Dr. James Harris failed two years of high school and became a father at 15. Counselor Henry Ray told him about Fresno State’s low-income program. It led to UCLA medical school. He now chairs surgery at Johns Hopkins Howard County. Being behind is not the same as being finished.

A Kentucky college had been teaching Black and white students side by side since 1855 — before the Civil War, voluntarily, successfully, for half a century. In 1904 the state passed a law making it illegal, specifically to stop them. Berea College was founded by abolitionists in the Kentucky mountains with integration as its founding principle. By 1900 roughly half its students were Black. It worked. It had worked for decades. The Day Law, passed in 1904, made it a criminal offence to operate a school teaching Black and white students together anywhere in Kentucky. There was exactly one institution in the state doing it. Berea fought it to the Supreme Court and lost in 1908. The Court held that a state could impose the condition on a corporation it had chartered. The college then did something worth knowing: it raised money and founded the Lincoln Institute, a separate school for its expelled Black students, because it refused to simply drop them. Berea was not able to admit Black students again until 1950.

Dr. Erlin Gooch, 87, was beaten and robbed in her Ripley home on Sept. 9. She was found bloodied, with broken arms, and says a knife was used on her head. She gave police at least four names. A month later, no arrest. A victim’s names are a lead. Leaving them unused is a choice.