Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun? by Reginald Lewis

says.
    “Reggie was always focused on what he had to do. Like I said, he was very reserved and, to me, even a little troubled. Reggie had like a burning desire and it’s something that I appreciated later on in my adult life. Because when you look at things from adolescence, you don’t really appreciate or understand things like perseverance, dedication, and purpose. Reggie always had goals, unbeknownst to many of us at the time,” Hill says.
    For Reginald Lewis, the time eventually came to leave Dunbar and move on to the next challenge. A mysterious new venue—college—beckoned. Lewis was now a big fish in a small pond. How would he perform in a college setting? He would find out soon enough. It was the spring of 1961 and high school graduation was just around the corner.
    After receiving their diplomas, the Class of ’61 scattered, as graduating classes typically do. Practically everyone in Dunbar’s advanced academic course went to college. In those days, black students had a much smaller scholastic universe to pick from than today.
    Much of the Class of ’61 wound up at Morgan State or Coppin State colleges—both of which are black Baltimore schools,—or at Salisbury State on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Bowie State, Howard University, 45 miles to the south in Washington, D.C., or Hampton Institute in Virginia. For black students to attend white colleges, particularly prestigious ones like Harvard, Stanford, or Yale, was exceedingly rare.
    The hours spent on the football field paid off for Lewis by helping him overcome his mediocre grades. Lewis got a football scholarship to Virginia State College in Petersburg, Virginia. Lewis had no way of knowing that his plans to be a football star would be derailed at Virginia State, putting him on a path to greater glory and accomplishment than he ever could have conceived of at Dunbar.

 
     
     
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            “I’m Going to Be a Millionaire”: Lewis at Virginia State
    Established in 1883 and situated close to the banks of the Appomattox River, Virginia State is the country’s oldest publicly funded black university. Once known as the Virginia Normal & Industrial Institute, the school’s rolling, tree-dotted campus sits atop a former plantation in Ettrick, Virginia, just outside Petersburg.
    The capital of the Confederacy—Richmond—is about 18 miles to the north. Back in 1883, most of Ettrick’s residents were poor white laborers who toiled at water-powered mills that fed one of five rail lines converging on the Petersburg area. News that a black college had been set up in the middle of town triggered tremendous resentment among the locals, many of whom had little or no formal education. In addition, many residents were still smoldering from having lost the bloody, divisive Civil War that was ostensibly fought over slavery 18 years earlier.
    Residual animosity toward Virginia State students was still percolating 78 years later when Reginald Lewis started attending college. Chesterfield Avenue, which runs past Virginia State’s campus, served as a demarcation line of sorts. Students seeking to avoid trouble prudently skirted the residential areas on the other side of Chesterfield.
    College campuses tend to be insular communities and Virginia State was no exception. The growing civil rights movement barelyregistered a blip on the radar screen of student consciousness. That would change somewhat before Lewis graduated, though.
    Lewis stepped onto this stage in the fall of 1961. “He wanted to leave home and go out of town. We were in an atmosphere where you had to be extraordinarily accomplished for a white school to give you anything. So, Virginia State made him an offer,” his mother, Carolyn, recalls.
    Except for his stint at summer camp when his mother delivered his newspapers for him, Lewis had never really been away from Baltimore for any extended period of time. Parting was difficult for mother and son.
    “I won’t say I cried.