Among the other projects I’d worked on for Gwen was researching private schools that had been created to avoid complying with Brown v. Board of Education yet managed to maintain tax-exempt status. When I’d driven alone to rural Tennessee and pretended that I was moving to town and wanted to find a segregated school for my child, I had felt like a private investigator. Other times under Gwen’s tutelage, I felt like a journalist, and still other times, I felt like a social worker.
