28. He spent his childhood picking cotton and tobacco
To help the family make ends meet, the McNair brothers took low-paid jobs as children. They worked from dawn till dusk, picking cotton and tobacco on farms bordering Lake City. The backbreaking work brought in $4 each a day, and served as a brutal reminder of the legacy of slavery. But Ronald later said the fields were the making of him. ‘I gained qualities in that cotton field’, he recalled. ‘I got tough. I learned to endure. I refuse to quit.’ Incredibly, two of his Lake City cotton-field contemporaries went on to study law and medicine at Yale and Columbia.
