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 clique.
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.