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guess he was prepared to turn it over. But anyway, this other group of younger men decided they wanted to get their opportunity to see what they could do with the Group.

Well, after they took it over-- and that was about 1967-68-- it started growing, and it grew in numbers. Bruce, who is a young man of tremendous energy and drive, audacity, who -- well, he is head of one of the top black-owned businesses in the country, Fedco Foods, a series of supermarkets; up until rather recently, he was chairman of the board of directors of Freedom National Bank. He gives the impression of being impetuous, but Ray Jones had a lot of confidence in Bruce, and Ray doesn't give his confidence easily, and on the basis of Ray's appraisal of Bruce, I began to look at him beyond his impetuosity, or what appeared to be his impetuoisity, and I saw from what he did with the Group, in building it, the solidity that justified Ray's confidence.

He built this Group into the Hundred Black Men, which now has, I guess, about six or seven hundred members, and I've been fascinated in seeing how he did it.

By the way, my interest in the Group continued, not just as an observer, but as I watched Bruce and his associates revitalize it, I became more actively interested. Not that I became active in the Group itself, but I invited them to use this building as their headquarters, when I was head of Metropolitan Applied Research Center. And when I resigned from that, the Group now by the way was under the name of the Hundred Black Men -- I forget when they took that name; maybe soon after Bob Mangum took it over--