well, that s a loaded question peter. wonderful to be with you part of it is that i was born and raised in huntsville, alabama and surrounded by engineers who came to huntsville to in the race to put the man on the moon. so engineering was a very common degree that people pursued i needed money for college. my activist parents were broke and vanderbilt offered me a merit scholarship on forever grateful. i loved science and math and i use the logic of engineering in my writing you could particularly i think see it in my most recent book where i m a self-hot-taught historian, but i bring a systems analysis. to the structures that create racial inequality. so there s a connection there. it s helps me to think critically. well that path began in huntsville, alabama. it went through vanderbilt university and then to oxford university masters in english law jd from harvard. and then a clerkship with supreme court justice thurgood marshall the clinton white house and finally to auth
A 150-year-old building on West Campus is the last remnant of a freedom colony, a community of formerly enslaved people. The building has been closed as an apartment complex was built up around it. Some say the historic structure has never really gotten its due.