I think we modeled, the teachers modeled getting along—it was an
interesting era, because somehow when you work with people trust comes,
and some of my very favorite professional colleagues are across racial
lines. We don't think of each other as black or white, we think of each
other as teachers who've been through these laughing. We laugh about war
stories we went through and how we worked this or that out, and how
horrible certain principals were and dah, dah, dah. So I think it was
modeled from the top down; the administration was always a black and
white pair, usually, or—I don't know how many assistant principals there
were but they worked together well, so the children saw that. We had
teachers who were proactive about this, and one person who comes to mind
was Gary Wort, who started the SAVE program, helped start that. One of
our students was shot and killed—Alec Orange, I think his name was—and
out of that came an anti-violence [stock]. I don't know what SAVE stands
for, but anyway—and that was also across racial lines. Nobody thought
about that and that effort, everyone was focused on the common horror of
this murder and doing something to prevent it. So I would say joint
projects made it work, and modeling from
Page 9the top down
did work; and maybe having been together since they were young, the open
program in particular, they were able to model for the other people in
this school. Another thing that I think was key was that we had such a
socio-economic diversity; we had poor, white children and middle-class,
white children and rich, white children, and we had poor, black children
and middle-class, black children and quite a few debutantes, so we had
well-to-do black families involved. And then we had the ESL group which
were at that time just newly escaped from horrible violence. These
refugees were there, and we had our hippie group there, which was nicely
racially mixed; the dramatists and the people who could read tarot cards
and all that stuff, so we had—anybody you wanted to be you could be, and
you could try it out and come back. Anyway, that was good. So we didn't
have this terrible divide that you found in some schools, where you had
all rich, white children and all poor, black children, which made a very
difficult situation, I think.