"Jerry as known as a tough, one of the cool kids. In his neighborhood it's cool to be very tough. It's cool even to be in gang fights sometimes...In his neighborhood, studying doesn't get you too far. In fact, studying would probably get you into trouble and ridiculed.

"He knows that to get a decent job he has to go to college, he also knows down deep that the odds are stacked against him going to college. But he also feels, 'If I'm not able to protect myself, I'm not going to make it.'.. That's a huge contradiction."

Romano confronted such contradictions again in the Boston tenements that house relocated refugee families from Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos, Families crowding 10 people into one apartment, and children with no place to study, responsible for chores of cooking and caring for younger siblings, defied his expectations.

"It began suprising me when they did study," Romano says of the Children. "They may have had flashbacks, they have been thinking of their mother or father in a refugee camp...It's not a proper assumption that kids recieve a lot of love and attention."

Romano scorns those who convince themselves by reason or argument that social problems do not exist, or are intractable without the self-help of its victims. "If they intellectualize it to that point, why go out into the community?" Romano asks. "They already know all the answers.

For Romano, academic understanding, book-learning, is not sufficient either. "I don't think it's enough to intellectualize it. By nature, it's second-hand and it's fiction."

Instead, his dogma is simple. He has little patience for those who refuse to acknowledge the struggle and suffering that dog the lives of human beings everyday throughout America's cities.

"How do you dispel [the illusion]? Simply go out into the environment and see that it's not universal to have opportunity, to have the resources you do, the great school system or a supportive environment, For them to do what you do they have to go against the grain just to go to school.

"I feel that my talents and success are not a product of my own self but a product of my environment, and I want to use the talents I have in a socially constructive way. I see myself as a tool that can be used the in the best way possible to improve the world."

Recalling with rancor a speech by a Harvard alumnus to newly admitted Atlanta high schoolers, Romano says, "He said, these people are the `creme de la creme of our society.' Now all of us have heard that, that this group of people are a lot better because they did everything themselves."

"Look," he says with a touch of exasperation and a hint of dogmatism to classmates, "you're here because you had a lot of advantages and a supportive environment to get here...and because of what you've been given you have a duty to do something with it."

Anthony Romano borrows the language of his cause from courses in his concentration of Social Anthropology, plus academic work on the civil rights movement, a seminar with Robert Coles '50 and Afro-American Studies classes on social justice. But the combination is uniquely Romano's, reinforced by a certain down-home common sense.

Described as "the most pessimistic idealist," or as an "optimistic pragmatist" by acquaintances, Romano seems to understnad that the secret to a moral philosophy lies in its contradictions and occasional inconsistencies. He firmly holds that the guide to the right often depends more on one's heart and turn of mind than on doctrine and sometimes even reason--and that in any case hands-on experience refutes feelings of helplessness or passivity.

"You start by asking, `Is there inequity in our society?' I think there is. That question for many is never asked. If it were asked, there's the potential that some people will work for a better society.

"I believe community service is one way to do that. I believe that the hands-on way is the sure-fire way...but people see it as only potentially bringing bad things to their lives. They see their lives as set. [Social work to them means] more guilt, more responsibility, them having to change their comfortable lives."