That location allows me to shorten my drive to the plant, which is about fifteen miles east of our home. It’s hard to make everyone happy, though, and some of the kids and adults resented me for being a smart, good looking, black boy, who is also a good athlete.ĭothan’s population is now about sixty-nine thousand, and we live in a nice neighborhood on the east side of Dothan. I showed myself to be a good athlete, starting in middle school, and that made me popular. I experienced some bigotry, being a black boy in the south, but not as much as many others. Despite my commitment to football, I still graduated with a degree in nuclear engineering, and that’s how I ended up back in Dothan, working at the nuclear plant near here. I’m good at math, also played football, and was fortunate to get a full scholarship to a Division I university in Alabama. Our parents both worked in a peanut processing plant, and they made sure that we studied and made good grades in school. It wasn’t easy for black boys to get onto the path of success back then, but I was fortunate to have loving parents who sacrificed for my sisters and me. My name is Marcus, and I was born and raised here, and came of age in the 1980s, when the population was around fifty thousand. Looking back now, as a mature, married, African-American man, living in Dothan (SE Alabama), I consider myself more fortunate than most.
