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Norman, Willie, April 9, 1976, tape 1, side 2

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Jon Eric Johnson:  Okay well, what was the first organization that you
remember being affiliated with while growing up?

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Willie C. Norman:  The first organization would have to be the Baptist
Church my mother and dad attended.

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Johnson:  Any other organizations outside of the church?

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Norman:  Uh. Uh. Well, I fail to tell you that I had attended a one room
school for for a couple of years while I was in Georgia before my mother
and daddy brought me to Pittsburgh area. And one teacher taught everybody
the big, the little ones and everybody. And that was-- I think that was one
of the things I can remember because I can remember the first thing I
learned in school. The teacher teacher took a book from one of the students
the first day I was there. The first or second day I was there anyway, and
she pointed to the capital letter I. She said, You know what that is? I
said, no, I don't know what that is. And she pointed to my eye. She said,
You know what that is? I said, Yes, that's my eye. She said, Well, that's
an eye, too, and I'll never forget it. [laughs] That's actually happened.
Johnson: You were, uh--

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Johnson:  We were talking earlier and you mentioned, uh, an organization
you affiliated with, uh, uh, something to do with the socialist or
communist or--

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Norman:  Uh, this was during my high school days when I was a student at
North Braddock High School. Scott High School. Uh, the employment situation
in the early 30s. You see, I went into high school in 31, and, uh, the
Depression was-- had a good grip on the whole nation. And an organization
was formed in the areas around Pittsburgh. It had a national, uh, it was in
national scope called the Unemployed Council. It was said to be communist
inspired. Uh, how factual that is I can't say, really. But I do know that
that organization had a great impact on the establishment, what we call the
establishment, to start giving up some funds and some food and some
clothing and to stop people from being evicted, stop people from having
their lights and gas turned off. Uh, because that, that was going on
wholesale during those times. And I definitely remember that organization.
And I got involved with that organization along with a lot of other people
in the area. Blacks and Whites, of course, because the crunch was on
everybody. Uh, poverty knows no, no color basis, you know, no color line.
And from that organization, I got involved in the YCL Young Communist
League. A lot of people probably won't remember it, but I definitely do
because I was involved in it. And to me, that organization kind of opened
my eyes to a lot of things that I wasn't being taught in the, in the media.
I used to read a lot and. This organization gave, gave very distinct,
distinction between the classes. Between, between the haves and the have
nots. And I began to read a lot of their literature and understand some
things.

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Norman:  And I used to-- in those days, we had radios. We didn't have TV.
Listen to a man named Father Coughlin out of Indiana every Sunday evening.
He was, he was a mouthpiece for the-- what we thought at the time was a
mouthpiece for the poor. Father Coughlin was a hell of a man. He is
somewhat on the same order as Father Owens Rice locally. I have a great
admiration for Father Rice locally. Monsignor Rice now. But he was
nationally nationally known. [phone rings] [audio cuts]. And, and I'll
continue that. This why the unemployed council and reading and listening to
Father Coughlin and reading Heywood Broun's column that used to appear in
the daily Westbrook Pegler and these, these, these readings and things kind
of opened my eyes to a lot of things that I figured were of value to me and
to people, you know, social. The socialist writer Heywood Hale had-- not
Heywood Hale Broun. Heywood Broun. He used to write a column called "It
Seems To Me." he was a very good writer in my estimation. Other
organizations, like, uh, fraternities and churches. I later joined the
Presbyterian Church where I became an elder. I was a Sunday school teacher.
Incidentally, uh, Virginia Union University is a Baptist home Mission
Society school. I studied Bible history there. Uh, however, I never joined
the Baptist church. The only church I ever joined in my life. I never will
join another one because I don't approve of organized Christianity. Uh, I
got out of the church. As I said, I was a Sunday school teacher and an
elder in the Presbyterian Church.

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Johnson:  That's pretty-- just, uh, it's pretty interesting. You mentioned
organized Christianity and how you're opposed to it. Why?

