematics Research Center was housed there. She asked me if I still wanted to go and I said yes.

I will always hold my parents in the highest regard because they allowed each of their eight children to choose their own paths in life. I’m sure my mom would have preferred that I went to Marquette University like my older siblings did. But I went to UW-Madison and they respected and supported my decision.

But I digress. At Alcorn, there was a student group that was protesting a local business — I think it was the only retail business — of charging inflated prices. I joined with the protest and got to know a lot of the student activists at Alcorn. We kept picketing and eventually they closed for a while.

One of the activists, Michael Ellis, invited me to his home for Thanksgiving in Como, MS, which was located on Interstate 55 between Jackson and Memphis. We took one of the several buses that came to Alcorn every Friday afternoon — in this case Wednesday — because on a typical weekend, most of the Alcorn students went home if there wasn’t an athletic game going on.