Word: nelsons
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...says Earl Prince, 30, who helped get several dozen homeless Chicagoans on buses to Washington. In the crowd, he agreed to correspond with other black men from Virginia, from Detroit, from San Francisco. "I had no idea it would be as magnificent as it was," says Lieut. Colonel Michael Nelson of Virginia. Trained to recognize chains of command, Nelson nevertheless felt the stirrings of rebellion: "I was out there for white Americans also. If I am the object of some people's scorn, then they need to see me in my physical being." Physical being countless times over, countless times...
...ACTIVE-DUTY LIEUTENANT COLONEL who served with the Army in Korea and Germany and side by side with Colin Powell in the first squadron of the 10th U.S. Cavalry, Michael Nelson, 47, is accustomed to being surrounded by men. But the power of standing in the company of only black men moved him deeply. "I went there to support the event, but then I found I was part of the event," he says. "I was taken in, heart and mind and soul." Ever the military man, he was struck by the flags waving in the Mall: the American flag...
...Nelson was already a battle-line warrior before the march. Three years ago, he began tutoring students in his spare time at Tyler Elementary School in southeastern Washington, where he instructs sixth-graders on how to own and operate a business. "If capitalism is the great engine that moves this country, then business is the fuel," he says. "If I show them goals they thought they could never attain, then show them how to get there, then I will have done my small part to help them achieve a better life." But the march has convinced Nelson that he needs...
...lieutenant colonel also leads by quiet example. While many of the march participants had cause to chastise themselves for abandoning their families, Nelson is a single dad. When he and his wife divorced nine years ago, he secured custody of his two sons and two daughters. "I loved the children enough that I thought I was more emotionally and financially able to care for them than my ex-wife," he says. Today his three eldest children have homes of their own, and 13-year-old Morgan still lives with her father. Other Army families and friends have helped out during...
...While Nelson's sense of mission is clear today, it was not always that way. As a child in Lorraine County, Ohio, he was popular and fun loving, more inclined to hit the party scene than the books. While studying engineering at Ohio State University, he was drafted into the Army. Already a husband and father by then, he had to work two additional jobs to support his family. It was only when a white senior commander suggested Nelson attend the Infantry Officers' Candidate School in Fort Benning, Georgia, that Nelson began thinking about a military career. In the years...