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Norman:  Why? Its, uh-- Johnson: share it with us. Norman: I'll share my
views with you. Johnson: Please do. Norman: Yeah. Uh, organized
Christianity is a, uh. To me, it's, it's, it's a kind of a false doctrine.
It's a, it's a misnomer. I read up on the Nicene Council 300 years after
Christ was was dead and buried, and Christ was only a prophet. Christ
wasn't-- uh, uh, if you believe in the Trinity, then you, you go with it,
you know. But I don't believe in the Trinity. The Trinity is fictional.
There's where, there's where you're splitting hairs if you've got to
believe in the Trinity. The Trinity is, uh, is so unrealistic to me. To me,
understand. Uh, because, um, it just can't be. It's, uh. Christ was born by
word, shall we say, you know, And this is physically impossible. This is
physically impossible. Now-- and the Trinity came out of the Nicene Council
about 300 years after Christ was dead and buried when they tried to
organize the Christian church. And the ironic part about Christ to me is
that Christ was a Jew. Peter was a Jew. Paul was a Jew. And none of the
Jews accept Christianity. They wanted no parts of Christianity. Even today,
you know. Some people may say, well, hey, Jesus Christ. He said, Yeah. He
was a big man in my church, too. You know, this is in the vernacular. But
when you deal into it and I used to spend a lot of nights, I went to the
Catholic Church in Wilkinsburg and Saint James Church. They have a
beautiful library over there. And I got permission to roam through that
library and read and read and read and look. I could never find anything
that satisfied my desires that Christ himself, as we're taught that he was,
was God, except the Trinity.

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Norman:  And the Trinity was a document. A document now agreed upon at the
Nicene Council by church people and the Saint James version of the Bible
that we study today was not interpreted by the people that wrote it. The
Greeks wrote it, and the British over on there-- sitting over on the
British Isles interpret it to their own advantage, I'll say. I'll use that
term. Okay? Johnson: Very well. Norman: And the Saint James version was
documented by a man who was a whoremonger. For his approval now, because he
was the king. Understand, he was a whoremonger. He had bastard babies. He
had, he had he had a lair of women. Plus a queen, you know. And we're
studying that. And we're asking our people today, at this day and age, to
accept that as, as authentic. You know, it just can't be. It just cannot
be. You violate every law of nature. How did how did we arrive here? By the
seed of a man and the seed of a woman. Nature says there has to be the seed
of a man and a seed of a woman. To create conception. Do you hear what I'm
saying? Now but Christ, the one and only, that we're supposed to believe
was the 3 in 1, was not conceived this way. And of all the magnificent
scholars and students down through the ages, if you go back 5000 years, can
no one. There's no one that has a history and a record of any man that has
ever been to heaven and come back and told you about it. It's a myth. If
you believe in Santa Claus, you've got to believe in that. If you don't
believe in Santa Claus, then you've got to take a second look at that.
Johnson: Very well put. That's rather profound.

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Norman:  Very profound. I have to be profound on it because it's, it's-- I
tell you what it is. It's one of the greatest brainwashing jobs that's ever
been been put on on the face of the Earth by, by human beings or by a group
of human beings. This is true.

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Johnson:  Okay.

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Norman:  If you want to let it alone. That's good, though.

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Johnson:  Just jump back to organizations briefly. Any any of these
organizations that you were affiliated with in the past or are affiliated
with today, have they ever rendered you aid when you needed it?

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Norman:  Uh, I would have to say no. Now, like I stated previously, I'm a
Three Letter Mason. Okay. My wife sitting in there in the room, she and I
are buying a home. We paid on that house 12 years. I got in a union brawl.
I was kind of disfranchised and run off of jobs. Companies were called and
told not to hire me. We lost that home after 12 years. Our furniture was
put in the streets. I called brothers. Who are sworn to protect each other.
I couldn't get a dime's worth of help from but two brothers. I got 50 bucks
from one and $35 from the other. My furniture is sitting in the streets
right on Blackadore here in Homewood.

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Norman:  Okay.

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Norman:  So that's, that's the, that's the amount of money, monetary value
that it had. Okay. But I don't condemn I don't condemn the brothers.
Everybody strapped with his own problem. Okay. I'll buy that. But I think
in times of a crisis, there should be some way where if you're a brother,
you can come to another brother's rescue, especially if we're all poor
people. You know, [Johnson: Right] we have to we have to kind of pitch in a
few bucks or some manpower or renovate a room or do something to to to take
care of another brother. This is my belief. Now, the Christian church don't
even help you. The Christian church won't even help you. They'll send you
to the relief office down the blue building downtown. That's where they'll
send you. So fraternally, uh, I would say it's mostly a social thing with a
religious connotation. Labor organizations are on the other side of the
street. They're. They're fighting for economics and for political
advantage. This is the way I see them, that they got to look another
direction very soon. Labor organizations I'm talking about now, they got to
look at brotherhood and, uh, the human aspect of it. This is my belief.

