My VIP for this week is Carol M. Swain who grew up in a two-room shack in the rural South. She was one of nine children in a poor family. How poor? One year the entire family failed their grade because they missed 80 out of the 180 days of school. The reason that they missed so much school is that there was a lot of snow that year, and the family did not have proper footwear for the children.
Swain and all her siblings dropped
out of school after the eighth grade. She married at sixteen years of age and
bore her first child at age seventeen. By the time that she was twenty years
old, she was the mother of three children. She married twice, but both marriages
had problems. She wanted to be able to provide for herself and her children
financially, so she decided to go to school.
Working forty hours per week in the
college library to provide for her family and to pay for her schooling, Swain
received a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree, and a Doctorate. She was a
tenured associate professor of politics and public policy at Princeton
University. She later worked as a college professor of political science and
professor of law at Vanderbilt University. She retired from Vanderbilt and now
teaches for PragerU.
Swain is an author of at least nine
published books. She is a public speaker and political commentator. She is a
lifetime member of the James Madison Society. Her passion is “empowering others
to raise their voices in the public square.” She has many other accomplishments
that I chose not to mention. You can learn more about Swain at her site.
I was familiar with Swain from various sources, but I did not know her story or much about her. I happened onto this site tonight and was mesmerized with her story. I hope that you will listen to her story and learn how to overcome difficult circumstances to become successful. She is a wonderful example doing things outside her comfort zone because it was the right thing for her to do. The
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