While I did not get my degree there, I still consider myself a proud alum of Lincoln University.
I spent my first two years of college there after graduating from high school in 1973. I learned a lot of things at Lincoln University, foremost of which was a very small slice of what a minority experience is like.
I had spent my life seeing pretty much what I saw every day in Oxford, Pa. A lot of faces that looked just like mine, almost always being part of a majority.
Then one day I sat down in a classroom at Lincoln University and realized mine was the only face that looked like that.
It's an eye-opening experience, and one I treasure to this day.
I try to treat people every day the way I was treated at Lincoln University.
The Lincoln community - and really the nation - lost an icon on Sunday.
Julian Bond died. He was 75.
Bond went on to national prominence, but I will always remember his ties to our area, Lincoln in particular.
His father, Horace Mann Bond, was the school's first black president.
Julian Bond was born in Nashville, Tenn., but he spent his formative years in the Oxford area as his father led the historically black college.
Julian Bond spent much of his life in the struggle for civil rights and equality for all citizens.
In 1971 he formed the Southern Poverty Law Center. He had risen to the national stage in the civil unrest and protests that marked the late '60s. He helped start the Student Non-Violence Coordinating Committee.
He was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in 1965, but his colleagues refused to let him take his seat because of his opposition to the Vietnam War.
After prevailing in a case that went to the U.S. Supreme Court, Bond served in the George House until 1975 and then six terms in the Georgia Senate. He was primarily responsible for carving out a district in U.S. Congress that better reflected its black constituents. It's the seat that has been held so honorably for years by Congressman John Lewis.
His name was put into nomination for vice president at the raucous 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Turns out he was too young at the time to accept.
Almost every key civil rights advance in this country has Julian Bond's fingerprints on it. He was elected board chairman of the NAACP in 1998 and served as chairman for 10 years.
Despite rising to national prominence, Bond never forgot his roots, including those sewn at the little school outside Oxford.
Bond returned often to speak. He also taught in the region, at both Drexel and Penn.
The nation and region has lost a treasure.
It's one felt just a little more acutely by those of us with a connection to Lincoln University.
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