Question:
Dick, can you tell us when you began at CRS?

Answer:
I began in June 1968, just before the Democratic Convention in Chicago. I was hired to be Midwest Regional Director in Chicago. At the time, there were only four regions; this was the fourth.

Question:
What were you doing before you came to CRS?

Answer:
Immediately before, I was regional director of the Washington D.C. office of the U. S. Small Business Administration.

Question:
What kind of work did that entail?

Answer:
I managed an office that provided financing and management assistance to small businesses in that region. I came to SBA a couple of years earlier from a career in journalism; I had been covering SBA for my own publication. At SBA I worked in what was called Lyndon Johnson’s Poverty Program. It was the economic opportunity loan program nicknamed the minority loan program to provide loans to businesses that weren’t owned by white males. That led me to the job of regional director of the local office in Washington DC.

Question:
What got you interested in CRS?

Answer:
I heard of it many years earlier actually, and had explored working for the agency when I was in Washington in the media, but there was nothing available there for me at the time. In 1968 my CRS was looking for someone with experience in race relations and running a federal office. My name came out of the Civil Service Commission computer. I got a call asking if I was interested in the job in Atlanta or Chicago. I said I was interested because you always say that when someone offers you an opportunity, but we were pretty well settled in Washington at the time. My family had just bought a home in the District of Columbia and we had no thoughts of moving. So I didn’t take this too seriously. I scheduled the interview, but didn’t do the usual preparatory work that I would do if I was seriously interested. Just before the interview Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and the city went up in smoke. I was in the middle of it because many of our borrowers’ stores were going up in flames. We had a major roll in responding in the days and weeks after the riots, and all of a sudden the immensity of the work that had to be done came down on me. I felt that SBA wasn’t the best place to be doing it. So I went to that interview. It was postponed because of the riots, but I went to the interview and ultimately I was offered a job in Chicago.

Question:
How long did you stay there at CRS?

Answer:
Well I was the Regional Director for fourteen years.

Question:
Why did you leave?

Answer:
Enough was enough. When I went in, Ramsey Clark, a liberal was the Attorney General. Lyndon Johnson was President. By the time I arrived in Chicago, and got my certificate of appointment, it was signed by John Mitchell, President Nixon’s conservative Attorney General. But interestingly, those politics didn’t affect us directly for a while. Nixon let the agency function and grow for about five years before they cut it back. Late4r President Reagan was there, and I decided it was time to move along. I had never been in a job for as long as three years before then, so I went back to my ways of moving around.

Question:
Can you tell us about a case that typifies your work at CRS?

Answer:
As Regional Director, my typical work was in supervision and management. But I did have the opportunity to take cases from time to time. Either I would choose one, or occasionally, I would be assigned to one. One case that I developed was a mediation at St. Cloud Reformatory for men in Minnesota. The agency started a mediation program in 1972. When civil rights protests began moving from the streets to negotiations tables, there was a need for mediators and CRS was in the vanguard of the community mediation movement. CRS was established under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and in 1972 moved into mediation. Mediation training was provided for one mediator and the regional director from each region. We spent two weeks training in New York and Washington, with former labor mediators who had moved into the community field through a Ford Foundation-funded program with the American Arbitration Association. We were trained for two weeks, returned to our offices and the new mediators were assigned a supervisor out of Washington. Regional Directors were told to find one case to "get your feet wet.”

Question:
Now when you say "we,” are you saying the Regional Directors were the mediators, or were the Regional Directors and other people trained to be mediators?

Answer:
There were two rounds of training. The first was for the mediators in the field. The second round of training was for the Regional Directors, so they’d be equipped to do the work as well. Then mediators were told to identify a case suitable for mediation for themselves. The case I found and developed lasted for the better part of the year. It was an extraordinary experience. You don’t want to hear it all, but just for the record, I wrote a detailed chapter about it for the book, "Restorative Justice, _________________, by Galloway and Hudson, published by Criminal Justice Press in 199_. I want to say at the outset in discussing this case that prisons have changed considerably since I did this mediation. Gangs and drugs were not a major factor in those days. So what we accomplished in the early 1970’s might not be possible today. Minnesota had a very progressive system which focused on community corrections. Whenever they could, they would put people in community settings rather than behind bars. So the people behind bars were the most serious offenders. The youthful ones were at the State Reformatory for Men in St. Cloud, about 75 miles from the Twin Cities. The background is that in an effort to change with the times, the reformatory superintendent did some things to recognize racial differences, and in the process, he inadvertently exacerbated racial tensions within the institution. St. Cloud had about 450 confined youths. white males predominated. There were about 25 American Indians, about the same number of African Americans, and five or six Hispanics. To help compensate for their minority status, the inmates of color were permitted to organize "culture” groups that had certain privileges. They had outside advisors who came in and worked with them. They could maintain a cultural organization with an office, telephone and staff person within the institution; observe ethnic and cultural holidays and conduct a banquet with outside visitors once a year. This would in some ways compensate for the Alcoholics Anonymous and Junior Achievement chapters, or other activities in which only white inmates participated. Everything that moved in that reformatory moved racially. There wasn’t much crossing of lines.

Question:
Why did this cause a problem?

Answer:
At first the culture groups worked fine. Then the white inmates, seeing the esprit, cohesiveness and sense of community enjoyed by racial minorities, decided that they needed some organizations. So all of a sudden there was a German culture group, and then there was an Italian culture group, and they were granted culture group status by the administration. The German American group was actually a block of inmates devoted to racist activity and they provoked fights with the black inmates. Rioting broke out on several occasions and some of that found its way into the Minneapolis newspapers where I learned about it. I placed a call to the Minnesota Director of Corrections in St. Paul and suggested that the Community Relations Service might be of assistance. He greeted me profusely, and the next week I was meeting with him in his office, telling him all the wonderful things our agency could do. We had a corrections specialist in Washington, we had a mediator in Dallas, Bob Greenwald, who had just completed a very successful mediation in the Louisiana prison system. The commissioner apologized when I met with him, because his deputy commissioner, who had oversight of St. Cloud, wasn’t present. I told him that we could assessment conditions at St. Cloud and that we had a training capacity and mediation capacity and we would be pleased to go on-site and work with them. He said he was interested and that I would be hearing from his deputy within the week. But two weeks passed and there was no call. When I called the commissioner he was surprised, and the next day his deputy phoned to tell me he thought they had the situation at the reformatory under control. But he called me back two weeks later and said, "We’ve had some more racial problems. Can you send us a team? I think we need some training.” So Jim Freeman, the corrections specialist from our Washington office went in with Efrain Martinez from my office and they did an assessment. Jim found deplorable conditions there. Institutional policies and procedures were unclear and management was weak. There were plans to make major structural and programmatic changes in the institution which Jim felt the staff was not trained to handle. He felt it would be inappropriate to provide training at this juncture. Until the policies were sorted out and certain other things happened, training would not be productive. That was his report.

Question:
Stop a second and go backwards and tell me how he went about this assessment.

Answer:
Well, the way he did it (the way it was often done) is the team went on-site. Remember, we had the commissioner who was at the top in St. Paul and very supportive of our work. Then came his deputy who was following his instructions with little enthusiasm, and then the superintendent of St. Cloud and his administrators. The structure beneath that was the corrections officers. They were union members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). They are the lowest-paid state civil servants and probably the least educated. This is significant because they are often outwitted by the inmates, who may not be well educated, but have great street smarts and are very clever. Then you had the administration and the inmates. The team went in and interviewed administrators, staff and the counselors. They asked questions and kept their eyes open and developed some understanding of what was happening there. Jim had worked in the Washington DC jail system and he knew what to look for.

Question:
Did they talk to residents?

Answer:
They probably did, but I do not recall. This was to assess training needs and the appropriateness of training. The reason administrators wanted the training was to prepare staff for a major restructuring of the institution that would segregate the inmates by their job or school assignments, rather than what they had, which turned out to be largely by race. They did not isolate inmates racially, but common sense told them that the five Hispanics should be in the same cellblock. Most of the American Indians stayed out of trouble and were able to live together in the honor cell house. Blacks were lived in three cellblocks, but most were in one. whites obviously were scattered throughout.

Question:
Okay, so they didn’t assess much?

Answer:
CRS conducted an assessment and found out that it would not be wise at this junction to make this major change ion the reformatory structure. Staff and inmate morale was low. The new structure would disperse and in many cases isolate inmates of color. There were policy issues and underlying management questions which needed resolution before the changes were made and the training took place.

Question:
So what did they recommend?

Answer:
I don’t recall their recommendations, except that the training they wanted would not help the staff address the underlying problems that were leading to disruptive inmate behavior. So nothing further happened then. I did not know whether we would hear from then again. It was about two or three months after my first meeting with the commissioner that I got another call from the deputy commissioner in St. Paul. It was a Friday afternoon and I was in a judge’s office in Cleveland where we were working on that city’s school desegregation case. I received an urgent message from my office to call the deputy in St. Paul. When I reached him he tried to sound relaxed and casual as he told me " said, I’ve got a few problems, do you think you can get out here Monday morning?” He told me the reformatory was in "lock up,” because there had been another racial rioting incident. I went in the following week with Efrain Martinez from my staff and with Bob Greenwald from Dallas and a young African American program specialist from the Federal Department of Corrections. We spent a week there doing an assessment. That’s really where the story begins about the mediation. I told you about the inmate groups. We went to see the superintendent and his top staff. They gave us the run of the place throughout the week the reformatory was in lock up, which is very dangerous because tensions become very high. But they insisted it was too dangerous to let the residents out of their cells. The administrators felt they had been very progressive and fair in their treatment of inmates of color. The administration had disbanded the German American group because it was clearly there to cause racial problems. The superintendent also denied permission from inmates who wanted to form a Scottish cultural club. The administrators supported staff and would not end the lock up. So we proceeded to interview the inmate groups. Each also had outside advisors. The Italian American group’s support came from Legal Assistance to Minnesota Prisoners (LAMP) from the University of Minnesota law school. LAMP had students who would provide assistance to the culture group. Every other week, this very attractive young law student in a mini skirt would sit with her legs crossed while a dozen gawking, very light-haired and light-complected Italians with names like Smith, and Larson, would sit and listen to her talk about Italian culture or give Italian lessons. This got them out of their boxes. They weren’t making any trouble for anybody, but they obviously didn’t have anything beyond that which bound them together. So we interviewed the corrections officers. We interviewed each of the ethnic groups, and the leadership of the groups. Many of them came together and we spoke to white inmates as well. Also the state’s Ombudsman for Corrections and the director of the St. Cloud Human Rights Commission.

Question:
And what were you asking?

Answer:
We were trying to get a fix on the place. We wanted to know why were they still in lock up. The guards were saying tensions were too high, that it was too dangerous to end the lock up. But that was not our perception when we talked to the residents. When we met with the American Indian group, as I said, they were mostly well behaved within the institution. They avoided overtures, they said, from the Black Brotherhood Development and Cultural Organization (BBDCO), to partner with them. They wanted to be left alone.

Question:
The BBDCO was another organization within the prison?

Answer:
That’s the black group. This is the American Indian group. And they were just concerned that their people be taken care of and they wanted no part of the violence. There were half a dozen, 5 or 6 Hispanic inmates, Mexican American, and they too, would align with the American Indians. They didn’t want any part of any violence.

Question:
And, in fact, hadn’t been part of it earlier?

Answer:
Probably not. I don’t remember, but probably not. There were only a few and they stayed to themselves. There was a segment of the white population that was overtly racist and would attack the blacks. The blacks were quick to respond. Keep in mind, virtually everybody in that place was there for a crime of serious violence. Murder or serious assault. Otherwise you could get out and work a community program.

Question:
And these were teenagers, I gather?

Answer:
Up into their early 20's

Question:
So after you talked to them all what did you decide to do?

Answer:
Well, then we had to sit down and see what we could come up with. It was difficult to get in to see the black inmates. They were a Muslim group. I was the "white devil", (which they later called me in their newsletter) who could not be trusted. They verbally abused me. You know, you expect some of that. The BBDCO said "we can’t end the lock up," and it became apparent to us that they were using the lock up, as leverage against the institution. Nobody in the reformatory wanted to be in lock up, but the BBDCO was using it politically. Creating a scare by saying it wasn’t safe. It wasn’t clear why they did this, but perhaps it gave them some power. As I walked out of the room I remember a BBDCO leader pounding on the table and waving his fist at me and saying, "there ain’t going to be no mediation in this place and if there is, it’s going to be in front of television cameras.” So that told me that the only question we had to resolve ultimately would be the openness of mediation to the press. I had the good fortune some weeks earlier to meet a women named Gwen Davis who ran the Antioch Minneapolis Communiversity, an affiliate of my alma mater, Antioch college in Yellow Springs, Ohio. We coincidentally met on an airplane. I remembered that she had told me that her husband, Syl, worked with prisoners. I called Syl from St. Cloud, told him what I was doing there and he came out to the institution with Raymond Johnson, an ex-offender, who regularly worked with the BBDCO.

Question:
And were they black?

Answer:
Yes. They were also teaching courses at St Cloud. When they agreed to support ;the mediation effort, it gave CRS credibility with the inmates. Eventually the black inmates agreed to come to the table. There were conditions, but basically everyone finally agreed to come to the table. I also enlisted the help of T. Williams, the Ombudsman for Corrections.

Question:
And I’m presuming he was white?

Answer:
No, T. Williams was black. I also had support from Phyllis Janey, director of the St. Cloud Human Rights Commission who at times would intervene in problems at the reformatory. I also gained support from groups such as the Minnesota Legal Assistance Program, a reservation attorney and an Hispanic attorney who occasionally worked with the culture groups. So they all knew we were there and we kept them advised of what we were doing. Most of them could not give us much time, but their support was important. Their involvement gave credibility to the process. We finally gave our report to the superintendent and we told him we thought the lock up should end and that an effort should be made to bring people together and start to talk about their concerns.

Question:
You made this report before you had gotten people to the table, correct?

Answer:
Oh yes. There had been no meetings, except that everyone had met with us. Along the way we learned that the corrections officers were angry at the way the place was run and were very angry at the administration. "If there is a table, it’s going to be a three sided table," they told us. They were upset at unclear policies and inconsistent procedures that made their work more difficult and endangered their safety. They didn’t want mediation, but they didn’t have a better alternative. After listening to their frustrations, I said to the union leaders, "You know, it sounds as though you’re in prison too.” And they felt that way.

Question:
What made you decide that getting people to the table was the direction that you wanted to move?

Answer:
I could facetiously say that my office sent me out to get a mediation. But it just seemed that there was a lot of misunderstanding and need for change and I didn’t know any better way to get change than to get everyone involved in the process. It had to come from within the institution. They didn’t want advice from the outside. So the superintendent accepted our report and said he wanted us to present it to his team of corrections officers the following morning. What I didn’t tell you earlier is that when we arrived at the institution he had set up what he called his mediation team. These were young officers, including the three black officers in the institution. Again all men, although there were a couple of women who worked there.

Question:
So when you say officers, do you mean guards?

Answer:
Guards. Yes, corrections officers. So he had set up this team and we had interviewed its members as well as the others and they had told us how bad things were and how dangerous it would be to end the lock up. And these were younger, more progressive members of the staff. Well, we came back the next morning to give them our report and we walked into the room where they had asked us to meet with them. It was a conference room. Maps and plans were spread out on the table. They said, "we appreciate what you are saying, but we think that before we open up this place we need to reorganize, so that the whole institution will never be together again. We’re going to change the dining areas, we’re going to feed in shifts and in different places, recreation and visiting will be in different places too. People will live together by job, and by school assignment. This was the original reorganization plan they had on the table when we first intervened months earlier, a plan to decimate the inmates of color. They said ,"We feel that this is necessary.” I said, "But I thought you told us that you had to wait for more money from the legislature so you could do the construction and provide the training?” They said, "We think we can manage. We figured it out and we can squeeze through until the legislature appropriates the money. It’s imperative that we do it now.” It became apparent that we were a threat to them. There was no place for negotiations in their plan. They were determined that the lock up would not end until the reorganization was in place. I went back and told the superintendent, "I understand what you are doing and there is no way we can pursue mediation under these conditions.” I wished him well and told him to let me know if we might be of assistance in the future.

Question:
Had you suggested that it would be helpful to get everybody to sit down at the table at that point?

Answer:
When we met with him the previous night and met with his mediation team, we suggested that we engage in a mediation process. But they didn't want that. They had this other plan. So I called the deputy director in St. Paul and told him we were withdrawing. To my surprise he urged me not to make a hasty decision. He asked me wait until he could be there in the morning. He obviously was feeling squeezed by the superintendent on the one hand and the commissioner on the other. By this time my team had disbanded and only Martinez and I were in St. Cloud. The next morning when we met with the superintendent and the deputy they said they wanted mediation to proceed. They agreed to suspend plans for the reorganization and end the lock up. They said they would not pursue the reorganization until they saw what happened at mediation. So we started planning for mediation. We asked the office of the Ombudsman to help us select who would come to the table. The first question was who would b e at the table. We could not have less then two from any one party because people needed support. So if you start with the Hispanic group you have to have at least two. And you needed two from the so-called Italian group. The BBDCO needed six seats at the table for political reasons within the group which meant there had to be six from the American Indian group. We ended up with sixteen from the ethnic groups plus sixteen from the general (white) inmate population, four representatives from each of the four cellblocks. The culture groups would select their own representatives, the white inmates would hold elections. The Ombudsman’s office agreed to conduct the cell block elections. The administration and corrections officers could bring as many as they wanted, which we knew would be fewer than the 32 inmates.

Question:
So how many people all together were around the table?

Answer:
We also agreed that not everybody would sit at the table. Some of the 32 would participate as observers behind the table, but if they wanted to speak, they could move up to the table. That gave us workable numbers at the table. We then conducted the elections which were absolutely wonderful. The greatest leadership qualities came out in some of these cellblocks. Young men encouraging their fellow inmates to participate, "This is your chance to have a word, a say on how this place in run,” they implored. We found that the prison residents wanted more then anything else, to get out of the box, and this election would give them the chance to get out of their cells. Also, they want to confront "the man." They were going to sit across the table. They were going to elect their representatives, they were going to caucus, set up agendas. They all finally came together when we had everything set. They had the elections, paper ballots, the whole bit. It worked. The place was just running like a top at this point. There was a high level of anticipation and then the group started working on their agendas.

Question:
All the groups together?

Answer:
No, they insisted on doing it separately. There was no trust between them. You maybe could bring the Indians and the Hispanics together, but every group insisted on working on their own.

Question:
Were you working with them?

