Exodus from the Door of No Return

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, piecing together years worth of research. The final product, Exodus from the Door of No Return: Journey of an AmericanFamily (AuthorHouse) was published in September 2006 and revised in October 2008.Phillips family saga mirrors the lives of what arguably 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.Phillips painstaking tracked down the descendants of the plantation owners James Germany McDade II who owned his great grandfather and other relatives. Phillips continues to meet and correspond with the McDades in Shreveport and East Texas.He also underwent DNA testing which helped him track both his paternal ancestry to the Mbute people in the Central African Republic and his maternal ancestry to the Mende people in Sierra Leone West Africa.

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, piecing together years worth of research. The final product, Exodus from the Door of No Return: Journey of an AmericanFamily (AuthorHouse) was published in September 2006 and revised in October 2008.Phillips family saga mirrors the lives of what arguably 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.Phillips painstaking tracked down the descendants of the plantation owners James Germany McDade II who owned his great grandfather and other relatives. Phillips continues to meet and correspond with the McDades in Shreveport and East Texas.He also underwent DNA testing which helped him track both his paternal ancestry to the Mbute people in the Central African Republic and his maternal ancestry to the Mende people in Sierra Leone West Africa.