Author Description

After sixty years, Dr. Roy G. Phillips, retired founding campus president at Miami-Dade College, Homestead Campus, returned to his native home in rural Webster Parish outside of Minden, Louisiana. It took him almost forty years to fulfill a dream, a journey that began as a conversation with renowned author Alex Haley culminated with the collection of fascinating stories, and then finished in a poignant book that tells the story of his ancestors in their trajectory from Africa to America. When he retired in December 2001, Phillips turned to writing, piercing together years' worth of research. The final product, Exodus from the Door of No Return: Journey of an American Family (AuthorHouse), was published in September and revised in 2008. Phillips family saga mirrors the lives of what arguable could be the tale of most African Americans. In the book, family is the glue that binds Phillips ancestors from Slavery to Reconstruction, Jim Crow Segregation, the World Wars, the Great Migration of black families out of the South, the tumultuous civil rights period of the sixties, to the present day. Phillips might never have started on the journey of family discovery if it had not been for a chance meeting with Haley, who had come to speak at the University of Michigan. At that time, Haley was in the midst of researching his book Roots, and Phillips was completing his doctoral dissertation in urban secondary administration. "I spent half of the night talking to him about what to do," he recalls. He said, "Go and talk to the old folks in your family. Get their stories." Which is exactly what Phillips did. He interviewed his maternal grandmother who was then approaching her 102nd birth date. She not only recounted riveting details about her grandfather and the white family who purchased him and how he ended upon the McDade Plantation along the Red River in Bossier Parish, Louisiana. Phillips painstaking tracked down the descendants of the plantation owners - James Germany McDade