Hampton University, one of the nation’s first historically black institutions, was a small struggling four-year college on the Virginia banks of the Chesapeake Bay when an ambitious, young, Alabama man, Dr. William Harvey, Jr. from Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, was chosen to be president of the school, originally known a Hampton Institute. 

The 1978 gamble on Dr. Harvey, a relative newcomer to higher education administration, became a winner, winner, winner, for the son of a building construction contractor and civil rights activist in tiny Brewton, a small rural town between Mobile and Montgomery, reports The Tennessee Tribune.