I first learned that there were black people living in some place called other than the United States in the western hemisphere when I was a very little boy and my father told me that when he was a boy about my age he wanted to be an Episcopal priest because he so admired his priest a black man from someplace called Haiti.

In this age which believes that there is a short cut to everything the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way is in the long run the easiest.

Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi.