Okay, talking first about babies grown.

Um, if you could tell me in your community that you grew up in segregated, what was a strong community?

What was the value of education?

What did people so quit, You know?

Yeah.

You see, this figure walking trust stop, look, wasn't segregated.

Doing great wasn't strong.

And it is value education.

Uh, because I think about the kids today who never grew up at that time.

What was that?

Okay.

I grew up in South Philadelphia.

We didn't realize it was segregated.

All we knew is that neighborhood was all black.

And we weren't even that conscious of color because the people who owned the store down the street, the black, the tailor, the restaurant owners, the undertake everybody in the neighborhood.

And it was a very small street working.

Everybody worked blue collar, essentially very close knit neighborhood.

Everyone had over four Children.

We played in the streets together on Saturday morning.

Our parents came out, the hucksters came around and their parents purchased things.

We had to go buy ice because there were no refrigerators.

Then we had a coal stove.

So the younger kids were responsible for, uh, putting wood and cold into the stove and keeping it going.

And, ah, the level interests and education was just profound.

I mean, I mean, even to this day, I don't think I've ever, ever had such a positive educational experience that I did my 1st 6 years because school was an integral part of the community.

We had a black superintendent like principal.

All the teachers were black.

Many of them didn't live in the neighborhood, either.

Contrary to popular belief, they were middle income people who lived elsewhere, but their hearts and their souls were into those kids.

I remember that third grade fourth grade plays were always conducted in the evenings so that parents could attend an auditorium that seated maybe 405 100 people with standing room only for third and fourth grade play.

What was it about the environment that was so hi and and what effect did it have?

What I'm looking for is what made such strong young kids coming into the sixties toe believe that they can change America?

Absolutely.

They were the Children of the fifties four late forties fifties that who grew up in the sixties and were active in the movement came from good, solid families.

Um, up until 1959 78% of all black families had a man and a woman in them.

That's a fact.

Teen pregnancy was, uh, looked down upon sexual activity among kids.

Uh, everyone bragged about it.

No one did it.

And ah, but if someone became pregnant, if there was an aunt in the South, they would go there there, so that the the moral standards and ethical standards for people living in those communities was extremely high.

It had little to do with your income.

Um, many of us were poor without realizing that we re poor during the war years.

I thought everyone, um, had one pair of shoes.

Uh, today I have a lot of shoes because of those early experiences.

You know, you put cardboard in your shoes when your souls were one.

You never went to your mother and said, Mom, my shoes need to be replaced or fixed.

You just knew that the money wasn't there for that.

So you got the thickest piece of cardboard you confined and put it in your shoes.

And if it didn't rain, you could last about two days.

When?

When did you hear about integration?

Did it make sense to you?

Was the practical solution two segregated and unequal society?

I mean, what is the one the first time you was when you become an issue?

Yes.

Where it's gonna change things.

You're gonna live with white people in school with white people.

We're all gonna become one country.

Well, many of us Who?

Ah, who exercise leadership in the civil rights movement in the early and mid sixties, integration was never our goal.

We never saw integration as a solution to the problems.

We were seeking desegregation.

And I think confusion on that point has continued to erode itself.

The collective self confidence of the black community today just a very confusion.

You see, I fought against the jury segregation.

That is when someone absolutely forbid me to go with a restaurant.

We're living in a given housing complex.

I was just restricted by law.

I remember when I was discharged from the military, coming home in 1958 and standing and in Florida, only person at the ticket window and have the man stop and wait on a white person.

He waited on 10 white people while I was standing there.

In the meantime, I almost missed the train and couldn't check my bags.

That's what I fought against the indignity of America's apartheid system.

So integration was never, ah, a issue for me or for many others.

But it was the issue that I think, uh, separated me from the civil rights movement.

Did did white kids this time talk about the school that they hated, hated everything about the school that teaches the end of the repression.

But I wanted it in the New York.

It sounds like it was almost the opposite in the sense that school was very rich.

If you could countries what I hear from all the white kids I interview from that time, which is, you know, I hated teacher.

I hated school, books were restricted, teacher wouldn't let you say anything and oh, yeah, I mean, the discipline was in the community.

I mean, you didn't speak back to an adult.

The thought of an elderly person being disrespected was just unheard of, and teachers were never disrespected.

And if you misbehave squat, you would be spanked by a neighbor.

Then you got your mother got home or following a home.

We respect their and, God forbid, a teacher should ever have to send for your parents.

And they had to take off work.

That was it.

And so it it imposed a kind of discipline.

And again, it was a discipline that had little to do with how much money you it was a sense of comfort, a sense of well being, a sense of oneness between the school in the in the community.

Absolutely.

It really waas.

And, uh, the issue of white people was never it was never issue was never discussed The most exciting thing in our communities when Joe Louis was fighting on Friday night on the radio and virtually the whole community came to a standstill while we listened.

And so that was the only relationship to whites that I can think of.

Particularly when Joe Louis was fighting most of the time he fought someone Wait, Jump!

Now, jumping to the second program.

Different questions difference.

Any questions of describe when you went to these black colleges don't give the year but more the feeling the black college environment, which is not generally known by people how good, was it?

How precise was it and have a good education.

But more important, wasn't talking civil rights.

