The Washington black community was able to succeed beyond his wildest dreams. I mean, we had our own newspapers, our own restaurants, our own theaters, our own small shops, our own clubs, our own Masonic lodges.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
During my childhood, Washington was a segregated city, and I lived in the midst of a poor black neighborhood. Life on the streets was often perilous. Indoor reading was my refuge, and twice a week, I made the hazardous bicycle trek to the central library at Seventh and K streets to stock up on supplies.
Before Booker T. Washington, we have small business owners but we do not have a philosopher of black entrepreneurship, and that's what Washington was.
There are many positive things to say about the black community. No question about it.
But we didn't have the financial structure, like the right attorneys, the right managers, the right accountants, and we were going against the grain of what black entertainers is supposed to do.
Harlem was an exciting place in the '50s. There were nightclubs that, as a student of Columbia, you dashed off to. The community seemed very viable still.
Take the time to discover how African-Americans have had a great impact on this country. In science, education, literature, art, and politics.
Black Power was really a major challenge to the social privileges and structures of the kind of privilege that I had grown up with. That whole belief... that you will only be able to advance if you are perfectly behaved, if you present yourself as what white people would consider an ideal of whiteness... all of that just began to burst open.
When President Kennedy was elected, many black Americans, like so many Americans, were captivated by his youth and energy and promise and were especially hopeful that he might move the country in a new direction on civil rights.
As a young black boy, it made me proud to see black leaders that did something amazing and made the world change.
It was to carry the American democratic journey beyond these failings that Black citizens and civil rights workers risked unemployment, violence and death.