 Well, let me tell you, I was born here in San Antonio on Crockett Street where my father had a house that he bought with two bedrooms. My mother was an uncompromising housekeeper. By that I meant everything was clean in order. My mother never had a job outside of her home. My mother, every time when I came home from school, my meal was on the table. Orders were given to me to get out of my school clothes, get into the play clothes, and there was the meal. Then after that, I studied. My dad bought the home with $100 that he could not borrow from the bank here. He went to Austin because his mother was in Austin. Her husband died in his forties. My grandfather died in his forties. He seemed to have been a progressive man. My grandmother came out of slavery at 13. She never had formal education. My grandmother laid a foundation in the life of her sons and daughters that education was primary. She made that primary in our life. When my dad and mother married at 19, they were 19 when they married, which meant that they did not get a lot of education themselves. But anyway, there was no question in my mind as to whether or not I was going to school. My dad would not even take me to work during the summers on the Pullman service. Men who were going to college, going to medical school, often worked in the summertime to get their money to go to medical school by working with the Pullman Company, working on those Pullman cars. My dad did not want me to work there. He said, you might like it. And I don't want you to get to it. I don't want you to leave and do this. You might like it. I had a very good relationship with both my mother and father. They gave me some freedom that I'm sometimes wondering if I would have given me that freedom if I had been my father. But they laid a great personal responsibility on me. For example, my father would say, yes, you can use the car. And the only reason I'm letting you have it is because I know you are not going to have anybody else driving you. And you're not going to be speeding up down the street and you're going to be looking after the car, not going to have an old crowd in the car. Well see, by the time he set all those responsibilities on me, he was taking all the fun out of my car. He laid a lot of responsibility on me, but he gave me a lot of freedom. A lot of freedom. That is, you know, I was driving around in my car when other fellows couldn't even get their car. You know, I was moving into places and doing things that they couldn't even get. But he did it by laying on me great responsibility. But never before that time, I was constantly desirous of satisfying what my dad expected of me. Now he never tried to dictate the feel I would go into. I don't know whether he was that happy that I decided to go to seminary. Because he had, we had some preachers in our family, but I don't know whether my dad was that happy about my going. He never discouraged me, but he never gave me the impression that this is what I want you to do. So he gave me the freedom to choose my direction. I went to high school here, finished my school, went to Morehouse College, finished Morehouse College, with the idea that I would probably practice medicine someday. Came out of Morehouse College and began to do some work because I was not able to go to medical school. I ended up working in a little, what we'd call a convenience store for my uncle where we sold ice and delivered wood and delivered ice. And I had been working in that. It was the time I was 14 years old. I left there, I had an experience in California, went to work there as a shoe giant boy in a white barbershop, which was a very, very humbling experience for me. If you know some of the attitudes of men who come out of Morehouse, there's a certain arrogance that they have by the fact that they're graduates of Morehouse College. And when you have to shine shoes after graduating from Morehouse, it's a real humbling experience. But I did that. I did that because I wanted to eat. And also because I wanted to prove to my parents that I was not a liability, that I could take care of myself. I wanted to prove that to them. And therefore I could have sent for money, but I never sent for any money. I stayed out there and did whatever I could. And then finally I went back to Marshall from Los Angeles to Marshall, Texas. That too is a cultural shock. Because a great deal of difference between Marshall, Texas and Los Angeles, California. But I went there back to Marshall, Texas, where I sold insurance, industrial insurance. Industrial, without an automobile, I'd like to say, no automobile, what you'd do is catch the bus, go into the black neighborhoods, go from house to house and collect the dues on their policies. But I met a lot of wonderful people and I began to think of my own life. I began to ask myself, where am I? Where are you going? What is it that you want to do? Who are you really? You're not going to medical school. What are you going to be? I began to enter homes of people who were making like $15 a week working for the boundary in Marshall and had three or four children. You go into their homes and their homes were very humble homes. And I began to see these people and they were happy and they found some meaning in life. They loved each other. I said, you know, there's got to be something here that I haven't gotten because I'm totally disturbed. I'm unhappy. I have no direction for myself. So I set out to go to seminary to find myself. Not ready to preach but to find myself because I felt like these people have known God. They know God and they never did it. There's something in this that I haven't found and I felt I needed to know more than I knew that I'd gathered from Sunday School. And I went to seminary with that in mind, not with the mind preaching. As a matter of fact, I had a great resistance to the whole idea of preaching because I always felt that preachers tended to help people to conform and I never wanted to be in that circle. There was something in me that was sort of rebellious. I never wanted that goal of helping individuals to conform and I felt that many times that had to be his role. Now it does not necessarily, it did not necessarily have to do that but that was my feeling about it. That's why I didn't want to do it. I ultimately got involved in study at the seminary and Andover Newton would be called a liberal seminary. Now I went to Andover Newton because I could not go to any seminary in Texas. There was not a single seminary in Texas that would take a black person at that time, not a single one. That said something to me about the Christian faith, said something to me about the church, said something to me about my need to try to understand the Christian faith. Evidently, it says something more than this. This is not what it has to say. If I can't go to seminary simply because I'm black, I cannot participate in the churches, in the communities simply because I'm black. This says something to me I need to know more about. What this Bible is really teaching and what it really has to say and I went to seminary with that in mind and there I discovered an identity as a preacher and then came back to San Antonio and began to engage myself in what I call the civil rights. I began there, engaging myself in the civil rights struggle. I began by working in the problem sections of our city. I preached at the cameo theater every Sunday morning and walked up and down those streets back alleys where men had been murdered and prostitutes were walking in and out of that community. I worked in that community. I had no sponsoring group. I simply asked the theater owner if he would let me preach there and I could get people from all up down that street to come in that theater. I left here and went to a church in Corpus Christi and stayed there for two and a half years, came back here as the pastor of Mount Zion. I couldn't get those same people. They weren't going to come to Mount Zion but in that theater where they could hide in the darkness where they didn't feel intimidated by what people had on where I could say to the prostitute, come over here, I want you to lead this group in a song. And she felt come on because most of the time she was a church girl that got lost somewhere. I mean, we think of these people as being evil and wrong. You find many people who just got lost in an activity that you can help them just making them sing a song, made them review where they had been and had more impact than all the preachers I was doing. So I'm saying all of this because this whole matter of civil rights was not something I joined. It was something that I was born into.