Julian Bond: William Raspberry welcome to “Explorations in Black Leadership”.  Thank you so much for being here.

William Raspberry: It’s a pleasure, a joy to be here.

Julian Bond: I am going to begin with a question about Brown versus Board of Education. Do you remember what it meant to you at the time you heard about it, the first time you heard about it?

William Raspberry: I do and it seemed utterly impossible. I was in small town, Mississippi at the time and I thought, that sounds nice, but boy it ‘aint gonna ever happen here. You know, I thought I knew whites in the South and I thought that this just ‘aint gonna happen. And slowly I started to believe that maybe it could. And now I have reached the point where I still believe maybe it could.

Julian Bond: All these years.

William Raspberry:  It hasn’t yet.

Julian Bond: So I guess that leads into the next question. At the time, you thought it wouldn’t mean what it promised to mean. What do you think it has turned out to mean now these fifty-two years later?

William Raspberry: It turned out to establish something that I thought was and still think is very important. And that is that the government has no business, at all its levels, has no business making all these separations of people based on race or other irrelevancies. That was an important thing to establish. It was important to drive home the fact that it was damaging. Quite a part from the legal implications, it is damaging psychologically to children to be told that you may not attend this school because of the color of your skin. Unfortunately, we went on to make another and I think also damaging conclusion when we said by implication, and I mean “we” the black community, said by implication and to some extent still say, that what is wrong with this school is that there are too many kids that look like you. That’s also psychologically damaging and destructive. I am awfully glad Brown happened. It wasn’t enough and unfortunately, we still, half a century later, haven’t figured out what enough would look like. We don’t know what to do about the education especially poor black kids in the cities.

Julian Bond: You wrote in a 1982 Post column that black Americans had a choice between being educated or integrated or both integrated and educated and made being integrated a top priority. And the results you wrote are socially questionable and educationally disastrous. What did you mean by that?

William Raspberry: I don’t think I was that smart back in ’82.

Julian Bond: Yes you were.

William Raspberry: What I meant by that was a series of things. First, is that for middle class black children already imbued with the values of their middle class parents, the education part had already happened and integration was the next logical step for them. What they did though was to make this a general prescription not as a logical next step for people who had already made a substantial step, but as a curative step for those who hadn’t. It doesn’t work as a remedy. And what I meant in that column is that when you devote major effort and major financial, economic and political capital to getting the integration to happen, you don’t have very much left to make education happen and we went for a good while without the necessary attention to making education happen. I think it’s one of those things that accounts for the situation we’re in today where we’ve got neither education or integration.

Julian Bond: Now in 1987 and you must get tired of having your words quoted and asked about things in the past, or maybe not. You said, “Civil rights tempts us think in terms of distribution and enforcement when we ought to be thinking of discipline and exertion”. Talk about that.

William Raspberry: Words do come back, don’t they? And I guess I can’t say I was taken out of context. I really do believe that. Let me say what I mean about that. There were things that were done during that period we remember as the Civil Rights Movement that were absolutely vital for our future. Laws were enacted. Practices were installed or stopped. And we called on America to change white America and it changed. It made possible some things that we couldn’t have accomplished without that change no matter how virtuous we were as individuals. The exemplar we used to use as a description of segregation in housing for instance that even Ralph Bunche who was our Colin Powell I guess in those days, even Ralph Bunche couldn’t buy a house in a white neighborhood and how awful that was and he was a symbol of virtue. We were asserting that our virtue was not a problem. It was racism that was the problem that needed to be overcome and we made some significant strides in doing that, but what I remember and what seems to be important is that there were always both internal and external barriers to our progress. In those days during the movement, the external barriers were critical. No matter what we did internally wouldn’t matter much as long as those barriers were in place. So it was a good noble fight and I am often glad we did it and that we won. We don't know, haven't quite figured out what to do with that victory though. In my own view, we have reached the point and it is a landmark point where the internal barriers are now more significant to our progress than the external ones. The external ones aren’t gone just as the internal ones were not gone back in the sixties, but they are less an impediment. The external barriers are less an impediment now than internal habits we’ve accrued and we haven’t quite got our minds around that because we couldn’t change the culture in the sixties. We could only make righteous demand. We made it and it was effective and that piece says that we’ve formed the habit of believing that righteous demand was enough to address all our issues. Some of the issues, including those that I think predominate now among many parts of our population don’t lend themselves to righteous demand. You can’t righteously demand that your children be educated. You can demand a place in school. Well we’ve got a place in school. But commitment to learning, to study, the things that really do make education pay off, do not lend themselves to righteous demand. You can demand a new school or a new traffic light or new anything and while you slept the government, if you made enough noise about it, might deliver it.  You might wake up and look out your window in the morning and see a shiny new traffic light where three kids had been killed in the years before. You won’t wake up in the morning and see a truck unloading education for your children on your front lawn. Your children have to go out there and get it. It has to be there and we made sure during the days of the movement that it was there. We now have to make sure that our children are prepared to fill up and grasp it. Otherwise, it won’t matter that’s it there.

