The Anthony Reeves Experience

When people talk about college, they often focus on the success story — the dream school, the scholarships, the 4.0 GPA. That wasn’t my story. I didn’t attend the University of Tampa because it was my first choice. I went there because I wanted to prove something — to a high school professor who didn’t think much of me. I turned down opportunities that made more financial sense, including a potential ROTC scholarship, for a private school that offered me just a small leadership grant. I told myself I’d make it work. What I didn’t realize then was that this wasn’t just a college experience. It was the first crossroad in my life — the one that taught me how to keep moving even when confidence was nowhere in sight. Surviving, Not Thriving When I got to campus, my finances were a patchwork of faith and luck — a Pell Grant, a leadership award, and a loan co-signed by my grandmother. I didn’t have backup. I didn’t have a plan. By the end of my first semester, I was already debating whe...

You Can’t Ignore History When You’re Living Through It Have you ever walked past a building and felt something — even if you couldn’t explain why? That’s what I call living history. It’s not just the stories we read in books or the anniversaries we celebrate once a year. It’s the kind of history that surrounds you every day — the kind that’s still standing, still breathing, and still shaping how you see the world. For those of us in Black Gen X, we grew up moving through places our parents once experienced very differently . The schools, parks, restaurants, and theaters that became part of our everyday lives were often the same places where they faced exclusion, humiliation, or even danger. We were living in the same spaces — but not the same experience. The Symbol Never Dies: A Plantation Home in Mississippi I can still remember the first time I saw a real plantation-style home in Mississippi while visiting my father. It was beautiful — the tall white columns, the wraparound p...

The Beginning of a New World When I started kindergarten in 1974, I didn’t realize I was walking into history. At five years old, all I cared about were crayons, toys, and getting to the swing before my friends. But behind those bright classroom walls, the country was still learning what equality really meant. I was born in 1969, just fifteen years after  Brown v. Board of Education  — the Supreme Court case that declared segregation in schools unconstitutional. My hometown of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, didn’t begin fully integrating its schools until around 1971 or 1972. That means by the time I entered Sixth Avenue Elementary, I was part of one of the first generations of Black children in the South to attend a truly integrated classroom. It may have felt like a normal first day of school to me, but history was unfolding in real time. A School Like No Other Sixth Avenue Elementary was unique — an entire school dedicated just to kindergarten. Six or seven classrooms filled with fi...

  When I think about what it meant to be Black Generation X, I often describe us as the bridge between worlds — the generation that inherited both the victories and the wounds of America’s transformation. We were born into a society that was finally beginning to make good on promises of equality, but still wrestling with the trauma of what it had done to get there. The Generations That Shaped Us We usually talk about generations in terms of dates — Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and so on — as if history cleanly resets every twenty years. But generations are emotional handoffs. Each inherits the unfinished business of the one before it. For Black Gen X, our inheritance was complex. Our parents were the first to see segregation fall and integration rise. They lived through the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy — four towering figures lost in less than a decade. They also witnessed groundbreaking legislation: the Civil Rights Ac...