Friday, September 21, 2012

Alcorn State and a new race debate

LORMAN, Miss -- In 1948, Medgar Evers arrived at Alcorn College with a GI Bill, a football scholarship and eyes that had seen two very different sides of the same world. Mississippi represented one side. Evers grew up in Decatur, a farming town buried inside a state in which extreme racial divisiveness was status quo for the times. But at 23 years old, Evers, the great-grandson of a slave, also had seen a world that was as different from Mississippi as moonlight and sunlight. Evers served in the Army and fought in the Battle of Normandy during World War II. Stationed in France, he had a French girlfriend and marveled at how he was more accepted in another country than his own home. It gave him hope that one day he could fully enjoy the rights he'd been systematically denied in America. Alcorn was a perfect landing ... READ MORE

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