Reading my father‘s long lost Morehouse diary gave me a new perspective on the richness of his experiences and accomplishments despite the negative shadow of "Jim Crow."

Recently, my brother and I discovered a cache of material from my father's years as a student at Morehouse College, an historically black institution in Atlanta, GA. We found concert programs, college publications, photographs and yearbooks. But the most riveting document was my father's multi-year college diary.

I had always assumed that given the barriers of segregation, he would have been denied many of the opportunities and privileges later black college students would take for granted—travel, attendance at outside cultural events, exposure to nationally recognized scholars, etc.

Remarkably, the college was able to provide an impressive educational experience for its students of the 1930s and 40s. As a budding violinist, my father studied with gifted musicians, and gave recitals in Sisters Chapel at Spelman College, Morehouse's sister school; performed in French plays (he makes special note of a play based on the life of Haitian revolutionary, Toussaint L'Ouverture); and attended lectures on campus by well-known experts such as education innovator Robert Maynard Hutchins from the University of Chicago.

When he traveled with the Glee Club, there were no public accommodations open to the group. However, they found welcoming hosts in private African American homes across the South who pampered them with warm beds and home-cooked meals.

I also found out that he earned money to ease the financial burdens of his parents by selling Fuller Brush products. Residents of Gainesville, FL, grandmother Mattie Duval Days was a school teacher and an early graduate of Spelman, and grandfather Drew Days was a postman. Miraculously, they scraped together the funds to send my father and his three siblings to college.

To read descriptions of my father's college life in his own words made me chuckle at times—especially when he described his dates and crushes on a series of lovely Spelman girls. But I wept at other moments as I marveled at his accomplishments, and felt the power of his determination to succeed, despite the negative forces of Jim Crow assembled just outside his Morehouse world.