Julian Bond: This is not a quote from a column, but the researcher who put this together summarized in this case, “Worse? An obsession with finding examples of persistent racism without inhibits more tractable and pressing problems from within.” Is that what you were talking about a moment ago?

William Raspberry: I don’t know what that means, but it sort of sounds like it. Yeah. I think it is very difficult to multi-task on racial disadvantage. King talked about the necessity for what he called arithmetic alteration between dealing with causes and curing conditions. It’s so easy to achieve a position of leadership if you hand the people who are in trouble a scapegoat for their condition. This is the villain who caused the peace. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I can share that because it is always right. It is always correct, but it’s not always helpful. And if you attempt to lead by saying they have been awful to us but what needs to be done next is up to us to do and we have to forget them for a little while perhaps or let somebody else deal with their sins and we have to deal with our own shortcomings. That doesn’t counterplot you into leadership. And even people, no matter how well-intentioned they may be, find it difficult to resist what I consider the applause lines of blaming the enemy for shortcomings. And it’s not the reverse of blaming the victim. It’s a matter of getting the analysis right or at least right enough so that you can make some progress because that to me, is the name of the game – moving from the condition we are in to nearer to the condition we hope to achieve. If blaming makes that happen, then maybe we should blame, but it doesn’t make it happen anymore. And it’s necessary I think to change some of the things we do and some of the things we teach our children because we have reached that unprecedented place in African-American history where for the first time, what we do matters more than what is done to us. It does not say and somebody will always hear you say this, it does not mean what is done to us is not significant. It continues to be significant. But what we do, for the first time, matters more.

Julian Bond: That’s a nice segway into the next question. And again, going back to Brown, how has the Brown decision in ’54 affected your life today and in the intervening years. I know you went to an integrated college so Brown had a little impact I would guess on that. But you have had a preoccupation, some would say, with education and now are engaged in a project in your own hometown. So what has Brown meant to you in that sense over these many years, professionally I guess?

William Raspberry: Brown has meant a lot of things, some psychological. Some practical. To have the nation’s highest court say what we already knew is still profoundly important I think. That we are full-fledged human Americans. No sub-categories. We are full-fledged Americans. Our humanity is complete. That’s a reassuring notion to internalize and to have other people who doubted humanity to internalize. So it’s meant that. It’s meant the opportunity for vastly improved education for a huge segment of  the black middle-class. It’s meant a number of things. It’s meant school improvement in a lot of cases. What it didn’t mean though and what it didn’t accomplish is significantly improved education for the poorest and most damaged of African-Americans in the rural areas and in the big cities. It wasn’t that anybody made a decision not to help those kids, which is sort of thought that if we help the ones that are least damaged, the help will eventually trickle down to those who are most damaged and it hasn’t. You mentioned the effort I’ve been making in my hometown of Okolona, Mississippi. One significant factor about that town is that the schools, fifty-two years after Brown, are officially desegregated. In fact, about ninety-nine percent African-American. There is no point in talking about solving Okolona’s education problems though some racial tinkering or some racial accusation or some racial guilt. We’ve got to deal with the kids we’ve got and with the resources we have. It’s also clear to me that there are things that our children suffer that we try to address, but we almost always try to address them by giving the schools one more thing to do and the schools can hardly do what their primary charge is to do, which is to teach the children. And I started thinking about the children in my hometown. My hometown, by the way, had given me a good start in life back before Brown v. Board. And looking at those youngsters and thinking there are some more Bill Raspberry’s scattered among them. Some more potential that if we are not careful, will go unrealized. What can we do? And the thought occurred to me that so many of our children begin school, begin kindergarten already behind and how does this happen? Because they fail to get the kind of start that is best for learning back home. Not because their parents are wicked, but because their parents don’t always know what to do. So I undertook, three years ago back in ’03, to teach the parents of pre-schoolers in my hometown what they can do at home to get their children ready for learning and for life.

