Grover Martin was born and raised in Prairie View and went to Prairie View A&M for his BA and MA. He moved to Amarillo to work in the local air force base and continued on in another federal government job until the early 1990s. He was part of the Amarillo NAACP and experienced all black education institutions.

Perri "P.K." McCary was born in 1953 in Texarkana. She grew-up in a ethnically diverse community in Alamo Garden, New Mexico and later lived near Prairie View A&M University when her father obtained a teaching position in the Industrial Education Department. McCary's parents gave her the tools to resist discrimination by exhibiting a strong sense of self and for confronting racist acts in front of her. She would opt to attend Jack Yates High School when her family moved to Houston because of the poor treatment of African-American students at the predominately white Madison High School. By 1970, McCary was attending the University of Houston and becoming involved in student activism. She would later engage in peace work and adapting religious texts with Black urban language to appeal to youth. She talks about instances of racism growing up, how her early experiences with diversity shaped the ways in which she engaged in cross-racial collaborations in her adult life, how Deloyed Parker and Ester King mentored her at UH, police brutality, and her family's association with the political movements of the 1960s and 1970s. She also discusses SHAPE Community Center and the Elders Institute of Wisdom, when she wrote a newspaper …