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 youngsters don't enjoy school anymore. School was important to us.

W: What was the name of the school that you went to?

S: High school?

W: Yeah.

S: Well I'll say even elementary school, we went to Pomonts Dunbar Elementary,
 which means we were in touch with literature in the school. We went to
 Armstrong High School, which is a major high school in Richmond now.

W: Although you seem as though you had a good education and a well-rounded
 education and say you were happy there, you must have been aware of the fact
 that you were still having a segregated education.

S: Yes, we always knew that because we had to go up the street and the other
 people had to come down the street. We lived in the same neighborhood with
 white kids. We lived on this street and we shared an alley, and after school we
 played together. But when we were going back and forth to school, walking this
 way, sometime somebody wanted you to get off the sidewalk, that of course may
 have started a little skirmish but nothing serious.

W: When you became an educator, did you see sort of the down side of the
 segregated system working as an educator yourself.

S: They say the wrong thing because I don't see all of the ills of segregated
 education. I think the part that has been presented was negative, but there were
 some positives. I have kind of an operetta that I wrote in 1959 after the Supreme
 Court Decision. It's a book I have in press now called Poetry for Growing.
 Poetry for Growing was kindergarten through college because I taught
 kindergarten through college, and at each level I was writing things. That's
 section five in that book, "A Panorama of Science," which was written in 1959
 and was presented the same night that Alan Shepherd went in space. Anyway, I
 don't believe people have dealt with the wonderful things that were going on in
 some black school. Everything was not negative about segregation. You get the
 Prince Edward story; they had poorer facilities, and so did most rural counties.
 We had good schooling and we were one of the first to have Negro history in our
 schools. So we felt good about ourselves.

W: So in a well-resourced school, even within segregation, there were certain virtues
 for the community.

S: There were excellent things that went on. I guess we didn't think of whites as