Julian Bond: What are those things? What do they learn?

William Raspberry: First, they are re-learning what we used to know. That education is magical. That it is life-transforming if you let it be. We are talking about a generation of parents, and I am talking now about young parents, including many school dropouts who no longer believe that education is magical. It didn’t work for them. That’s why they dropped out and had a little Stephanie when they were seventeen or sixteen or eighteen. They want their children to do well. They love them. They spend precious money on dressing them to make them look cute. And I say to them, or we say to them, we know you love your kids, but supposed we said we can give you something that will matter more for their lives, long-term, than those cute Weeboks you have on their feet, which will be too small in a few months anyway. Supposed we said we can give you some things for life down the road, make it better. Would you be interested? Of course they would be interested. We say I know what you are thinking. We are talking about education and you think there is nothing you can do to help your child be successful academically because you weren’t. What do you know? I say, look. You are the child’s first teacher, like it or not. And every single day you get up in the morning, you are teaching your kid. We are not talking about whether you should teach your child. We are talking about what you are teaching your child. You can teach your child that his life or her life will be pretty much the same as yours. Or you will teach your child that he or she has the prospect of a vastly changed life trajectory that something wonderful can happen if we start now and prepare to make it happen.

Julian Bond: And surely people buy into this and say, ‘Sure sign me up, I’ll do it’. Have you thought about the people who say ‘No it’s not for me’ or ‘I don’t have the time’?

William Raspberry: Nobody says ‘not for me’. Nobody says ‘I don’t want it’. They signal they don’t want it by not showing up.

Julian Bond: Right.

William Raspberry:  With everything, they are the early adapters who will show up every time you say life is going to be better for my kids, I want some of that. And there’s a second ring of people who will come in kind of reluctantly. There’s a third wing who will say, let me see how this goes and then I may step out. We are affecting the third ring. There’s a fourth ring that I am not smart enough to reach, but if we can reach a critical mass of parents of young children, I think we begin to transform what happens in schools. I’m already committed to doing a birth to five, that is parents of children from birth to five. It is already clear to me that when the five year old becomes six or seven and enters the public schools, we can’ walk away from those parents. The things we have tried to teach them and the attitudes we have tried to instill in them will still be important. So we will have to find the ways and means of following them into schools. But you ask what we do, what we teach them. Sure, attitudes are among the things that I think are critical. The beginnings of a new belief in themselves as parents, in their own efficacy. But there are specific things that they can be taught to do. Talk to your kids. Talk to your children. It can be quite astounding to watch how little conversation happens between parent and child at some of the lower income levels. The studies have been done on this, that as you come down the socio-economic ladder, conversation between parent and child. All parents, according to one study that says that all parents do pretty much the same amount of business talk. Now, ‘bring me my shoes’. ‘Hang your coat up’. ‘Stop’. We all do about the same amount of that. At the lowest socio-economic spot, that’s all that happens and you spend time with a middle-class mom or dad and their toddlers and there is this incessant chatter that is going on both ways. This is language formation. It promotes reading readiness although that is not what it is meant to do. It is kind of a bond. It is what they do, but it’s fun trying to teach taciturn parents to be chatterers, but it is important. It is fun for them too and they enjoy it. We are not taking them to the woodshed all the time.  We are saying, here are things you can do. Here are things you can talk about. Reading to their kids every night. Something they can do. Using stuff that is around the kitchen to teach initial letter sounds. There is something they can do and enjoy learning to do. Talking to them about health choices. Moms are often making poor health choices themselves and it is hard to enforce. But if you can help people to believe that what they do will make a difference for their children’s life chances, you can get their attention.

Julian Bond: I don’t think that would be the initial hardest barrier to convince parents that their children’s outcomes can be different than theirs because of the interaction or intervention of the parent. Once you are over that hurdle, I’d think it would be easier.

William Raspberry:  It’s not easy, but once you are over that hurdle, it becomes possible.

Julian Bond: Okay.

William Raspberry: And you are exactly right, that is the critical barrier. You don’t have to convince parents to love their children. They do that automatically and naturally. But they don’t have much basis for believing in their own efficacy as parents. They haven’t been reinforced. They don’t see any good that will come of it. So our task is to do some modeling and make that happen.

Julian Bond: Now after three years, it is too early to say this has been successful, this didn’t work too well.

