A 75-Year-Old Black woman is set to graduate from a North Carolina-based HBCU after 57 years.
Rebecca Inge, a Raleigh resident, is set to graduate from Shaw University, a private Black baptist university that was founded in 1865. It has been the oldest HBCU to begin offering college courses in the Southern region of the U.S. and has had notable alumni including legendary singers Gladys Knight and Shirley Caesar.
Inge initially left her home in Sanford, Fla., to pursue higher education at Shaw in 1965. During that time, she reportedly worked in the institution’s cafeteria to support herself financially while she was studying.
“I always dreamed of going to med school because I was sick a lot as a child. I dreamed of being a surgeon,” she said.
However, she ended up putting her goals on hold after getting married and giving birth to her daughter, Marisa Ratliff Dunston.
“She put her life on hold so that I could finish my 21 years, all of my education so that I could be successful today,” Dunston said.
Inge made a second attempt to earn a degree at Shaw and previously worked for NASA during the first space shuttle mission as well as Disney World as a safety instructor.
When her husband died in 2015, she stayed with Dunston in different foreign countries, as her daughter served in the U.S. military and was stationed in places such as Japan and Germany. Then, she made the decision to finally return to the HBCU she dreamed of attending.
“The [school official] looked at me, and she said, ‘I don’t know if we got your records, and I said, ‘Then find them!'”
Eventually, the woman she spoke to found her academic records, including her old student ID.
After completing her studies, Inge will graduate from Shaw on May 8. She even purchased a pretty sequined shirt from the university’s book store with its name and the number “65” on it.
“This my year, this is the year I came to Shaw,” Inge said. “You gotta live ’til you die, so why not be happy doing something that makes you happy and get involved?”
