"But this is undoubtedly our society's last chance to infuse into itself a stream of people whose moral vision has been--relatively, at least--preserved and sharpened by exclusion from opportunities for self-betrayal as well as advancement. The Negro is the only American whose loyalty to his country has not made him an accomplice in a succession of dubious enterprises from Cuba to Southeast Asia. If the vision of the Negro is sometimes distorted by hatred, it is seldom blurred by guilt."

In a city of banalizing values in which I grew up, a white amongst ambitious whites--not by others but essentially by myself betrayed--the saving character of a people who have held onto the roots of uniqueness, moral courage, political bravado and intellectual guts provide me today with one solid base to stand on, one place of life worth vitally living, one neighborhood where individual honesty and verbal directness still exist.

There are a lot of children on my block. When they wake me up in the morning it sounds as if there must be a million of them. At evening in the summer, when the sun goes down on these rooftops, they are all over the sidewalks. On the steps of my house they sit and study small objects (bottle-tops, bent-in beer-cans) with an atomic scientist's endless concentration and precision. I stop to take a look. . . .

They are likely either to hammer at my shoe or twist my fingers and my sleeve.

In the later evenings, still in the summer, when their parents are around, we sit on the doorsteps sometimes after supper and just talk. . . .

Miss Marguerite Sullivan of the Boston Public Schools, from whom God save our children, has pointed out recently with her killing condescension that the people of Roxbury speak in "native dialects"--as it were, a different language from the one that the rest of us speak.

Miss Sullivan is correct.

They do speak a different language.

And Miss Sullivan would gain many blessings, as would many of us, if she could ever learn to speak it too.

It is the language of kindly humanism, of natural generosity, of many intensities, and, above all, of truth.

I have come here for good.