CARLTON FLETCHER: I’m no one’s honored alumnus, but I wear my blue and gold proudly

Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends. We’re so glad you could attend, come inside, come inside.

– Emerson, Lake & Palmer

I say it with pride: I’m an Albany State University graduate, and I celebrate homecoming along with all my fellow alumni.

It was almost 40 years ago when I enrolled at ASU. With invaluable help from people like Drs. Hugh Studdard, Wilburn Campbell, Judd Biasiatto and many others, I quickly found my place on campus and settled in, taking in all that the university offered.

And, yeah, if I’d worried about such things, I would have concerned myself that I stuck out like a proverbial sore thumb on the campus adjacent to the Flint River. (It would be years later that the waters of the Flint overflowed, bringing on a “disaster” that became one of the most fortuitous in the university’s history, leading to a multimillion-dollar remake that expanded the campus and updated its weathered on-campus facilities.)

Back to that sore thumb. When I attended ASU, I was one of a handful of white students on campus. I was also in my 30s, so I was older than an overwhelming majority of the students.

But one of the things I decided early in my life was that race was not an issue to me. Yes, I’d grown up in small-town Georgia – Ocilla, a place that, like most of the state, still carried resentment that the South had lost the Civil War and that the argument that they were “superior” because of the color of their skin had long since been debunked.

By the time I left Irwin County High School, a large number of my friends were black, and I’d completely thrown out all those tropes of racist propaganda that I’d been taught by parents who were among those who found assimilation a difficult pill to swallow.

When I arrived on the ASU campus, attending classes between the work I carried out as a member of this newspaper’s Sports staff, I found it pretty simple to ease into the flow of campus life. I made friends, found professors who were accustomed to working with non-traditional students and usually went out of their way to accommodate unusual schedules. (One even let me come to their house to make up assignments or take tests when my job forced me to miss classes.)

Having a full-time job (and, later, a part-time one as well), raising a son who was 9 at the time and often went with me to events on campus, and trying to keep up with everything in my classes was an experience I wouldn’t have the energy for now. But back then, it was a challenge I accepted gladly. And I survived that challenge because I had professors and administrators at Albany State – as well as some cool classmates – who wanted to see me succeed.

I catch an occasional football game at the stadium – which usually reminds me of my time at ASU when future NFL player Dan Land was the top dog in the SIAC – and I try to catch up with campus legends like Reg Christian as often as I can. I usually attend the homecoming parade, but I’m usually not included in reunion plans. That’s OK, I most likely wouldn’t have time to attend, anyway.

But, as I said, I am a proud ASU alumnus. I have my Albany State hoodie that I wear as soon as the weather turns cool, and I keep up with what’s going on on-campus … because, well, it’s part of my job but also because I care about the university. I won’t be included on anyone’s “significant alumni” list because I don’t make enough money to contribute like a good alumni should.

But I care. And for lots of reasons. But the primary one is that this university, which was birthed more than a century ago so that black students – denied the opportunity to seek higher education in the racist South at the time – could seek knowledge, nurtures and passes on its knowledge to some of the brightest kids I’ve had the pleasure to know.

I may not be recognized among the brightest of them, but I am one of them. And I wear that honor with blue and gold pride.

Email Carlton Fletcher at [email protected].