That's where much of the contact between blacks and whites came in those days. Whites employed blacks, often to do household work.

[Eddie], WHO TURNED out to be hard-working and smart and harmless, comes to mind today as the Pinellas County school system begins the 2000-01 school year. This is the first year that the Pinellas system has been declared legally free of discrimination by a federal judge, a ruling that may end most of the county's forced busing that began in 1971.

"It cost millions of dollars, destroyed black communities, devastated black and white neighborhoods, uprooted black kids - who paid the biggest price - and angered a lot of whites.