Gates, an intellectual drawn back into the arena - wtop.com

Gates, an intellectual drawn back into the arena - wtop.com:

Again I ask .. who is the racist? ~~~ The Munz

"'Civil rights took us all by surprise,' wrote Gates, whose life was changed, as millions were, by the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing the 'separate but equal' laws in public schools.

Just two years later, Gates began at the Davis Free Elementary School, integrated in 1955 and virtually the only place in Piedmont where blacks and whites gathered together. Gates arrived more determined than afraid. He was 'marked out to excel,' an early reader and writer 'blessed with the belief that I could learn anything.'

'I was all set to become the little prince of that almost all-white school,' he wrote."

~SNIP~


To his eventual embarrassment, he wrote in his Yale application:

"As always, whitey now sits in judgment of me, preparing to cast my fate. It is your decision either to let me blow with the wind as a nonentity or to encourage the development of self. Allow me to prove myself."