Having finished an assignment in Baton Rouge, I was returning to Baker, Louisiana, the location of Leland College, and I was driving President Becoats’ car. It was my senior year and I had been accepted as a first-year law student at the University of Michigan Law School, conditionally, since my college was not accredited.

Suddenly a Model-T Ford cut sharply across the highway. The 1934 Dodge Sedan I was driving collided with the Model-T Ford. Two white men were in the other car and one died on the spot. I was black and this was rural Louisiana, 1937. The only witnesses were two white men, one a farmer whose name I did not learn, the other an oil refinery worker named Jesse Sharkey, a local Baptist minister. Both men told how the accident happened. In Louisiana, 1937, a black person could not be innocent no matter the circumstances when involved in an accident with white people. The fact that these two white men told the truth at the inquest the next morning freed me from prison or worse.

Pondering my experience and shaken from center to circumference in my whole being, I felt led to become the Lord’s lawyer as a preacher and entered the Oberlin Graduate School of Theology, with all that has followed.