Fraternity: In 1968, a visionary priest recruited 20 black men to the College of the Holy Cross and changed their lives and the course of history.

In the fall of 1968, the Reverend John Brooks, a Jesuit priest at Holy Cross college in Massachusetts, made it his mission to recruit a group of African American students to the school. He got in his car and drove up and down the East Coast, searching for young men that he felt had the potential to succeed if given an opportunity. Among the twenty students he had a hand in recruiting that fall were the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas; the Pulitzer Prize–winning author Edward P. Jones; the …