Answer:
Yes, Efrain and I would come back every other week to work with them. Now we had some problems with Washington because here's the Regional Director having the time of his life, working on this wonderful case. But I had enough background in media and the Washington world to know how to handle this. I was able to get the support from the commissioner, getting a letter when I needed it. We got an editorial in the Minneapolis Star praising the process, saying maybe this is what's needed. As long as we had this support, my own director in Washington supported the effort.

Question:
So when you said "background in the media,” it suggests that you placed the editorial or you encouraged it?

Answer:
As a former newspaper reporter for Sun News, I know how to work with the media.

Question:
Feed them information?

Answer:
No, I didn't feed them information. But what is appropriate, and what I often had my staff do in high visibility cases, was to offer background briefings to newspaper editors. I routinely did this when we had a school desegregation case to let the media know what we were doing and understand how we worked. This helped assure accurate reporting and sometimes resulted in favorable editorials. Also, the inmates were free to talk to the press. That was one of their rights in Minnesota. It took the inmates weeks to get their agendas completed. Meanwhile, some of the most constructive and effective leaders were being paroled. Others were having problems and were put into segregation, which means they were isolated from the general population. A few times BBCDO charged racism when its leaders were put on segregation and the organization refused to work with us until they were out. The agenda process started in winter and now we're getting into spring and summer.

Question:
Were you working with the entire group at this point, meaning the entire group of blacks, or just the two?

Answer:
The culture groups came together as culture groups, or those who were interested in working on the agenda.

Question:
All the people in the culture group, or those elected to represent the group?

Answer:
That's right. Elected or designated because of power plays. But whoever ended up in the group wrote its agenda. The white inmates were making great progress with their agenda.

Question:
When you're talking about agenda...

Answer:
Each was making up their laundry list of the things they wanted to bring up at the table.

Question:
That translated into their interests?

Answer:
These were their interests, and they covered the waterfront. They were very serious ones, primarily from the racial minorities, related to disciplinary actions.

Question:
That seemed to be racially oriented?

Answer:
Yes. Everyone agreed there was a disproportionately large number of blacks going to detention, there was no question about it. Guards said it was because of the way people behave, blacks said it was because of racism. This had to be addressed. Issues went all the way down to whether inmates should have rugs in their cells. Also, whether television sets, which had to arrive in a new box, could come from a repair shop, where drugs or other contraband might be smuggled in with it. Censorship of the inmate newspaper. Visiting times and places. Food, Canteen issues. Scores of items found their way onto the agenda. Let me now get us to the table. It took a lot of prodding to get the inmate groups to complete their agendas. The BBDCO didn’t really buy in, and they loved the time out of their cells. They were negotiating, and a coffee cart or donuts would come to the room where they were putting their agenda together and they’d be sitting with their feet up doing no work. It took forever, but with the help of the outside groups, we finally got some agendas together. One day the Hispanic inmates came to Efrain Martinez and said, "Hey can we trust that guy Salem?” He said, "Ah, what do you mean?" "He’s white, how can you trust him?" "But what do you have to lose?” I was the white devil.

Question:
That never changed?

Answer:
I doubt it. I wouldn’t expect it to change in a prison environment and sometimes its true outside. It is hard to tell how much is real and how much is rhetoric. When Mandela was negotiating with deKlerk, one of them, because his constituency demands it, stands up and blasts the other ruthlessly over an unacceptable position or statement. This happens, and then you figure out how to make it right. They understand what is going on, so they can see their way through it, and this was happening here. For some of the BBDCO members, I was white and had to be the enemy. Ok they needed an enemy and I was the target at that point. We finally got the agendas, and we called a meeting of all of the residents.

Question:
Did you contribute to the agendas, or did you just record what they tell you?

Answer:
No, we took what they said I took their agenda items and then I rewrote and organized it for clarity. I started with some simple, easy to resolve issues including those where I knew the inmates would win. Censorship matters, food issues, creature comfort matters. I put some of the heavy duty ones further down. I wanted them to see they could reach agreement on some issues. Pretty standard text. Along the way, the Italian American group could not come up with anything meaningful for its portion of the agenda. They wanted sick leave for the work program. That was their issue, sick leave. That’s all they could think. Their leader said, "We really don’t have anything here,” and during the course of the mediation, the Italian Americans acknowledged they weren’t a culture group. They had no issues and they were beginning to feel awkward. It didn’t really manifest itself until later at the table when they basically said, "We’re dissolving, because we have no reason to be here.” While listening to others at the table, they came to understand and appreciate the plight of the racial minority groups, and they didn’t want to be there.

Question:
Now are you saying you created a black agenda and a white agenda?

Answer:
No, no. I merged all of the agenda items, but the cultural items were often grouped.

Question:
So how do you decide who’s issues go above who’s? Did that ever become an issue?

Answer:
No it didn’t. I started off with easy ones to resolve and then moved along. Those were mostly creature comforts proposed by the general population. So now we come to the table. We start talking about some of the creature comfort issues. One of the first issues, for example, was censorship of the newspaper. They had a very credible newspaper. Censorship actually violated the state law. So at the first session, the deputy, the assistant commissioner, and the assistant superintendent agreed this was something we could work out. Censorship of mail was an issue. The administration agreed, "We don’t have to open all incoming mail. We don’t have to read every outgoing letter.” Delivery of books and magazines brought by visitors; it would sometimes take 48 hours to get the package to the residents. "We can do better,” the administrators agreed. We were making progress. Even though these were relatively minor issues, they began to build credibility into the process. These were agenda items from the white residents, but that was okay. The inmates of color were at first untrusting of the process and were laying back, waiting to see what was going to happen. The Indians were sitting there saying, "Our only issue is that we want a reservation in the prison.” That was the last agenda item because I knew where that was headed. With each issue, the inmates were articulating their case and doing it well. Then they got to the problem of hair in the food. This was a wonderful story. This was at a time when a lot of guys were wearing long hair and that included servers on the food line. The resident negotiators were complaining bitterly and the corrections officers and administrators were sitting there contributing little. One of them says, "Yeah, we noticed the problem but we don’t know what to do about it.” An inmate leader reached into his pocket, took out a hairnet, and dropped it on the table. "Would you wear that?” a corrections officer asked. The inmate reached over, picked up the hair net, removed the cellophane wrapper and placed on his head. . Nothing else was said. He wore the hair net all morning. The matter was resolved. Canteen items was an issue. What can be sold in the canteen? And then how is the money spent? Money from the canteen went to a social fund. Some of the profits from the canteen went back to the inmates, and they didn’t trust how it was being used. We were fortunate because the husband of the head of the St. Cloud’s Human Relations Commission managed canteens for the VA hospital. So he came in as a consultant and would review the operations and confirm that everything was on the up and up. What could be sold in the canteen? Hispanic residents wanted salsa. "Well, we can’t allow salsa in the canteen because that’s a weapon,” an officer said. "You can throw that in somebody’s eyes and blind them." "Well, you let us carry our Zippo lighters and you let us buy lighter fluid,” was the response, "and you give us these cans of varnish spray for the arts and crafts shop. You think that’s not a weapon?" "Ok you can have salsa and other foods." Playboy magazine was an issue in the canteen. The rugs in the cells. The doors wouldn’t close properly if the rugs weren’t set back properly, so they had removed all floor coverings and that created a fuss. They resolved that issue, but it was not included in the written agreement; nobody wanted the public knowing that they were negotiating over rugs for the cells. As we solved each issue, I’d write it up, bring it back the next time for everyone to approve.

Question:
How often were you meeting?

Answer:
Every other week. We had a problem which almost capsized mediation very early in the process. Residents got a hold of a confidential memo that said in two weeks, construction of a new dining room was to begin as the first step of the reorganization. This was in total violation of our agreement. I had assured the inmates that this wouldn’t happen. I phoned and called the deputy director who said, "No, this shouldn’t be happening. I didn’t know that they were going to head that way, but I guess they plan to.” I then phoned the commissioner and said, "It looks like we are going to have to stop mediation. What I’d like to do is meet with you and the support team to the inmates.” I rented a room at the Holiday Inn for the next morning and we met there at eight o’clock. The BBDCO support group from Minneapolis was there. The lawyer for the Hispanics was there, about seven of us. We met with the commissioner and we told him what had happened. He was furious. Now I’ll tell you what was going on. The deputy commissioner was an alcoholic. I suspected something when I saw him dancing with a young blonde one night at the tower of the St. Paul Hilton, where I used to stay when I was in St. Paul. I foolishly said hello to him, and he didn’t even acknowledge me. I figured something was going on. He’d been on health leave a few times. The Commissioners said, "I’m going to fire him and I’m going to remove the superintendent too." As we left he said, "I want mediation to continue, so I’m going to remove them. I’m going to appoint Orville Pung acting deputy and his only job is going to be to supervise this. I’m going to remove the superintendent and who else do you recommend go?" I said, "Don’t remove the superintendent." Let Orville Pung decide that one. There I was giving him advice, which seemed to be appropriate at the time. He was so angry he was going to fire half of them. Orville Pung came in and we continued mediation without a problem. The mediator was finally controlling the process. Pung, incidentally, went on to become Commissioner of Corrections.

Question:
So what happened about this document?

Answer:
They stopped everything.

Question:
Was the document valid at the time?

Answer:
Yes, there was a document out there. Someone found it. No one denied it. The other piece of this is the deputy commissioner reportedly had been involved in a hit and run accident in the St. Cloud area. The incident was hushed up, but they were holding this over his head. Okay, on with the agenda. Everyone wasn’t happy up there, and I remember scheduling a mediation for the opening day of duck hunting season. Only a fool plans any business in rural Minnesota on that day. But nobody alerted me. The mediation was a long and tedious process. Some of these issues move quickly and easily, but throughout there were tensions. There was one point when BBDCO complained that they were being harassed, people were being put in lock up. They refused to come to the table for a while.

Question:
And did you proceed without them?

Answer:
We did on some issues, with their concurrence. I suggested they send an observer in the room to sit and watch without participating. I don’t remember if they did, but I would not have proceeded without consent. There was also one incident when a white inmate got so ticked off that he verbally abused one of the guards. "You don’t know what it’s like, you s.o.b.” The officers all walked out and we had to wait a half-hour until they came back. There was a continuing problem at the institution that cut across mediation. The attorneys from the university could be discourteous and abrasive with the staff when they came to meet with residents. The officers disliked them. One of the attorneys caught me one day and said, "We are having trouble gaining entry. They hold us up till the superintendent is here or his associate is here. Then, they hold us up at the gate, then they don’t escort us downstairs and we are losing an hour every time we visit. We aren’t going to stand for this.” I asked them if they had talked to the superintendent about it?" "We shouldn’t have to talk to the superintendent," they said, but they agreed to do so and I said I would work with them to get the matter resolved. The legal assistance attorneys were not participating in mediation at this point, but when we opened the next session that afternoon, one the attorneys and a student stormed into the room and announced that they were not going to represent the inmates any more if they were going to be harassed by the staff. "This is an issue which I want resolved here and now or we aren’t coming back to this institution” he said. You can image the response of the inmates. They then caucused with the legal team behind a locked door for 45 minutes. They hadn’t been there for three weeks and all of a sudden they came in and made this announcement and caucused across the hall. Eventually they came back and the issue was resolved. I don’t remember the details, but there were assurances given and then they disappeared again.

Question:
What were you doing while this was going on?

Answer:
I was cooling my heels. What can you do when the group caucuses and they don’t want you there? Usually, you wait awhile and give them some time and stick your head in to see if you can be a positive factor. But they wouldn’t let me in. Oh, they were furious. That ended and we got through that. We were making progress on the agenda. Finally we got to the culture groups. Throughout this, there was some wonderful understanding going on. Let me just back up and talk about one of the other general issues - visiting hours. There was insufficient space for visitors, but there was no money to expand the visiting area. The request of the inmates was to have more visiting space. The administration agreed to include money to expand the visiting area in their next budget submission to the legislature and they would arrange outside visiting facilities when the weather permitted. They also said that if the residents would agree to move out quickly and return to their cells promptly after visits, an additional 15 to 30 minutes would be added to the visiting day. So they were able to work together on some of these issues and come away with a better understanding of the problems. A number of the answers were "we don’t have staff to supervise this, that and the other thing." From the inmates perspective, at shift change they would see double shifts standing around for 30 minutes with hands in their pockets. Well, the reality was that it was important to have both shifts present when head counts are taken at shift changes. That requires overlapping. So again, the best they could do there was to say, "If after your culture group meets, you can get back to your cell within fifteen minutes, we’ll give you an extra fifteen minutes of meeting time." So they were able to work out some of that. They gave them an inmate staff for their culture groups, they gave them certain telephone privileges for the culture groups, so they really got some benefits from that.

Question:
So was this going primarily one way, where the inmates are saying, "We want this," and to the extent that they could comply, the administration would?

Answer:
The inmates were really effective and articulate in expressing the problems and helping come up with ideas. They are creative and intelligent guys, as intelligent as anyone else in the room. They just took another path in their life.

Question:
And the administration was...

Answer:
Open to anything reasonable. Oh yeah. I think they were all legitimate. They were under pressure now. Orville Pung was in the room much of time, not always, but much of the time. They gave more then they had to in some cases, and then the union got upset that they did. So at the union meeting, they denounced what was going on to some extent, but they hung in there. More training for staff came out of this, human rights training, civil rights training. When new staff was hired, inmates from the culture groups would have an opportunity to brief them. Then they had the hard issues. First, was the disciplinary procedures. The African American inmates brought in not only an outside advisor, but also a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist talked about what happens when you deprive inmates, for example, of showers, or calls home. They used behavior modification, and that’s quite controversial.

Question:
Now how did the inmates have connections with the psychiatrist?

Answer:
An outside support group. Pro bono assistance. A young psychiatrist came up and helped.

Question:
Did you facilitate this in anyway?

Answer:
No, that wasn’t necessary in this case. The Ombudsman undertook a study of the disciplinary procedure, and it was agreed, that his office would review every disciplinary procedure for racism. A black lieutenant, Westbrook, was put in charge of disciplinary procedures. Inmates were granted hearings if racism was alleged. There was some increased understanding of why the black residents were so loud when they came down the hall after their meetings. Have you ever walked by a black church on Sunday morning and heard the joyous singing? Well that’s another side of the coin to the pain, too. Some of this came out at the sessions. The American Indians’ need for solidarity came out when we talked about their issues. So good things happened. Meanwhile, guys are getting paroled, guys are locked up, and things are dragging along. The main issue remaining was the reservation. The American Indians wanted a reservation within St. Cloud. They knew it would not be allowed, but in lieu of a reservation, they wanted to be able to provide their own Indian counselors when an Indian inmate was in trouble. So a guy could be taken from his cell and counsel his friend or the other inmate. The corrections officers absolutely refused to consider the matter. They drew their line. "That’s our job, we are correctional counselors.” And the administration stood with them.

Question:
Stood with who?

Answer:
The guards. Now the Indians, I think, the leadership knew they would not get a break on their reservation. They knew better. But not because they didn't have an eloquent plea. And the sad part is that the guards or administrators were unable to come up with a single argument against the proposal for peer counselors.

Question:
So did they get any of their major issues?

Answer:
Culture group issues, but the American Indians did not get the one thing they said was most important, well, the two things really. One was the reservation and the other was the Indians counseling Indians. To me, it sounded like there was great logic to that issue, but the administration would not budge and that was its concession to the guards, who felt that the administration was giving away the institution. I didn’t even make a serious effort to intervene, because I know the logic was there and it was so clear. You’d cry to hear this guy make his plea. "The Indians are in trouble, no one is going to help them like a brother. Let us help our brothers.” "Ah, forget it. That’s our job.” So they the Indians didn’t come back to the table after that. The last issue, and we were saving this one, was the Inmate/Staff Advisory Council, ISAC, that would be established to deal with future problems on any matters unresolved from our agenda. ISAC would be there, and the question was who would be represented. Everybody agreed the culture groups should have representation. Nobody felt they shouldn’t have special representation. Every cell block plus culture groups. That’s when the Italian leader said, not the Italians. He understood. He'd grown some in that process and there was a lot of that kind of transformation. An angry Hispanic inmate said to Charlie Davenport, the associate director who was viewed as compassionate and a friend of the inmate, "You don't even know my birthday. You don't care about me. You deserted me, you took a promotion to be associate director. You used to handle programs, now you're associate director. You deserted me. You don't care about me. You don't even know my birthday." That was a stinger. People saw how they were seen. So they set up ISAC, and the big controversy was if there is a reorganization of the institution, will they still permit the inmate groups to come together in culture groups? The answer was yes. The administration yielded on that critical issue. That was a big concession, but it also was the last issue.

Question:
So reorganization, per se, was not to be decided by this case mediation, or was it?

Answer:
No it was not. That wasn't to be decided there. The arguments were made by the inmates about the need to keep racial groups together, give them support. There was a wonderful article along the way in the inmate newspaper. It said something to the effect, "at least people are listening to each other, and that was sort of nice." A little bit of the best side came out of these kids. Some of them lost patience. Some lost interest, but that you'd expect too. So we had all the issues there, everything was neatly typed up and now we're going to have the signing ceremony. I did call the media and tell a reporter what was happening. So in the morning paper, there would be an article in the Star or the Tribune. The morning paper said that an agreement has been reached on ten issues and included this and that, and didn't mention rugs or televisions. We did talk about some other things and the important things, such as the review of disciplinary procedures. I arrived at the reformatory found that very few people wanted to bother with the signing ceremony. The administration was there, but the Indians boycotted it. That meant the Hispanics are boycotting it. Reluctantly, the blacks sent one guy and one of the support groups was there.

Question:
Now why were they boycotting?

Answer:
The Indians? Because they felt it was useless, they didn't get what they wanted despite the logic of their argument. Hispanics are their supporters. The Hispanics had only one issue. A room had been promised them for arts and crafts. They had a kiln which had been donated, and they wanted a crafts room. It had been promised to them prior to mediation, but somebody reneged on the promise. I believe there were only three or four Hispanics at St. Cloud at this time. So nobody came to the signing ceremony, and with as much grandeur as I could muster, I walked over to the one black in there, out of the eight who were usually there, and his advisor who was there and he signed. And the whites were there, and they signed, with the administration and the guards and me as a witness. Then I got a call from the afternoon paper asking me, "Did it really matter that everybody didn't sign?" The residents had been talking to the press. I said "Absolutely not, the agreement stands." We actually delayed the signing for two weeks because of the state’s gubernatorial election. We signed after Election Day. That's because no governor wants either corrections or mental health in the newspapers. They just don't want any publicity on those issues at election time. I didn't have to be told that. About two years later, I sat on the panel with one St. Cloud resident and two administrators at an international corrections association meeting in Minneapolis. We did a panel on the mediation and that's where I found out that they'd reorganized the institution. "Yes, the mediation helped, but we really think it was our reorganization." I got wondering fifteen years later, and I went back again to St. Cloud, and that was a wonderful experience. First I met with Commissioner Orville Pung in St. Paul and he arranged for the superintendent to see me. I drove out to St. Cloud, and as soon as I got there I was told he had just left for lunch; he stood me up for an hour and a half just like he always had. He came back and we talked. He said things were going well. He said, "Yes, the inmates-staff council is still meeting. In fact, they're meeting this afternoon, do you want to go?" So I went down, and they were just starting their meeting. There was the same psychologist who had been there fifteen years earlier; he was now associate superintendent. Lt. Westbrook was still in charge of disciplinary actions; he later told me things were going well. At the meeting, an inmate representative complained about guards shining flashlights in the eyes of residents at night, and about sheets coming back torn from the laundry, It all sounded familiar, but now there was a forum to address and discuss things.

