ond year there were rumors among the few colored students in the clinical hospital, especially with white women patients. I laughed. It was, I was sure, a put-up rumor to scare us off. I knew black men who had gone through New York medical schools which had become parts of this great new consolidated school. There had been no real trouble. The patients never objected—only Southern students and the few Southern professors. Some of the trustees had mentioned the matter but had been shamed into silence.
"Then, too, I was firm in my Hampton training; desert and hard work were bound to tell. Prejudice was a miasma that character burned away. I believed thoroughly. I had literally pounded my triumphant way through school and life. Of course I had made insult and rebuff here and there, but I ignored them, laughed at them, and went my way. Those black people who cringed and cowered, complained of failure and 'no chance,' I despised—weaklings, cowards, fool! Go to work! Make a way! Compel recognition!
"In the medical school there were two other colored men just managing to crawl through. I covertly sneered at them, avoided them. What business had they there with no ability or training? I see differently now. I see there may have been a dozen reasons why Phillips of Mississippi could neither spell nor read correctly and why Jones of Georgia could not count. They had no hard-working mother, no Hampton, no happy accidents of fortune to help them on.
"While I? I rose to triumph after triumph. Just as in college I had been the leading athlete and had ridden many a time aloft on white students' shoulders, so now, working until two o’clock in the morning and rising at six, I took prize after prize—the Mitchel Honor in physiology, the Welbright medal in pathology, the Shores Prize for biological chemistry. I ranked the second-year class at last commencement, and at our annual dinner at the Hotel Pennsylvania, sat at the head table with the medal men. I remember one classmate. He was from Atlanta, and he hesitated and whispered when he found his seat was beside me. Then he sat down like a man and held out his hand. ‘Towns,’ he said, ‘I never associated with a Negro before who wasn't a servant or laborer; but I've heard
