(gentle music) - I am Norm Silverstein.

Thanks for joining us.

I'm in good company today with someone who's a scientist, an activist and an educator.

The "Democrat and Chronicle" calls Dr. Walter Cooper, a superhero because of his contributions to the Rochester community, his devotion to equality, and his commitment to young people.

Dr. Cooper is associated with nearly every social equality institution in this community, from the Community Foundation to Action for a Better Community to the Urban League.

People who have seen you in the media might not know this, but actually, Dr. Cooper, you're a scientist by trade, and I'd like to go back to your early days, and what made you choose becoming a scientist?

- Well, that's very interesting, Norm.

I was born in Clairton, Pennsylvania, a small industrial town, 14 miles southeast of Pittsburgh in the Monongahela Valley region.

And I went to, I started elementary school in 1934.

My elementary school was only about 200 yards away from a pond.

And I was always intrigued, and especially in the spring by the tadpoles, and the frogs, and the other aquatic life that existed in that pond.

So I was inquisitive, very inquisitive.

And the other aspect of it, I had known African Americans who were pharmacists, doctors, even a lawyer.

But I didn't know any scientists, and I thought that would be a good challenge for me.

- But you grew up in a household where, although your father didn't read or write, your mother I understand, kept a lot of books in the house.

- Yes, that's true.

My father didn't have a day of education, but my mother had nine years of education in southwestern Georgia, and they migrated north in 1921.

And my mother's family were tenant migrants, and so they went from place to place.

My father started work in a sawmill at age eight in Henson, Florida, and somehow they met and they married and came north in 1921, settling in Clairton, Pennsylvania.

- But before you got even to thinking about college, you were in high school, I understand you were a football star, and that there were some issues that came up with African American women not being allowed to be cheerleaders.

And was that your earliest, I guess, time involved in activism and in trying to change that?

- Yes, that was the very first active, kind of movement to try to restore some rights or actually to achieve some rights for a group of young women in the school system.

The football squad was approximately 30% non-white, and there was an unwritten law that black girls would not be cheerleaders.

So the squad, the football squad won four games.

And the week before, our most traditional opponents, McKeesport, Pennsylvania, I was able to encourage the black athletes to boycott football practice for a day on Monday.

And the coach on Tuesday decided that whatever was needed, it should be changed.

- Do you remember what year that was?

- That was 1943.

I was 15 years old.

- Now, education is what brought you to Rochester.

I'd like to hear a little bit about that.

- Well, I graduated from Washington and Jefferson College in 1950.

And it was interesting those days since there were probably four siblings younger than I still at home, I said, well, maybe I'll get a job.

And so I was interviewed by the DuPont Corporation.

They went through my resume and my activities at Washington and Jefferson College, and the interviewer said, well, you have a very dynamic and illustrious career at Washington Jefferson College, a star football player, an officer of your class, and a outstanding student.

But I just want to remind you that we do not hire blacks in our research facility in Wilmington, Delaware.

So I looked him in the eye, and I politely said, I think that's your problem, not mine.

- Hmm.

- And so I did not get a job directly.

So I went to Howard University and worked in a master's program in chemistry.

And that's where I met my wife, Helen, who also was a graduate student in chemistry.

I had a special course in Washington, DC from a person by the name of Dr. Terrell Hill, who had been a professor at the University of Rochester's chemistry department.

I took a special course under him in statistical thermodynamics, and I talked to him about, well, where do you think would be an appropriate institution for me to pursue a doctorate in chemistry?

And he highly recommended the University of Rochester.

He thought it would be an excellent fit.

So I applied and I came to Rochester around August 20th 1952 to pursue a doctorate in physical chemistry at the University of Rochester and its chemistry department.

- So it's 1956 now, Dr. Walter Cooper of Kodak.

What was that like?

- Well, it was very interesting, and I worked in a small group called Photographic Theory Laboratory, and it had the primary purpose of trying to unravel the theory of the latent image formation, you know, the very initial steps in chemical photography.

My first problem was a tough one.

I worked on the ability of gelatin to accept halogen, which is produced on the exposure of a film.

- Let's jump forward to 1964.

We just noted the 50th anniversary of the racial unrest here.

Now, I know you were out there yourself, trying to keep things from getting totally out of hand, but I also understand you have an interesting view of what people call the '64 riots.

That it was people like you who wanted to make change, who were in the streets as much as anyone else.

- The non-white population underwent an explosion in this community.

It was 5,000 in 1945, 7,000 in 1950, 17,000 plus in 1957, and in 1960, a tad under 24,000.

- And why was that?

- Because I would say called truck farming in the area, it kind of exploded.

You had farms in Colliersville, Sodoma Farm in Brockport, farms in Williamson and Sodus, and it needed labor.

And the labor, it was the second surge, I would say, of the influx of blacks from the south into the Rochester area.

- And how did that change things?

- It was a difficult process because I'd like to give reference to when other communities or groups came to Rochester in waves, for example, when the Jewish community was expanding in the beginning of the 20th century, you had, almost immediately formed Bain Street settlement in 1907.