So was it trying to keep civil rights down?

It wasn't students or raising the issue.

Who was raising it on?

Well, any the early days.

Civil rights was not an issue.

The black colleges gave kids like me a high school dropout who dropped out with three months after my 17th birthday and then went into the military and get introduced to learning there.

Uh, got on flying status, went to AA really nice military school, learned airborne electronics.

Um, it's, um, flying with the military and then finish my high school education there on DDE and was told that I could enter any any college in the country because of my scores.

But I like the kind of confidence, uh, and but the black colleges, my college Cheyney State College, I think reached out to me was a warm environment.

It was almost a continuation of the kind of warm and accepting environment I experienced in the black schools in my native Philadelphia and my old neighborhood.

It was just Chaney was a continuation of that kind of loving experience, but it was tough.

I remember being entered with 13 other veterans, and we were given some priority and admissions because it was thought that we move a tour.

My grades weren't that great, and so we replaced on academic probation.

But all the half of us made the dean's list at the end of the first year from academic probation because our professor's really work with us and wait, let's see casual, casual, more careless than the white colleges or you are tougher than the white colleges Now they were they These colleges were tough.

As I said, 13 veterans with the G I Bill all on 13.

That was half all of us.

Just about were on academic probation, and I remember, and I had most of us had to work full time, so I had to take a minimum load.

But I remember dropping out of the literature course because after a couple of days, because I knew I couldn't keep up the pace.

But I didn't want to flunk the course because I valued it too much to try to hang in and do a marginal kind of job.

So I dropped out and then took the Liberty across the next semester, eventually got in a But Dr James Oliver had a PhD in philology from the University of Montreal.

They were only about a handful of philologist.

That's Ah, field of anthropology there.

Only a handful of full of philologist in the country.

And he could have taught at Harvard.

But he chose to teach at Cheyney State College, And they're a lot of professors like him as a young person.

When did you get involved in the civil rights?

Well, I don't mean the first moment, but I mean the feeling when you feeling like something big was gonna happen.

I'm asking you also asking, Was anyone in the black community pushing to support you or holding you back or both?

But it was sort of something that you were caught up in a storm.

You know, you walked out one day and the wind was blowing and the rain was coming down and everyone, everybody around you was talking about the movement and whether you wanted to or not, you had to pay attention to it.

And I did.

And God involved as a young social worker, um, at first participating with the local civil rights organization.

And then within a few months, there was a leadership vacuum, and I just sort of step forward and say, Well, I'll organize the next demonstration and then got involved that way, eventually volunteering about 40 or 50 hours a week in the movement while maintaining a job as a social work in a mental health clinic.

Oh, absolutely.

A flaming idealists who had this burning desire to, ah, to change things primarily because of my early experience as someone growing up in the South and Dan being sort of dropped in the growing up in the North and then dropped in the South in the military facing Ross segregation.

Ah, I was very bitter from that experience.

For three years after my discharge in the military.

I remember my heart racing every time it red light would flash in my rear view mirror because I was arrested three times and in prison in local jails three times because of my activism in the South.

And so those early memories really motivated me to do something about it.

In this idealism, describe what your dream world is.

A good question, particularly dream.

United States would be like as a young person at that time in the early sixties.

What did you think it would be like?

And should be like And what I have you got?

What is that you're idealistic about?

What?

What were you gonna change?

What I saw around me was a city council without any blacks.

Most of the institutions that had no blacks in any decision making.

All of the low income people in the city lived in the deteriorated black area.

I was really moved by that that that had the change, that something had to be done for poor blacks.

I was primarily motivated by the conditions facing four blacks.

And that's what really got me involved in the movement and what I really wanted to see Housing patterns changed.

I wanted to see the schools that, uh, where 80% of the kids and special classes were black.

Only 12% of the kids in the high school in the academic course curriculum were black.

And I was more concerned about the underachievement.

Ah, both socially, economically educationally of the black community.

So my concern has always been the deterioration of black communities that some of the crime and the violence that I witnessed weeks, the lattices.

Did you see kids taking action?

I want you to describe that because the young people today don't realize how this was led to some extent.

My kids, young people.

Yes, I want you to talk about somebody's like yourself and you and younger.

You saw 60 to 63 year old.

There was always tension between, um I think the younger people in the community who wanted more media change.

But it was also severe class division two, even among black and white activists and civil rights movement.

The people who were activists in the civil rights movement tended to be professionally trained individuals, black and white.

And I was always caught in the middle between the kind of goals that they were pursuing.

And I was a leader of such a group and the knees and desires of low income people who were the ones really caught up in the riots on who started the riots following the death of Dr King, and so that there was always this great chasm between the needs of low income blacks and, uh, middle income leadership.

And so I always try to bridge that gap by welcoming into the leadership and into those organizations the views and opinions of people in the bars and the churches and in the trenches.

And surprisingly, there was great resistance to that.

I never understood it until later in life, but it was great resistance to including, in the decision making process, the views and opinions of those who were untutored, unlearned.

So it was not only an age gap, but it was also a class.

Capa's well, was this very interesting?

I didn't know that was It was one more question on this tape.

I want you to describe these young people because we have these pictures of these young people and it's something to see today for a young person.

So many young people were involved.