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Robert Wilson Kitchen, Jr.
1921-1981

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A very meaningful yardstick by which men may be measured is the friends they have. By this standard, Robert Kitchen was a man whose measure was a full one. His friends extended literally across the world, across nationalities, religions and races; across economic and intellectual strata; across those filled with hope and those downtrodden with despair. But their variety notwithstanding, these friends all had one common bond, their love for him.

Robert's origins were not those commonly thought to harbringer [[harbinger]] a career in world affairs. His origins, rather, were rooted in the American south at a time in U.S. history when that part of the country was still basically an agrarian economy. And, as the section of the country in which he was born fought for its economic salvation against the slings and arrows of a world economy gone sour, so did Bob have to struggle for his personal salvation-socially, educationally and economically. 

As a black young man looking outward on the world from the Georgia of the late 1930s, Bob had to take opportunity where he found it. That opportunity arose with his entry into Morehouse College. It was during his four 

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