Question:
Were these mediated at all, or were these agreements self-negotiated?

Answer:
They were all self-negotiated, but there certainly was a collaborative discussion with the psychologist who had been there all these years. That was their style anyway. Right after the mediation closed, the Indians went on boycott and had a sit-in and were put in segregation for a few weeks.

Question:
When you say put in segregation, separated?

Answer:
Disciplinary action. They put them in a certain area with isolation. The nature of prisons has changed, and you can't do that through mediation today.

Question:
Why not?

Answer:
You have gangs, more toughness, you have out-of-state prisoners who come in, you have drugs, and you can't stop it. So that's my story.

Question:
So what can you do today if this sort of thing doesn't work?

Answer:
Different population groups, different techniques. In Washington State there is a mediation program that is working in a state prison. They are doing some mediation of inmate disputes, I don't know how it's working, but they were actually teaching conflict resolution, teaching the inmates better ways to talk and solve problems. In another program elsewhere, the guards and staff were given training and conflict resolution skills, and they lived in settings with inmates where it was safe to do so. They tried to change the culture of the corrections officers. So you do what you can do, basically. I think the most difficult thing is finding a way to treat people as human beings. You take the edge off the prison experience and the edge off the intent of leaders who want to keep a hostile environment of guards and prisoners at all times. That's humanity. The thing Mandela did in Robin Island is to get his jailers to love him, and to respect him, and that way he and his colleagues survived. If you can find ways to make it more humane, it is better. But everything dictates against it. One of the problems in St. Cloud was that Minnesota had such a good corrections system that most of the best talent was drawn to the community programs. The worst assignment would be an institution like St. Cloud. Mostly local people work there. To attract the person of color from the Twin Cities is very difficult, because who would want to be there and live in that community? It was basically a white community. There were so many natural barriers, there has to be an extraordinary effort and the public just doesn't care enough. The whole plan of today is incarceration and take away the human factors. Who cares? Take away the television sets and the movies. He committed a crime, lock him up. But if you can get the staff, you need leadership, in a place where there is leadership, you can do these things. I was able to do it there, they wanted it in Louisiana because there was interest. But there are a lot of places where there is not.

Question:
You don't think there are places where you could get that now?

Answer:
Yeah, there probably are. But whether these techniques would work there, I don't know. Also, CRS was a little unrealistic because I was on the government payroll, as were my people, so nobody had to worry about who paid us. That's a real factor when you're doing these kinds of disputes and this kind of work outside of a government setting. Who pays you? You need a foundation, you need to find out, and instead of haggling or figuring out who gets what, that adds a dimension that makes it more difficult.

Question:
Why did you send four people up originally? That sounds like a higher number than our other interviewees in the initial assessment.

Answer:
The first assessment that I did, we sent Jim Freeman from the Washington staff and one field worker from my region with him. That was about par for the course. I might have even sent Greenwald up because he was a specialist, too, having done Louisiana. When I went in, I just figured I needed all the help I could get. Greenwald was available, and that just made me stronger, I wouldn't have known how to interpret anything up there. The guys could help me, and then I just winged it after that.

Question:
Were you ever able to do anything to improve your credibility with the blacks?

Answer:
Oh sure, but they just couldn't acknowledge it. They got good things out of this, just like everybody else did, and they were intelligent. You don't expect people to trust you because they are still incarcerated and you are outside. When you leave them, you go and meet with the man upstairs and they know that. So I don't make any pretenses. I try to gain their trust, but I expect only limited success. At St. Cloud, mediation was the best thing the residents had going for them at that point in time. And their trusted outside advisors told them that. That's why they were ready to discontinue the lock in. If you have no credibility whatsoever, then you might as well pack it in and leave.

Question:
Is there anything else you did to build credibility that you haven't mentioned?

Answer:
At one point, I brought in Ellis McDougal as a consultant. He was corrections commissioner in Georgia at the time and a consultant to CRS. He met with Orville Pung. Being able to bring in that kind of guy is useful. You never know if that helps or doesn't help the credibility, but I think it does. I think one thing that was very important was always doing what I said I would do, when I said I would do it. I found judges appreciated this, amazingly, when we did a court-referred mediation. If I say I am going to call on Thursday afternoon, then I call on Thursday afternoon. No postponements, no delays, and they do appreciate that. In this case too, if I said I was going to do something, I did it.

Question:
Was your impartiality ever questioned?

Answer:
I assume so. I assume when I came in, I was the guy there who cared about race relations and human rights, so what do I know about the real world. And I'm sure the residents questioned it much of the time. Not because of what I did, but because I was from the outside and the superintendent had the key. If absolute trust was required, I never would've gotten near the place. It's just that what did they have to lose? The African American inmates, whose support I gained, began to trust me and the process because people they trusted, their lifeline to the outside, advised them that it was safe to do so.

Question:
What did you do to diminish tensions between the parties?

Answer:
When we entered, tensions were exceedingly high. I could observe no level of trust whatsoever. The game for inmates was to taunt the corrections officers, who didn't want to be there in the first place, but had to be there because that was their job. Many of the inmates didn't resent every counselor, but they wanted to make life for most of them as unhappy as they could, and they were masters in brinkmanship. There was no trust at those levels, and between inmates there was no trust between groups. During the course of mediation, when people were talking and began listening, tensions were eased. Within the reformatory, the parties at the table had to learn to know each other a little better. There was some transformation as they listened and there was credibility to what was being said. Everybody has certain basic needs including being acknowledged and understood. Those instances that I cited, with the salsa and the hairnet, guards and administrators came to see that the inmates were bright, at times eloquent. The inmates got a sense and understanding of why the place was run the way it was. Some of it was unforgivably sloppy and poor. But there were reasons why there had to be twice as many guards on a given hour, during the head count, and there were reasons why there wasn't more visiting space. So they were able to understand each other's problems and that eased tensions.

Question:
Did anything happen to humanize the guards?

Answer:
Less, because the guards didn't involve themselves. They were pretty quiet, and they may have agreed not to say very much. No one waited for them to say very much, so there was relatively little input from the corrections counselors. It is hard for me to know the impact of mediation on them.

Question:
Did you find yourself wanting to do anything to strengthen the parties' capacities to deal with the conflict, or did they pretty much do that themselves?

Answer:
They really did that themselves. The great fortune here is that this had time to run it's course. It didn't happen in two visits. It just took a life of it's own. That administration was very poorly run and bright inmates helped the administration figure it out. So there really was very little need. The one time I felt intervention was needed was with the Hispanic inmates. They were just waiting and waiting for their kiln and their room, and they started with six of them and two of them went home. In the preliminaries, Martinez met with them to bolster them and encourage them. With the Indians too, who could relate to them? You really need a person of color in that setting to maximize your credibility, or to get as close as you can to build something.

Question:
Did you two co-mediate the whole time?

Answer:
Martinez had to leave before we got to the table, or maybe after the first or second session. I just had to cut him because there were other assignments in the region and Washington told me to cut back. So there was just no way to keep him involved.

Question:
But at that point, you presumably had the credibility to carry it by yourself?

Answer:
From the administration point of view, they were under the gun from the commissioner. The deputy was appointed, a guy was pulled out from under them and reassigned, so they had no choice. They were passively cooperative. The guards would complain. I would hear stories about the union meetings, and after a few beers they would start complaining that they had given away the store. But they knew the place was poorly managed and wanted to see some changes.

Question:
Were there ever internal conflicts within a group?

Answer:
Well, there would have been in terms of whether they should continue, get involved, or to what level. I couldn't read those. They didn't come to my attention. I'm sure there were certainly conflicts among the African Americans as to whether they were going to get involved at all. There was never enough cohesiveness among the white general population to call it a group. The members couldn't form a group. The attacking group just disintegrated, people drifted away. I think people liked what was going on. They got out of the box, they could sit across the table from "the man," and some better things were happening. Even if they were only creature comforts, and weren't the most important things in their lives, by the time we were done they got some attention to some of their critical issues as well.

Question:
Did confidentially ever become an issue, other then the leaks of these documents that we talked about before?

Answer:
No, it never became an issue in this at all.

Question:
One thing that you mentioned at the beginning was the blacks said they would come to the table only if the media was there. Obviously, the media wasn't there until the end. How did you get them to the table?

Answer:
We agreed that we would tape the sessions, but those tapes could only be used internally, so they could play them for their own people. Also, they would have to handle the taping. It became so cumbersome that it lasted about half of one day. It wasn't realistic.

Question:
And when you say, "played for their own people," you mean inside the prison?

Answer:
Yes, within the walls there. The tapes would only be played for their constituents within the walls. It just became too cumbersome, and again that's face saving. That was designed to help them save face. They had access to the media, they could place a phone call to the media. They didn't do it very much. When they did occasionally, we got wonderful press out of it, because they said things were happening, changes were coming a little bit here and there.

Question:
Did you do anything to enforce the agreement beyond that committee who's name I'm now forgetting?

Answer:
ISAC.

Question:
Yes, that one. Did you do any other long term planning or any sort of constituency work to try to make sure the changes that were agreed upon really happened?

Answer:
Well part of the commission of ISAC was that it would review, it would serve as the enforcement mechanism if anyone had any complaints. The Ombudsman was also there for that purpose. I don't remember the wording of the agreement, but that was the enforcement mechanism built in.

Question:
And did it work?

Answer:
I don't know if anybody ever took a complaint. I think the real answer to that came 15 years later where the same procedures were still in place and I asked McCray, "Why did you leave them there?" He said, "Well they worked." Everything that came out of that was their design. I might have suggested some things or pushed some things in certain directions, but I believe that all came right from them.

Question:
Reading between the lines, it sounds as if you would deem this mediation a success.

Answer:
Oh sure. I said it, if you read between the lines and you come back to 15 years later and you go down there and they are negotiating torn sheets in the laundry...

Question:
Did CRS deem this successful? You were regional director so we're talking about the Washington director. Did they consider this to be successful?

Answer:
Well, I must say as a regional director, I always try in important cases to bring it to the director's attention. So a letter was written either to my director or to the attorney general from the Commissioner of Corrections and we got a favorable editorial, coincidentally. I didn't promote that, but they gave us a nice boost and I made sure that Washington appreciates that. Then my boss can send it to his boss, and sometimes it gets to his boss. So that's useful.

Question:
What I'd like to do now is go back through the interview schedule and talk in more general terms, discussing lots of cases, opposed to just one. We might start with a question about how cases routinely came into your office. Did people most often call you? Did you most often read things in the newspaper or hear them on the radio or TV and go out after them? What was more common?

Answer:
A combination of methods. At one point we went so far as to have United Press news wires in our offices. Half of it was to be sure if Washington saw something, we knew it first. The worst thing was to get a call from Washington saying what's happening in Peoria, and we didn't know, but they had received a call, or something of that sort. Typically a mediator or a field representative, conciliator (different titles at different times during the agency's history), would have some geographical responsibility. A regional director would determine who would be responsible for what geographical regions or areas, and they would have links into those communities. This might have been done ethnically in some places. If you had people on your staff who were American Indians or Hispanic in some areas of the country, sometimes it might be divided that way. For example, it was understood that if there were issues in Chicago coming out of the Hispanic community, the two or three Hispanic staff members would handle those. We had a Hispanic in Detroit though, and he was responsible for everything there. Typically, we would get newspapers from the major cities in the region. People would make periodic phone calls if they thought something might be coming up. People kept their own "future files" to follow up on events, if they knew something might be happening. We had strong links to the state NAACP chapters. State chapters of La Raza, and at times, cold calls would come in from someone who had been referred to us. Sometimes another federal agency would call with a problem that was not in their domain. It might be the US attorney's office, it might be a HUD office, EEOC Employment Opportunity Office where they had something unique and they brought it to our attention. So it could be any combination. But certainly we were alert to the media. Our people listened to the radios and we had newspapers and when there was a hint of anything happening we would respond. Now how we responded would depend in part on what was going on. If we had a very heavy case load, if we had no travel budget, if we had people out on other assignments, or sick, or on vacation, then we might discourage a response or hope the problem would go away. These are the realities, the human elements that come in. Let me add one other thing. Occasionally another region would alert us to a problem that would overlap, or that they heard about. Regarding alerts, I should say we would formalize activities at the Community Relation Service so that there were categories of things that we did and one of them, perhaps the first one, was alerts. When people were evaluated, we reviewed responsibilities, and how many alerts a person brought in. After each alert was received, a one page report was written. Just a few scribbled lines that indicated who called, when they called, what the issue was, and what the follow up would be.

Question:
Explain what an alert is.

Answer:
An alert is a notice to the Community Relation Service providing information that there was a matter, a case, that came to our attention that demanded that we take a look at it to see what to do. Then we would determine what the next step would be. It could be something that we closed on receipt for any number of reasons. We might not have been able to respond, it may have been very low priority, but very likely it was out of our jurisdiction. We would typically refer it to somebody or give some quick phone advice or information. Or it might move to the next phase, which is obtaining more information and beginning an assessment. So the alert typically would be something within our jurisdiction and it would mean some report of some type of problem, conflict, differences, disagreements in a community.

Question:
And you encouraged your staff to go out and get as many of those as they could?

Answer:
Well not go out, but from behind a desk usually, or receiving phone calls or making phone calls. It was imperative that we knew what was happening in our regions.

Question:
Now how did you do prioritize when you had more on your desk then you could handle?

Answer:
I should refer you to that article I sent you a year ago, the one I wrote for Peace and Change Journal on CRS’s methodology. *[find and insert relevant section with footnote.] It has the CRS model, and there I categorize each of these areas. Okay, number one was potential for violence. Assuming it's within our jurisdiction, the mandate of the agency. Number two, is it likely we can have some impact? How many people are involved? Another is, who's asking us? Is it a school superintendent, is it the head of the NAACP, is it a congressman's office, is it the director calling from Washington? This all had a practical impact on whether we responded or not. That had an impact on how effective we could be. It had an impact on how important the matter was, and the political consequence to the agency of responding or not responding, which obviously is a matter that you had to take into consideration. That wasn't overriding, but it could have some impact. How long had the problem been persisting? Have we ever been in that matter before? What other efforts had been undertaken? Was this intractable, or was this something that was new and fresh? Was this something we had experience in? Do we have a higher expectation of success based on our experience? Did we have the money to respond? Did we have the personnel to respond? What were the negatives? Was there someone who didn't want us to respond. Maybe there was a good reason not to. That might not be pretty always, but there well may be a reason why we should not respond. I think that probably covers all of the things we considered.

Question:
This is a difficult question to answer probably, but what percentage of the cases that got to be alerts did you actually end up handling at the end?

Answer:
That is an impossible question to answer. There was one point, for example, where staff began missing alerts so we adjusted our internal evaluation system to give more credit to identifying alerts than we had been. We started to do some counting and everybody in the office had to focus more on alerts. Now there was one person on the staff who probably was our weakest conciliator. He started grinding out alerts like you wouldn't believe and by the scale we created, he was the most effective person in the office. Also there were cases when we would respond to an alert by phone and close it out, make no more of it, only to learn later that you really helped somebody. At an Ohio NAACP conference one year, a women from Lima, Ohio, came up to me and said, "Oh, are you Mr. Salem? Mr. McKinney was on your staff and he was so helpful when we called him. He got us started and sent us some materials and that got our organization going." This was a case recorded only as an "alert” four years earlier. When the call came in, it was an incipient group that had no real organization, they had difficulty defining their problem, didn’t know where to go. It was not the type of case we would respond to, so Howard McKinney provided some advice on the phone, perhaps referred her to some local community leader, and sent her some materials. We never heard from them again, but she couldn't have been happier. It was very helpful to her. It's hard to gauge effectiveness, even to measure things that never got beyond the alert stage. The report probably said "I sent her some materials, discussed the problem, and closed the case.” So I don't know, and I don't think anybody knows, how many such "cases" moved along. Let me add another thing about alerts. When we would go to meetings or conferences of state organizations we would get a lot of alerts. You'd meet people and they would tell you they have a problem in their community. You would take that back to the office and then get back to people later. So that was another heavy source of alerts.

Question:
On your more major cases, when there isn't a phone call that comes in, but you are the initiator, who do you decide to talk to first?

Answer:
Typically it was an aggrieved party who would call. And in all of these cases you have people who were aggrieved, victims of an injustice, in their perception. So you would typically talk to that person and obtain information. You would then want to verify what was being said so you might call the local person in the local leadership who you could trust to get a view of that person's complaint. Typically, for example, if a parent called about a school problem, you might go back and check with the local NAACP or urban league or human rights commission, someone you knew in that community who could give you a good reading with a sympathetic perspective, who might even know that person. If CRS initiated the calling we would start by calling somebody in the community we knew and felt we could trust. We would try to get a reading before contacting the disputing parties.

Question:
But you don't go to the person against whom the charges are being made?

Answer:
You asked me where you start. I'm saying you start with people who can give you more information.

Question:
So you're starting with a person who is neutral?

Answer:
Not necessarily. For example, someone might call and say we are having this terrible problem and I might pick up the phone and call the head of the local NAACP who certainly would not be neutral. He or she would say, "oh yeah, that's a problem and we've been dealing with that for a long time." They just never thought of bringing it to us for any reason, or maybe they'd say, "Well, yeah, that's a problem, but that's really an isolated case. They have a new principal over there and we are working on that." Then we get some sense of whether it is appropriate for us to intervene or not, based on our scale. Now if the NAACP director said, "Wow, now this is a real problem and am I glad you called," you probably would respond differently. Or if the aggrieved person was part of an organization rather than being just a parent it would influence our response. Was it a committee? A coalition? Is it a new committee or an established committee? We would ask, "Who have you talked to? What have you done?” You just try to flesh it out a bit.

Question:
So when you make this first phone call what kind of questions do you ask?

