<Begin Segment 11>

TI: But going back in terms of even before they desegregated, so how, how did it make you feel when you saw these, these inequities? Having prisoners of war and German and Italians treated better than U.S. soldiers of color?

CS: Yeah, it really didn't bother me. I was aware of it, and outrage is an unusual thing. Sometimes it is conscious, and sometimes it is not conscious. And to the extent that as a person of color, I would resent the fact that prisoners of war were being treated better than non-prisoners of war who were persons of color, it occurred to me that there was something wrong with the equation, but it never occurred to me to be so resentful of it that I was truly outraged. After the fact, as I look back on it, I, I think it was very typical of our white-oriented military society, is that if you are not white, you are sub-human, and if you are white, you're human. And they considered Italians white, they considered Germans as white, so they had white prisoners of war. They didn't have any prisoners of war of color. There were no Japanese prisoners of war at Camp Lee, Virginia, and I don't know whether, if they had had any, how they would have treated them, whether they would have treated them the same as they treated the German prisoners of war, or the Italian prisoners of war. But I was even then in the early stages of my awareness of the inequity of our government having prisoners of war who were being treated better than they were treating their own soldiers who were not prisoners of war. But what could one do about it? You just wait -- we used to have an expression: "for the duration of the war plus six months." And so you wait six months after the war is over, and then you decide what you're going to think about something, or what you're going to do.

TI: That's interesting. So after the military, you went back to school.

CS: Right.

TI: But at some point, you changed schools. Didn't you go to Temple University?

CS: Right, right.

TI: So how did that happen?

CS: Dr. Gray was president of Florida A&M University, and he left there, I think it had to be about 1948, and returned to Philadelphia. And I returned to Philadelphia with him, and that was how I ended up living in Philadelphia. Temple University was in my neighborhood, two blocks away, and so I enrolled at Temple University and again, pursuing this smorgasbord of courses -- [laughs] -- that Dr. Gray had decided for me. And I ended up with a degree in business education, which was a heavy emphasis on business administration. So I took courses in advertising and communications, all kinds of things, as part of the package that was my degree. And I got my degree in February of 1952 from Temple University.

[Interruption]

TI: So let's pick it up, you decided to attend the University of Washington law school. And I seem to recall in something I read that your mother was also in Seattle, or did she come to Seattle with you?

CS: Yeah, my mother had lived in Seattle for a number of years. I had a sister who lived in Seattle, and after my parents' divorce, my sister bought a house for my mother to live in with her then four younger children. And so I came to visit my mother in 1951, my first trip to Seattle. I fell in love with Seattle, the city. Lake Washington was crystal clear, Mt. Rainier was visible, and I thought to myself, "This is God's country. If they have a law school here, that's where I'm going." Because otherwise I would have been doomed to law school at the University of Pennsylvania in downtown Philadelphia, and I wanted to get away from Philadelphia. And so I decided to go out to the law school at the University of Washington. And the associate dean I know very well, and I'm still in touch with him, his name was A. John Nicholson. A. John said to me, "Do you have a transcript?" And I happened to have had a photocopy of the transcript in my pocket, I showed it to him and he looked at it and he said, "You're admitted." That's the way I got admitted to law school. [Laughs]

TI: [Laughs] Little easier than it is now.

CS: Yeah. They hadn't invented the law school admissions test, the LSAT, and in those days in order to be admitted to law school, you had to have a degree from a recognized college or university in a field other than music or agriculture, and you had to have two semesters of accounting. And if you didn't have the accounting, you were allowed to take the accounting after you were admitted. I had my two semesters of accounting, I had my degree, and I had my performance. And so that's how I was admitted, and that was the beginning of my legal career, from law school beginning in September of 1952.

TI: Before we get to the law school part -- I'll ask a few questions about that -- but what was it, after you moved to Seattle, how would you, how was it different than Philadelphia? I mean, what, what did you notice about Seattle?

CS: Well, number one, you didn't have streetcars clanging in the middle of the night. In Philadelphia we lived on the street where the streetcars came all the time. But it was the antithesis of the urban area. Philadelphia was, was then and still is, a highly impacted urban area. Presumably high crime rates, heavy police activities. In the North Philadelphia neighborhood where we lived, the chief of police had armored vehicles patrolling the streets at night. This was the early reaction to urban crime. And I felt that I needed to get away from that kind of environment, so Seattle, in comparison to Philadelphia, was an oasis of calm, where people were polite and spoke to each other, the streets were clean, people lived in neighborhoods with lawns and grass, and flowers grew, and we had water on this side, Lake Washington, water on that side, Puget Sound, we had the magnificent mountains and the forests. And I thought, this is sort of like Eden. It's different. And my mother lived here, my sister lived here, and so I was sort of coming home, in a sense. That I was anchoring myself in my mother's home and going to a law school to get the education that I had promised to acquire, which was a law degree. And so that was how all of that happened. But I would go down to Madrona Beach, Lake Washington, and swim. I haven't been in Lake Washington for so many years, but this was an ideal world for me, entirely different than the intense urban environment of a city like Philadelphia or Chicago or New York, or places like that.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.