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3 Birth of a Social Conscience The seeds of a social conscience were sown in my psyche from birth, planted there by my mother.“Danny Boy,” she would say,“hold your head high. You are just as good as anyone, no better but just as good. Don’t you ever let anyone put you down.” Her deep religious beliefs made it a mortal sin to act superior to another human being, and this idea was drummed into my soul. It formed the solid foundation of a belief system I could use to put these thoughts into action. As life’s experiences accumulated, an awareness of the unequal social conditions that surrounded my life slowly began to emerge. I would struggle to understand the nature and reasons for the social and economic forces that enveloped my southern roots, but not until I reached the age of reason would I fully understand the importance of my mother’s precepts. As I began to make my own decisions, the ideals and beliefs she planted in my mind would shape my conscience. I sometimes made the wrong decision , but I was never in doubt about what was right. As I grew to maturity in Greensboro, North Carolina, I had to deal with the inequities and prejudices of a class system that permeated every aspect of our lives. I would not challenge the racist aspects of the system until I encountered the influence of the Quakers at Guilford College. I was born on October 10, 1925, in my grandmother’s house in Concord , North Carolina. Our family was living in Greensboro at the time, but the Calloway girls, of whom my mother was one, usually returned to their mother’s home to give birth to their children. It was a tradition in Birth of a Social Conscience / 49 the family that older members of this large and gregarious group would be available to help with the birth and care of family children. Neither I nor my brothers nor my sister was born in a hospital. Even though my grandmother died in 1929, when I was only four, my earliest memories are of being in her home surrounded by the warmth and love of my many cousins, uncles, and aunts. Those were carefree happy years; none of us were aware of the economic turmoil and hardship that the coming Depression would bring to our lives. Greensboro, economically and culturally, was a much different place to grow up in than Concord. In 1925, as now, Greensboro had a larger population than Concord. It was the center of a thriving economy until the Depression came in 1929. Cosmopolitan and wealthy, it had a rigid class system controlled by a small, close-knit group of successful industrialists , lawyers, businessmen, and churchmen. These individuals, generous in financial support of worthy causes that interested them, kept a tight rein on the social order that separated the rich from the poor, both black and white. During the desperate conditions of the Depression, our family, like millions of others, was caught in a struggle to survive. This experience had a significant impact on my thinking, especially as I tried to understand the larger issues that brought about the Depression. My father laid down the law early in our lives: none of his children would ever work in a cotton mill. Although the mills provided most of the city’s economic vitality , he would not even allow us to wear the overalls produced by “sweat labor.” His constant refrain was that we must go to college before starting to work. It was an ironclad rule in our family that education came first, a job second. My father knew the riches, intellectual and economic, that education brings and that through it lies the main avenue for escape from the social and economic strictures of a closed society. I had no idea how this could be accomplished, since our financial condition was rather precarious, but I never doubted that it would happen, because my father ruled it would. The Warrens were of modest financial means but proud. A Scots Presbyterian , my father’s mother named him after the Scottish king Robert De Bruce. He worked at the local post office as a mail carrier. He was a gentle man who loved his family and his country and contrary to the pre- 50 / Dan R.Warren vailing view of the day, seldom used the rod to enforce discipline. A nod, a scowl,or a cough was sufficient...

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