Answer:
Take a look at the article I mentioned in Peace and Change Journal. It has a chart in the back describing the information we seek in the alert and assessment stages. What you want to do is find out what happened and you start an assessment once you start asking these questions. I mean, you're in the case from the first phone conversation. You might close it in a minute, but right then you're in it, so you are doing all those things a good mediator has to do. The listening, drawing out information, taking good notes. At the outset you are more likely to be doing this on the phone. What is happening? Who is involved? You want to know what happened - - the history of the conflict. What are the issues? How long has it been going on? What has been done to date to resolve the problem? It's probably on any academic's list, any conflict map. Those sorts of questions are used to assess the situation.

Question:
How many people then do you contact by phone before you go on-site?

Answer:
Anywhere from one to a dozen, depending on a variety of circumstances. You might never get on-site or it may take a while to do so. You usually don't know whether you are going on-site until you have the information and then can place it in the context of your other priorities, the budget, your schedule, and your personal factors will inevitably come into it, even though we don't like to talk about it. You know, if you had a long weekend vacation planned you might try to put it off for a week. It depends on how critical the situation is.

Question:
Are there certain situations where you prefer to talk to people in person rather then on the phone to do the assessment?

Answer:
That was not feasible. The assessment, by necessity, has to start on the phone unless someone walks into your office or you are in their community. Typically it starts on the phone and at a certain point it continues on-site if the case warrants it. After talking to the person or people involved in the matter and making some preliminary judgements, you might give them some initial advice. I'd suggest you talk to the assistant principal and call me back. If he is unaware that this is happening in the classroom and this teacher is doing this to your child, here are some things you might do to move this forward. Here are some people locally you might call, someone we know we'd refer them to. Or depending on the state of the matter I might call the assistant principal, or the school superintendent. Very often when talking to establishment officials I would start at the top with my Justice Department credentials to get their attention and worry them a bit. They seldom want the Justice Department to come into their school, police department or community. Many people with grievances do, but no public official wants anyone from the Justice Department coming in. So we don't say this is a Community Relations Service mediator governed by a confidentially clause. We say, "this is the Justice Department.” So, we would have to be careful in determining who to call first and let them know we are coming in. We wouldn't start with the assistant principal. We might call the principal or the superintendent of schools and say we've heard there is a problem at the George Washington School, and there have been some protests, we're wondering if we can be of any help. We offer our services and ask if we can be of assistance and try to get some information. I guess everybody would approach it differently, but we try to create some rapport so this person will be willing to talk to you. You begin to build your information base, your assessment about what’s happening. Also during this time, you try to build some trust and get some indication whether they would be receptive to your coming in. Or you might just say, "we’re coming in.” You might say, "we’re coming in for this matter," or you might say, "I’m going to be in the area anyway, I’d like to drop by and chat with you about it when I’m in your city." When Gerald Ford, unexpectedly acceded to the presidency of the United States, I checked on Grand Rapids, Michigan - - his home town - - where we’d had little activity. We had one case there over the years regarding a museum that was unearthing an Indian mound, and there was a conflict over the bones, whether they go to the museum or the Indian group. Other than that, we hadn't had a Grand Rapids case in a dozen years. All of a sudden we wanted to know what was happening in Grand Rapids. So I took my senior mediator and we went to Grand Rapids to meet with the head of the Human Relations Commission and the head of the NAACP to establish some relations in the President’s home town. That was a practical, political, but also programmatic response. We never did very much there after that because there wasn’t a call to. When there was a volatile Indian fishing rights dispute in remote northern Wisconsin, we took information on the phone and Efrain Martinez and Werner Petterson made an initial site visit. Martinez stayed with the case. It was one of the best he ever did when he was working out of Chicago. The reservation was in the district of a congressman who was on our Appropriations Committee. So that made it easier for me to commit our sparse funds for travel to a remote area. The congressman was essential to CRS’s funding and survival, so this was a way to be sure he was aware of the important work we were doing. So, getting back to your questions, during the alert stage, we always would talk to people who were involved on all sides of the conflict and then let them know if we were coming in. Only rarely would be go on-site without an initial phone assessment.

Question:
Is that because violence was happening or you think that it’s about to?

Answer:
Yes or some other critical reason. For example, we had a call from rural Ferris State College in Michigan, where they had been recruiting black students for the first time. The black students were being intimidated by white students who kept their hunting rifles in their rooms. There was some serious intimidation, and it was apparent to call that this was a serious matter. The alert came from the state NAACP, I believe. The handful of black students on campus were being intimidated, their parents were on campus and the college president had refused to meet with them. C.J. Walker, in our Detroit office, phoned the President and told him he was coming in. We stayed close to C.J. on the phone then, because he was new on the job. He just went in there to get the parties talking, to get something happening. There was no time to fool around there. We had the resources, we had the person, he was nearby, he got in there, and he got on the job. That’s the way we would operate when there was high tension or a crisis. What he did there, incidentally, was to get the parties talking. He got the president to meet with the parents.

Question:
Why did he refuse?

Answer:
He would not meet with them because they hadn’t made an appointment. It was one of those things where "If you want to meet, just make an appointment, but don’t just show up.” Or "We have this under control, there is no need for a meeting.” The main job of CRS was to get him to meet with them. Not to carry the message of what was happening, but to get the president to sit down with the parents, hear them out and give them a response. That was the appropriate role for us. When the president told us he was too busy to meet, C.J. said, "I only need five minutes of your time,” and that five minutes was spent convincing him and trying to help him understand the necessity of meeting with the parents.

Question:
Do you find that it’s easier to gain trust if you meet in person rather than trying to form a relationship over the phone?

Answer:
Face to face sounds better, but we didn’t have a choice. You just have to do it every way. Sometimes people don’t know who you are, what color you are, how old you are, and sometimes it’s better if they don’t see you. That way you can talk to them and build rapport. So I don’t have an answer. I’m thinking of another emergency where we got a call from Flint, Michigan. This was also C.J.’s territory. He worked out of Detroit. In Flint, Michigan, there had been a policeman shot and killed by someone believed to be black. Police then rampaged through the black community, breaking into houses during the night and pulling people out of their homes. I got on the phone from Chicago late in the afternoon. C.J. was unable to get into Flint until the next morning. It turned out that the police chief was on vacation, his assistant chief was in control and clearly couldn’t control what was happening. I called the assistant chief at 4 p.m. and said, "Mr. Walker is coming to Flint and should be there this evening. If he gets there in time, he’ll call you and let you know he’s in town. But he’ll definitely call you in the morning.” I knew C.J. wouldn’t be there until the morning but I wanted police to think the Justice Department was on their back that night. I don’t know whether it worked or not. This was a case where our first concern was getting somebody on the scene or at least to have the police chief think somebody from outside was there observing. Once we confirmed the likelihood of police violating the rights of citizens in the black community again that night, we did not need a further assessment to know we had to be there.

Question:
Were there ever cases where a party did not want you involved in the case but you went anyway?

Answer:
Oh yes.

Question:
Can you give an example?

Answer:
As I said, public officials seldom want the Justice Department to come in. The school superintendent has a contract coming up in two months, he doesn’t want the Justice Department in there saying to the world that he can’t handle his job.

Question:
But does he tell you that he doesn’t want you in there?

Answer:
Well, you can read it pretty quickly. He may not say, "stay away," but he conveys the message. Mayors of big cities seldom want the federal government intervening in local racial conflicts involving police or schools. They want to believe they have the resources to handle it. Sheriffs, as you know, are elected at the county level and not subject to the dictates of governors, state legislatures, congressmen, presidents. Sheriffs run their own fiefdoms in rural areas; they are often a political force in the county. During one period, we were having trouble gaining cooperation from sheriffs in Ohio. They did not want CRS involved, and we could make no headway. Within the year, the Justice Department, unbeknownst to us, indicted about twenty sheriffs in Ohio, for embezzlement, gambling or some other felonies. Each case was separate. No wonder they didn’t want the Justice Department in their counties, even CRS. Sometimes people don’t want us, but they know that they have to have us, because they have no choice. We don’t need anybody’s permission to intervene. An untoward police act, people protesting, major protests in the city, the police chief doesn’t have it under full control, the police commissioner or mayor had to do something. Again, he may not want us, but he knows something has to happen and maybe we can help. So he works with us. We worked in Cairo, Illinois, which is closer to Birmingham, Alabama than Chicago. Nobody in the establishment wanted us, as there was blatant discrimination going on. The city lost every case in the courts over the years, but they dragged it out. The political establishment did everything it could to resist change. It was a black/white issue, straight up. At times there was violence, at times it was more subtle. The public officials often refused to talk to us. I remember the Chicago office of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, wanted to hold a meeting down there, so we worked with them. It was a request they made in conjunction with local black leaders and I couldn’t say no. So we scheduled a meeting, and the governor’s office sent some people in. City officials, the county officials, the sheriff’s office all refused to show up. They knew we were sitting around a table. And there I am, and there’s the Civil Rights Commission, which also has no enforcement power. The governor’s people flew in on a private plane. But the other chairs were empty because they just wouldn’t come. So no, they didn’t want us.

Question:
Did you ever manage to get them involved anyway?

Answer:
One of my last mediation CRS was a voters rights case in Cairo involving some of those same individuals, a beautiful case because it settled, and that was through the court. The case had been in the courts for years and finally, when the handwriting was on the wall, the city agreed to settle and the judge asked CRS to mediate it.

Question:
But that was forced by a lawsuit rather than...

Answer:
Most changes in Cairo, Illinois were forced by lawsuits. The black community had good legal services from lawyers coming out of Chicago doing pro bono work with the civil rights groups out of Chicago, and the Land of Lincoln law firm out of St. Louis. But these cases would hang in the courts for years and years and only when the handwriting was on the wall would the city would turn around and agree to settle. When the cases went to trial, the city would lose. So yes there were many times we were not wanted in the community. The other side of the coin is that many times we were welcomed in the community. I’d like to give you another example of a time we got a call from Kellogg community college in Battle Creek. A Hispanic leader phoned and Efrain Martinez took the call. He told us how terrible things were at the community college. Martinez went on-site. There was a problem here and he felt we could do some good. He met with this community leader and some students. I don’t remember whether the community leader was a student or not, but then there were some students and they had what you might say is a traditional list of problems. Admissions of Hispanics to the community college, curriculum problems, faculty problems, advisors. Then you get down to other issues like the food, the respect people were receiving and those types of things. There were maybe eight items on their agenda that needed addressing. Martinez went over to see the President of this college. He greeted him with open arms and agreed the list of complaints was valid. He said the group had not approached him and he asked Martinez to arrange a meeting.

Question:
And was it genuine?

Answer:
Martinez had no reason to think it wasn’t. He came back very enthusiastic. So I saw that report, talked to Martinez and stayed on his back when the case began to drag out. "What’s going on?" I asked. I thought you had this thing moving along. Well what happened is the community leader disappeared. You had a President ready to give the Hispanic students most everything they wanted and more perhaps. He was responsive, socially responsible. The students had been motivated by this community organizer from Texas who came up to Battle Creek, probably on the migrant trail. He suddenly pulled up stakes and returned to Texas. There was no organization, no cohesiveness, not even serious interest on the part of the students. So Martinez returned to the school but was unable to pull the student protesters together. It fell apart. There were changes made because the awareness of the President was heightened, but there was no Hispanic community organization. It was just one leader who pulled some people together. He could have pulled off great things if he hung around. So it works that way too.

Question:
Going back to the earlier conversation where there were officials who did not want the Justice Department in there, did you ever start working just with the minority community, figuring that you could get the officials, the administration to go along later?

Answer:
A lot would depend on the community where we were working. Many times you get a call from a smaller community, Xenia, Ohio; Evansville, Indiana or Peoria, Illinois, away from the big cities, where there were very few resources. When you worked in Chicago or Detroit there were resources galore and, incidentally, strong mayors never wanted CRS. They played at it, played with you, but they seldom wanted you there. And they seldom needed you as such, those communities had resources on every side of the dispute. But you get down to Evansville, and there weren’t that many resources. And when you got to smaller cities yet, say Xenia, and by the time you show up there, someone from the Justice Department more likely than not a black or Hispanic, someone they could relate to, they’d never seen this. I mean they knew it was there, but here you are. This guy they met at the state NAACP meeting is now in their town to help them with their problem. Wow. You start working with that group. Yes, you go and see the school superintendent or the city manager or the police chief too. When the establishment doesn’t want us there? We work with them within the limits of our authority and ethical questions about what our role is, but I think everyone in CRS recognizes that very often, especially in smaller communities, you’re dealing with establishment vs. aggrieved communities that have damn good reasons for their concerns and complaints, and they’re on the short end of the stick much of the time. So to help empower them is important and appropriate, and in many cases the establishment understands this and agrees. If the mayor has a problem in the community, if he doesn’t have a cohesive group to work with across the table, he’s not going to get that problem solved. We will tell him we are working with this group so they can get an agenda together to bring to you that goes beyond "freedom now”, that specifically says what they need so that you can address them. This was often seen and accepted and understood, even appreciated.

Question:
What about when it wasn’t?

Answer:
Well, a lot of things would happen that I wouldn’t know. The field representative who had a very high sense of justice and was doing something that perhaps went over the line. They weren't going to come back and tell me exactly what they did to help the community.

Question:
Did you hear about it though? Would people call up, city officials or somebody call up?

Answer:
Not too often. There may be things that were said about an individual or a place or a time but typically that did not happen. I remember Bob Lamb and I went to see the police chief of Richmond, California. It was a special project that the CRS Director put together when police were having problems with Black Panthers in the ‘70s. When police would try to serve a warrant at a Black Panthers headquarters they risked being turned away by gunfire. So we had a plan that tried to find intermediaries in these communities where perhaps someone who was trusted in that community, could help serve a warrant, so that a routine legal matter could be taken care of without police being blasted away. And in discussing this with the police chief of Richmond, California it seemed to work fine. The chief listened to us and he thanked us. He then wrote a scathing letter to Attorney General John Mitchell expressing surprise that "You would have people like this working for the Justice Department who would not have police do their required work in a required manner.” So we got complaints that way when they disagreed with what we were doing. But, you know, when we talked about empowerment I mentioned earlier that Howard McKinney just sent some stuff in the mail or gave some advice over the phone to someone. That certainly was helping one side of the conflict. There was another case, for example, involving Reggie Turner who was the police chief of Cleveland, Ohio, a black who had been a high ranking officer in Detroit. There were some community problems with the police firearms policy in Cleveland following some shooting incidents. Our only role there was to provide technical assistance, they didn’t need mediation. There was good communication between the police chief and the black leadership. What they needed were some good firearms policy models and our organization pulled together half a dozen of these, got them to all the parties so they could work together, and that empowered the community, but it also empowered police because locally they just didn’t have what was needed and we could provide them with what they needed to work together.

Question:
Who decides what they need, do you or do they?

Answer:
We always start with what the group says it needs. It would be nice to sit here and say they tell us and we respond, but the reality is when you do enough of these for enough years you can sort of pretty well see what’s needed and what’s happening and you can lead the community group into knowing what it needs very often. One simple thing is helping a group understand it needs a good agenda if is going into negotiations, with or without a mediator. That grievances should be presented in a way that they can be responded to. If the agenda is fire the school superintendent, or fire the police chief, you know that's not likely to be achievable. You encourage them to shape an agenda that puts that at the bottom and started with some of the substantive changes they want to see. So you put the achievable at the other at the top of the agenda and push "fire the police chief” to the bottom. When they make enough progress at the top and middle of the agenda, they realize that you don’t have to fire the police chief, if he’ll abide by what you’ve agreed to up above on the agenda. So that’s empowering, helping the group understand the negotiation process. And you’re leading the group that way, certainly. You’re saying, "I know what’s best for this group in this negotiation.” I’ve never seen a group when we suggest resources that are available that wouldn’t be eager to accept them, if they were serious about resolving problems. Sometimes it was a consultant we identified who could help them, someone who had resolved a similar problem in another community, or an expert in policing or schools. We could pay plane fare and honorarium. "We’ll pay this guy’s plane fare to come over to talk to you and sit down with you.” In one case, I brought three Hispanic parents from Chicago into Washington DC to meet with the Civil Rights Division (CRD) during Chicago’s school desegregation suit. There they had a chance to meet with the attorneys who were working with the city and putting a plan together. So they felt they had their voices heard in Washington. That is providing technical assistance -- knowing that’s what the group wanted in that case. It was hard to tell whether anyone was listening, but the community members felt they had their voices heard. Now that’s another way of building credibility for ourselves. Before that, trust levels were really low. There was at a big public meeting and CRD had asked me to go; the US attorney had asked me to go. Nobody else in the Justice Department wanted to go near it. So what I brought to that public meeting was the idea that we would pay the fares for three people in your group to go to Washington to talk to the Civil Rights Division and be sure their voices were heard. There was so much skepticism that somebody raised their hand from the audience and asked, "Are you going to pay our plane fare back too?”

Question:
Did you ever get pressure from Washington to stay out of things in Chicago because the mayor didn’t want you intervening there?

Answer:
No. But I started at CRS in June 1968, and the democratic convention was in August. This was not a racial matter, primarily, but there were a lot of civil rights issues and there were marches from downtown Chicago out to the amphitheater where the convention was that went through black neighborhoods. And police would deter marchers by throwing out tear gas which would waft into apartments and there were racial overtones. So we intervened.

Question:
And what did you do?

Answer:
The guys who responded were on the street, I wasn’t doing that. Primarily this was, with one exception, a black staff; three people from Chicago and one sent in from Washington. What they did, I suspect, was confront police and alert them to the problem. I don’t know whether they asked them or told them or what they actually said. We were also on the street observing the horrendous police behaviors. I can’t say what everybody did, because I wasn’t there, and I know they weren’t telling me, nor were they telling Deputy Attorney General Warren Christopher when we reported to him at his suite atop of the Hilton. What I do know, is when it was all over, five or six of us were sitting in the office when the phone rang and it was Roger Wilkins, the director of CRS. I’d only been out there about four months; they’d just opened the office. I was the regional director. They did not consult Mayor Daley on my appointment, which federal agencies usually did when they appointed regional directors. Often Mayor Daley would make the appointments himself. But we did not control the flow of federal funds and he had no use for us, we were like flies on the wall. Roger said on the phone, "Dick put me on the speaker.” So I pushed the speaker phone button, "I want you guys to know that whatever happens, you acquitted yourself very well.” It turned out that police had complained to the FBI and the FBI complained to the white House that we were running around telling police what to do in Chicago. That's how Roger started the conversation, "Dick, did any of your people tell the police what they should be doing?” And I said, "Guys?” "No.” So who knows what happened in the heat of things? That’s the report that came back to the mayor and they wanted us out of there. It wasn’t important enough for them to pursue and the issue died. But at that moment, it sounded like we were all going to be working somewhere else. So yes, there are times the public officials let it be known they don’t want us around. Very often, if someone would complain to Washington, the letter would go to my boss and it would go to the Attorney General, as it did in Richmond, CA. It would come back down to my boss for the AG’s signature, he’d send it to me, so that I would draft the response to the complaint against me, send it back to him, back to the attorney general, back to the complainer with the AG’s signature.