William Raspberry: You sound like a funder. Yes it’s too early. It’s not too early to begin the measurements. We have a brilliant woman who is in Mississippi, whose specialty is assessment, who is doing this for us and we will have some numbers and she has already been talking to the parents. Both parents and children in the Baby Steps Program, I think I forgot to tell you that’s what we call it, Baby Steps. They talk to people in Baby Steps and they try to access certain pre-literacy competencies and so on. That’s a pay-grade higher than mine. I think it is something we need to do and we will keep doing it.

Julian Bond: As an aside, in ‘64 in the Freedom Summer in Mississippi, we had freedom schools for kids. About three thousand kids went to these schools. Only anecdotal evidence will tell you that some of them flowered and flourished. At the twenty-fifth anniversary of Freedom Summer, we had a reunion and a teacher went back to Hattiesburg and met three girls who are now women who had been Freedom School students. They were children of single-mothers and had all the demographics that you’d say means failure for these women. Two of them were doctors, one of them a lawyer. And I have always been curious, why some graduate students, and I try to get my graduate students to do it, to go back capture this cohort. We have the names, they are easy to find. And compare them with those who didn’t have this experience and see whether this single summer of a broadened educational experience might not have had some large effect, but anyway. Let’s not get distracted by this.

William Raspberry: Maybe you know.

Julian Bond: I don’t even know if they were in York County in ’64, but anyway, maybe some of the mothers of these children are kids who were in those schools all those years ago, but let me move on. Now this is pertinent to what you were just talking about. In your own life, in your personal life, who are the people who were most helpful to you in developing your talents and developing who you are today? And I notice you’ve made a distinction between mentors and role models. Talk about that a bit.

William Raspberry: The smartest thing I did earlier on was to choose my parents very, very wisely. I had two terrific parents. I still got one of them, my mom, whom I saw four days ago, is a hundred years old and a lovely woman. She is still living in her old house. But she and my father, through I don’t know what means managed, to acquire some childrearing skills that were phenomenonal. They didn’t manage to acquire much money. They were both teachers and we were never hungry or less than properly clothed, but the clothing was not always the good stuff that some of the kids were wearing. We didn’t feel poor. What they did was because they loved learning so much themselves, we absorbed that, all five of us. We were forever reading things. My sister used to read in the shower. And my own children have kept that habit going, which makes me appreciate for the power of observation, but somehow they we able to instill in us, first a love of learning. They were able also in Okolona, Mississippi, segregated and awful for us, they were able to make us feel that we were okay. Valuable people and the center of their lives, they were able to make us believe that no matter what happened around us and to us, we were to behave like Raspberry kids. That meant something in those days. That other people’s mistreatment of us did not relieve us of the responsibility of behaving decently in the world. They never quite said it that way. They would chide us with things, but more importantly, modeled. They modeled what they believed. 

Julian Bond: Where did they get this from?

William Raspberry: I don’t know where they got this from. I saw these attitudes reflected in both my maternal and paternal grand parents, especially the grandfathers. And I suppose some of it came from there. I am sure if you ask them, they couldn’t tell you where it came from. But this is the part of it that strikes me as powerful. When it happens and however it happens, you can recognize it’s power and how it makes you feel and it makes you want to pass it along so once you get infected with this gene, whatever it is, it can, with a little help, replicate itself down the generations. By the same token, if you get infected with an attitude that says nothing you do matters and that vengeance is a proper response, that getting even is more important than getting ahead, that’s heritable too and I see kids. I used to see kids on the playground who would fight because their parents had instructed them, you don’t take nothing off nobody. And if anybody does anything to you, you hit them with a rock or you stab them with a pencil and they thought they were teaching their kids to take care of themselves because they loved their kids. So what my own experience, both at my house and I do mean it when I say it, my parents were sort of incredible. There is another thing about my early years though that is also extremely important I think. I was born on the campus of what was then Okolona College, a little two-year college with a four-year high school attached. It was a campus setting with dormitories and that sort of thing. That’s where I was born. That’s where my dad taught building trades. It was at that time, the only four-year high school for blacks in Chickasaw county. But there was that little school supported by the Episcopal Church that saw as its mission preparing young black kids to succeed in a hostile environment. The people there, I think I remember one Ph.D. the whole time the college existed. These were people who were not extraordinary scholars or particularly gifted teachers, but they were so committed to rescuing and saving a generation of us in the heat of segregation that they really did transform our lives. I am talking about a surprising number of people who came through that little high school and college who went on to do well and the presence of that little school helped to transform our town into what these days we would call a learning community. At least for the black half of the town, but we had some effect on the other but I am principally talking about what happened to black kids in black families in that town in those days and it was really quite extraordinary in ways that I did not realize until I left the place and that experience of observing it firsthand what a few committed people can do to lift the sites of people who didn’t have much previous reason for lifting their eyes. That’s also a part of what drives the Baby Steps effort. I don’t want to recreate the little college. There is no point in doing that, but I came to understand and I understand more every day as I look back the importance of changing the cultural attitudes towards learning. Learning is in disrepute in some part of our country. It’s starts to be a feat kind of thing and acting is more importantly than merely learning and in our own little way, Baby Steps hopes to get people thinking about creating once again a learning community in our town. We also hope to transform the town racially as well. The town is almost equally divided between black and white, and we haven’t figured out yet except at the edges, how to live together. There are some people who want to do it who try on both sides, but I think it occurred to me, once again, that we can argue about politics and religion, about whether to put the park here or the school there, but one thing agreed on is that we want our children to do well. You ask for a show of hands of those who are opposed to children, but you don’t get anybody waving their hands about. It’s about the only thing I can think of where we are all agreed and we are waiting for somebody to give us something to do to act on that agreement.