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Johnson:  Okay. Obviously, from what you've said thus far, you're very
active in labor unions or in in labor movement or in your particular union.
Norman: Yeah. Johnson: Now, if elected president of your local. Uh, what,
uh, new philosophy or doctrine will you hope to implement to substantiate
what you just said to make some positivechanges ?

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Norman:  Well, I have very, very strong feelings in a lot of areas. Now,
our present president has been in our-- been in the presidency for the past
nine years. Uh, there have been no programs instituted in the organization
to reach in that direction, which I just mentioned, like brotherhood,
humanism, you know. It's all politics and let's get a job. If we don't have
any jobs, let's look for some jobs, you know, and let's keep the ball
rolling in that area. Now, we we call each other brother in our labor
organization. We address each other as a brother. We grab hands and shake
hands and call each other brothers. In the church it's the same thing, you
know. But brotherhood and humanism doesn't exist in the hierarchy of labor
organizations. Like I said, they're economically involved and politically
involved. This is for big stakes in-- organized labor is big business. You
know, just like US Steel or Westinghouse. Now, it's my belief and my
thinking that organized labor has to look in the direction of humanism.
Here's what I'm trying to say. Now, we've had brothers that have heart
attacks, fires and completely wiped out, evictions, children dropping out
of school for lack of 2 or $300, and no one is concerned. Now, I was on a
job where a brother got burned out one morning. We took up $600 for that
brother that week. This was a substantial help to he and his family. Right
up here in East Liberty. Now, I'm saying this and I'm telling my, my
constituency in the organization that we must if we're to be brothers, we
must begin to say we got to create a what we call a-- I call a distress
fund. This is in my union literature. We've got to be able to immediately,
in the case of a distressed person or a family who is a member of this
local, immediately come to their aid, check the genuincy of the distress
call, find out whether it's a genuine call or not, and immediately be able
to hand that family 2 $300 so they can get out of the streets or so they
can take care of that that man's family until his relief checks or what
have you, start coming his way.

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Norman:  There's a woman with four kids and her husband's laid up with a
heart attack. By the time she starts to get money from the, from the, from
the pension and welfare fund, she's out. She's out in the streets. But
where is that sum, the immediate sum necessary to tide her over until his
checks start coming? We have a fund for that set up through what we call
pension and welfare that takes care of hospitalization too. It also takes
care of man after he's retired. A certain amount. The amount-- the more you
have in, the more you get on your pension. Okay. And we have nothing to
bridge that gap and we've got to find a way to put something in escrow by
by volunteer offerings to bridge that gap. And at every union meeting,
should I become president, there's going to be some money taken up called
the distressed fund. And I don't want it to go over a thousand. If we get a
thousand in the Treasury, we cut it off and I hope we don't-- we'll never
have to use it, but we will have to use it. Okay. Now, if we should have to
have to use 3 or $400 of that money for a distressed case, then we start
recollecting. And while that when it reaches a thousand, we discontinue.
This is the format that I have in mind.

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Johnson:  You've obviously brought this up in the union meetings or to some
of your constituents.

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Norman:  I brought it up in the meetings. I've expounded on it at various
meetings. I've written written letters to the membership relating to this
very thing.

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Johnson:  What has been what has been the general reaction?

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Norman:  The general reaction has been warmly received. But how are you
going to how are you going to, you know, handle it? And my plan is that one
elected officer should be the chairman of the distress fund. Okay. With two
volunteer brothers from the rank and file, work with him to check out any
distress call and to immediately grab this money when they find it to be
genuine and run it to this man or to this woman or to this, this family.
And it's, it's not reimbursable. It's a gift from the membership.

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Johnson:  Okay. Okay. The Great Depression of 1930, 1930s, they had an
effect on almost everyone at that time who was around. And of course, being
young man myself, I wasn't there. So I would only have to, uh, talk to
people who are older than myself to, to really appreciate it. You mentioned
briefly that how hard it was back then, but could you could you be more
specific and say and just, you know, in general, what was the Great
Depression to someone like me who wasn't there?

