In high school, I won a prize for an essay on tuberculosis. When I got through writing the essay, I was sure I had the disease.

I was born and raised in the oldest settled part of the nation and in an environment in which racism was officially mooted.

Had it not been for James Meredith, who was willing to risk his life, the University of Mississippi would still be all white.

I remember being infuriated from the top of my head to the tip of my toes the first time a screen was put around Bob Carter and me on a train leaving Washington in the 1940s.

King thought he understood the white Southerner, having been born and reared in Georgia and trained a theologian.

Doing away with separate black colleges meets resistance from alumni and other blacks.

Living at the YMCA in Harlem dramatically broadened my view of the world.