WASHINGTON, D.C. — Growing up in the burgeoning metropolis of Los Angeles in the 1960s, there was little doubt that Dr. Michael Lucius Lomax would go on to college.
His father, Lucius W. Lomax Jr., was a well-known attorney and businessman. His mother, Almena Davis Lomax, was a pioneering journalist who would go on to earn national accolades for her groundbreaking coverage of the Civil Rights Movement.
“The world that I grew up in was Black intellectuals and the Black professional class,” says Lomax in a recent interview with Diverse.
From 1943 to 1960, the Lomax family owned the Los Angeles Tribune, a prominent Black weekly newspaper that profiled Black entertainers and civil rights leaders. Lomax recalls sharing ice cream and cake with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the family home in 1957, as his mother interviewed the iconic leader about his work with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
“We grew up in the Black middle class. Of course I was going to go to college. Everyone went to college,” says Lomax, who enrolled at King’s alma mater, Morehouse College, in Atlanta, with a scholarship courtesy of the Charles E. Merrill Early Admissions Program. “But the question was, would I go to a Black college, at a time when Black people from California did not go back South to go to a Black college?”
Although his five siblings had all opted to attend predominantly White institutions, Lomax’s time as a student at Morehouse, during the tumultuous days of legalized segregation, undoubtedly set the trajectory for what would become his lifelong passion: advocating for HBCUs—first as a college professor, then as a university president and now as the head of the United Negro College Fund.
“I had a great educational experience,” Lomax says of his time at Morehouse when the legendary Dr. Benjamin E. Mays served as its president. “I joke with my siblings that I got the best education of all.”