Question:
You’ve talked off and on about empowering the low power groups. Are there any other ways that you do that, that you haven’t mentioned already?

Answer:
I think a large part of our work was empowering, even though we’re doing conflict management, even though we’re helping communities find peace. Our mandate is to help communities to resolve problems, differences, and disagreements. The whole thing is empowerment. You’re bringing a group together, you’re helping them find ways to come together. You’re educating, growing on the experience of the mediator on the scene, and educating people as to how you behave to get better results, helping them understand that you can only get so much based on how much power you have. Helping them understand the factors that go beyond "you.” Mediation really was an education process for people at all levels, from the most sophisticated local leadership to grass roots community members who were trying to boost up their organizations and get things. It isn’t always that way; very often the groups that we would work with would be very sophisticated. For example, I was working with a group in Minneapolis, and former Congressman, Bob Frasier, was the new mayor of Minneapolis. There’s a small African American community there, and I was drawn in because a special friend of the director of CRS was a woman who worked for the Urban Coalition out of Washington. She called me and said "We have a chapter, we have a newer man in Minneapolis, with the Urban Coalition.” (The Urban Coalition was an establishment-oriented public service group that addressed race relations in urban areas.) "He needs some help.” So I went and talked to him, and there were race problems related to police. You had that new mayor, so it looked like it would be a good place to make a mark. We had done some good things in that part of the country over the years. We knew the players, but not well enough. I had not done my homework well enough. This is one of the disadvantages when you’re shooting in and out of places, and trying to be all over the place. Especially if you’re the regional director focusing on a community. But by that time we had a very small staff and we hadn’t spent a lot of time in that part of the country in some years. So what I didn’t know is that the black leadership was rejecting this man who had come in from out of state to head the local Urban Coalition. There was a very tight knit black leadership group. We knew that, but they didn’t signal us that they were rejecting this guy. We pursued the issue of police community relations. There were police abuses, not serious violence. There were a lot of complaints, and they were probably accurate. At first, the police chief would not talk about them. I had suggested to the mayor’s office that he might want to consider sitting down and mediating this conflict. Along the way, this fellow from the Urban Coalition left his job; they forced him out. I got a call from the mayor's office that the mayor would like to sit down and talk. I said "Hallelujah!” A big city mayor, relatively big city mayor, is willing to mediate, wow! So I called one of the black leaders and arranged a meeting with him. When I get to his office it turned out to be a command performance if you would. Five or six people from the black community were there, and only one of them was talking. It was clearly a planned meeting. They had worked out whatever differences they had before I ever got there. And they said "Dick, we appreciate everything you’ve done, but I think we’ll take it from here. Why don’t you go back to Chicago, and we’ll call you if we need you.” So that took care of that. What had happened, is that they had announced a week or so earlier, and this had gone by me, that they were going to have public hearings on these police issues. They were going to have a public debate and the police chief’s chair would be there, even though he refused to participate. It would be empty. And they knew they would get good publicity. One of the black leaders was about to run for the city council, and there were a couple of other agendas there. Also the hearings would heighten awareness in the community of their problem. It was a great strategy. But they didn’t want any mediation at this point, and they let me know in no certain terms. And they were right, so I went back to Chicago. And they got their publicity and the problems was mitigated, although probably never fully resolved.

Question:
Why do you say they were never resolved?

Answer:
The same types of cases that the agency has been responding to since I started there in 1968 are still happening today. Police abuse, excessive use of force, improper training of police, quick pulling of the trigger, racism. You can say things are better, but in some places they’re still bad. Chicago, New York, California, they’re still in the front pages.

Question:
But once you go into a city and establish some sort of structure, such as the one you were talking about yesterday, does that tend to improve things over the long term?

Answer:
I don’t know for sure. I am sure it does in some places. That’s why I suggest we try to get a grant to look at some of that. I mean I could think of some good things that have happened, where you have a police-community conflict, where you get a significant level of response from the establishment, from the mayor’s office basically, and police commissioner, depending on the structure, and the aggrieved community. Then you come together and you set up some mechanisms to address the issues. People exchange phone numbers so that anybody can contact anybody in an emergency, so when there’s a problem you can get to the leadership on the streets. Whether it’s the police leadership or the community leadership. You have monthly meetings of the leadership to discuss issues. You have improved training, you review the police firearms policy and you make changes in it. You do human rights training, human relations for whatever that’s worth sometimes it’s worth a lot, sometimes less. You build this into the orientation for new police officers. You address personnel complaints about assignments, hiring, and promotions. So these things would be written in. You come up with an agreement with half a dozen components to it, whether it was formal or informal mediation. You’ve involved the business leadership, perhaps, or other socially concerned business leaders, civic leaders, the black community, the white community, whoever the parties are. I don’t know how enduring those have been in places over the years. It takes some enlightenment. Yesterday, I mentioned that case in St. Cloud. It’s not very often you go back fifteen years later, find the parties have changed and yet, the agreement still goes on. So yes, that worked. In Columbus, someone would have to go back and look where we had Pat Glenn help set that system up with police and the community. I imagine that there are settings that you’ve heard about during the course of these interviews, in schools or communities, where conditions haven’t changed measurably. That Bad River Reservation that I mentioned up in Northern Wisconsin was extraordinary. You had Indians on a Reservation. Some of that land was owned by white resort owners who rented it out for hunting and fishing. Then, you had Indian Rights, which limited how much hunting and fishing could go on. There was a real threat to those resort owners, so the bumper stickers in the area would read, "Spear an Indian, not a fish.” You had a white, and rural community around that broader Indian Reservation area. There had been no communications across lines. I’ve got some letters about that work. Martinez and Petterson opened up communications between the Indian leaders and the county commissioner, local folks, where they had never talked before. I have letters from the heart, thanking Martinez for the work he did to bring them together, and as a result of that, things must be better up there. People were communicating. Whether it reverts, I doubt that it all reverts, but you need another glance everywhere, to explore this.

Question:
Did parties ever ask you to do something that you were unable to do?

Answer:
I’m sure that they did. But, I think people really understood the limits of what we could do. I think it didn’t take parties long to realize that we couldn’t come in and end abuses, that this had to come through them and the courts. We would discuss the options. You’re probably going to get better answers on that question from the people who are in the field day in and day out, rather than a regional director. Sometimes, staff would do things that they shouldn’t do. Certainly during Wounded Knee, people were asking us to smuggle things in. Sometimes we would, staff would do that because we thought it would help out in the long run. That’s how you deal with trust, that’s how you get people to talk to you, bringing food into Wounded Knee. Sometimes you couldn’t do it. But you had to do it at Wounded Knee, where it was important that they had some gasoline so responsible leaders could move their motor vehicles between these bunkers where armed people were, so they could communicate with them and control the shooting. So we knew when they were siphoning gas from the tanks of our cars, that’s how it was going to be used. So we didn’t fight it. We just tried not to get caught on the road with out gas on the way back, which would happen from time to time. So you’re there -- you couldn’t do it, and you shouldn’t have done it, but you did it because you knew in the end it was going to be helpful.

Question:
We’ve been talking directly about empowerment, but talking around the issue of neutrality, and impartiality.

Answer:
Neutrality is strictly theoretical. There is no neutrality. You can’t be neutral where you have vast injustices.

Question:
Do you portray yourself as neutral when you talk to the groups?

Answer:
No one expects you to portray yourself as neutral if you come into a situation where everybody knows there are inequities. It’s not necessary if you can project yourself as objective, understanding, and empathic. We were called upon to help communities resolve problems, and empowering is part of that. You could do that legitimately and appropriately without violating your objectivity or impartiality. You bend and you lean, but I think everybody understands that.

Question:
So that never became a major issue?

Answer:
Sure, it became a major issue. People were concerned with who we were. You walk into a police chief’s office after an officer shot a 14 year old fleeing from a 7-Eleven, and the kid didn’t have a gun. Who’s impartial when you walk in from the Justice Department or Community Relations Service? Who’s impartial, especially if you’re black? I am not, but I might have been with a partner who was. Or, I’m immediately speaking about concerns being expressed in the minority communities, or the liberal communities. The police chief knows he’s got a problem. He knows that the cop who shot that kid had more arrests in the last year, meets the statistics better than anyone on the force. He also knows that he’s got a problem. So I want him to see me as part of the solution and show him how we can help him. He’s got protest group problems, his job and police force are being threatened by this, so I let him know I can do something to help him with that. The first thing I need to do is let him know I understand his problem and what he’s going through. The police chief of Detroit said, "You know, if I discipline those two guys, I’m going to have a strike. It might be that every illegally parked car is going to be ticketed in this city, or a slowdown of some sort. I will not be able to control this police force if I discipline those two men the way I’m being asked to,” I need to demonstrate an understanding. I can’t be the angry community member coming in. I have to support the community in another way, and they have to understand that, and they do. They don’t ask me or my mediator to leave town. I’m using first person in a lot of this, but I’m really speaking for the process that we would use. Some of which is my own experience, and some of which I know from living with the people who did this.

Question:
This direction the conversation is taking reminds me of a conversation we had with Ozell Sutton, who talked about when they would call the Regional Administrator in. There were several cases that he talked about when the field officers would start on a case, and at some point, they called him saying, "Ozell we need you.” Or, he would decide that it was appropriate for him to go in because the situation seemed to warrant somebody from higher up in the organization. How did you make that determination that you personally were needed?

Answer:
How would I decide to personally go onto the scene? I mentioned earlier, we went into the city because we were breaking new ground in the President’s home city, and I wanted to know what was happening. It’s not that I didn’t trust who was going in, but I had the time available. It might have been an ego matter or it might have been to give support. Because we had two people rather than one, we had more ability to do things. Or it might be because I wanted a presence, or it might be because I was looking for a connection. I don’t even know what motivates us. But number one, because I felt I added value to the response. Number two, I would go in if it was a very high visibility matter, where I wanted to personally involve myself. I love field work, like every Regional Director does, and we wanted to be out in the field sometimes. I could select my cases, so that’s why I went to Kent State and that’s why I personally undertook some other cases. Sometimes, I would get a request from a field representative who saw value in my participating, and I would seldom say no. Sometimes I was in a supervisory or management role. Perhaps somebody was working in the city and was reporting all kinds of good things happening, and it was a major city. So after eight months, I would go in and verify that. It was a management problem if you had a person spending too much time in one place. I wanted to talk to some of the principals to be sure of what was happening there. It would depend. We also had outlying field offices and I would periodically go to visit a field worker and go on-site and they would want to put their best foot forward. Sometimes I created tension and I wasn’t wanted on the scene, but sometimes I was, it just depended. There was always racial tension with a white Regional Director dealing in race relations issues. I had to recognize that. You pay a price for that, and one of the prices is there is tension that exists between your own staff of civil rights or race relations workers. Should they have hired a black or Hispanic for my job? Well, they didn’t. I was available and someone who was black decided I was the best person for that job. But, you should know that there were four or five people in that office when I was hired who felt that they should’ve had a crack at that job. One of the prices we pay is having some tension within their own organization. So you have to earn your stripes, if you will, in many ways. Some of us did and some of us didn’t. Some of us did with some staff, and some didn’t with others.

Question:
What about the outside world? Was your race an issue when you went into the field?

Answer:
Sure, race was an issue for anyone who went into the field and interacted with other races. It’s a fact of life. Factors that influence that were, were you new on a scene, how did you compose yourself, what were the tension levels, who were you meeting with locally, who were you with from your own staff, who invited you in, who was there from the community? All of these things could be factors in how you were treated. Like mediation of any kind, your job was to build trust. You had to build trust. If you didn’t, you couldn’t work effectively. Some will say "If you can’t build trust, get out of there and go home.” Well, you can’t always get out of there.

Question:
What do you do?

Answer:
You do the best you can. You can’t tell in advance how it will work out.

Question:
If you were dealing with a black/white situation, did you try to get a black staff person involved? Did you try to match the race of the mediator to the problem?

Answer:
Yes, depending on the problem and the circumstances. I’ve given you some examples where that was not the case, but some people came over the years and they’ve been working in this office for many years and have built constituencies. So there was a black member of my staff in Chicago who had a lot of rapport. He would go to the NAACP state meetings, which was appropriate, he was a senior person. He would get calls, sometimes directly from them. They would call him, not me. That was appropriate too, because they knew him and he had been there for them.

Question:
Can you recall any examples when you served as a scapegoat, or when you helped another party save face?

Answer:
Yes. There’s one story which comes out of Wounded Knee. At Wounded Knee the American Indian Movement had taken over the historic village of Wounded Knee, within the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, and the feds had set up headquarters in the town of Pine Ridge. There was basically a sort of battle ground and there was a truce period before talks started and there was a DMZ. The demilitarized zone was agreed to, where no one would go and there would be a cease fire. It was agreed the talks would start and CRS was moving in and out between the parties, even though we were feds and nobody fully trusted us. We were trying to serve as intermediaries and help get talks started, among our many roles there. It was agreed that at noon on a certain date, the American Indian Movement leaders would set up a teepee in the demilitarized zone, in that no man’s land near the federal road block, and that the feds would come in and we would begin to have negotiations in this big teepee. It was very ceremonial and very public. The press wouldn’t be in there, but they’d be outside. Indian time was typically late. The AIM leaders would be up late at night. They would have a spiritual ceremony. They would be late starting the next day’s activities by any clock that was set outside their own needs. I’d told this to Kent Frizzell, who was Solicitor General for the Department of Interior, who was the head US official. I told him to wait until I radioed him before his team came through the road block to negotiate. I spent the night in Wounded Knee and planned to come out with the leaders who were carrying and setting up the teepee. I would radio his office and let him know when to come in so that we’d all come together. That morning, we were late, as usual. There had been a shooting incident during the night; nobody was hurt, but it had people up late. At about 1150 in the morning, the AIM leaders were walking up the road with the teepee to the DMZ. All of a sudden this helicopter lands at the road block, and there is Kent Frizzell and his assistant. There were about 50 reporters at the road block. Also at the road block were other federal police types, who were keeping people apart and keeping people from passing through. So I’m walking with AIM up the road with about 150 yards to go and Stan Holder, one of the AIM leaders turns to me and angrily asks, "What are they doing here?” I said, "Wait a second, let me see.” I went running up to the roadblock and there was Kent Frizzell and I said, "I thought you were going to wait until I radioed you that we were ready.” He said, "We’re going to do this one on white man’s time, not Indian time.” He was setting a hard line to start the negotiations. So I said, "Look, there were real problems. I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but last night there was a violation of the cease fire and it was because some of your BIA people, early at sunup, they decided to have breakfast. So they drove over the hill, set up a blanket, took out their rations, and had breakfast on the wrong side of the line. That was a violation and caused a lot of consternation. People were up running around. I had to send a man up who was with me, Bert Greenspan, to see what was going on and report back.” I said, "That’s one reason everyone’s late.” Well, no one had told Kent about this incident. They were covering themselves. He said, "Alright, we’ll go back, but you tell them we’re going to back in a half hour and we’re going to meet on time or there’s not going to be any talks.” So I ran back down the hill to Holder, and I told him it was a mistake. "I must have screwed up,” I said. "I gave them the wrong time. They thought they were supposed to be here at noon.” He said, "Alright, but you tell them not to do it again because if they do it again, we’re going back. There’s not going to be any talks.” I ran back up the hill to Kent I went. I said, "Well, he says okay, a half hour’s fine.” They left and came back 45 minutes later, after I radioed them, and we had our talks and everything was okay. So that was serving as the scapegoat.

Question:
So that is a way to build trust?

Answer:
Well, you give everybody an excuse; you cover both sides. You leave yourself exposed, but you know they want you there, so nobody’s going to call you on it. It lets everybody save face as well.

Question:
Changing gears, going back to the assessment phase, how do you go about identifying what issues are key? Is this something that you leave to the parties, or is this something that the mediator will play a strong role in doing?

Answer:
Well, it’s politically correct to say you leave it to the parties to define the issues, and in fact you do. But you see things. You’re traveling around, and when you get to Evansville or Xenia or Springfield, you’ve seen the situation in other places and you hear certain things, and all of that directs your questions to certain points. The state of the group, how serious the violations are, what kind of sources of support they have, all these factors tend to alert you. That doesn’t mean that an individual without an organization can’t bring about great change. I mean, I told you about this community worker who wasn’t even from Battle Creek, who was bringing about major change at a small community college but that’s the exception. So during your assessment, you look for certain things: what resources are in the community, how supportive are they? Things that would key in the mediator in doing the assessment, and making it more efficient to determine whether or not mediation or further intervention would have significant results. So yes, the parties would define the issues, but sometimes you would point out other issues that were important to them, that they just hadn’t really thought about in the context of this particular problem. A jail suicide is what they’re complaining about, but there may be underlying issues in police/community relations that led up to this. "Why don’t you believe them when they tell you this was a suicide?” There’s a lack of trust. So what engendered that lack of trust are the issues you may want to look at.

Question:
Did you find yourself helping each side understand the issues from the perspectives of the other side?

Answer:
Yes, and that was probably one of our primary tasks. Where you could, you brought the parties together and facilitated their communicated. But very often, you found that you couldn’t, or that in the interim you had to help explain to one side or the other what was happening and why. It often lacked credibility coming from a third party, so that was not the preferred way to work. What you would try to convey to parties was the importance of sitting down with the other side. You needed to communicate that to them without saying how they should then proceed. We never told somebody you shouldn’t stop demonstrating. We never told somebody you shouldn’t stop enforcing the law, but we did say you ought to sit down and talk.

Question:
So you urged people to sit down at the same time that they were demonstrating?

Answer:
I wouldn’t even say sit down; I would say communicate, open communications. You could never place conditions. Someone can demand, "I’ll only negotiate when they stop demonstrating,” and you can carry that message. "They say they will only negotiate if you stop demonstrating,” and the answer usually will be, "Hell no.” So you go back and forth this way, but you would never tell someone what they should or shouldn’t be doing. Someone might advise, "You can always start demonstrating again tomorrow. You’re options are still open.” And they would decide what the risks were or weren’t. They would know that. Usually people would know. More importantly, you would advise the group if they didn’t have the background to make sound choices. You had to be very careful that you weren’t telling them to stop building their power base, but as I mentioned in the case in Minneapolis, the group was very wise and they knew what they should or shouldn’t be doing. Typically, community groups would know what was in their best interests, whether to stop or not. We would not advise them. We would just help them understand their options and also sometimes encourage them to bring in resources from their own community who could advise them. So we might point to people in their community they might want to be talking to, or even from another community, to help them make sound decisions. But our goal was to get people talking.

