After taking some tests at a local school for Negroes, he was stunned to learn that he could be admitted no higher than the fifth grade. He was twenty years old. Suddenly, years of humiliating pain loomed ahead of him, as he realized that he would have to shed his preacher’s dignity to make a fool of himself in classrooms of children, working at night and studying in his sleep, just to finish high school. College—Alberta’s level—lay somewhere beyond that, and marriage was nowhere in sight.
