His paternal grandfather, the Reverend Clifton L. West Sr., was pastor of the Tulsa Metropolitan Baptist Church, and West was an active member of the Shiloh Baptist Church in Sacramento. He often credits his strong religious upbringing by his parents as the single most important factor in his life accomplishments.
In 1970, shortly after turning seventeen, West graduated with honors from John F. Kennedy High School and matriculated at Harvard University. One of his Harvard teachers, Martin Kilson, referred to him as the brightest and most intellectually engaged student in his three decades of teaching. West first majored in philosophy and then changed to Near Eastern languages and literature, keen to acquire a reading knowledge of Hebrew and Aramaic. West's studies had a strong emphasis on history and social thought heavily drawing from the range of distinguished teaching faculty: Kilson (the first tenured African American professor at Harvard), Samuel Beer, H. Stuart Hughes, Martin Talcott Parsons, Hilary Putnam, Preston Williams, Terry Irwin, and John Rawls.
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