KQED News Mind/Shift – Maquita Peters
“A few “short” years ago, during my sophomore year at The City College of New York, some fellow Caribbean classmates told me that the education department was offering a “free” course, called Thinking Chess, for three credits. As an international student from Barbados, paying almost four times more in tuition than locals, the idea of getting “free” credits in a system where we had to pay for everything was nothing short of a miracle. I jumped at the idea of taking the class because, after all, who doesn’t want to save a few dollars living in a foreign country away from one’s family? More than that, I’d always wanted to learn chess. And, as if I weren’t psyched enough about free credits, the kicker sold me — the class was going to be taught by an international grandmaster. I may have been a novice at chess, but I sure knew that a grandmaster meant I would be learning from one of the game’s best. Details about our instructor-to-be got even more exciting. Not only was he a grandmaster, but he was the first African-American and Jamaican-born grandmaster in chess — a designation that brought me immense pride as a West Indian.”(more)