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My grandfather was born a slave in Kentucky in 1863.

But time changes all things.

Now that slave's grandson teaches at the university slave owner Thomas Jefferson founded in Virginia, instructing young Americans about the modern day struggle for human liberty. That struggle has its roots in Jefferson's words more than his deeds, and its parallels in my grandfather's membership in a transcendent generation - that body of black women and men born in the 19th Century in servitude, freed from slavery by the Civil War, determined to make their way as free women and men.

One hundred years ago, as my grandfather approached his fortieth birthday, black Americans faced prospects eerily similar to those we face today. It was thirty years after the Civil War and the first Reconstruction, the 19th Century was winding down, and white America was growing weary of worrying about the welfare of the newly freed slaves, tired of fighting to secure their right to vote and to attend a public school.

Then, as now, scientific racism and social Darwinism were in vogue. Then, as now, a race-weary nation decided these problems could be best solved if left to the individual states. Then, as now, racism demagogues walked the land. Then, as now, minorities and immigrants became scapegoats for real and imagined economic distress.

Then a reign of state sanctioned and private terror, including ritual human sacrifice, swept across this region to reinforce white supremacy. That's when the heavy hand of racial segretation descended across the South, a cotton curtain that separated blacks from education, from opportunity, but not from hope.

Speaking in 1901, my grandfather saw the world before him hopefully. He said then:

"The false partitions set up to separate classes and races are falling down. Illegal and un-Christian distinctions, though still disgracing the age and hampering the spirit of progress must soon yield to justice and right....Then forward in the struggle for advancement."