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conservative man, who later became a very close friend of mine, by the way. And obviously he was on the side of-- not the NAACP, but on the opposite side. And even though I was a defendant, by virtue of being a Regent, I testified for the plaintiffs. I went out to Buffalo. And Judge Curtin, a Federal Judge, sat on the-- by the way, he's ill-- and Buffalo is an excellent example, by the way, now of an effective form of desegregation of a city school system. They had an article in the NEW YORK TIMES a couple of weeks ago on that.

But that was an example of my alienation, or distance, or independence from the majority of my colleagues on the Board of Regents. I was on the side of the plaintiffs, in spite of being a defendant. That's an unusual position to be in, to be a defendant and witness for the plaintiffs in the same case. But by this time my colleagues, I suppose, saw me as a maverick, a threat to the fact that because I was black, I was going to be constantly raising issues of racial equity and justice. And up until that time the Regents were calm and not engaged in the kinds of controversy which I tended to precipitate, and I think the only excuse they had for this was the fact that I was black.

In other words, what you're saying there is that you were concentrating on issues which were just across-the-board educational issues, not narrowly race issues?

That's not quite true. I mean, I could see how the