He attended West Savannah elementary school, Tompkins High School (class of 1963), and Morehouse College (1964–65), where he met Martin Luther King when King spoke at his alma mater after receiving the Nobel Prize for Peace.
[citation needed] Mydell trained as an actor, working with Dr. Baldwin Burroughs and the Atlanta Morehouse Spelman Players in Shakespeare”s The Tempest, and Trials of Brother Jero by Wole Soyinka.
[4] At NYU, he was trained by Lloyd Richards, Olympia Dukakis and Kristin Linklater, and directed by Andre Gregory.
He also worked at Seattle Repertory theatre and for the National Endowment for the Arts in their touring production of "For All Times".
He traveled to England in 1979 to research his one-man show on Paul Laurence Dunbar, "Lyrics of the Hearthside", which he developed while studying for a Ph.D in theatre.