![]() ![]() Nearly all of your first students were black, first-generation students from Mississippi. I remember watching you give everything you had to your students those first few years we were back in Mississippi. I wondered if your black colleagues, who were your professors a few years earlier, called you lucky to be back teaching at Jackson State. When you were my age, you’d been teaching at Jackson State for two years. When I told you where I slept, you said in order to embody black excellence, especially at a place white northerners deemed elite, I must maintain healthy distance from my colleagues and never let them see me ‘disheveled.’ I heard, that first week, from more white colleagues than I could count how lucky I was to be at Vassar. I had 6 percent body fat and a few hundred dollars to my name. ![]() I was a 180-pound black adjunct professor at Vassar College. You were parked at an auto shop in Brandon, Mississippi, hoping a mechanic would fix your Subaru on credit while I was sleeping on the floor of my new office in Poughkeepsie, New York. ![]()
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