From The Introduction

They were crying. Our parents--perhaps a hundred or more--had come to hold an evening vigil of song and prayer for all the jailed children, and as they looked up at the walls of the detention center where we were held, they openly wept. They wept at the thought of their children in narrow, overcrowded cells; they wept out of fear for and maybe also pride in those children they held so dear; they wept, frustrated with an oppressive system whose time to go had come.

Tears streamed down our own faces as we looked back out the jailhouse windows at our mothers and fathers outside. Our emotions were raw.

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood with our parents. With his words, he comforted us all and lifted us up. His voice carried from where the crowd gathered, and we, the children sent to jail by the segregationists of Birmingham, Alabama, listened carefully as he strengthened us, saying that what we had achieved by marching and willingly going to jail would change the lives of children not yet born.

What we children had achieved.

Changing the lives of others not yet born.

I was twelve at the time and could not yet fully grasp either Dr. King's meaning or his vision. I could not imagine that I would one day be president of a university that embraced a diverse student body of whites, African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and students from a hundred or more countries. At the time, I had never even seen people of different races seated together or learning together; I had never spoken to anyone of another race.

For now, I was sitting behind bars, wondering not so much about generations to come but about my own future. When would I get out of this jail? What could I expect of the future? Would Birmingham, Alabama, the South, or America change so that someone like me, who was excited about school, could get an education and follow my dreams wherever they took me, even though I was black?

Ahead of me was a long journey through five decades, a journey from Birmingham to Baltimore, during which I worked to fulfill my dream of providing greater opportunity for high-achieving students so they could realize their potential, regardless of their backgrounds. This book is the story of that journey. It began in Birmingham, a city that was briefly and critically the epicenter of the civil rights movement in the spring and summer of 1963.

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Excerpted from Hold Fast to Dreams: Empowering Youth, from the Civil Rights Crusade to STEM Achievement by Freeman A. Hrabowski
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