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AI: Now, tell me, what made you conscious of the Brown decision? You were still relatively young. You were a teenager. And at teenage years, many young people are not paying that much attention to national news or social or political issues. What caused you to be aware of this decision?

PI: Well, this has a lot to do with what happened before we moved to Delaware. And to go all the way back -- my parents, my father came from a rigidly Protestant family and my mother from a Catholic family, and they both gravitated to the Unitarian Church. Now the Unitarian Church, which is not a large denomination, but it's always been fairly influential in this country -- a lot of our presidents were Unitarians all the way from Thomas Jefferson, William Howard Taft, in fact was Unitarian. But the church itself, which grew out of the sort of the Enlightenment in England and this country, and people like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau, the Unitarian Church was a church that had rejected the Christian Trinity. That's why they were called Unitarians instead of Trinitarians. And there's an old saying, "Unitarians believe in one God at most." And it's a church that always has emphasized thinking for yourself, developing your own moral and ethical code and theological opinions. And there's a real diversity within the Unitarian Church. There are people who consider themselves Christians, although not Trinitarians, and people who are agnostics and even atheists. So it's quite a mixture. And it welcomes people basically who are searching for the things that are meaningful in their lives. So my parents were Unitarians, and I grew up in the Unitarian Church. I went to Sunday school. When we lived in Richland, Washington, my father helped to found the Unitarian Fellowship, a group of people that is not really a church, doesn't have a minister, but they meet every Sunday and have a Sunday school for kids. So I grew up in the Unitarian Church, and I remember a lot of the lessons we had. I stayed in it all the way through high school. We spent a year, for example, with a textbook. And I remember all the Unitarian textbooks. They all came out of the church headquarters in Boston, 25 Beacon Street. And one was called Jesus, the Carpenter's Son. And it was a book really about Jesus as a person, but not emphasizing the fact that he was supposedly the Son of God, but just a real person. Growing up, his father was a carpenter. They lived a very humble life. And he decided that he wanted to help people, and he would do things to help people. And there was another one which was very influential, I forget what year of Sunday school, but it was called The Church Across the Street. And we spent a whole year -- this was while I was in high school, I think -- visiting other churches. Every other Sunday, we would go visit another church. And I remember we visited a Mormon church and a Greek Orthodox church, which I found fascinating with all the, the incense and liturgy. And we visited a Black Pentecostal church, where there was a lot of clapping and shouting, and Unitarians do not emote very much in church services. So I got a real appreciation from the very early days I was growing up of how everybody is different, and we have to respect those differences and appreciate them.

Another thing that I think influenced me a lot was that my parents made it very clear -- in fact, the one lesson that I remember learning very explicitly from my parents was racial tolerance and inclusion. We didn't have a lot of friends who were not white. The General Electric Company didn't hire them. They didn't live in our neighborhoods. But we did know people and went out of our way, and in fact the Unitarian Church, particularly in Cincinnati where I spent my high school years, was a mixed church. And my, the Sunday school teacher who had the most influence on me was a black woman. And I don't remember her name unfortunately, but I do remember when I went to prison as a draft resister and was first put in jail, waiting for a transfer to federal prison in Cincinnati, Ohio, she came and visited me. She'd read about me in the newspaper, that I started serving a prison sentence. And she came to visit me. And I remember the guards at the, at the jail, the Hamilton County Jail, saying, "Irons, you have a visitor, but I, it must be a mistake because she's black." And I remember, in fact, when I recall this, which is not that often, I remember how much that meant to me that she came to visit me. So that had a tremendous influence on me as a child growing up.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.