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Now, there's one experience that I must tell you about, that I had in between college and graduate school, and that was the summer that I stayed in Washington before going to graduate school. And it happened just by sheer accident that I got a job in the office of Charles Houston, and at that time, the whole business of segregation cases was just beginning, and in this law office came many lawyers, including Thurgood Marshall, Charlie Houston's son, -- I can't even remember the names of all of them, but they converged' in his office to prepare these cases, and that was the most marvelous learning experience I have ever had -- in the whole sense of urgency, you know, of breaking down the segregation, and the whole sense of really, blasphemy, to blacks, was brought very clearly to me in that office. It really was. And that was a kind of exposure I'd never had.

By that you mean that you did not have an earlier sense that something might be done about this segregation?

Well, I had a sense that something might be done, but here was something concrete being done. You know, here was an actual tangible kind of approach to the whole thing. I had known there were law suits before, of cxourse, but I'd never been close to it, and never had any sense of the judicial part of it, really. Not any of that at all, although I had been in Washington four years and I had been to visit the Supreme Court, and never really thought about going to hear a case, until then. It was something over here.

And did you go to hear a case?