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Why don't you ask them?

Yes. Let me get to this column. But first, I want to go in to this role model. What about people in various cultural activities as role models and demonstrating at least for the possibility that some can break through.

Sure.

I'm thinking of an entertainer like Harry Belafonte, writer like Lorraine Hansberry, a singer-actress like Lena Horne, Pearl Bailey, and Ossie Davis, and his wife. Are these simply anomalies or are they important as role models?

Of course, they're important. They are important as indicators of the indomitableness of human beings, certain human beings. They are indicative of the fact that some human beings can overcome tremendous barriers, and they should be so communicated to young people, white and black, by the way. They are not new, although the number is increasing, but in slavery there were some free blacks, Phyllis Wheatley who--Phyllis Wheatley was a poetess who turned her experience as a black into communication, poetry such a level that the great egalitarian Thomas Jefferson didn't want to believe that a black wrote it.

Is that a commonly known fact about Jefferson?