A story out of Texas headlined, How a San Antonio football player helped change Dartmouth offers not only a look at how Tyrone Byrd changed Dartmouth, but how Dartmouth changed Tyrone Byrd. From the story (LINK):
T-Byrd, as he is known to friends, was a star wide receiver, a cum laude graduate of the Ivy League school. Ambitious and focused, he played briefly with the Green Bay Packers, became a successful banker and, currently, an equity partner for a Houston energy company. Now 72, he is popular at college reunions, where conversations periodically turn to “The Shockley Incident,” an event that galvanized Black students, energized the Class of 1973 and accelerated change at Dartmouth that’s felt today.
About "The Shockley Incident:"
On Oct. 15, 1969, Nobel laureate William Shockley arrived to lecture on race and IQ and the genetic inferiority of Black people. Byrd and more than two dozen African Americans staged a creative protest, which made national news. According to media reports and Dartmouth Library archives, 17 students were suspended.
Within the San Antonio Report story, which does a good job of detailing Byrd's struggles and triumphs, is this eye-opener:
Dartmouth . . . was launching an experiment, dispatching alumni across the country to recruit more Black students. One alumnus found Byrd in San Antonio. Others found 15 street-toughened 22- and 23-year-olds from Chicago, most connected with the Vice Lords gang.
Gang members? At Dartmouth?
From a 2011 story in Chicago magazine about a "short-lived 1960s-era program that transported street-smart Chicago Vice Lords to the hallowed halls of the Ivy League . . ."
It was not, by most metrics, a roaring success. Fifteen men were admitted. Seven graduated with bachelor’s degrees; eight dropped out. Almost all of them returned to Chicago, most to the city’s segregated neighborhoods, where half beat the odds and found productive careers. The other half did not, and six of them died in the inner city’s clutch of drugs and guns, a plague that was becoming lethal just as these men were going east to school.
Find the full story HERE.
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EXTRA POINT
The local Fourth of July parade went off without a hitch yesterday morning but by afternoon the sky got crazy. Here's how it looked at one point and again after the threat had passed:
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| Yes, that's a color photo. |
