Thirty years ago today, at the ripe age of 17, I covered my first news story professionally. I covered a huge anti-apartheid rally in Newark, N.J. for The New Jersey Afro-American newspaper, the “baby” of what then was a chain of weeklies that went up and down the East Coast. Deborah P. Smith-Gregory, my journalism teacher at Seton Hall University’s Upward Bound project in 1983, brought me into The AFRO. She allowed me to share her byline with her. The article made it onto the front page, and I never looked back. Thanks, Mrs. Deborah Smith-Gregory!