“[He] was a World War II veteran and trained as a physicist at the University of Cambridge. But, as a black man from what was then the colony of British Guiana, he had difficulty finding work in his field in the early 1950s. ‘I was too black to be a scientist,’ he once said, ‘and too educated to be a lot of other things.'” But he became a teacher at a progressive school, where his experiences became the basis for his most famous book.