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Norman:  Oh, the Great Depression was just what-- just what the word said.
It was a Great Depression. Mills, factories, business institutions
collapsed. The stock market crashed. I was caddying when it happened, and
I'll never forget it because we used to get a-- what we called then was a
generous tip would be 25 to 35 cents. 50 cents was a big tip from the man
that you caddied for. Tips cut down. Membership fell off at the golf
course. People lost businesses. A lot of people committed suicides because
they were bankrupt. I saw people in soup lines. Incidentally, I was, I was
a participant in the first picket line ever put around the county office
building during the 30s with people-- with a group of people from Braddock,
North Braddock, Rankin, Swissvale, and that general area begging for food.
I was a participant in that in that picket. Right on Grand Street in
Pittsburgh. They had police on horses and those days they had a lot of
police ride horses and they had those-- what we call headache sticks. And
they were very generous with them. And and we came down in trucks. We
didn't get the streetcars. They had streetcars in those days. You know.
Johnson: They still have them [laughs]. Norman: Yeah, Yeah. But I mean,
running through Braddock, Rankin, North Braddock going out to Wilmerding,
they had streetcars.

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Norman:  We went in coal trucks. Trucks and old raggedy cars. And it was a
county wide thing, organized by the organization that I previously
mentioned called the Unemployed Councils. And it had a great impact. And
they also had Father Coxey's Hungry March. We had Shanty Town in Pittsburgh
where people had lost their homes and they made homes in a section of
Pittsburgh down here called Shanty Town. Out of anything they could get
their hands on. Planks, cardboard, uh, waste materials, scraps of all
kinds. I saw people resole their shoes with old automobile tires. This was
common. I've seen this with my own eyes. I'm not exaggerating. I've seen
people in soup lines with buckets, what we call a galvanized bucket that
you use to scrub the floor with today. They would go down and get it in the
soup line and take soup back home for their families. And you had to go to
the police station in those days for-- that was the headquarters. Every
borough, every township, every village and hamlet in the outlying areas.
You had to go to the police station to get this food. Free food. And I also
have seen a lot of people will will verify this. The old timers, where if
you were an employee of the US Steel, you could get food that the US Steel
bought through Union supply who was a big outlet for the steel and the
manufacturing concerns in the area.

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Norman:  They supplied the food to US Steel. Us Steel would give it to the
people that worked for them and the US Steel truck would deliver it to your
home. Sacks of flour, sacks of sugar, sacks of potatoes, canned meat,
canned beef and stuff that they had bought from surplus from the federal
government who had had it in storage for years for for for army purposes.
For to feed the soldiers. Great big cans of beef. Cans, I guess they must
have weighed 5 pounds and it was all ground up, chipped up beef. You made
hash, you made what we might call today ground, you know, when you grind up
meat and make it like in a ball. Johnson: hamburger. Norman: Hamburger.
Yeah. They made a lot of hash and those great big cans as large as that
container on your stove there. And formerly US army surplus stuff. And the
mills bought it and the states bought it and distributed it through the the
county agency. We didn't have the welfare structures that we have today.
There was no cash money. We were on relief.

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Norman:  After a short time there, we got on relief to like everybody else.
You got a certificate according to the number in your family. So, for
instance, you had ten in your family. You got a certificate to take it to
the local grocers with your signature and your wife's signature. And the
grocer would accept that certificate and give you the said amount on that
certificate, like $15 with the groceries. Okay. No cash money, no check,
only a certificate. That's what we got. And that's how we got food. Through
certificates issued by the state, through the welfare agency here in the
city of Pittsburgh. There was a Black woman in charge of that agency at
that time. I've forgotten her name. She's dead and gone now, of course. And
she had assistance, of course. You know, the social worker that we know
today or the DPA worker that we know today was nonexistent. And these
people worked through a liaison officer directly with the local police
station. And that's where you lined up and got your food, shoes, blankets,
and everything. And even soup lines. They had stoves and things in there to
cook soup. They cooked there half of the night. Out on Braddock Avenue in
Braddock. I've seen this with my own eyes.

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Johnson:  It sounds like a a hassle.

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Norman:  It was a hassle. It was tragic. But it finally worked itself out.
It had to. When President Roosevelt was elected, there had to be a drastic,
very drastic turnaround in the whole system and everything else because the
country was in trouble. They had a march on Washington, and MacArthur and
his gang up there guarded Washington and they had quite a bit of trouble
there. They had trouble in there, because the country was on the verge of
collapse. We had troubles.

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Johnson:  Since you've moved here to Pittsburgh, have you maintained your
contact with your family down in Georgia? And to what degree? Norman: Some
of them.

