All of this contributed to who I am today, all of the unique and beautiful people along the way with whom I was able to engage in honest communication because frankly I was open and they would never meet me again. They could be honest without consequence. It was a matter of one door of opportunity opening up to another. And I was enthralled with meeting people different than me. The world opened up wide before me.

But I have gotten off track. So the Thanksgiving after I started attending Alcorn, the great Alcorn State University, I went with Michael Ellis, an activist friend of mine, to Como, Mississippi. And on the way back oln the bus, we passed by the place where my the house that I and Eddie Young had rebuilt — I think it had been a sharecropper’s shack —and I thought it looked awfully dark. And when I stopped in at the Student Government Office before I headed home, the vice-president said, ‘Was that your house that burned down?’ And I knew immediately that it was.

So I ended up staying on campus for 3-4 weeks, crashing in the dorms before heading back to Milwaukee for the Christmas Holiday with nothing more than the clothes that I had in my backpack. My motorcycle had melted down significantly from the heat of the fire.

I don’t think anyone expected me to return to Alcorn after the house was burned down and I lost most of my earthly possessions. But I knew that I needed to return. I know this sounds hokey, but the truth I was to learn at Alcorn was not yet revealed to me.

And one of those truths was revealed to me when I was walking by myself around The Yard. Just like in Mississippi prisons, there was a green area surrounded by buildings and we called it The Yard.  And so I walked around The Yard by myself. And I felt a mental/emotional pressure that I had to figure out ande relieve. It was beyond the socio-psychological pressures one might feel being in the minority — UW-Madison are you listening? — and it was bothering me. And then, all of a sudden, I realized that I was prejudiced. Now it wasn’t that Southern bigoted, hateful prejudice. But I realized that I had been creating “boxes” that I was fitting everyone into. In essence, I was creating elaborate stereotypes that I could use to classify everyone and put them in a box where I didn’t have to really deal with anyone — or myself for that matter. And I realized that I had to deal with everyone I encountered as a person.

Now as I came to this revelation that I was prejudiced, I didn’t exactly run around The Yard proclaiming that I was prejudiced. People might take it the wrong way.

But after that moment of self-revelation, my approach to people was different. Instead of approaching people from the top down — using classifications of people as the starting point — I started app[roaching people from the bottom up, knowing them as a person and then understanding how the cultural and historical currents impacted them.

Later on, I was accused of trying to be Black. Well most of my peer group was Black and unless I was going to be like the British in Africa where they separated themselves from the Africans, I was going to be different through my interactions with other students.

Alcorn State University was one of the most impactful experiences of my life. It made me who I am today, for better or worse. And it led to me working for the Madison Urban League — later Urban League of Greater Madison — for 12 years and then eventually to founding The Capital City Hues. One of the most profound friendships that I had was with Betty Franklin-Hammonds for whom I was the vice-president for eight years. Betty and I were like foxhole buddies as we fought to keep the Urban League movement alive back in the mid-1980s. And that continued on to The Madison Times, which she revitalized in 1991, until Betty died of an asthma attack in 1999 and I became the editor — by default — of The Madison Times.

To this day, I don’t know why Betty hasn’t received community-wide recognition. She was all about the community and children and set the plate for the work of Dr. Virginia Henderson in the early 1990s to make the first push to eliminate the Black achievement disparities. Virginia said, ‘If it weren’t for Betty Franklin-Hammonds, I wouldn’t have been able to do the work that I did.’ I hope someday that Betty gets the recognition that she deserves.

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