I became much more aware of race in the early 1970s when my father founded a local chapter of a relatively new and growing non-profit, A Better Chance (ABC, https://abetterchance.org/). ABC’s mission remains the same 50 years later: to “place high-performing students of color into the nation’s leadership pipeline through increased access to the nation’s top independent and public schools.” My high school, in upper-middle-class Simsbury, regularly ranked as one of Connecticut's top college-preparatory public high schools.

Whereas I had a single Black friend in Kindergarten, Larry, who was bussed from Hartford through an initiative called Project Concern, he didn’t return for first grade. Thus, I had no interaction with Black students for the remainder of my elementary school tenure.

I was in the sixth grade when my Dad started the Simsbury ABC chapter. Nine sophomore-aged Black and Hispanic boys moved from New York, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Philadelphia to attend Simsbury’s high school for their final three years of K-12.

Blacks moved, in my mind, from a concept to a reality. These boys were intelligent, friendly, and funny. This was very different than I anticipated, given the prejudice prevalent in American culture then (and what I had clearly but unknowingly absorbed).

I didn’t realize the controversy their arrival had stirred in the town. When the local ABC board of directors recruited the boys and found them a group house close to the town center, many Simsbury neighbors did not receive it well. Some argued that the town shouldn’t be bringing this “element” into our quiet little village and our schools. Others claimed it would be too disruptive for our kids.

Despite the controversy, the boys arrived, attended school, and three years later, eight of the nine graduated (one left after his sophomore year because he was homesick). The boys were pioneers in our lily-White town, integrating our schools more powerfully than a handful of Project Concern children who were bused into town daily from Hartford for a decade or more.

Even more powerfully for me, when I entered my sophomore year in 1976, three new boys joined the program—Mike, Chuck, and John, all African American. They became good friends of mine during our last years in high school. By spending time with them almost every day, in class and sometimes after school, they became real people to me as my perspective about Blacks was no longer fueled by the Black tropes featured on TV shows or the evening news—like the scary or angry Black man or the loud and sassy Black woman.

Fifty-some years later, the program persists in Simsbury. Yet the boys attending Simsbury High School are still among only a small number of youth of color enrolled. Unfortunately, I lost touch with all three high school friends once I started college. I would not have someone I could genuinely call a Black friend again until I had lived in Washington, DC, for a couple of years after moving there in 1988.

In those intervening years, I found myself in surroundings almost exclusively with White people—in college, my post-graduate advocacy years, and graduate school. I thought about race far less during those years and began settling into an almost exclusively mono-racial life.

With Whites everywhere.

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