BERMUDA this weekend begins the build-up to the national celebrations of the Emancipation on August 1, 1834 that marked the ending of black people being held against their will, for centuries, in chattel slavery in this country and elsewhere.

And there could hardly be a better time than now to highlight the return home this week of young Jay Alexander Hilton Butler, a decathlon-type winner, not in the Olympics, but the world of academia.

Jay decided on a side trip to Argentina and Brazil after graduating from the prestigious Harvard University in Boston with a bachelor of arts degree with highest honours in history. And after a well deserved respite at home with family and friends he will be off again, this time to England as a Rhodes Scholar, to study law at Oxford University.

Jay had not even unpacked his bags when we met him purely by chance after he had exited the airport and later at the home of his grandmother, Mrs. Georgine Hill. He came across as usual as the genial, modest young man we have always found him to be.

We often encounter two types of modest people, some who have little or nothing to be modest about; and others like Jay who have to be modest about. His peers at Harvard have described him as an academic force with a dedication.

At age 23, he speaks five languages ? English, French, German, Hindu and Urdu. He is widely travelled, and is fully aware of his inordinately rich heritage, bequeathed him by his highly accomplished forebears who are deeply rooted both in Bermuda and Boston.

Jay has an extraordinary Boston connection, dating back five generations to his great-great-grandfather, Dr. George Franklyn Grant, the son of former slaves who studied at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, and was the university's first African-American faculty member. Grant was a pioneering dentist, who was the inventor of the golf tee.

Those are some of the elements that bring us directly to the link between Jay and this year's Emancipation celebrations. The thesis that merited him his degree with highest honours in history was titled and sub-titled

It goes without saying that as well researched and scholarly as it necessarily had to be, Jay's thesis is an easy-to-read 100-page documentation of slavery in Bermuda, and of the centuries-long struggle for freedom and the subsequent efforts to consolidate that freedom, inescapably citing among others some of his own forebears including the Robinsons, the first Hilton G. Hill and his son of the same name, both of whom served in the House of Assembly.

Jay is the older of the two sons of Community Affairs & Sports Minister Dale Butler and his paediatrician wife Dr. June Hill. It was June's mother, the former Georgine Russell, who forged the Bermuda-Boston links when she became the wife of Hilton G. Hill 2nd, MCP. Georgine's mother Maybelle was the daughter of the above-mentioned Dr. George Franklyn Grant; Maybelle was married to Dr. Alfred P. Russell, another Harvard dental man.

Earlier we mentioned that Jay's contemporaries at Harvard regarded him as an academic force. But he was later hailed as 'the saviour of Harvard' when it became known he had been selected as the 2006 Bermuda Rhodes Scholar.

When Rhodes Scholars from the United States were announced in November 2005, there was a sort of dismal air hanging over Harvard, because for the first year in a long time not a single Harvard undergraduate student had made the cut, although 14 had made application to the US Selection Committee.

Harvard students have been awarded 319 Rhodes Scholarships since 1902 when the scholarship was created by the will of British philanthropist Cecil D. Rhodes. Winners are selected on the basis of high academic achievement, personal integrity, leadership potential and interests in extracurricular activities, among other attributes.

Jay coolly takes his many distinctions and attributes in his stride. In 2002 he was named a Bermuda Government scholar. The following two years in succession he was named a Harvard College scholar. He will be remembered for the role he played in virtually hosting and performing with the famed Kuumba Singers of Harvard College when they toured Bermuda over a year ago. He has played violin in several orchestras.

Two summers ago he travelled to New Delhi to work with the South Asian Human Rights Documentation Centre.

If there is any one thing that Jay may be inclined to talk openly about in reference to himself, it's how in the year leading up to his graduation, he volunteered to cook breakfast once a week for people in the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter.