A Conversation with Educational Trailblazer Adena Williams Loston Growing up in the segregated South, Adena Williams Loston and her siblings would take messages for her father’s plumbing business. He was the first Black, self-employed plumber in her hometown and served predominately white clients, never turning down a job but also showing his kids that dignity mattered. “They would say, ‘Send that n****r over here—because that was his label,” remembers Loston, the president of St. Philip’s College who was named one of the 10 most dominant HBCU leaders of 2021. “We had to write it down and then he would charge people according to the way they talked to his children, always telling them they were getting a special price.” When people were polite and kind, he would sometimes finish the work for free, Loston says. If they called his kids names, they paid more. “He used the same words, ‘I have a special price for you,’ but they had different meaning,” she says. “Individuals thought they were getting a great price either way, but we knew he was restoring our humanity.” That principle of getting whatever work was out there done while still standing for what he believed in never left Loston, especially as she broke barriers in her career as the first Black or first Black woman in leadership roles at numerous higher education institutions and at NASA, where she served as a director of education and the agency’s highest ranking African American woman.