And then when the clothing industry started expanding in 1912, 1913, they were hiring cutters and tailors from Sicily and Italy.

You had the Caltanissetta Society founded in 1913.

And in England during World War I, the settlement agency concept started to develop, and it was actually implemented here in Rochester with Genesee Settlement Agency, Lewis Street and so forth, to take care of immigrant streams come into the community.

No such instrument, community instrument was developed or institutionalized to meet the demands of an incoming population that came from a agricultural economy running headlong into a rather sophisticated industrial economy.

And I see that as one of the basic problems that has vexed this community, with the expansion of people who are looking for opportunity, but an educational institution that did not at least prepare the parents that their children had to compete in a highly sophisticated industrial community.

And now we're faced with the very vexatious problem of how do you prepare a generation coming, whose parents come from an agriculture economy to be participants in a digital economy, which is emerging?

- Well, you're very involved in efforts to try to change things in education.

There's a school named after you, School Number 10, the Dr. Walter Cooper Academy.

And I know you're very committed to it.

So what, what do you see as perhaps a way to start to bridge that gap?

- What I see, I think is some fundamental differences in the population, which is impoverished compared to the one of the depression years.

There's some fundamental differences.

I grew up during the Depression years, but you had family.

At the time of the Depression years, over 80% of black children lived in a household with two adults.

That persisted until the Moynihan Report came out in 1965, which showed that, at that time, you still had over 70% of black children living in a household with two adults.

But from 1965 until the present 2010 census, there was a almost an exponential decline in what you would call children living in a household with two adults.

In the African American population, it's only 30%.

So if you're caught in a situation where there's been a serious erosion of the family, what is an adequate substitute in terms of education to meet the hopes and aspirations of a new generation of children?

And my feeling is the school becomes the refuge for the children.

Others have talked about residential schools and so forth, but it's still the family.

- You're a former member of the New York State Board of Regents.

Do you think that as a government, we've been focusing on some of the wrong issues.

I mean, one of the big debates right now is about Common Core, but you don't mention Common Core or teaching, you're talking about the family and about support for the students.

- While I was a voting regent from 1988 until 1998, and as an emeritus, I still serve on two regents committees.

I'm of the opinion that the Common Core may have emerged out of the experience of New York State Regents, for example, going to sending groups to Europe in 1989 and 1992.

For example, I visited the German system twice those years, and you saw the high quality, especially of their apprenticeship programs.

And we asked ourselves the questions, why would a country whose economic base was destroyed during World War II and within a period of less than 50 years, emerge as the strongest economy in Western Europe?

And one has to take a look at the educational system, and you come up with the answer.

A system that has some tracking in it, but has mobility in it and has probably, the world's best apprenticeship programs.

And so in the early 1992, we attempted, we had $10 million from the National Science Foundation to institute or revolutionize the teaching of math science technology in our K-8 STEM program.

Rochester had three schools, Buffalo.

- What year was this?

- This was 1992.

- 1992 and we're still talking about STEM.

- Yeah.

Because it was never really implemented.

I'll give you an example.

Rochester had three schools, New York City only had four.

We had schools 39, 43 and 55.

We had very excellent staff development programs at Saint Paul Technical Institute during the summers.

55 never participated, they were kicked out of the program at midpoint of the five year program.

43, with a black principal was only lukewarmly involved, and they left on their own initiative.

Only one at Rochester School stayed in the program, that was '39, with Cecilia Golden as principal.

And the lead teacher, Lynn Gatto, who now runs the Horizon program at the University of Rochester.

But Lynn Gatto was the state teacher of the year in 1999, and the National Teacher of the year in 2005, that school did an excellent job of participating in a STEM program, 1992 to 1997.

- Well, not every school can have the teacher or principal of the year or of the country.

So what happens with the other schools, why did they drop out or get kicked out of this program?

- Well, my personal opinion is that you're not, there was a rejection of having an external program, external source, supposedly dictating to you what the children needed.

And they themselves had not taken a careful assessment of what children needed to be highly competitive in a global economy.

The regent saw it, but we did not get the cooperation.

Another thing, we talk about charter schools today.

In 1994, the regents recognized the pressure for charter schools.

So there was the concept of 21st century schools and what were the 21st century schools.

Each school district, and we must have had 720 school districts in the state at that time, could choose schools to be designated as 21st century schools.

Their performance would be reported directly to the commissioner of education, bypassing what critics call local mandates and so forth.

The first year of the program, and I chaired the committee, we had 30 applicants, we chose 10.

The second year we only had 10.

They boycotted the 21st century concept.

I see a distinct difference between the community of the sixties in terms of leadership, in the sixties, maybe it was catalyzed by the fact we had a national civil rights organization and movement going on, and the community was certainly energized by the visits of Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, A. Philip Randolph, Thurgood Marshall, and others.

- [Norm] You knew some of these people.

- Well, yes, I met them.

I knew Malcolm X very, very well.

