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means and finding it with a pencil was a little strange to most people. It was a little strange to my family, but it was a kind of thing that I'm sure if I were to speak to most Negro young people today, while they might not have as great a tragedy sometimes happening in their family, they would find an identity of oneness. We could find a means of communication purely out of some kind of common interest in spite of the fact that I'm pretty near forty-seven years old and somebody who is nineteen or twenty years old, a Negro who comes out of Central Avenue, or Watts or Compton or someplace here. There's a oneness here. The difference, I think an important difference, is that by the time I had reached my teenage there were people who had reached out of this environment of Chicago. Names like Catherine Dunham that were beginning to come forward, Nelson Algrin, who was a little older but was a part of the south side of Chicago. Willard Motley was writing. Archibald Motley, the older brother of Willard Motley, was a painter and was quite a famous Negro painter at that time, nationally known. There was Charles Sebrig, who was a dancer, a poet, a playwright. There were many other figures, names that probably would be meaningless to you people. But we used to sit around...now this was when I was fifteen or sixteen...and every Saturday night, and talk about the arts, talk about, exchange ideas about art, exchange ideas about people.

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