I graduated from Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1994.

During my senior year, I took public speaking, a requirement for graduation.

Dr. Anne Watts was the instructor.

She taught oratory at Morehouse for 42 years before retiring in 2013.

I took the class with one of my running buddies, Lewis Bingham.

Lou was also from New York, Queens, not Brooklyn, and was a history

major too. We met during our freshman year, and over the next four years, we rolled through

Morehouse together. There was no better study partner than Lou. He came to every study session

prepared, and on those occasions when we

had to pull an all-nighter, he always baked the cake, one as good as anything my grandma made.

Public speaking with Dr. Watts was our last class together. After graduation, Lou stayed in Atlanta and attended law school at Emory,

while I headed to North Carolina and enrolled in graduate school at Duke.

Despite the distance, we remained fast friends.

He was in my wedding and I was in his. The other day, I sent

Lou a text. It read, public speaking, senior year, Dr. Anne Watts, Brawley Hall, 100. Lou Bingham's

favorite poem of all time is, and three minutes later, he text back,

If We Must Die, Claude McKay.

And then, he sent a picture of the poem, framed and hanging in the entryway to his home.

It was the same poem he recited for his final presentation for Dr. Watts,

Claude McKay's If We Must Die, written in 1919.

If We Must Die, Let it not be like hogs, hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, while round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, making their mock at our accursed lot. If we must die, oh, let us nobly die so that our precious blood may not be shed in vain

then even the monsters we defy shall be constrained to honor us, though dead.

...