Graduates of the University of Florida's College of Journalism and Communications named to its Hall of Fame!
The college has been bestowing this honor since 1970.
More than 35,000 students have graduated since then. I was actually named to the Hall of Fame in 2020, but the pandemic forced the postponement of the ceremony and the awarding of the medal.
Not bad for a Black girl from Jacksonville, Fla., who began life in a segregated elementary school, but who wound up being the first Black local opinion columnist and editorial board member of The Florida Times-Union.
How ironic is it that I wound up in Memphis - the city where Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in 1968 - which happened to be my last year in my segregated elementary school and the summer in which my family and me would move to our newly-built house in a suburb that my father and other Black educators and investors platted for Black middle class families.
All for a better life. All during a time of confusion and despair, but also a time of hope and anticipation.
Like now.
