And his grandfather was a, you know, sounds like by all measures, an extraordinary figure,

a real sort of self-creation, very powerful man who pulled himself up by his bootstraps

and ended up owning his own business and amassed a certain amount of wealth as a small

businessman and managed to buy some properties and rent them out and became a figure of some importance

in the black community in Savannah, but was really kind of a classic figure of iron discipline

and very stern authority. And for Thomas's purposes, and there's some debate about this,

which we can get into if we want, he credits his grandfather,

Myers-Anderson, with really being the person who transformed him and made it possible for him

to become the person he became. And then at the age of 19, really, he heads north to Holy Cross.

It's in 1968. It's really his second year of college because he had started for a year in

Missouri. He was recruited to Holy Cross as part of an effort to integrate the college. And he's one of,

I think, 18 young black men who are recruited there. And he's one of the poorest of them. And it's a

pretty amazing cohort of individuals, one of whom includes Edward Jones, the novelist who, you know,

is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, Stanley Grayson, who's a very influential figure here

in New York City. It's a cohort that's going to go on to become sort of part of a, you know,

various kinds of power elites. And they're all fairly militant. You know, it's, as I said,

it's 1968. And they're in a very white environment. And they set

about transforming the campus. And they formed something called the Black Student Union, which has a set

of demands that I think for anybody who's been on a college campus and, you know, the last 40 to 50

years will seem fairly familiar. But at the time was pretty transformative. Demands for more black faculty, more black

students, more courses in which you can study black literature and black texts. Thomas is part of this.

This group is both on the one hand making these demands for inclusion, but also has a very strong

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