Through the Banks of the Red Cedar: My Father and the Team That Changed the Game

by Maya Washington

When he arrived at the Kellogg Center, the campus hotel, he was taken aback by the opportunity to enter through the front door. “I’d never stayed in a hotel before. Everything was really different. I mean, I’d never gone anywhere in my life, really. And next thing you know? I’m in East Lansing,” he recalled as my crew and I captured an interview back in 2014. “What did you think of it?” I blurted, trying to imagine the magnitude of his experience. “I thought everything was nice. It was really nice. A big campus. I was interested in seeing where we’d have our classes. The opportunity to get an education was really big, you know? I’d never seen anything like that before.”