Freeman A. Hrabowski III helped mark many civil rights milestones in education last year - the 40th anniversaries of blacks at Clemson University in South Carolina and in the medical school of Duke University, and the 35th anniversary of the integration of Vanderbilt University medical school.
Next month will be the 50th anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education. Hrabowski, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, started first grade in segregated Birmingham, Ala., schools the year that the Supreme Court ruled segregation unconstitutional.
"They told us not to take the brown paper covers off our books," he said at a symposium at UMBC last week marking that 50th anniversary.
"But I did. I saw the stamp that said they came from the white school. My teacher told me, `The book may be second-rate, but you aren't.' "
Hrabowski - who will deliver the school's Low Lecture on the Brown decision May 5 - was extraordinary by any standard. He was only 4 years old when he started first grade, 15 when he went to college. He grew up in Birmingham as it became a cauldron for the turmoil of the civil rights movement that would galvanize the nation.
Despite the Brown decision, his education was segregated through college. But the court decision was a promise dangled before the black community that nurtured him. Everyone knew change was coming, that - for better or worse - the world Hrabowski would encounter was going to be different from the one his parents had endured.
Education was of prime importance in the Hrabowski household. His mother was a teacher specializing in math and English for eighth-graders. His father started as a teacher but found he could make more money as a laborer in Birmingham's steel mills. He worked two other railroad jobs. And he made extra money reading, writing and doing math for the illiterate whites who were often his supervisors.
A year after young Hrabowski started school, Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of a Birmingham bus. Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in town. The movement was beginning.
"My parents were always going to meetings of something called the Alabama Christian Movement," he says. "They would take me with them. I would be sitting in the back, doing my math problems, reading a book."
