Session: 1234567891011121314         Page 1234567891011121316171819202122232425262728293031323334353637383940414243444546474849505152535455565758 of 763

don't remember -- my wife says that I'm pretty insensitive about subtleties of hostility to individuals or groups, you know, and she's correct in many ways, but I don't remember any inter-group hostility, even including the Jewish orphans who used to come down, in spite of the fact that they were in khaki uniforms, and were clearly distinct from us.

The race problem became dominant in junior high school, when I went to 139, and by this time, it was not only the majority black but predominantly black, so much so that by the time I graduated from ninth grade, there was only one -- maybe two, but only one that I remember, an Italian fellow, I forgot his name, who was in our graduating class there. And I remember him very vividly because, like myself, he was small, and we couldn't compete in the gym and what not. He also brought sandwiches to school, that seemed to me highly spiced with garlic. We'd interchange sandwiches sometimes.

Junior high school was the beginning of segregated educational experience for me -- which fortunately was not at that time tied to inferior education. Our teachers taught us. Ubrecht, a German man, taught us mathematics and algebra, and insisted that we do our work. Our English teachers taught us grammar, taught us sentence structure, taught us pronunciation, and would not accept sloppy work. A man by the name of Mitchell taught us Shakespeare, and had us not only read parts of “Julias Caesar” and what not but interpret them,

I must tell you that part of my, a large part of my present controversy with inferior education in inner city schools today stems out of my own personal experience that this need not be. You know, no one of those teachers at that time -- this is in the 1920's --