Julian Bond: Now besides these academics and your own parents and teachers I guess, are there other figures that in your early life that had an impact on you?

William Raspberry: There are! There are such people and I will miss some of them, but let me name one by way of illustrating a point that I think is important. We talk to our youngsters today as early as junior high and we tell them the importance of studying and staying in school, making good grades because a college graduate earns this much and a high school graduate only earns this much and a high school dropout only earns this much. So you see how important it is that you stay in school and do well. And I rolled back into my childhood and I think that I did not study a single hour or write a single paper or pass a single examination with an eye on my economics twenty years down the road. It just wasn’t a part of my thought process. For kids, long-term is the weekend after next. I worked hard in school to please adults who cared about me. My parents of course, but Mr. Gardner was my math teacher. He was a wonderful man and he liked me and it was so important for me to have him think well of me that I wanted to ace his algebra courses and I did so well with Mr. Gardner that my first major when I went to college was math. I just thought I wanted to be like Mr. Gardner. There were other people on campus. One man taught me agriculture. I didn’t learn that much about color crops and that kind of thing, but he was the only teacher I remember who would take us high school boys aside and talk to us about life, which is to say about sex, and it was profoundly important to us because we were not getting it anywhere else. I wasn’t, God bless them, I was not getting it from my parents at home. My parents never I think uttered the word sex to any of their five children. We never had the talk. I thought I was the only one who missed it, but I talked to my older sisters and they said, “No, no, no.” What they would do when those important phases arose is that they would find little tracks of books and magazines lying around in the living room confident that we would find them and read them, but they never uttered a word.

Julian Bond: Let me ask you, do you remember any specific national or local historical events that were regularly discussed in home around the dinner table and if so, how did these events shape your consciousness? 

William Raspberry: That’s a hard question because I hadn’t thought of it. I was born in 1935 so my first memories of important national events were World War II and the impact of that on what we did, what we ate, what happened to cousins who went off to fight in the war and all of that? 

Julian Bond: Did you have a victory garden?

William Raspberry: We hadn’t. We had a survival garden. We always had a garden. Yeah we had a garden and always a few chickens running around the yard. What we did have was blackout curtains. I remember one phase of my life we were living in a house that did not have electricity. We had kerosene lamps that were so dim, you had to do a double take to see if anybody was home and yet we bought these thick green or black blackout shades and when the air raid warning sign went off, we beautifully lowered our blinds. I said, the Japanese couldn’t have found Okolona if we set the town on fire, let alone turning off the lights, but we were beautiful and patriotic and cared about it. And we didn’t resent the fact that shoes and sugar and meat and candy bars were rationed in our contribution to the war.

Julian Bond: Your contribution to the war effort?

William Raspberry: Yes.

Julian Bond: What about other events? Do you remember the war’s end?

William Raspberry: I’m sorry.

Julian Bond: Do you remember the war’s end?

William Raspberry: The war’s end. Yes. I remember sharing the celebratory mood. I did not understand what any of this was about. I do remember wondering what will the headlines of the paper now because everyday was about the war and I couldn’t image what they used to be about. We didn’t have as many dinner table conversations or I didn’t overhear as many adult conversations about politics as we would now. Roosevelt at the national level, but we were shut out of state and local politics. We knew vaguely who was running our lives, but there was nothing we could do about it. My mother by the way, I was in college when my mother became the first black woman in the Chickasaw County to vote.

