Alma Mater Columbia University, New York, NY

y father's father and grandmother were almost desperate in their desire for him to get the best possible education. It was his father's greatest ambition for himself as a child. In fact, in 1881 he ran away from home at the tender age of 16 to find work, in order to make enough money to go to school.

Although unsuccessful in obtaining an education for himself, Frederick Thomas Smith—who worked as a waiter for the Pennsylvania Railroad—passed his desire on to his youngest child.

My father decided to forego the company of most of his friends, who attended Lincoln, a black college in Pennsylvania. Instead, in the fall of 1920, he joined the freshman class at Columbia in New York City, commuting to campus on the upper-West side of Manhattan.

Columbia's campus, circa 1924, looking east from the Journalism School. Low Library is on the left. Cars are riding through campus on 116th Street.

It is impossible today for us to appreciate the sense of change that rocked the nation during my father's college years, 1920-1924.

A new medium, radio, flooded the airwaves for the first time and changed the nature of mass communication forever. The creation of Warner Brothers and Paramount gave birth to the major motion-picture industry. Hem lines were rising above the knees of bob-haired flappers, some of whom were also raising glasses of moonshine to their lips. Their Victorian-age mothers, whose hem lines had been below their ankles, were aghast. Their fathers were apoplectic. And in Harlem night clubs, an original American-music form, jazz, trumpeted the new age.

My father's family life was changing, as well. Unfortunately, much of the change was unwelcome. When he was 19, his father remarried. Within the year his grandmother, whom he called "the grand old slave lady," died. Shortly after Grandma King's death, his brother Albert died from tuberculosis.

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