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Norman:  Correspondence. I haven't been back, but all of my all the rest of
my family have. I never found time, seemingly. I always put it off today
until tomorrow, or next year, until next year. I haven't been back.

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Johnson:  You've never had-- you've never had any, uh, family reunions or
anything?

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Norman:  No, we've never had a family reunion. But I have met a number of
my relatives over in New Jersey and Philadelphia and here in the Pittsburgh
area. Quite a few of them have come where we say coming up North from, uh,
from Georgia since then.

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Johnson:  After the Depression and with the, uh, coming on of World War
Two. How were the changes, You know, how were Blacks specifically, uh,
affected by the war? What were the attitudes back then?

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Norman:  Uh, the attitudes didn't change that much. We still live in a
racist society, you know. But racism during the early days of the war and
even immediately after the war was still here. Racist attitudes, racist
habits still maintain their, their posture. Maybe not as, as, as vocal,
shall we say, because, uh, lynchings in the South, uh, subsided. Burnings,
like burning people's homes, Black activist's homes and things like that.
Of course, you. I know you're familiar or you've read about, uh, bombing of
churches and things during Martin Luther King's time. But the federal
government began to take a second look at activities of that nature. Uh,
this was not brought about to my way of thinking by pressures from within
so much as pressures from without. And when I say without, I mean outside
the continental United States. Because, you know, we preach-- and when I
say we, I mean the United States now. We preach a whole lot of freedom and
liberty and justice. But then when you have bombings of the nature that I
refer to, so many lynchings and so much disfranchising of theBblack man.
Uh, people abroad ask questions, and this has had a great impact on the
thinking of our federal upper leaders at the top level in our federal
federal government.

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<><> START HERE <><> Norman:  And then the changes started to come about.
The real changes, the real changes in the United States. Not 100% the fruit
of the activities of the Blacks and the so-called White liberals in the
United States. There's a great, great element outside the continental
United States that has an effect on these changes, too, for for economic
reasons. It's a very broad thing to get into. But I've watched this thing,
like I said, I-- my eyes were opened to some of these things when I first
got into the YCL and later in Washington, DC with the, uh-- I was still a
member of the YCL and the Communist Party and Communist literature and
socialist literature by a lot of the writers and listening to people like
Father Coughlin and people like that. And incidentally, there's a hell of a
book by Pierre Van Paassen, uh, that relates to a lot of this, uh, outside
pressures and the activities of people involved at the upper echelon in our
government that will tell you things If you can just read between the
lines.

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Johnson:  Of lynchings and bombings that you've mentioned, uh, were
lynching, lynchings and bombings, uh, predominant back, uh, in the days of
World War Two, or do they still lynch people? Norman: Yeah. Yeah. Johnson:
Do you remember--

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Norman:  Prior to that, too

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Johnson:  Do you remember any, any lynchings that you've heard about, like
here in the Pittsburgh area?

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Norman:  No, no, no, no. Not here in the Pittsburgh area. I've seen crosses
burned in the Pittsburgh area when I was a kid at the same cemetery where I
say I earned my first whole dollar. And in that same cemetery, there was
only 6 or 8 blocks from my home. When I was a kid, I saw crosses being
burned there.

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Johnson:  Was the Black community intimidated then?

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Norman:  Uh, not that much, I don't think. I think it was, uh. It was a
dying gesture on the part of the Ku Klux Klan who was supposed to have a
strong headquarters in the Wilkinsburg area. Because the Blacks in my area,
then we're pretty well loaded. They were loaded for bear, you know. And
this was a this was a threat at the at the Catholic community to where we
live. They were, they were almost all Catholics, you know, the Blacks and
the ethnic groups in my community.

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Johnson:  Okay aspects of life in Pittsburgh which came into conflict--
which came into direct conflict with your upbringing.

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Norman:  Conflicts. Aspects of conflicts.

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Johnson:  Which came into direct conflict with your upbringing.

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Norman:  Uh, I'm not too clear on what you're saying. Really.

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Johnson:  If your parents told you one thing, you went out in the street
and you saw another thing. How would you react to that?

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Norman:  Uh, I would have to go with my parents thinking as a rule. Because
I had great admiration for my mother and my daddy. And I I would believe
what mother and daddy told me about, about most things. Unless, it was
something that, uh, was low keyed and very personal.