Julian Bond: Really?

William Raspberry: I was already gone. So I had a vague, vague recollection of their interest in politics, but not strong. They used to talk a lot about how people behaved and one of the things that I remembered so well was that in this little, I almost want to say poverty-stricken home. For most of my childhood, there was at least one person, not a family member, living with us, to go to this little school on its campus I lived. So it became almost second nature that a spare bed would be put somewhere and another cup of water in the soup. This was what families did if they had a little to share and spare. And I didn’t realize what sort of impact this had made on me personally until my wife and I found ourselves taking our thirteen year-old foster son into our homes some years ago because it seemed the natural thing to do. A decent kid who needed a place to stay, needed a home, needed some parents. And I think what I am saying is that little seeds get planted in ways that you don’t even suspect and they will sprout at times and places that surprise you. You don’t know and it makes me. I am almost glad I didn’t know this early on. I think it would make you crazy as a parent if you understood the influence of your ordinary day-to-day behavior has on your children and it’s scary, but it can be quite profound.

Julian Bond: Now moving ahead, how did you choose your career? I understand you had multiple majors in college. What were your majors?

William Raspberry: As I said, I started off as a math major. Partly to please Mr. Gardner, my math teacher, and partly because my father who taught building trades would in a fairer world would have been an engineer I am sure and I thought maybe I could be the engineer that dad couldn’t become because he was my disease. They had filled me with confidence that I was smart enough to do whatever I set my mind about doing and I really believed that. I was half way through college when I found out it wasn’t true. I ran into organic chemistry and discovered that I couldn’t do anything I wanted to do. At any rate, I thought I could do whatever I put my mind to, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do and I found myself reacting to what people I cared about and who cared about me said I should do. Oh, you are good in math, you should be a math major. You’re really good with English. You can spot a gerund or a participial phrase across the campus. You know? You ought to be an English major. So I was an English major for a time. I was at one point a History major because somebody said something else and then at one point, some people came around to say that the Episcopal Church needed priests. They invited a bunch of us males off to visit Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia, my first time in Washington in fact, to tell us that if we thought we could be a lawyer or a doctor or an engineer, but also thought we should be a priest, we ought to get that some consideration. So I became a priest seminarian. I was going to become an Episcopalian priest except that I was running out of money for school. Scholarships were not as prevalent then as they are now and I had to work my way through college and this particular summer, it was between my junior and senior years, I had trouble finding a job and my re-entry into school that September was in doubt. It was July already and I was sweating it. And that July day, a friend of mine who worked for the Indianapolis Recorder called and said the sports editor just quit. If you are willing to pass yourself off as a sports writer, I think I can get you hired. So I went down to the Recorder and told Mr. Stewart I was a sports writer and got hired that day.

Julian Bond: Where you a sports writer?

William Raspberry: I didn’t know anything about sports. I liked sports. It took them about a week for him to discover that I wasn’t his next sports editor, but I was very good with subject-verb agreement and I had been an English major for a little while and Mr. Stewart liked that. And I also had one other quality that he adored, my willingness to work for the minimum wage. So he put me on that July and when September came around and it was time for me to go back to school he said, I want to find out what your school schedule is and any hours you are not in school, you can work here. He gave me a 35mm camera and said, go learn how to take pictures. And he just sort of gave me my hand and let me learn to be a journalist and I spent four years at that place. I went back to school that Fall and then worked at the Recorder and went to school for awhile. Then when I finished school, I stayed there until I got drafted into the Army. So the Indianapolis Recorder was my fifth major. It was my journalism major although I never took a journalism course in school. It was my school.

Julian Bond: And you learned at the Recorder the things you might have learned had you gone to j-school?

William Raspberry: Some of them.

Julian Bond: How to write a lead?

William Raspberry: How to write leads. How to write headlines. How to structure a story. I learned something that I am not sure I would have learned in journalism school. I had been writing papers for my college professors and they were good in the sense that they tended to be grammatically correct and I learned little tricks about sticking in short sentences after a series of longer ones, but they were not… I am glad I can’t find any of them now, but I was writing then for an audience of one who had to read my work. The first thing that hit me when I went to the Indianapolis Recorder was that nobody has to read what I am writing. Nobody has to read it. And this was a worrisome thing to me and I learned not because somebody taught me about leads, but because I was afraid that I would do all this work and nobody would read it.