Early Life
Jerome Ringo was the third of six children born to Earl Ringo, a retired postal worker, and Nellie Ringo, a nurse. Ringo grew up in Bayous of Southern Louisiana during the height of the American civil rights movement, during which time Earl worked to racially integrate public schools in Louisiana.
His father would often play recordings of speeches by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. When he was thirteen, he and his brothers prepared to become the first black students to enroll in previously segregated schools in Lake Charles, Louisiana. In the middle of the night, their father awakened the boys, telling them to crawl up to the front window. When the boys looked out, they witnessed a posse of Ku Klux Klansmen, who were burning a cross in their front yard.
He was the only African-American working as ranger at the world's largest Scout camp, in Cimarron, New Mexico.
Ringo attended college, planning to major in education at both Louisiana Tech University and McNeese State University. Before earning a degree, however, he decided to take a job in the petrochemical industry in 1975, lured by a high salary.
Read more about this topic: Jerome Ringo
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Three early risings make an extra day.”
—Chinese proverb.
“There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius.... They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.”
—Simone Weil (1909–1943)