- How did, how did he influence you?

- Well, Malcolm X influenced me to the extent that he was a man with a brilliant brain.

He was highly educated, and I often thought that if he had been born under and reared under different circumstances, he would've been our quantum physicist.

So it just highlighted to me the necessity to train people well, in terms of education.

See, the appearance of Malcolm X in this community was initiated by the fact that in November of 1962, out of about 1,330 prisoners, there were about 770 blacks, 17 of whom were black nationalists.

And they had the temerity to request to have a Muslim minister come in one day a week to provide services.

The warden turned it down, so they went on a hunger strike, and that brought Malcolm X to the community in November of 1962.

In February, 1964, when we had a meeting at Bain Street on police brutality, we had 800 in attendance.

He gave a fiery speech, but he said, his last comment was, "Now, go home in peace, don't tear up your own communities."

That was in February, 1964.

The last time I saw him was February 15th, 1965.

He was assassinated six days later.

I met Martin Luther King Jr in February, I believe 1958, when he visited Colgate Rochester Divinity School.

So you had those kinds of meetings taking place, and the community was not isolated from national leadership that was doing significant things.

A. Philip Randolph came here and Abernathy.

And so the community was really apprised of what was happening from a national scene.

- [Norm] What about Thurgood Marshall?

- Thurgood Marshall was a very large, heavy voice, dynamic person, and he believed in analogies of his involvement in civil rights.

And I'll never forget that the reception, or maybe during his presentation here, people said, be patient, wait for time.

He said, well, if you are asking me to wait for breakfast, I'm willing to do that.

And if dinner is late, I'm willing to wait.

But if a man has his hands around my throat, choking me to death, don't ask me to be patient.

- Now, you have two children who have followed you in education.

- [Walter] Yes.

- They're both at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

- Well, my youngest son who has a doctorate out of Harvard in economics and his wife, are on the faculty at Hobart and William Smith, and my son has just retired, and he's writing books.

In fact, he and his brother, are writing books, a book about my life.

- We're running out of time, so I want to ask you the same three questions I ask all my guests, starting with, if there's one thing you could change about this community, what would it be?

- I think that people have to understand some of the historical context of the emergence of the various immigrant groups and racial groups in this community.

And I think they have to have a better understanding of how some groups have become disadvantaged because of changes in our economy.

For example, I see clearly the problem of inequality because my father worked as a laborer for 44 years, but as a laborer, he made enough money to provide shelter and actually, maintenance for a family of seven children, a person as a laborer today cannot do that.

So that was a glue that kept families together.

And I think instead of blaming everything on poverty, let's look in a historical context, how people have been impoverished, and what mechanisms, and what they use to get out of impoverishment, for example.

I don't see any way out except through education as the defining role for transforming the life of a family.

My family was transformed by education.

And you know, out of the seven, five, went on to college, three earned advanced degrees in my family.

And we came from nothing.

I kid students at school that when I grew up, we lived on three square meals a day, oatmeal, corn meal and miss a meal.

But I think you, I still believe that there are family values and institutional values that persisted in the 60s and 50s, and Depression years that enable families to survive, and to encourage their children to go on to college.

See, what bothers me is, for example, I look at the black church, after the Civil War, it was primarily the Quakers and institutions funded by the Rosenwald Fund that provided monies and historical black churches, that provided the money and time to try to bring literacy to basically illiterate free slaves.

And so it was the same national black church bodies working with the Freedmen's Bureau and the Memorial Act that were the principal founders of the historical black colleges and universities.

So there's this heritage, but if you look for a memory of it, in terms of the activity of churches, you don't see it particularly in the area of education.

- Well, Dr. Cooper, despite all these challenges, you made Rochester your home, you raised your family here.

What do you love about Rochester?

- Oh, there, I think, I've had wonderful relationships with the people.

I've enjoyed that.

Many of the institutions I've had wonderful relationships with.

I love the scenery, the park systems, and the overall, I can tolerate the weather even in the wintertime.

But I think it has the fundamental elements to be, once again, to be an outstanding community.

It has a rich history, which we should know more about.

And often I will quote Frederick Douglas, and particularly in terms of educating young children.

Frederick Douglas once said, "It's easier to create strong children than to try to repair broken men."

So I have a strong belief that if we do the job right in pre-K to six, with the help and cooperation of parents or families, that no matter what the structure is, that we can see a new generation of educated young people who will make their, who will make their points in this community and in this world.

- And finally, what do you think is Rochester's best kept secret?

- I would say that the, one of the best kept secrets is the high quality of your medical institutions here.

And the effort that many of our institutions of higher learnings are doing to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

- Well, I'll be waiting for that book about Dr. Walter Cooper to come out.

So put aside one of those first editions for me.

- Okay, I will do that, Norman.

Thanks for having me on this program.

- Dr. Cooper, thanks for being my guest.

- Thank you.

- And thank you for watching.

You can share this program or watch it online at wxxxi.org and we'll see you next time on "Norm and Company."

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