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.
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“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
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