Question:
You said a minute ago you could not always get people to talk. What would stop you from getting people talking?

Answer:
At times you could not get people talking. Someone was adamant. "I won’t talk to them.” And again I come in, a mediator comes in, and doesn’t know the whole history. "I will not talk to them. Those people don’t listen,” or, "He doesn’t listen.” Sometimes it was a matter of timing. I mentioned Kent State, where a new president came in and his contract had just been signed, the ink was still wet. He was not about to engage in a losing situation, which it would have been, had he met with the protesters. They requested the meeting; I forwarded that message; he agreed; and then withdrew his agreement. Sometimes a group can’t get its act together and isn’t ready to meet. Sometimes, if you’re dealing with coalitions, you’ve got many views within a coalition and they’re not going to tell you about that. When I first started this job in 1969, there was a union building trades conflict in Chicago. There was a lot of discrimination against racial minorities trying to break into the construction trades. There was a major building trades confrontation in Chicago, major protests. The Rev. Jesse Jackson was there. At that time, it was Operation Push. Push was blocking construction sites using the Black P-Stone Nation, an infamous street gang, to provide the bodies for demonstrations at major construction sites. During the incipient stages of this conflict, I went directly to Art Fletcher by phone. He was the assistant Secretary of State for Labor under Nixon and he was black. I talked to him and he said, "I’ll make available to you Horace Menasco who is my deputy. He will come out and meet with the black coalition and tell them what their rights are under the law and what they can do.” It was a very generous contribution he was ready to make. I felt great and so I took this back to Clark Roberts who was my deputy then and asked him to arrange a meeting for us with the black leadership. The meeting that he arranged was with C.T. Vivian who was a prominent civil rights leader in Chicago at the time and chief spokesperson in the building trades protest. Clark sent a message over that we wanted to meet with the leadership to proffer this offer from Washington and it took a full two weeks to get a response. Finally, we got the meeting and it was in a church basement and there were CT Vivian and about five guys with red berets sitting there from the Black P-Stone Nation. None of them uttered a word, and I told him all of these things that Menasco was offering; documents and a presentation and the law, and they listened and said thank you, and it took another two weeks until they said yes. This was related to levels of trust, their own strategies, what they wanted to do. They were not ready to meet with anybody at that time. Ultimately, they said yes. Menasco came in and held a very large meeting, almost a public meeting. He made his presentation and the conflict went on and ultimately was resolved. It was very political. But there, people would not meet except on their terms, when they were ready.

Question:
Did you ever slow parties down who did want to meet? Did you ever decide that they were not ready yet and you didn’t want to bring them together yet?

Answer:
I don’t think so. I’m thinking of the Skokie-Nazi conflict where parties would not meet. They would not meet; they would not acknowledge each other. It was so bad that the ACLU could not get a response to a request from the village of Skokie for a parade permit for their client the neo-Nazis. And we had to serve as the intermediary and go to Skokie because the city officials were told not to communicate with the neo-Nazis in any way. So we all of a sudden became this intermediary and the only ones who were talking to all the parties. They would not meet and we knew that. We would never ask them to meet.

Question:
So how did CRS end up being the intermediary on that one?

Answer:
Well that’s another tangent we’re going into. I wrote a case study about the Skokie-Nazi conflict for Mediation Journal in about 1983. This was a group of neo-Nazis who were demonstrating regularly in the Marquette Park in Chicago and they were vile and intemperate in their language. It was a white neighborhood in an area where there was black housing. The whites viewed it as encroachment on their neighborhood. These were largely Eastern European families whose homes were their lives, and their savings. They would make their weekly mortgage payments at the local S&L, building their equity in their homes. Now they saw all this being threatened as blacks moved in block by block. So while these homeowners would not accept the values being espoused by the neo-Nazis in Marquette Park, as soon as their homes were threatened, they felt really threatened and they were sort of glad about that storefront neo Nazi office in their neighborhood. Every so often, the neo-Nazi group would step out of their area and go into a Chicago area which was black and there would be some violence. Then every so often, a black leader seeking some recognition, not the main line leaders, but some young mavericks, would want to march into Marquette Park area and then there would be some violence. There was police action, nothing heavy, but enough to cause major publicity and stone throwing type incidents. But after one of those incidents, the city passed an ordinance. The Chicago Park District refused to permit any group to demonstrate in Marquette Park with 75 or more people unless it had a permit. The neo-Nazis never had a membership of 75, but their leafletting drew large crowds so they were told to get a permit. The neo-Nazis refused to apply for permits and ultimately were banned from Marquette Park. They then wrote letters to about 75 suburbs in the region threatening to come to the suburbs. Most of suburban officials discard letters, but Skokie, which has a large Jewish population, including many concentration camps survivors, warned the neo-Nazis to stay out and that started an engagement. Skokie passed some ordinances, which later were stricken down, banning Nazis from demonstrating there. It became a cause for neo-Nazis throughout the nation. The ACLU accepted them as a client and it hurt the ACLU considerably. There were fine legal scholars at Northwestern and elsewhere who supported the ban. Then there was state legislation introduced, banning neo-Nazi marches anywhere. The neo-Nazis were really a rag-a-tag band of Keystone cop-type guys when they came out in their uniforms and wooden shields. Their vile language and hate messages inflamed the Jewish community and many others as well. It appeared there would be a demonstration in Skokie so Werner Petterson went into that case to advise Skokie officials on matters related to policing and handling demonstration crowds. If you had a handful of Nazis saying they were coming to Skokie, you were going to have tens of thousands of people from all over the country planning to come to Skokie to counter-demonstrate. So on the one hand, we worked with city officials and the police. I joined them in some of these meetings on techniques for minimizing the likelihood of violence, as the Skokie police had no experience in this. We got Commander Jim Reardon from the Chicago Police Department to help us. He had worked the Democratic Convention years earlier. He talked to them about crowd control. We visited with the state police and discussed what support they were giving and how. We met with the leadership of the Jewish community to talk about ways to minimize confrontations by planning their counter-demonstration at least a mile away from the neo-Nazi site to discourage people from interacting. Then, maybe a small delegation would walk over there with their candles or something in silent protest. All of this sounded good, but there was going to be thousands of angry people. The momentum was building. Conditions were inflamed by newspaper headlines about the determined neo-Nazis. A newspaper reporter told me that a travel agent in his home town of Los Angeles had booked 2000 charter seats to Skokie. President Carter had a political rally at a Skokie high school prior to his election some years earlier and tied up traffic in the village for hours one evening, so you can imagine what would happen. Then you had the Burlington, Vermont veterans of foreign wars saying they would pitch tents in Skokie. You had people from Europe who said they’d be there and then you had the controversial Jewish Defense League saying, "There will be blood in the streets of Skokie,” and putting ads in the Jewish Forward media saying, "Send us $50, Send a Jew to Skokie.” It was obviously going to be a catastrophe and everybody saw this and nobody wanted it. And there we were, the only ones meeting with all of the parties. So it was just natural to turn it to mediation. We were under constraints from the ACLU attorneys. They understood who we were, but they didn’t have much respect for anyone who did not declare their position. But they needed us. We met Frank Colin, the Neo-Nazi head, just to talk to him, and we worked with Eugene Dubow who headed the Chicago office of American Jewish Committee and was coordinating counter-demonstration work greater Chicago area. He was very supportive of what we were doing. We tried to get Chicago Park District to consider opening up its park to prevent serious problems in Skokie, but they wouldn’t talk to us. Somebody came up with the idea to have a counter demonstration scheduled at the Federal Plaza in downtown Chicago a couple of days before the planned Skokie march. This way, if there was a cancellation, there would be face saving done by giving Collin a site to demonstrate. Well, out of the blue, the head of the Federal General Services Administration in Washington, who happened to be Jewish, issued a statement that they were going to block this. He was unaware that the ACLU for years had protected people’s rights to demonstrate in Chicago parks and on the Federal Plaza, so he had a losing cause. I called my boss in Washington, who had to call over to this guy to tell him to back off, that this was a safety valve, so they backed off. I knew if they opened up the park district, that would help. I asked Gene Dubow to call somebody in the Jewish leadership. I asked, "Can’t you get them to talk to somebody in the mayor’s office and get them to open up that park for just a day until this matter is resolved in court? The word came back that, "We don’t negotiate with Nazis, we don’t talk with Nazis, but how is Salem doing?” Illinois Governor Thompson said he was going to come to Skokie for the counter-demonstration and that was inflaming things further. He was going to be there at the demonstration. Also, I kept my own Congressman Abner Mikva, who represented Skokie as well, appraised of developments so he would be aware and alerted to what we were doing and could advise the administration not to do anything foolish, which people tended to do in these kinds of things. Then Colin issued a very strong press release. "We are going to Skokie no matter what.” But it’s a two page statement and mediators tend to look at the bottom, not the top of statements and at the end of the statement after saying at the top, "We are going to protect our first amendment rights, we don’t want blood shed but we are prepared for what may happen, he ends by saying, "The only thing that will keep it out of Skokie is that (1) Chicago gives us access to Marquette Park; (2) Skokie withdraws its ordinances and (3), the state legislature withdraws its proposed legislation to ban our demonstrations. There was a little note in a gossip column in the Chicago Sun Times saying that there was contention in the Neo-Nazi group as to whether they should go to Skokie or not. They were also trying to get support from other neo-Nazi’s in other parts of the country. I had received a call from a state senator from a predominantly Jewish District in the north part of Chicago. He asked if I could come over to his house Sunday morning to meet with him and a colleague. This was a private meeting to get a message to Colin that unless he withdrew from Skokie, they were going to pass the ordinance that would ban him from all over the state. The Senator and the legislator with him were obviously under pressure from their constituents to keep Colin out of Skokie. I also found out from another legislator that if Colin did not go to Skokie, the state legislation would never pass. It was very controversial, and would likely be stricken down by the courts as a First Amendment violation. Meanwhile, the Skokie ordinances and the ban from the Chicago Park District were moving through the federal courts and it appeared they would be overruled on appeal. So I called the ACLU and arranged a meeting with Colin in their office. My understanding with the attorneys was that we would not tell any lies to Collin. I said, "Frank, I know you want three things to prove you have your first amendment rights. Suppose you got two of them, would that do it?” He was silent for a moment and said that maybe even one would do. I fell off my chair and his lawyer fell of the chair. So we went back to work and I called the park district, the public relations man. He didn’t call me back, but within minutes I received a call from the office of the general council for the park district. I asked if I could meet with him in his office. He said, "No, let me come over to your place.” After getting no response from the park district for weeks, suddenly their top lawyer comes running over to my office. They must be ready for something. What I wanted was to get the park district to let Colin demonstrate in the park for one day. Give them their one day in July that they originally wanted and this is going to remove all the pressure in Skokie. There would be no demonstration there. And of course everybody was under pressure now. Nobody was saying who was talking to whom, but they were petrified out in Skokie. You’re going to have tons of people coming into the area that will never hold them. They are going to be trampling bushes, houses, and people. Everybody knew the Neo-Nazis probably would never get there, but they were frightened nonetheless. When the park district attorney arrived, we started with some small talk. I mentioned that one of the problems with using lawyers in community mediation is the issue of their fees. He agreed that fees and demands for damages could be a problem. He recalled that the Hari Krishnas wanted to bring an elephant in a Chicago Park and then sued for damages when their permit was denied. So much for the small talk. We started talking seriously. He said the park district would not compromise, the case was in the courts and would be decided there. "We aren’t going to back off on this thing. We are going to win in the courts.” Then, he told me how "We offered them the other parks in the city, but they don’t want any part of them. They could go to Lincoln Park without any license or permit, but they won’t take that.” I assured him they were intent on going to Marquette Park, in their own neighborhood. It was safe for them. The he said, "All they have to do is sign a permit to get into Marquette Park. I asked why they refused to sign. "Well, the permit is needed only if you have 75 or more, and they claim they don’t have 75. But they pamphlet the place and they attract a crowd and we have to count those people.” I listened and made notes on a big yellow pad and we talked for about 30 minutes. I had two or three pages of notes on my yellow pad, but I was at a loss. I couldn’t figure where he was headed. Then he said, "Well, what do you think?” I tapped my pen on the yellow pad and I said, "I think the answer’s right here.” He said, "Good and he darts across the room and shakes my hand and says, "But remember, no damage and no fees,” and then he left. So I knew I had something there, but I didn’t know what it was. I picked up the phone and called the ACLU attorney and said "Tell me about this rule of 75.” He said, "Oh that’s a lot of bologna. They always count the crowd. It’s just an excuse they use, but these guys aren’t going to sign it.” Okay, so at least now I knew what it was. I called the park district attorney him back and said, "Look, why do you have to count the crowd? There are going to be so many media people there anyway you are going to get more then 75. I checked this out, they’re not going agree not to pamphlet the place. Maybe they won’t, but no one is going to control the numbers there anyway.” He said, "Well, we might do that.” I checked back with the ACLU and a few calls later we had a deal. The ACLU and park district had been fighting court battles for years over banning controversial groups from the Chicago parks. The ACLU would invariably win. The park district would pay a hefty fine and the same thing would happen the following year. There was no way those parties could sit down together. So, I drafted a letter to Collin citing his demand for his First Amendment rights, and noted that the park district had agreed not to apply the rule of 75 on July 7 which meant he would not need a permit to demonstrate on that day. With his other concerns moving through the courts, I encouraged him to abandon his planned demonstration in Skokie. I said if you go to Skokie, there clearly will a threat to people and property that cannot be controlled. I also noted that his First Amendment rights were being protected. I signed the letter, but I first had the draft approved by the attorneys. The park district attorney initialed it. I had the letter typed and someone in my office hand delivered it to the Neo-Nazi headquarters. I had sent a copy of the letter to the clerk of Federal Judge George Leighton who was handling the park district case. I never spoke to the judge because it is improper to intervene in a court case, but I wanted the judge to know what was going on, because he had a ruling on the following Tuesday and this was Friday. We were a week away from Skokie. Well on that day Frank Colin was coming back from the East coast where he had tried to recruit neo-Nazi support from his North Carolina colleagues. He was due back that night. There had been some turmoil in the Neo-Nazi office that I had learned about from Doug Kneeled of the New York Times who was covering the story. Reporters can be a wonderful source of information, and they know how to protect confidentiality. Doug told me that he knew there was a conflict among the neo-Nazis about whether they would go to Skokie and they had scheduled a press conference for that night. At the press conference they held up my letter in front of the cameras and said, "We have an offer to go to Marquette Park.” Colin returned half way through the press conference, picked up the letter and said, "We are going to Skokie.” I stayed late in my office that evening and called Colin after the 10 p.m. news. He called back about 10:30 and said, in his usual stiff voice, "This is Frank Colin, You called?” He spoke in the very officious manner that he always had. I always try to break that barrier, "Oh hi Frank, Dick here. How was your trip?” He said, "It was really very nice. The scenery this time of year on the Pennsylvania Turnpike is just beautiful.” I was amazed. I finally broke through. He’s a guy who probably had no warmth in his life, he was disenfranchised from him parents, one of whom was half Jewish. He was a misfit in society, he lived with misfits, and all of a sudden he responded with some warmth. I said, "What are you going to do about that letter?” He said, "Well, I’ll study it and get back to you.” The following day the newspapers reported that the park district made an offer, and there was an immediate denial by Arnie Matanky, the head of Public Relations. We have no offer, we are not speaking to them, we are not offering them anything.” But on Tuesday, Judge Leighton ordered the park district to permit the neo-Nazis into Marquette Park on July 7. As a result they canceled Skokie. They did have a demonstration on the Federal Plaza, but it was a sham. Police delayed their arrival, took the batteries out of their loud speaker system then gave them a replacement which went dead. People threw eggs and rocks. Marquette Park was a boisterous demonstration, but comparatively uneventful. Police were everywhere and counter demonstrations were prohibited. The rhetoric was about sending Jews to gas chambers and blacks to Africa. Nobody went to Skokie.

Question:
About how many of the people who were counter protestors who were going to go to Skokie went to Marquette Park?

Answer:
There was a Jewish delegation that went down and they marched into the park for about an hour. It was a token demonstration and fortunately nothing happened to them. It was a short sleeved crowd and a warm July day and it was a non event. Colin was arrested a few years later. He was working as a hospital orderly and was accused of abusing two 15 year old boys and was jailed and that’s the last I heard.

Question:
Interesting story. When you brought parties together when tensions were high, what did you do to try to facilitate effective communications?

Answer:
I would let them talk and do a lot of listening. Sometimes counsel parties if somebody got very angry. Sometimes you would say something like "I can’t tell anybody what to say, or how to behave, but I just want to emphasize that when we use certain language it makes it difficult to communicate and make progress, so I’ll ask you to just keep that in mind.” That wasn’t often. No, I would never tell anybody how to talk to anybody. It might come up. I think people understood what the ramifications of their behaviors were and they had to play it out when they were together. Usually, by the time you get to the table the anger has been expressed sufficiently so that the level of anger expressed at the table is mitigated a bit.

Question:
So did you ever have any ground rules before you started?

Answer:
You’re talking about formal mediation now when you talk about ground rules. Yes, there would be, but they didn’t come into play very much because, in all of these cases that we are talking about, a lot of them were not formal mediation so you wouldn’t have ground rules. Sure, ground rules are when we talk to each other with respect and try to do this or that, but we didn’t make a big point of it. There weren’t that many formal mediation. Some of them might have lasted a long time. I can think of strategies, but I can’t really think of too many instances where this occurred. M1030>

Question:
Do you teach people how to listen?

Answer:
Well you model behavior. I have counseled people to "try to listen and let them know you care,” but I don’t lecture them. I think if people aren’t listening, they pay the price and they learn that way.

Question:
So when one side says, "No I won’t sit down with them, they won’t listen,” you don’t go to the other side and say, you need to listen?

Answer:
No, no, that’s not my role. I’m not saying I wouldn’t do that, but I didn’t experience that.

Question:
If one side said that they wouldn’t meet with the other side, did you let it lie?

Answer:
No, I would respect their decision, but I certainly would explore further. I might ask why, and I might not get an answer. It might be rational or might not be. There are times when you shouldn’t sit down with another party, and I respect that. Either party may not be able to do it for political reasons, or to strengthen their position, they may need time, they may have an internal problem within their constituency. I may not be able to be seen by the public meeting with this group. My contract may be up next week. Sometimes I will counsel people to wait until doing things, to consider that, but no, I would not push them. I would explore with them why and let it rest with them. I also know the dynamics of a conflict changes and people change their minds.

Question:
Now you said quite a bit earlier that your main goal would be to get people talking, to get people together. Then just recently you said you only did 6 or so formal mediators. So presumably most of your stuff is what you call "informal mediation.” How is that different than formal mediation?

