Melvin Watt: “I was seated here listening to the stories and thinking about what this trip meant to me. Let me start by just thanking…”

“I was seated here listening to the stories and thinking about what this trip meant to me. Let me start by just thanking the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Lewis), our leader, our primary leader, and the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Upton), our co-leader on this trip. It was a wonderful, wonderful experience. My colleagues will probably recall that at the end of the trip when we were at the airport about to board the plane from Alabama, we had a little debriefing, a discussion, and everybody was going around talking about what this trip had meant. And I sat quietly and never said anything because I was still sorting through the emotions I was feeling and the significance of this trip. And it took me several weeks really to kind of put in perspective some feelings. And this is kind of where I got to at the end of that vexing period. I was reminded that in 1963, I got a scholarship offer to Talladega University in Alabama. And I came to that fork in the road. I had never been to Alabama. And when I looked at the scholarship offer that I had gotten, I decided that probably the last place in the world I wanted to go was Alabama in 1963.”