So it is that in more than twenty years of faculty pictures here, you see me—or rather, you don’t see me, a quiet, dark space among all the bright, pale faces, my heavy-rimmed glasses catching the light. There was a time when I was not alone. I was hired to teach here along with two other Negro men. Dexter Johnson was one. The other was Hugh Davenport. They had stellar credentials—Amherst and Yale—as did I, with my degree from Harvard. We spent time in one another’s cramped apartments, discussing this or that student or, more often, the issues of the day. However, a few months into our acquaintance, I began to feel a rift growing between us. More and more, I had become convinced that the way to effect the greatest good was to toil within the system that Chelsea had long had in place. I believed our very presence could begin to create change as long as we behaved honorably. My colleagues did not. While they started out full of hope, as soon as one or two of their proposals were dismissed out of hand—such as the one about having every Chelsea student take one course of Negro history—they began to complain about “the Man” and about how “a black man would never get a break” at this school. One day, after yet another litany of unhappiness, I said to them, “Some would say that we got a break by being invited to teach here. It is up to us to make of the opportunity what we will.”

My colleagues stared at me, then looked quickly at each other. “So it’s like that, huh?” said one. “I thought you were slipping over to their side.”

We completed our meal but never spoke again about anything but class schedules. Within a year, they had both left the faculty. I have no idea what became of them.

The conviction that I began to form in those earliest days has only strengthened and taken root with the passage of years—it is up to us to make of opportunities what we will. I believe that I can affect the hearts and minds of boys who might never have seen an educated Negro before—boys who knew only the women who cleaned their floors and the men who trimmed their lawns and, maybe later, Bill Cosby from the flickering television screen—simply by my presence and skill as a teacher. More important, my presence stands as a testament to the notion that we are not all cut from the same cloth, that individual effort and rigor will ultimately win out over all.