During one of our long conversations shortly after I met Mr. Ernest McBride, he told me this: “I lived through a time in this America that so crushed the hopes of people that I felt suicidal and I know I was not alone.” That summed up for me, Sunny Nash, how he chose his life’s work or how his life’s work chose him, as he often said. Ernest McBride, Sr., played professional baseball in the Negro League with the Memphis Redsox, started the NAACP in Long Beach CA, and organized unions.