BS '46
I graduated from Townsend Harris High School in 1941 and got an automatic scholarship from the City College of New York. There were very few Black students at the school at that time. I think I was the first Black member of the football team. There were other African-American students later on who became members of the football team. I scored the first touchdown in two years in 1945, my senior year, although the yearbook credited it to another player. As president of the Interracial Society, I led the largest student benefit ever in the school's history when in 1945 we brought Josh White as a star of the program. He was a ballad singer and was very big at that time. I was a liberal arts student for three and a half years. In the last year and a half, I changed to pre-med, believing I could overcome the economic and quota barriers to a Black student at that time. All of this extra time gave me one of the best, all around education in the country at that time. After CCNY, I went on to get my medical degree at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee. That was one of only two Black medical schools in the country at that time. I specialized in surgery. CCNY gave me the outstanding preparation for the life to follow, especially along the lines of equal opportunity and diversity in this country.