Bill Campbell grew up on the south side of Chicago through one of the most tumultuous times in 20th Century America: the era of the Civil Rights Movement. For 30 years he has been working with ABC-7 Television Chicago. He came to speak on Jan. 30 to the NEIU campus community.
Campbell started off sessions with outlining the general topic of the address: being positive on purpose. He noted that people live in two different worlds: “reality and the world of possibilities.” The audience of the address listened intently to this while he fleshed out the meaning of what he was saying by bringing up these two worlds. He brought it up with an anecdote regarding an editor-in-chief of a paper who never thought he’d make it to where he was. When the editor was asked if he ever dreamt that he would make it as far as he had, he admitted that he never dreamt it but did imagine the possibility.
Campbell went on with some jokes about how shy he was in high school. However, he did have the ambition to try to become the editor-in-chief of his high school paper. Due to the competition and his shyness he had to do something that would make him stand out, like getting an interview with a famous person. That person turned out to be Bill Cosby and this was when he was 17-years-old. Long story short, he dreamt about the possibility and worked towards it, achieving his goal of becoming editor-in-chief.
He told the audience that his first choice was Oberlin College, but one of the civic projects of the organization he was in lead him to go to Carleton College in Minnesota. The organization took students from the Chicago Public School system and the schools of some of the suburbs and had them doing civic projects in different neighborhoods. The project that lead him to Carleton College had the students broken up into teams; one white student and one black student per team. They had to interview people in the neighborhood on the topic of race relations. One of the first doors his team went to housed an attorney that told him to consider Carleton College over Oberlin.
He got into Carleton College and started off the way some students of NEIU start off; in a summer transitional program. During his tenure as a student of the Carleton campus community he looked into the prospects of studying abroad, but much like some of the other African American student population of the school, was discontent with the fact that there was no program to study in Africa. He, with the help of the other students and an anthropology professor who had done previous work in the Ivory Coast by working as their advisor, started up the first study abroad program that went into Africa. On the way to where they were going for the purposes of study they stopped off at Gori Island, a former prison that was used in the transporting and transitioning of slaves, for a view of the darker part of the past. He explained that he broke off from the group saying, “I was just wandering by myself in the area where the cells were. I went down this hall that kept getting narrower and narrower. I got to the end of hall kneeling and looked out this small window and all of a sudden I burst into tears sobbing.”
It was at this point where he met an elder tribesman who greeted him with a smile saying, “Welcome home” while he explained that Campbell’s great-great-great grandmother /grandfather might have looked through the very same window that he just looked through with tears in his eyes. The elder told Campbell, “You are the descendant of some of the strongest of the strong people on the planet,” because they survived such adverse and inhumane conditions. Before the tribesman walked away, he gave Campbell a broken chain link as a memento, which Campbell passed around during the Keynote Address.
Campbell returned to an older topic for a bit to tie the chain link into the two worlds he spoke about; the chain being the symbol of the reality of a past of slavery and the break in it being a symbol of the possibility of freedom.
On the way to France, he found out that he had come down with appendicitis. He told the audience that by the time he had gotten to the hospital where he got an appendectomy, he technically died on the operating table. This was before the near-death experience reports started to get big. Yes, he technically died at the age of 19-years-old. “I told the doctor that I was traveling and that I saw him put the defibulator paddles to my chest and I was seizing,” said Campbell. The doctor told him that he was hallucinating so Campbell buried the experience down until he saw the film Contact. “The trip through the stars and tunnels just reminded me of what I had gone through,” he said.
After finishing this part he let us know about the time he had trying to find a job in journalism. After a while he attempted to just stick to the job he was in. “We all tend to be human ‘doings,’ because we’re caught up being busy and ‘doing’ so much. We should remember that we are in the present and just be human beings,” Campbell said. Through insights and anecdotes he let the audience know how he lives. Afterward he answered a few questions, took a few photos with people in the audience and gave some autographs.