After sixty years, Dr. Roy G. Phillips, retired founding campus
president at Miami-Dade College, Homestead Campus, returned to his
native home in rural Webster Parish outside of Minden, Louisiana.
It took him almost forty years to fulfill a dream, a journey that
began as a conversation with renowned author Alex Haley culminated
with the collection of fascinating stories, and then finished in a
poignant book that tells the story of his ancestors in their
trajectory from Africa to America. When he retired in December
2001, Phillips turned to writing, piercing together years worth of
research. The final product, Exodus from the Door of No Return:
Journey of an American Family (AuthorHouse), was published in
September and revised in 2008. Phillips family saga mirrors the
lives of what arguable could be the tale of most African Americans.
In the book, family is the glue that binds Phillips ancestors from
Slavery to Reconstruction, Jim Crow Segregation, the World Wars,
the Great Migration of black families out of the South, the
tumultuous civil rights period of the sixties, to the present day.
Phillips might never have started on the journey of family
discovery if it had not been for a chance meeting with Haley, who
had come to speak at the University of Michigan. At that time,
Haley was in the midst of researching his book Roots, and Phillips
was completing his doctoral dissertation in urban secondary
administration. I spent half of the night talking to him about what
to do, he recalls. He said, Go and talk to the old folks in your
family. Get their stories. Which is exactly what Phillips did. He
interviewed his maternal grandmother who was then approaching her
102nd birth date. She not onlyrecounted riveting details about her
grandfather and the white family who purchased him and how he ended
upon the McDade Plantation along the Red River in Bossier Parish,
Louisiana. Phillips painstaking tracked down the descendants of the
plantation owners James Germany McDade II who owned his great
grandfather and other relatives. Phillips continues to meet and
correspond with the McDades in Shreveport and East Texas. He also
underwent DNA testing which helped him track both his paternal
ancestry to the Mbute people in the Central African Republic and
his maternal ancestry to the Mende people in Sierra Leone West
Africa. A year after retiring, Phillips was invited to Ghana, West
Africa by the Honorable Christine Churcher, Minister of State for
Basic Secondary and Girl Child Education, and her friend, Chief
Nana Kweku Egyir Gyepi III, to assist in the development of a
community college at Cape Coast Ghana, similar to the ones he had
planned and managed in Detroit, Seattle, Omaha, and Miami-Dade.
While in Cape Coast Ghana, West Africa, Phillips knelt and prayed
in the middle of the stone courtyard where the ancestors of many
African American families exited the door of no return to waiting
ships to be taken to the Caribbean Islands and the Americas. Prior
to leaving, Phillips met with the faculty and staff at the Academy
of Christ the King, a school in need of adequate facilities,
educational equipment, and materials. Despite these limitations,
Phillips observed a student body eager to learn. The school
reminded him of the two-room segregated Rosenwald School that he
first attended in rural Webster Parish during the early forties. He
pledged his support to use part of the proceeds ofthis book to
assist the children of Cape Coast Ghana in the development of its
programs and facilities.
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