My people are from Kelly, Georgia, which is a little more than an hour's drive east of Atlanta.

There they experience the horror of enslavement and the joy of emancipation.

My great-grandfather was born there, around 1870.

He was the first in my family born free on American soil,

and I was born a century later,

a world away in Brooklyn, New York.

Growing up in Brooklyn, all of the family members I knew lived in and around New York.

And while I did think about the enslavement of my ancestors, I didn't dwell on slavery itself.

Just about everything I had been taught in school about

the peculiar institution focused on the cotton-producing South. And every time I checked, there

weren't any cotton fields in New York City. But I began to think differently when I enrolled at

Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. At Morehouse, my dorm room could have easily

been mistaken for a shrine to New York. Together with my roommate who also hailed from the city,

every inch of every wall was plastered with reminders of the Big Apple. There was a poster for

Moe Better Blues, a Spike Lee joint, penance for the Mets

and the Yankees. I was the Mets fan, of course, and he was the Yankees fan, and even a New York City

street sign, but don't ask us how we got that. And much to the chagrin of my professors,

I didn't confine my New York nationalism to my dorm room. I freely shared it in the classroom, including

during discussions about slavery in America. I don't remember exactly what I said in my freshman

history class about American slavery that day, but it was some wisecrack about slavery being basically

a southern thing. I do remember exactly how Dr. Windham responded.

Brother, he said, you got a lot to learn. And he was right. So I did what many people believe is

...