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I want to take you back to a time when a group of idealistic people, feeling hopeful about the future, about America,

threw themselves into the fight for racial integration. It was 1963, and New York City was planning to build a new school right next to a housing project,

where the students would be almost entirely black and Puerto Rican.

But these white parents came in and said, no, no, no, no, don't build it there.

Put it closer to the white neighborhood.

That way all our kids can go to school together.

They were dogged these white

parents, lobbying the city at meetings, writing letters, saying don't build it there, it will

inevitably be a segregated school. And we want our kids to mix with black and Puerto Rican kids

from the projects. It's a decade after Brown v. Board of Education, they said. Schools should be

integrated. There's an archive filled with letters where the parents wrote things like,

we don't want our white children to be part of some, quote, small, white, middle-income

click. The Board of Education agreed, changed the entire plan, and located the building where the

white parents wanted it.

A few years later, the school finally opened.

And then, none of them sent their kids there.

I went through this box of letters, called as many parents as I could, not a single person actually sent their kid

to the school. Not one. What happened?

I remember thinking very clearly that, okay, I believe in this, but I don't sort of want

to sacrifice my children to it. No, as I said, I'm a Quaker, and so my kids went to the Quaker

school. But you were a Quaker when and so my kids went to the Quaker school.

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