This World: Hunter Bear / Dr. John Salter Jr.
One of my American Heroes is Hunter Gray, also known as Hunter Bear, whose name was Dr. John Salter, Jr., when he taught a class in social justice that I took at the University of North Dakota. At the time, I was 19, coming out of a small, Minnesota town, and had never met someone who’d both 1) been a key figure in the national struggle for civil rights, playing a key part in the 1963 Woolrich lunch counter protests in Jackson, Mississippi (that's him being assaulted in the foreground of the photo at left), and also 2) been “abducted” and studied by friendly beings from another planet. Most students found him really captivating, or at least quirky and interesting, and for me, meeting him was challenging —his life was hard to assimilate . On the one hand, you had to put your body on the line for causes you believed in; I still have a hard time imagining myself exhibiting the courage that...