Answer:
CRS defined mediation and had a series of activities. There was conciliation, there was pre-mediation, and there was mediation and follow-up. It was quite structured. In formal mediation, you have an agenda, you have ground rules, you have parties agreeing to all of this. That was highly structured. Much of what we did never reached that level. Yet you had the same behaviors in bringing parties together and getting them talking around a table. Now was Skokie a mediation? Sure it was, but not by this formal standard. Parties wouldn’t come around the table. So you did Mediation things and the definitions become blurred, but I don’t want to get hung up on that. There were formal mediation that I did and there were informal mediation, or conciliations, call them what you want.

Question:
Did the venue of the meeting ever matter? Were you careful with the choice of location?

Answer:
We took it into consideration, but it often didn’t matter. Sometimes it was the most comfortable place. I never knew that to be a serious factor. The Illinois voting rights case we met in the courtroom because that was the most convenient, but once they were in Chicago we met up in our office. Obviously in Skokie you couldn’t do certain things in that formal setting. With St. Cloud you met in the prison. Prisoners are prisoners. You can’t get away from that.

Question:
Were there ever situations where you got people to the table but they weren’t negotiating in good faith?

Answer:
Of course.

Question:
Then what?

Answer:
When you find out you have to address it. I’m trying to keep the theoretical from the practical and actual. There are times when people come together and they aren’t going to negotiate in good faith, but they have to come together. I certainly think there are cases where people had their mind made up and couldn’t bring themselves to change it and had no intention to. Again, I don’t know if that’s not in good faith, I think for example that at Kent State, with the trusties and the University being very conservative and not yielding an inch and having no compassion, sympathy, or empathy for the protestors that they were not going to budge an inch unless they were forced to. So there you have low trust levels, and unwillingness to change. What you’re hoping is that when people come around the table and hear each other out, they will move off of their intractable positions. But again, the politics have to actually permit people to change. If you’re dealing with nations, or high institutions perhaps for political reasons they can’t change. If you’re dealing with people across the table who aren’t bound that way, they can make some concessions and some changes. Sometimes they can do it and save face. But you can get a school superintendent to make some changes that are totally unacceptable to him for political reasons. His board would never accept it and his public would never accept it. Yet there are changes that he might make after listening, just as he does other things he is asked to do, that are just as important to the community, that he could do without risk. So that when he came in that room, he wasn’t going to yield an inch, but as he listened he found out that he could. I think that comes into play. So it really depends on the political constraints on the establishment party and also on the community party. In the building trades the group couldn’t move, wouldn’t meet, because trust levels were so low. But there was something going on in that coalition, in the building trades coalition, that prevented them from moving forward. That had to be worked out internally without outside intervention or interference. They had to work out their own power struggle internally before they could move forward.

Question:
When you say without outside interference, does that mean without CRS assistance too?

Answer:
You bet. There is a limit. You may be able to help, but you may not. If you are lucky someone will say to you, "You are just going to have to give us time on this.” After a while you learn. When you make a call, and no one responds to you, you know something is going on. People behave in certain ways and you come to recognize it just from having done it. You are calling somebody and they always return your call and now all of a sudden you don’t get a call back. That was true with the St. Cloud situation. I knew something was going on up there that had to be worked out.

Question:
So coming back to the table, when one side makes a demand or a request that the other side absolutely isn’t going to budge on, what do you, as a mediator, do?

Answer:
Try to find out why, try to keep the conversation going. I mentioned the case where the American Indians wanted a peer counseling at the reformatory in St. Cloud, and it was clear a wall was put up and it was not retractable at that point in time. So some dynamic is going to have to change, but on that day, that week it wasn’t going to happen, and there was nothing that I could do. Now, we could have taken a break and I might have gone over to talk to somebody, but it was pretty clear that the union had taken its stand and was in control. They were quiet the entire mediation. For 6 months they really had few demands and I knew they were very angry that the administration was yielding on so many points. Then all of a sudden, this is their stand. We are the counselors and nobody else , no inmate, is going to do counseling. The fact that it was better for the inmates had nothing to do with it. The administration knew they couldn’t pass that line and they didn’t. It was clear to me. Probably clear to the inmates that they wouldn’t accept it. There was no need for me to go over to somebody and say, "what’s going on? Can’t you open up?” There might be other cases where I’d sit with somebody, but not then.

Question:
Would you go over to the other side and say, look I think you’re going to have to drop this demand?

Answer:
Now they are going to have to decide that. They have to know the consequences of hanging in there. Again, in that case, there was nothing in the balance. I’m going to give you another example of one of my favorite stories. We were negotiating the Cairo, Illinois, voters rights case which had been languishing for years until the city finally decided to get it resolved. The negotiators were two attorneys from Carbondale, Illinois who had been retained by the city to handle this for them. They weren’t from that community. And there were two civil rights lawyers from the Land of Lincoln Law Firm in St. Louis. We had several meetings in the courthouse and they had done some communicating and we finally got the matter resolved. They agreed that instead of at large voting there would be by district voting, so there could be, for the first time in history, black representation on the city council. They decided how to divide the city and they decided how to pick the mayor and everything was done. Boy, I thought, we were done. We had the final meeting in the courthouse. It was an old courthouse in St. Louis, a big old building. We were meeting in the jury room and reviewing the final details of the settlement. They had just come back from gain their clients’ consent to these details. The primary election was going to be held in September and the general election in November. At the election in November they would vote for the new city council. Just as it looked like everything was set, Herb Eastman, a very soft spoken civil rights lawyer, looked across the table at his fellow lawyers and said, "I don’t see why we have to wait until September for the primary and the general election in November. Why can’t we have the primary in August and elect the city council in September?” Here’s a case that had been unresolved for twenty years and he wanted to move it up a month! Jack Freirich. the lead lawyer for the city, was about 6'4'’ and weighed about 250 pounds. He stood up, pounded his fist on the table and his face turned red as he said, "What! You want me to go back to my client after we have finally convinced them to resolve this and ask them to move the primary one month?” I could see the whole deal falling apart. Herb Eastman cowered and said nothing. I was with Gus Gaynett, my co-mediator, and Gus turned red and said, "What are you guys doing?” I said, "Wait a second.” I pointed to Herb and Harvey Grossman, who was his colleague (Harvey is now the general council for the ACLU in Chicago) and asked them to step outside into the courtroom for a minute. Jack Freirich was just beside himself. He said, "Damn! I don’t know what these guys are doing. ” I let him vent. He was going to vent whatever I tried to do. So he vented and I listened. "Yes, I understand, I can see why, I don’t know, I’ll tell you what Jack, just wait here a minute will you?” Gus waited with them and I walked out to the courtroom. I walked over to Herb and asked What’s going on?” He said, "It’s okay. We can go back now?” I asked, "What do you mean we can go back now?” He said, "You know Hattie (one of the six plaintiffs) is 85 years old. She has never been able to vote for a black city councilman in her entire life. She’s getting old and I thought I owed it to her to make this happen just as soon as possible.” I gave it a try. We can go back now. So we went back in and the city’s lawyers didn’t know what was going to happen. Harvey and Herb sat down quietly and I said, "Herb?” and he said, "We can continue with the original election date. It is okay.” We very cautiously proceeded and soon had wrapped up that agreement. As we left the lawyers looked at me and said, "You’re terrific. I don’t know what you did, but you’re a genius.” I had done nothing but just go with the flow.

Question:
And know when to break them up.

Answer:
Well, yes. It would have happened even if I didn’t break them up. Herb would have backed off eventually. I don’t know what would have happened, but we find ourselves in the middle and take credit for all these wonderful things.

Question:
Do you use caucuses a lot to try to diffuse situations?

Answer:
In community conflicts you’re doing a lot of meeting with the parties separately, often before they come together.

Question:
What other techniques do you use if you’re in a mediation, formally or informally, if you have parties together and things start getting hot. What do you do to cool things back down?

Answer:
Well, you might take a break at any time. Whatever form it’s taking. It depends on what the level of rhetoric is. I’m getting partly theoretical because I can’t think of a lot of situations where I was in mediation where it got so hot that people were endangered. You try to let them vent and keep it from going too far. Take a break and come back. Just in my experience I haven’t used the caucus a whole lot. I didn’t have a need for that, I guess, or maybe my mediation never got that hot.

Question:
Other than Wounded Knee, which I want to talk about tomorrow, were you ever in situations where there was a serious potential for violence?

Answer:
At the table you mean?

Question:
Either at the table or in the community.

Answer:
Oh, well in a lot of CRS-type cases there is potential for violence in the community, sure. If the conflict is unresolved, it can result in a protest where there is a potential for violence.

Question:
So what do you do to try to reduce that potential?

Answer:
You get people talking and hoping that they see some light at the end of the tunnel. Most people don’t want to be in violent situations because someone can get hurt, including them. Most people are looking for ways out and they use the potential of violence to bring it to the brink and they hope they don’t have to jump.

Question:
Changing gears completely again, we’ve talked on and off about giving technical assistance to parties. You’ve talked quite a bit about what you would do with the minority parties, but did you bring technical assistance for the majority parties, the authority figures?

Answer:
There was less of a need, but yes, we would put them in touch with counterparts and other communities who had experienced the same things. Sometimes you would do that for your own credibility, but sometimes they would have useful advice for their colleagues. Sometimes you would provide a police chief with firearms policies from other cities, sometimes you would bring a consultant to a police department from another city’s police department. That was very popular. I mentioned that I did that at the Minnesota reformatory. I brought in a corrections commissioner from another state. Sometimes we provide training for either party. You’d work with police or you’d help people put training programs together that would bring the minority community into the training process with police.

Question:
And what about technical assistance for the minority community?

Answer:
Sometimes it was advice based on your experience elsewhere, sometimes it was paper based on things they could be doing or things other communities generated elsewhere. Sometimes it was people, bring in a consultant to work with them. Sometimes it was putting them in touch with people from other communities. That was typically what the technical assistance was comprised of. And sometimes training. I guess you could call the types of things you just do in your day-to-day work technical assistance, even though it wouldn’t be labeled that. It’s helping them sort out their organizational matters when you’ve developed a relationship that enables you to do that.

Question:
Were you ever asked to do things that stepped over the line of what you thought you could do as a third party that got to be more straight forward advocacy?

Answer:
Sure. People always wanted me to be advocating for them and you often couldn’t, but you did it in other ways that people understood. That didn’t mean they wouldn’t ask you to, or give you a hard time, tease you, or bait you. Sure.

Question:
And what did you do?

Answer:
Something else.

Question:
Did you ever feel you needed to strike a balance between helping the parties reach a settlement on the one hand and equity on the other?

Answer:
There was often a tension, but as I stated earlier, a party could only get what it had the power to get, so that they might not receive equity. They might get half a loaf and that’s because they had to come back another day for the rest of it depending on their state of organization, their persistence, how much they cared about an issue, and the circumstances around them. So there might have been a school district, as I gave an example earlier, where parents wanted something, but they didn’t have the power to get it. The first step is to get them around the table. It might be the first time they ever sat down with the local officials and negotiated with them. They are getting empowered that way, through the process. It’s self empowering if you would, but they will only come away with part of what they wanted. You get what you can get.

Question:
Were there instances where you saw them agree to less then you thought they could get?

Answer:
Boy that’s tough. Sometimes you’d counsel people, push them to ask for something a little bit more perhaps if you saw that, but this is almost theoretical again. You don’t know where those lines are going to be drawn. When we went into St. Cloud I never would have dreamed that one issue by American Indian inmates would be to have inmate-to-inmate counseling. Clearly it was a sound proposal. I could not predict how far they could have pushed that issue. If it had come up the first week maybe they could have gotten it because the administration had to make some concessions and the guards weren’t that angry. Maybe I’m the reason they didn’t get that because I put it toward the bottom of the agenda. I don’t know. Nor do I know that everything that’s requested is reasonable, I can’t make those judgements. I don’t make the assumption that because a teacher is Hispanic or white or black that the students are going to be better off, or worse off. Yes, I know you need certain things for a well rounded education for everybody, but I won’t carry it that far.

Question:
Did you ever have a problem retaining your objectivity when you were involved in a conflict?

Answer:
I probably did, but I do not remember it happening. If it happened it was not often. Maybe if my skin was a different color, or my experience was a little different I’d have more difficulty maintaining my objectivity, but I can’t remember a case where I lost my objectivity.

Question:
What about the Nazis?

Answer:
No, that was not a problem. I never took them that seriously as a threat to anything. I tried to be empathic. I had no sympathy for them or what they were doing, but it never prevented me, I think, from doing my work objectively. That doesn’t mean I didn’t try to advocate a just resolution by helping to empower a racial minority group by, for example, helping it to prepare for a negotiation when they wanted that kind of counsel and if I thought it appropriate.

Question:
Would you work this hard to help the Nazis?

Answer:
I doubt it. That was an exceptional case. I think you obviously lean and bend with who you are, and people in CRS are compassionate and have a high sense of justice and an outrage at injustice, so that’s going to effect your behavior. And yet you have to find that middle ground, if that’s what it is where you can work. If you can’t work in the middle, you have to do other kinds of work to fill your needs.

Question:
Aside from Skokie was your impartially ever challenged?

Answer:
Oh I’m sure. I don’t remember.

Question:
To your face? Were you accused?

Answer:
Not in a formal mediation, but I can’t imagine that over the years and all the things I interacted with that someone wouldn’t say, You aren’t fair, you’re not impartial.” But that happened often. It may well have happened more with my staff, but we fought those things out internally. That’s natural, I think. Everybody had a high sense of justice and we were all torn by the need to bring about justice and to have the group get what it could, maximize its gains.

Question:
Feelings that there were different ways in CRS to do that?

Answer:
Oh, I’m sure that people behaved differently, that some were more advocates and did things behind the scenes that were not appropriate by the book, but nobody would criticize them for doing those unless it was seen as going beyond some point. But you take those risks. We really were advocates for justice through negotiation and we were able to do a lot of things to help people achieve greater justice.

Question:
So did you have staff meetings within CRS where everybody would get together and talk about how to handle something?

Answer:
Not enough. People didn’t want to always talk about it, but we did have staff meetings and talk about cases and what not. It was less formal than that much most of the time.

Question:
Did you debrief after cases?

Answer:
Yeah, very often, not always.

Question:
Anything more you can tell us about maintaining objectivity and impartiality?

Answer:
Well, what I want to emphasize is the extraordinary difficulty for mediators who have any sense of justice to come into a community conflict where racial, or civil rights issues are involved and remain objective when they see clear violations of people’s rights. We’ve already said there is no need to be neutral, but yet you want to be seen as objective and impartial by the parties, certainly by the establishment party who is accused of perpetrating this violation of rights. This is very hard, especially for younger, newer mediators. But with the passage of time and by being Mediation in our behaviors, we tend to assume less, listen more carefully and empathetically, get a better understanding of where parties are. It becomes easier and more natural to be able to understand where a police chief, a mayor, or a school superintendent is coming from. There’s not always malice as you sometimes tend to feel coming into a situation, where there has been abuse of a youth in a school or by police. By understanding the broader dimension of what that the police officer is facing, what that police chief or school superintendent is facing, without excusing the behavior, but understanding it better and their dilemma, wishing it hadn’t happened. That makes it a bit easier to be objective and at least project yourself with greater objectivity.

Question:
Do you want to talk any more about empathy? I know that it is a topic that has concerned you considerably in the past.

Answer:
Well, it hasn’t concerned me, but it’s been paramount because my view is what we wrote in our textbook, what we found, what we learned, what we know is how you listen and the ability to listen is extremely important. That means listening, not only to obtain information, but with empathy. To reflect back to the other party is critical. It’s critical in dealing with any emotional situation and virtually every civil rights conflict we entered a strong emotional component: anger, rage, disappointment, hurt, fear. To be able to listen with empathy, reflecting back to the party that you understand what they are saying and how they feel about it, not being critical, suspending judgment, not interrupting and those types of behaviors, all learnable skills, are absolutely critical to be consistently effective in this work. I remember John Chase telling me, when he was the regional director in Philadelphia, of a public housing case where the tenants were protesting over the construction of a highway through their neighborhood. The community got very little satisfaction in this case, but later one of the community leaders came up to John and thanked him, saying, "Since this problem began, you were the only one who listened to what we had to say.” I sort of caught that when John told me that story. So I started collecting stories like this. I have some other instances where mediators have gotten feedback from parties who really didn’t get a whole lot out of the mediation, or did, coming back and saying "At least you listened.” Typically, a mediator in a standard conflict is the only one who is going to sit and listen to the whole story. This obviously builds trust, which is critical, and the most important component for the mediator. It opens up a party to talk more, so you get the information that you need because information is what you need in any negotiation. Empathic listening is the most important skill a mediator brings to this work.

Question:
You talked off and on about bringing in resources that CRS knew about and also community resources. How did you identify resources that you weren’t previously aware of? Community resources for instance.

Answer:
Well during the course of the assessment you would identify the power points in a community, who they were and how to reach them. I remember when we were in Indianapolis, working on school desegregation, there was a banker who was also a big figure in the Indianapolis 500 race, and headed the Indiana Bank in Indianapolis. He was known to be active socially and so we gravitated toward him once we learned of him and his interest and clout in the community. You know that the Eli Lilly Foundation is down in Indianapolis so you try to find out what the interest is there. You learn from people in the community as part of your assessment what resources are there. When you do your assessment, one of the questions you are asking is, what’s the history of this conflict, who are the parties, who else has been involved, and sometimes it will surface that way. People have set up committees to work on a problem and may have some people to do that. Former public officials, leading business people, you ask around and you move in those directions.

Question:
Did confidentiality ever get to be a big issue?

Answer:
No. Seldom was it a big issue.

Question:
What kind of assurances did you make to the parties about confidentiality?

Answer:
You would make it clear, if they didn’t know already from having worked with you before, that anything they tell you would be held in confidence. Very often we would make entry into a case by a phone call from a person in the minority or church community. While conducting the assessment, we would call the establishment party and tell them we had heard there was this problem. "Oh, where did you hear that?” And you’d invent language, or pet phrases and just talk generally, but you would not reveal who alerted you to the problem. When asked, "Who have you talked to about this,” You might respond, "Well, a number of people.” You try not to say who you spoke with or met with if you think it will create a problem. Sometime we would plan an on-site visit to start late in the day when the offices are closed. We would call ahead and tell the city office we would be arriving Tuesday night and would like to meet with them first thing Wednesday morning. Then on Tuesday night you could meet with the community people who may not be available during the day anyway because they’re at their jobs. You’re up until two in the morning or until midnight working. And then at 8 in the morning when you see the city official you say, I got in last night and had a chance to speak with some of the people in the community who are concerned a bout the problem. That way, you didn’t violate protocol by not seeing him first, especially if it’s a mayor. Sometimes it was important to see an official first, but if it wasn’t critical, then you try it the other way and you get the community perspective of the problem before you meet with the public official.

