Her life was a struggle. She grew up poor in the gritty projects of Los Angeles. She left California a well-educated woman with an associate's degree from a community college, a master's degree from Stanford University and an effervescent love for teaching.

Leslie V. Forte moved to Virginia, where she became the first African American to teach English at Northern Virginia Community College. She founded an African American literature course there and several years later, this woman -- who put herself through school on dreams and hard work and scholarships, who put great faith in community colleges, and who "brought herself up by her bootstraps," as she used to say -- learned that she had leukemia.

But she kept teaching and kept fretting over why particular students fell behind in class. She kept wondering how to reach others in her lectures. And she kept taking chemotherapy for the cancer. She continued teaching at Northern Virginia until the end -- when her illness forced her into the hospital and then claimed her life on Aug. 30, 1982 at the age of thirty-four.

Now fifteen years later, Forte's name, if not her untold story of courage, is about to burst onto the national scene as part of another bitter struggle for survival -- this one over the uncertain future of affirmative action on college campuses.

"I think Leslie Forte would be proud that her name is on this scholarship," says a longtime friend, Lynn Casablanca, an assistant English professor at Northern Virginia. "She believed one of the missions of community colleges is to help disadvantaged students get an education. I think it's a noble purpose and I'm sure she would, too."

Merle Thompson, the college's assistant division chair for English, recalls that Forte was a popular teacher with students and "had a terrific sense of humor."

"Sometimes instructors who teach at community colleges feel put down or that they should really be teaching at universities," she says. "Leslie was not one of those. She felt she was where she belonged. "