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What’s the fuss?

Nat Irvin’s response

News Argus News Editor Janell J. Lewis: What is your reaction to the readers reactions? Do you still feel the same way now? Would you change anything about the article now that you have received various opinions and more information about your views?

MR. NAT IRVIN: I’m not surprised by the reaction that I received. A lot of people care about the university [WSSU].I wanted to get the attention of young students.There’s been an extraordinary response … I’ve probably gotten about 65 [plus] letters … probably 90 percent of the letters I received saw things the way I saw them.A lot of letters reflected graduate’s awareness of image in the future and this is a very serious matter. It is not a matter for the faculty or the administration – this is something for the students. We’ve got to get past the emotion [we feel about the article] and get analytical and critical.I’m a futurist and that’s what I do – study the future of people … I can tell you that the most important currency in the future, will be image.Nat Irvin was debating on if he should write the article, but said, I was confronted by an older, elderly woman – she was about 90 – and she asked why was he [Alan Brown] wearing that … I owed it to anybody who helped build that school [to write the article].

Alan Brown’s response

News Argus Editor-In-Chief Nicole Ferguson: What is your reaction to Nat Irvin’s column he published Nov. 9 in the Winston-Salem Journal concerning your attire in the Winston-Salem State University Homecoming parade?

Mr. Alan Brown: Anyone that knows me knows that I am a happy, free-spirited person. The smallest things just make me excited. People thought that something this big would automatically bring me down, but it didn’t. I feel happy they were talking about my coat. That means I made a good investment.I’m just somewhat shocked with him [Irvin} being a professional, an educator at Wake Forest and a former administrator of WSSU, and having sons of his own, that he would write this. If anything I would think he’d be trying to uplift youth and accentuate the positive. Now if I was on the float with my pants hangin’ down or huge earrings on, or maybe if my dreads weren’t clean, what would we say about me then?There’s a grand possibility that he [Irvin} was trying to prove a point that we need to look at ourselves, and I was a good tool in which to do that. Maybe he said that this is a great person with a great soul and a great spirit and maybe I can use him he wouldn’t take offense. And if his intentions were to “bring us down” to lift us up and make the average person attentive to his issue, he did just that. He lifted us up, and made us come together and become attentive.