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Transcript from "Then & Now"

But, as I said, there were some incidents. I don't like to think about the negative things, but it was not easy the first quarter here, but I got through. I made good grades. I think I had two A's and two B's. I don't know if they still have a long session and a short session of summer, which counted as two quarters. And I decided, well, “I think what I'll do is to take a leave of absence from my teaching job, and go down the Spring quarter. And that's what I did. Fortunately, we weren't paid very much money at that time as teachers, and I thought this is going to be a financial challenge. But the local teacher association…black teacher association, because they were separated at the time, raised about a thousand dollars, my church gave me money, and that really made me know that people were behind me. A lot of people were afraid during those days because they were afraid of repercussions. They were afraid of losing jobs, of having to go to jail, but there was that determination. Everybody wanted to help to do something. And my generation nowadays, I think some of our students are a little bit too militant. I have always thought you can get more bees with honey than you can with vinegar. This isn't their way, though. They want everything to happen now, because they have been brought up with a lot materialistically and they feel that they deserve it. And they do. But, you have to have patience. And, I guess, as old as I am, I can be a lot more patient than the young people of today. But, I said this in my commencement speech almost two weeks ago now, that although we may not have made all the progress we should have, we're certainly years away from where we were at the beginning. And you have to appreciate the progress that has been made, and then build on that, and continue to work to get it where it should be. But you can't think that everything is all doom and gloom, because it isn't. I don't know how many of them would agree with me, but when I looked at the audience and saw a good mixture of students, you know, all ethnicities, it just made me feel wonderful. And of the audience the same thing, because when I graduated, I was one person in class, and the family and friends who had come with me were the only ones. And that was the first time they had had an integrated commencement. I guess, you have to grow older in order to accept that kind of a philosophy about life, but my feeling is that President Adams and so many others, the GAPS students that instituted the lecture in my name, a lot of good things have happened. I see students mixing, you know, blacks and whites together. I have a little cousin…she is not little now, she's 21, who is in the band. She plays clarinet as I did. And she enjoys being in the band, although I think last year there were only seven. This year, there may be more, I haven't asked her. But, this is the way it should be, and this is how it has to grow, because nothing happens overnight, though we may want it to. And certainly, civil rights was a good impetus to get things started. We still have racism in the world, and it all isn't one way. I think that blacks sometimes are not tolerant of whites and vice versa, so we have to learn to live together.

That may be one of those things that we pull out to put in our special edited version of a CD that says this was a wonderful point that Ms. Early made.

It's true, it's true.

You're exactly right.