Meet Winfred Rembert.

He was born in 1945, black and poor, in the rural town of Cuthbert, Georgia. Abandoned by his father and given away by his mother, who could not afford to care for him, he was adopted as an infant by his Aunt Lillian, who lovingly raised him as her own. By the time he was four, "Mama" Lillian was taking Winfred with her into the local cotton fields, where she labored from sunrise to sunset to earn a meager living as a picker.

By the time Winfred was seven, he, too, was picking cotton and "shaking" peanuts. For the small quantities of crop he could harvest on his own, he earned 50 cents a day. The seasonal field-work, however, kept Winfred from attending school …