When I was 12, Pop and I moved to Somerville. There Pop became the pastor of St. Thomas A.M.E. Zion Church. Somerville was midway between Westfield and Princeton and was larger than both of them. It did not have the rigid caste system as Princeton. But the Black community there wasn’t as close physically or emotionally as it was in Princeton.

There they had a separate school for Black children. Mr. James L. Jamison ran it in a one-room, two-story building. He had moved north after the Ku Klux Klan burned down his schoolhouse and beat him. They did all of that because he insisted on keeping the school open during cotton-picking season.