Only One Thing in Common

HE IS BLACK, Southern-born on a sharecropper's farm some sixty years ago. As he grew, he measured his approaching manhood in how many pounds of cotton he could pick. School was where he went between weeks off to work on the farm. He mostly remembers school by the events he won, like the 100-yard dash, or by the fights he had. He left a segregated South, with its "colored only" signs on water fountains and toilets, to fight in an all-black army unit in World War II.