Unbought and Unbossed

by Shirley Chisholm

One experience that keeps recurring to me is a meeting I had just before Christmas 1968 with a group of redcaps from Penn Station. Not many people know that a majority of these porters, elderly men now, have college degrees. When they got out of school during the depression, they discovered that what they had been told about education being the way out of poverty was not true for black men. They have spent their lives growing gnarled and bent carrying white travelers' bag- gage for nickels and dimes. Imagine the waste — the human potential that they once had, the loss to our society when they were denied a chance to serve it as they were ready and able to do. One told me with tears in his eyes, "Keep on fighting, for all the black children." He was reconciled to the fact that it was too late for him to have a fair chance, but he did not want it to happen to another generation.