“Got something for you!” Grandpa Frey announced, enthusiastically waving a scrap of paper. I was on holiday break from college, visiting my grandparents in rural Arkansas.

I come from a very long line of Southerners. My family can trace its roots back as early as 1710 in South Carolina, with ancestors fighting in both the Revolutionary War and the War Between the States. We then put aside our gray uniforms and in the 1960s my great-grandfather led the charge to integrate Tuscaloosa County schools.