African-Americans celebrated a milestone in the civil rights movement this week as they, and indeed much of the larger American family, observed the fortieth anniversary of the bloody struggle for the admittance to the University of Mississippi of the first African- American, James Merridith.

    The story is particularly relevant on a personal level because I remember reading about it forty years ago in Time Magazine at the library at St.Mary's Academy in 1962. The event helped make a hero of then President John F Kennedy who called in Federal troops to Oxford, Mississippi to enforce the decision to admit Merridith. It seemed a bit weird to me at the time that soldiers had to be called in to permit a human being's enrollment in an institution of higher learning.

    Some of the details in the Time Magazine article were long forgotten but the big picture and the symbolism of Federal soldiers battling white rioters for hours just so an ambitious young man could gain admission, was never forgotten. The fortieth anniversary celebration reports rekindled my fading memory and brought the larger picture into sharper focus.

    The aging process has its rewards. When we look back on events from a distance of time they tend to take on a larger significance. It is as if we are looking down the valley from the mountaintop. The issue then was not James Merridith, but the right of African- Americans and other minorities to higher education, something we take for granted today.

    Forty years later, the man over whom the issue was fought, is gray,and seems to be almost carrying a banner of history on his shoulders. He could not have planned a better anniversary. His son, also named James Merridith, just graduated at the top of his class with a doctorate in Business Administration from the University of Mississippi. That's his way of adding an exclamation mark to what is clearly a remarkable historical event.

    We in Dominica and the rest of the Caribbean have benefited enormously from the achievements of the civil rights movement in the United States. What is not known, however, is the degree to which our young students appreciate the sacrifices that were made by an earlier generation of African-Americans to secure those rights. Young African-American girls were bombed to death in a church in Alabama; the last of the accused were convicted recently. Freedom marchers had their heads cracked open by the police, bitten by dogs, spat upon, and dragged into jails by the hundreds, all because they dared stand up for their civil rights.

    I recall clearly an episode during my university days in up state New York in the early 1970's.A white student made a comment about how Caribbean students are different from Afro-Americans, as if to drive a wedge between us and native African-Americans." We may be 'different', I observed, but I would not have been here had it not been for African Americans".

    Today Dominican students are achieving academic excellence in some of the most distinguished institutions of higher learning in the United States. One of the least known facts in the world is that the English speaking Caribbean has as good a secondary school system as can be found anywhere. I have personal knowledge of our students excelling at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard Business School, etc., and they move on to further distinguish themselves in their chosen fields in the workplace. I might also add parenthetically, that a Dominican, Dr. Donald Peters, served in a senior capacity on the faculty at the University of Mississippi.

    But it is important that they all understand that someone paid the price of their admission ticket many years ago; James Merridith was one of them.

    Finally, this anecdote: I had a conversation in 1983 in Miami with the head of the Urban League,(a civil rights organization) T. Willard Fair. He said to me that it is important to have a sense of history. For as late as 1968, a mere fifteen years before our conversation, black people were not allowed on Miami Beach. He disclosed further that his first success as a civil rights worker was to place two black girls as clerks in a local department store in 1968. There were none before. Young black women were known as maids and servants, but never as store clerks. The only white color jobs open to blacks were as elevator operators, and there were not too of those around. The lunch "sittings" had not yet significantly changed attitudes, so the presence of blacks at lunch counters, let alone hotel restaurants, was a rare event, sometimes punishable by threats and vigilante justice.