ScienceMakers Toolkit Manual - The History Makers

Walter Massey - Video Clip Transcription
Clip 1 - School and Math: I was not a bad student, but I, if you were to look at my grades, I don’t think my
grades would look that great except in math. School wasn’t hard to me, let’s put it like that, wasn’t diffi cult, and
so I did what I liked to do in school, but I never fl unked anything. It wasn’t, you know, it was not diffi cult. But
I was not, I was not one of the top students…I always liked arithmetic, and always liked then mathematics, I
liked it because you could, you could absorb yourself in it, solving mathematical problems was a way of sort of,
I don’t mean I wanted deliberately to get away but it was almost like reading, just totally occupied your mind to
solve a diffi cult--does, of course--diffi cult mathematical problem. When you’re young, anything is diffi cult. So I
liked fi guring out the math and I could just sit and you know, fi gure out math problems all day, it was like some
people with crossword puzzles I guess, it was something I liked to do.
Clip 2 - Going to Morehouse as a Student: Morehouse was part of a group of schools, I think three of them.
The Ford Foundation chose to experiment…to see if they could identify students who were prepared and capable
of coming to college without fi nishing high school. And I know Harvard was one, and Morehouse. It was
a full scholarship the Ford Foundation funded. And they gave tests, examinations around the country, around
the South at least, and it was like an SAT or something, I don’t remember. But they gave the test in Jackson and
I went up with three or four other students, on Royal Street, to take the test. And my mother, in fact I drove the
car we took, our car, and my mother was going up to take classes at Jackson State. She continued to take classes
‘cause she didn’t fi nish school, when she had me, but she kept taking these education classes, try to get her
bachelor’s degree. And we went to Jackson and I took the exam. I didn’t expect anything to come of it, and a
few months later, we received this letter that said I’d been admitted to Morehouse College with this full scholarship.
I mean we were all fl abbergasted and I don’t think people, if they had to bet on who would’ve gotten
the scholarship, I don’t think they would have bet that I would be the one. But I did and then we had to discuss
whether or not I should take it. My father was not too certain, he thought I was probably too young to go off
to Atlanta and we only knew one person who’d gone to Morehouse…I was ready to go as I told you, early on,
this was my chance to leave Hattiesburg early and wherever they were going to send me, I was going. And my
mother was very supportive of it, so we all decided that I should accept it.
Clip 3 - Challenges at Morehouse:
I didn’t become interested in science until I came to Morehouse…So after the freshman week, when I called my
mother and told her I wanted to come home, I said this is not going to work, these, everybody’s too smart, everybody’s
much smarter than me. You know, just speaking with them about courses they’ve had, they’ve taken
calculus and physics and chemistry. I had taken nothing. I hadn’t taken biology. I hadn’t taken trigonometry, let
alone calculus. I said, I just won’t survive. And when I decided, she said, stay, just stay, go through the week,
stay there. We had to take placement exams then and during freshman week, and they would post them by rank
of all the freshmen students. Number one person’s score, number two, number three, all the way down to the
person who scored number ninety. In those days, they put it on the dorm door and I had a score of I think fi ve,
and I was just, I mean I was blown away, I was so fl abbergasted. It was the fi rst time in my life that I realized
that I might be smart. I mean, I realized that well, maybe I am, maybe I’m smart. I mean, I couldn’t believe I
came before all of these guys from all over the country, you know, who were so smart that, I was fi ve or six or
something. Field Thompson was one, Bo Plessy was second, the Green brothers Frank and Al were there, and I
was a fi ve or six. And that changed my whole view of who I was and how I thought of myself…I realized that I
was ignorant but I wasn’t dumb, you know, there’s a big difference, I didn’t know things, but I wasn’t a person
who was incapable of learning. And that’s what really, that story, that’s how I really got into science. Because
everyone said, I liked math and you know I was going to do that. I said well, nobody takes McBay’s course,
Henry McBay, as a freshman. Chemistry. Very few, shouldn’t do that. I said, well, I’m going to take it, so Hops
and I, we said we’re going to take this course. So we just took the hardest courses in the sciences and they said
well, nobody majors in physics and they taught physics at Clark College across the street, we didn’t even have a
187
Physics