Tuskegee University

Lionel Brockman Richie, Jr. is an American singer-songwriter, musician, record producer and actor. From 1968, he was a member of the musical group... Commodores signed to Motown Records. Richie made his solo debut in 1982 with the album Lionel Richie and number-one hit "Truly". Richie was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, the son of Alberta R. and Lionel Brockman Richie. Richie grew up on the campus of Tuskegee Institute. His grandfather's house was across the street from the home of the president of the college. His family moved to Joliet, Illinois, where he graduated from Joliet Township High School, East Campus. A star tennis player in Joliet, he accepted a tennis scholarship to attend Tuskegee Institute, and graduated with a major in economics. After receiving his undergraduate degree from Tuskegee, Richie briefly attended graduate school at Auburn University. He is a member of Kappa Kappa Psi and Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity. As a student in Tuskegee, Richie formed a succession of R&B groups in the mid-1960s. In 1968 he became a singer and saxophonist with the Commodores.
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Ralph Waldo Ellison was an American novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer. He was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Ellison is best known for... his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953. He also wrote Shadow and Act , a collection of political, social and critical essays, and Going to the Territory . Ralph Ellison, named after Ralph Waldo Emerson, was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, to Lewis Alfred Ellison and Ida Millsap. Research by Lawrence Jackson, one of Ellison's biographers, has established that he was born a year earlier than had been previously thought. He had one brother named Herbert Millsap Ellison, who was born in 1916. Lewis Alfred Ellison, a small-business owner and a construction foreman, died when Ralph was three years old from stomach ulcers he received from an ice-delivering accident. Many years later, Ellison would find out that his father hoped he would grow up to be a poet. In 1933, Ellison entered the Tuskegee Institute on a scholarship to study music. Tuskegee's music department was perhaps the most renowned department at the school, headed by the conductor William L. Dawson.
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