One hot June evening 51 years ago, a scared young man named Ralph Waldo Emerson Jones stepped off the train at Grumbling, a tiny community in the pine woods of northern Louisiana. At 19, newly graduated from Southern University near Baton Rouge, he faced a formidable mission: to teach biology, chemistry and physics, shape up a football team, strike up a band, act as registrar, and help cut firewood at Grambling's 25-year-old school for black teachers.
Jones succeeded so well that in ten years he took over as president. Over the next 41 years, he saw his country school blossom into Grambling...
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