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James E. Shepard was born Nov. 3, 1875 in Raleigh, just 10 years after America's Civil War ended.
The South was still smoldering under the tempest of social calamity when Shepard was born.
Shepard was a visionary of the highest caliber. What could have formulated this sincerest devotion to the spirit of humanity in this 35-year-old giant of a man?
What forces came together to inform the education-driven motives in Shepard? What events placed before him could have happened to steel his determination towards selflessness and to see education beyond himself as most fascinating.
He had to work within the framework of a social climate of racial oppression in these years of his hope for a better possibility for humanity.
Perhaps we can draw a mental picture of that time's anachronistic Afro-American Black Pride Movement; this movement symbolized the undaunted social hero of 1910.
Shepard must have known that education could be the salvation from many types of tyranny.
Shepard would have known that the distrust, the despair, and the rejected hopes relative to America's Reconstruction era could be resolved.
He would have known first-hand the looks of despair on the faces of the newly emancipated slaves who marched before him, ruing the past while at the same time marveling at the bright though cloudy horizons of the future of freedom's endless possibilities. Shepard would have heard the constrained prayers that raised the rafters of nearby churches.
Even too, the distant reverberations of lamentations for heavenly Providence that trebled through the red and white-streaked clay hills of Alabama and Georgia would have reached Shepard's heart.
Through the most remote Southern soils of all America, was a freedom recognized by the American Constitution, Shepard sought to answer the prayers of his people with humility: he seemed to answer prayers for a public demand as well as a private respectability.
Most assuredly, Shepard was not daunted by the constraints that held other men bound to their dreams.
Shepard's dream was an early dream, one that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would propose some 53 years later.
It is a dream that Mr. Barack Hussein Obama — the first African American president of the United States of America — would realize just 35 years after Dr. King reiterated Shepard's dream. Shepard helped to set down this foundation for our self reliance.
Shepard's lifelong goal was education. It was a means to the end that he dreamed not just for himself.
He not only envisioned the dream; he worked diligently to assure that education for his fellow man would be like freedom for every man.
We should ponder his social climate in America only 45 years after the most iconic event in America's history, the American Civil War. It is difficult just to imagine the courage and determination of Shepard in 1910.
Let alone, it is remarkable that he succeeded so well that N.C. Central University still stands here on Fayetteville Street, 100 years later.
We should all take advantage of this legacy, the cause for which Shepard gave his life and we should make sufficient and actual use of his dream.
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