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26 five School Days I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught. —Winston Churchill In second grade, I was a difficult child. Much to the class’s enjoyment, I often would talk back disrespectfully to the teacher, who always was a woman. One day, while I was acting up, my classmates’ laughter ceased and silence pervaded the room. When I looked to the door, my father was standing there. He chastised me in front of the class, making good use of his powerful hand and belt. He made me apologize to the teacher, Miss Walters. My days as class clown came to an abrupt end. In 1925 the public schools in Philadelphia, though north of the MasonDixon Line, were strictly segregated by race through the sixth grade. All the teachers in the colored schools were colored, but the principals were white. Starting in junior high school, the schools were integrated, and both the teachers and the principals were white. I started kindergarten at the age of five in the Meehan School, about an eight-minute walk from home, two blocks into “Pulaski town,” the heart of the smaller West Germantown Negro ghetto; it was tough, but not as tough as the Sharpnack Street Negro ghetto in East Germantown.The Fitler School was much closer to home but was for white children exclusively. Miss Adams, my kindergarten teacher, was an attractive woman who apparently saw some potential in me. When I finished grade 1B, I was skipped to 2B, which meant that thereafter, until I finished college, I always started a new grade or school in February rather than September. It was Miss Walters in 2B who noticed that I had what appeared to be a speech defect. Since there was no speech teacher at Meehan, I was sent to the all-white school, Fitler, for speech instruction two periods a week. I discovered only much later in adulthood that I did not have a speech defect. Rather, I had no feel for phonetics and could not pronounce complicated words unless I had 01-0488-1 part1.indd 26 9/9/10 8:27 PM School Days / 27 heard the word pronounced by someone else. The Fitler school never picked up on the real reason for my so-called speech defect. The physical facilities at Fitler were far superior to those of the segregated school to which I was assigned. Unlike Fitler, Meehan had no gym or playroom ; to keep from freezing in the winter when we went outside for recess or lunch, we crowded in a group up against the wall in a game called “Hybo Sally.” Pushing and shoving, we tried to move to the positions closest to the wall. To avoid facing the cold at recess time, I often invented an extra study project, like trying to write a poem, which permitted me to remain inside. The Meehan School included kindergarten through fourth grade. For fifth and sixth grades, we went to the Joseph E. Hill School, a racially segregated school less than two miles from home. It was a tough school, as the poorer kids from the Sharpnack Street ghetto thought that they controlled the turf. I also was the new boy on the block because most of the other kids had started at Hill in kindergarten. I learned to stand up to bullies and ruffians, but on occasion I got the hell knocked out of me, arriving at home with a bloody nose or a black eye. Fortunately, in those days the weapon of choice was just a bare fist. After the first year it got better. Some of the kids had discovered the Wissahickon Boys’ Club. Some went to Camp Emlen, as beneficiaries of the Wirtz Foundation or the Country Week Association. My days at the Hill School were character building, exposing me to a different kind of discrimination , one based on poverty, class, and envy rather than race. The teachers were relentless, and they gave me a good grounding in mathematics. In sixth grade, I took over a newspaper route, delivering the two evening Philadelphia dailies—the Evening Bulletin and the Daily News. On Thursdays I would deliver the three weekly Negro papers, the Pittsburgh Courier, the Afro-American, and the Philadelphia Tribune, to the colored neighborhoods. I later decided to increase my income by standing in the late afternoon on a corner at Wayne Avenue and Coulter Street, where people who worked in downtown Philadelphia and commuted...

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