In the early 70s, in one of America’s most racially divided cities, kids from different races found themselves going to school together. A Boston program called Sidetrack brought students from Roxbury and Lincoln together—both in school and in each other’s communities. Fifty years later, one of those kids, Peter Thomson, tracked down his fellow students to see how it shaped them (which it did, in big ways) — and to reflect on whether something like it could work today. This was an interesting era in an endlessly interesting town. There’s an added urgency to this reflection as America is moving backwards on integration and race relations in general. The radical, forgotten experiment in educational integration that changed my life. “For the kids in my class, the teachers were the key … But no one I’ve been in touch with remembers either of them leading any formal conversations about race. In our class anyway, the adults rarely put their fingers on the scale or set bounds on what the kids could or couldn’t say to one another. They generally let us work things out among ourselves. And we generally did.” That, it turns out, is a revolutionary idea.