Question:
What makes it important to see the public official first?

Answer:
Just a protocol matter. It would be more important if the public official triggered the request. If you felt he or she would be offended if you didn’t see him or her first, then it was important to. But you get a better rounded view of the problem as perceived by the aggrieved community. If you would see them first, then your meeting is more productive with the school superintendent or whomever.

Question:
How did you deal with the media?

Answer:
Well I dealt a little more boldly than many CRS people because I was a former reporter and editor. So I tried to use the media positively when I could to help the case or the agency. Typically we would have to be cautious with the media. What I would try to do, when I didn’t want to engage with the media, but the case had visibility, would be to have a prepared brief comment and say no more. I counseled my staff to do the same.

Question:
At the end of each day or how often?

Answer:
Sometimes when you arrived in a community. If the media knew you were coming, reporters might be waiting for you or the would call you in your office. Again you reach into your box of stock phrases and know what to say, such as, "We’ve been invited,” and again you don’t say who invited. "We’ve been invited to come in and talk to people involved in the school issue that has been so widely publicized in the community. When we heard about it we called some of the individuals locally involved in the problem to see if we can be of assistance.” "What are you going to do here?” "We’re going to see if we can be of assistance.” "Do you think…?” "I don’t know, we just arrived and we just don’t know.” You just stop talking and get out of there. Or in the break of a mediation, "The parties have met and we’ve talked for four hours today and we will resume tomorrow. We’ve made good progress in exploring the issues.” And you’d say no more. "Are you optimistic?” You might say, "Our people are listening to each other.” You try to do something to focus positively on the parties and get out of there. Often in mediation, you work out a press policy with the parties. They might want to make a statement or they may want the mediator to do it for them. Now, the most important rule to me was that the parties involved in the conflict often were seeking recognition and heightening public awareness of the conflict no matter what side they were on, and they don’t want the mediator hogging all of the newspaper space. So if you stay out of the story, it leaves room for coverage of the parties and they want their voices out there, they want their names in the paper. So I tried to not get in the way of that.

Question:
How often did the parties say things to the press that would have been better not said?

Answer:
I don’t know. It happened, but I can’t make that judgment for a party because maybe I didn’t like it, but from their end it may have been important.

Question:
What about violating confidentiality?

Answer:
Well, when we went into formal mediation we would address the press issue and it might be that all statements will be made by the mediator, by representatives of each party, or we will jointly put out a statement after each session. Very often they would say why don’t you talk of that and then when the agreement is announced, if there is one, have the parties step out from the background. You don’t want to be taking their space. It’s their victory, it’s not yours and it’s easy to want to be there.

Question:
You mentioned yesterday that reporters are often a good source of information...

Answer:
Oh, good reporters and good newspapers know what’s going on. When I was in Chicago doing the Skokie/Nazi case, I learned the dimension of the problem at one point when Larry Green, who was a Chicago reporter for the Los Angles Times, told me that two thousand people had chartered seats through a travel agency to come to Skokie. That was real. People had already reserved seats on the plane and were ready, or had put their money down, and you begin to multiply that by the potential problem and that was important information. Or, when Doug Kneeland of the New York Times told me that he had heard of some dissension within the ranks with the Neo-Nazis, over whether they wanted to go to Skokie or find a way out of it. Reporters can go in and ask questions that other people can’t. It’s impossible for me to go in and ask them things that he could. So, as sources we would trade information and he would respect my need for confidentiality. He was also there when I wanted to be identified when the case was over; it didn’t do any harm to get a little bit of recognition at that point its part of helping the agency get some visibility, too. That seldom happened in CRS because of the confidentiality and the fear of individuals without experience working with the media. A lot of the staff just shied away from of the press. They stayed away from the press and wouldn’t talk to them. So to me, the most important thing other then protecting confidentiality was not being seen as taking media space away from the parties. I used the media strategically during the Skokie-Nazi case at the height of the conflict when it appeared that in two weeks tens of thousands of people were going to be converging on Skokie. We were in negotiations and I was confident the protest in Skokie would not occur. I arranged a story through a friend who was a lawyer for the Chicago Sun Times. He had called the managing editor and said I would give them an exclusive interview. They one of their star reporters to my office and I gave her a story that ultimately read "A Justice Department official who was trying to mediate a settlement in the Skokie case is confident the matter would be settled without a demonstration at Skokie.” That sort of set a tone that encouraged the parties to work for a solution and also discouraged people from coming into Skokie.

Question:
Now why did you think that was going to help, as opposed to inflame things further?

Answer:
To say there's going to be a settlement?

Question:
Yeah, I could see where the Nazis had gotten up to that point with that statement.

Answer:
Well, then an alternative would be found that would satisfy them. They did want a settlement, but they didn't know what was going to happen. I didn't either at that point. Not only did it ease tensions of people who thought there were going to be real problems in Skokie, but the people involved in negotiations gave a positive twist to that too.

Question:
But I gather it was a rare occurrence; you didn't usually do things like that.

Answer:
Correct. That was a rare occurrence. There typically wasn't a need or opportunity and it was seldom appropriate. It also entailed some risk.

Question:
How did you determine when you should end your involvement in a conflict?

Answer:
We tried to set goals going in as to what we would do. If it was formal mediation it was sort of easy. You knew when it was over. You knew when you had achieved or wasn't likely to when you wore out your welcome, or ability to positively impact the situation. We went in and said this is what we're going to try to achieve. We wrote a brief activity report each day and that helped guide us.

Question:
Were most of your cases done in one trip, where you went in, did the whole thing and left, or were there situations where you would go in for a couple days and go home for a couple weeks and go back?

Answer:
I mentioned that the St. Cloud mediation lasted almost six months, almost every other week for six months at the reformatory. That was unusual. In a school desegregation case, we would sometimes open an office. We opened an office in Dayton just to work on that matter. Or assign somebody to Cleveland, who worked 90% of the time on that school desegregation case. When we didn’t have an office, such as in Lansing, Michigan, the mediator would travel back and forth, working with parties and meeting with them. Many cases involved single trips of a just a few days, but once we opened a case whether or not we would return was open-ended. Although we set goals at the outset, we might change them during the course of our work.

Question:
How many people did you have working out of your office?

Answer:
When I arrived in 1968 there were seven of us. One was stationed in St. Louis, one in Gary, one in Cincinnati and the rest were in Chicago. We expanded to Cleveland, and Milwaukee, Kansas City, Louisville, and then the regions were reconfigured. But at one point I had about thirty people in the hiring chain when they cut us back. In the Nixon years they turned on us and cut us way back, so it went back down to smaller numbers I found when I first arrived.

Question:
When you were moving to leave a case, what sort of structures, if any, did you try to set up to continue the work that you were doing after you were gone?

Answer:
Depending on the nature of the case, we’d try to set up some structure. For example, one or committees might be set up in the community that would continue in force long after CRS was gone. In the case of a police-community conflict, it might a leadership committee that would meet monthly to keep communications open and to address any alleged violations of agreements that had been reached. CRS was unable to enforce these agreements so we would set up local "enforcement mechanisms” to do that. If someone came back to us, we might re-enter, but usually, if you had success in the case, there was some mechanism locally. I don't mean a formal mediated agreement, it just could be a negotiated agreement that the parties were going to do certain things.

Question:
Was there any implicit threat that the larger Justice Department might do something if the agreement wasn't adhered to?

Answer:
No, but we often felt it necessary to be sure that members of the community were aware of their rights and knew who in the federal government to call if they wanted to move in that direction. This was especially in smaller communities where people were at tremendous disadvantages for legal and other resources. But, that does not mean we were not perceived as having some clout. We might call a U.S. Attorney's office, and say we've had a complaint and we think somebody from the F.B.I. ought to go in and investigate it. Or we might encourage somebody in the community to call the U. S. Attorney. That was appropriate. We were never supposed to share confidential information.

Question:
Did CRS take any continuing responsibility for implementing an agreement?

Answer:
Typically not, but we would stick with school desegregation cases for a long time. What would happen is when a federal judge was considering issuing a school desegregation order, we would visit the judge, explain what our agency was doing, and what role we might serve. Some said, "Thank you, we'll call you if we need you," and other judges would write us into the order as a resource to the parties. Some orders were general; others gave us very specific tasks. These orders gave us license to work with the parties, monitor developments and keep the judge appraised of what was happening.

Question:
What other kinds of cases did you get court referrals for?

Answer:
In our region we set up a pilot project with Seventh Federal Circuit, which I wrote about in the book by "___” by Louthen(?) and Pinkele, published by Iowa State Univ. Press. My chapter reports on several cases we mediated for the court. We had a number of prison cases. Judges receive a tremendous number of complaints from prisoners and a few judges asked us to mediate them. Werner Petterson was in Waupan State Prison in Wisconsin where he mediated a series of complaints for a judge. Those complaints were filed in the Eastern district and the Western district, the two federal districts in Wisconsin. One judge was antagonistic toward these cases and wasn’t interested in our services. The other judge was very much interested in them and used us. I did a voting rights case in Cairo, Illinois with Gus Gaynett. We made our services known and other judges would call on us. Jesse Taylor did a prison case related to racially segregated housing in Cook county jail and another one related to the city’s discrimination against the black neighborhoods of Clarksdale, Indiana.

Question:
How did you measure the success of an intervention?

Answer:
Well, you are always trying to project your successes in a bureaucracy. Information is always needed for budget purposes, annual reports, monthly reports, you are always expected to put your best foot forward. People need achievements, you'd always want to go up to a higher level. To a Congressman, a constituent, anything would support the agency's needs because you need to get money, you need to budget, you need to get staff. So at times we didn’t think of how you measured success, we just thought of what our best foot forward was. At times we were trying to show how many dollars were saved in mediated case, rather then a court case.

Question:
How do you do that?

Answer:
With great imagination. You say, "here's how many hours were spent on this case and here is what it would have cost had this case been litigated.” You make some estimates and say hundreds of thousands of dollars were saved because this case was handled this way rather than that way. I think, in reality, the test of success is whether or not the parties involved in the case would invite you back if they have another conflict. That's an issue that I gave some thought to later when I was writing about it, when I did that article for Peace and Change, 'How Do You Measure Success?' My primary answer was, would the parties want you back if there was another case? Then you know you were successful, because not every case will settle or should settle. Every dispute should not be resolved. I told you about the Minneapolis proposed mediation that fell through and the community was stronger because of it. They wouldn't let it go to mediation. They were able to heighten awareness in the community and have better results in the end, better outcomes. Sometimes you run into people afterwards and find out how successful it was because you did something they remembered. It can't simply be a head count of how many cases you won, because that becomes a game too. You do know, though, that in many cases there were very few resources available to the communities and you were there for them. You point to them in directions, you brought in assistance. We used to do a survey each year for the attorney general, an assessment of the potential for violence and for disruption in communities around the country. We would do an assessment of major areas in our region where there was a potential for racial violence. The reality was we could never really predict anything. We could say tensions are high and there is a real danger of violence if this situation is not addressed, but nobody could really predict if violence would happen or not. Also, you can't say that there was no violence because of our presence. I'd like to think that because we were at Wounded Knee there was less violence. But how can we be certain? Failures I often know immediately. Some things didn't work. To measure success, I would stick to the question, "Would the parties want you back to work with them again?” Do they feel you did everything that could be done? That's part of success. There were an extraordinary number of things CRS mediators did that clearly helped people's lives and made important contributions. No matter what spin we put on it, how we perceive it, how we put ourselves in the picture, there can be no doubt that many conflicts were addressed with tensions mitigated, people counseled and progress made.

Question:
You mentioned a minute ago that some things just aren't appropriate for mediation. What kind of cases would those be?

Answer:
Where the parties aren't going to have a fair shake at the table. When I say mediation, I mean formally sitting down and talking. I don't mean conciliation, I mean formally sitting down at a table. There might be cases from the communities' perspective where they really need to do more to gain more strength to come to the table with enough power to get what they need. With the establishment there can be cases where the public officials can't afford to be seen in a negotiating posture with the community for political reasons.

Question:
In either of those cases, the case where the community needs more power, or the authority group doesn't want to come to the table, who makes that decision, them or you?

Answer:
Them. I never make that decision. If we see something is a problem, we won't propose a certain action. If you know there's a municipal election coming up in a month, and this is a critical election issue, you would not likely suggest that people come to a mediation table where there will be visibility in the community at that point. You might do something else and then after the election take a fresh look at it.

Question:
If you felt like coming to the table would undermine valuable protest activity, but the group who was protesting seemed okay with it, would you go ahead?

Answer:
Oh sure. You work with the group. I mean, you do a reality check like you do in any mediation. Typically though, community groups have smarts and they have good counsel. You can always help them with that too, by putting them in touch with people who can give them guidance. People sometimes say that mediation stifles the protest activity. In my experience I've found that to be theoretical and not real. You're usually dealing with pretty astute people who have been fighting in a battle for survival and now want to take the next step. They will ask, and they are prepared to make their own decisions. Now, sometimes they may not see the advantage of coming to the table, because they get locked in on a given issue on which they feel they can't prevail. "We can never do anything with that mayor, that chief, with that superintendent."

Question:
How did the changing nature of the Civil Rights Movement affect your work?

Answer:
When I joined the agency in 1968 there weren't many people talking. They were protesting, they were breaking windows. We were going back and forth between parties in volatile situations, such as a protest where the law was being violated because somebody didn't have a permit and yet they were going to march down the street and what not. We were helping mitigate tensions and do things that would help minimize the likelihood of violence. Explaining to people what was happening to one party, why the other was this way. It was important to meet together, and getting them to meet was a big thing - just opening communications. After a while, the dynamic changed and people started talking. There was greater verbal communication across tables rather than through protests, marches, and violence. That was the time when we learned the skills of mediation. CRS learned to mediate and started blazing trails in this field and developing a body of knowledge through our experiences. We did more of this type of mediation than any other entity, and we were the first major body of mediation after labor. Next, the protest broadened, so instead of black/white it was Hispanic/black/white and American Indian and Asian, and women and disabled. In the black communities, this was often perceived as diluting the resources available for African American. Similarly with Hispanics. The broadening of the federal government’s response to civil rights abuses was rejected by many civil rights groups focusing on race related issues. They felt it was an intentional dilution of resources intended to deal with race-related discrimination.

Question:
Did CRS handle that kind of case?

Answer:
CRS maintained that its mission was race related and should remain that way, and it never changed. To this day it hasn't changed. It doesn't get involved in the disabled, doesn't get involved in aging. What it does do, is respond from time to time to extraordinarily heightened crisis where it makes sense for public, social, or political reasons, to become involved. Kent State is one example. That was a heightened conflict of national interest. It would not have been appropriate to tell the Special Assistant to the President of the United States that we don't do student campus conflicts. Fighting over scraps is what it comes to. Until there are more resources, you are going to have these problems. But the agency has always hued the line on race related matters.

Question:
So if mediation wasn't the original intention of CRS in handling civil rights issues that came up, what was the original intent and how was CRS intended to go in and work with them?

Answer:
CRS was established in 1964, under Title 10, a very short title under the Civil Rights Acts. It's role was to assist communities that were having racial or ethnic conflicts. To help communities with racial and ethnic disputes, differences, and disagreements to keep the peace.

Question:
Now did CRS start acting in this preventive way early on or is this something that came in later?

Answer:
CRS was a small agency. It used consultants around the country before it had field offices and they tended to respond to the highest crises. As a result they went to the most volatile situations. So they were on the bridge in Selma and in those types of situations they were there. I’m sure Ozell told you on his tape, they were in Memphis when Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed. They were there in a whole variety of ways. There were those who were working with the police, there were those who were working with the striking sanitation workers, some with other city officials, so you had a lot of people there.

Question:
You talked a little about the violence or tension assessment in different communities. When you found that there were tensions, or there were tendencies towards violence, would someone from CRS be sent to reduce that in a pro-active way?

Answer:
You mean when we did annual assessments of racial tensions in certain communities. I think this was probably a political ploy originally, where a frightened Republican administrator probably turned to the director of CRS and said, "Where’s racial violence going to break out?" We'd then come back with a report that said what’s needed here are more jobs, or more money from the Labor Department to take care of this problem. We would do an assessment, I’d call my staff together and we’d look at the region and the areas we should cover. The staff knew the region and would conduct the assessments. That doesn’t mean that because tensions were high over a public housing issue in Chicago that we were working on that case. Sometimes the staff would build it up to alert Washington how bad things were in the Chicago low income community that relies on public housing. We could never really predict what was going to happen. We could just say tensions are high, people are worried about a potential for violence.

Question:
How is civil rights mediation different from other kinds of mediation?

Answer:
I think one thing different is that we would meet separately with the parties upon intervention. To be efficient and effective, it was imperative that you did careful assessment. Sometimes you would not do that in the mediation, and even in civil rights formal mediation it might not be necessary. But when you went out in the field to do conciliation or respond to community conflict, before you reach the formal stage, it was important to do an assessment to find out what was going on. That means talking to a lot of people, gathering a lot of information, and then deciding whether we belong here and what can we do here? Should we stay? If so, what are our goals, how are we going to get it done, what resources will it take? In community mediation, you have to understand the nature of systems if you’re going to be effective. How do governments work, coalitions, other organizations, school districts some of those things I mentioned earlier. You don’t want to have a mediation two weeks before an election. You have to learn the nature of coalitions and how they function, how decisions are made in coalitions and how decisions are made in establishments and what the differences are. So, I think it takes a broader range of knowledge and skills in this field.

Question:
There are a number of conflict theorists who suggest that identity conflicts are a) the hardest to resolve, or b) cannot be mediated at all. They say identity conflicts require a needs-based process, rather than interest-based negotiation or mediation.

Answer:
That's clearly accurate because they are difficult, un-mediateable, but you don’t mediate the conflict, you mediate the dispute or related problems. You mediate something that’s going on. You don’t mediate Christianity vs. Islamic Law for example, but the problem of how the parties can live and work peacefully in the same environment. You’re trying to change attitudes along the way, but you’re dealing with behaviors over a specific issue.

Question:
So you mediate the specific issue, not the underlying identity.

Answer:
You do what you can do, but be realistic. You’re there because of a problem and everybody has rights to things and people can accept that, and they understand that. You try to show people what they have in common. Minimize the differences. Get them to hear things they haven’t heard before, and to understand where others are coming from. Hopefully, you get some attitude adjustment along the way. Whether it’s partial or total transformation or none at all is another matter.

Question:
The line that got missed when we turned the tape over that I thought was important is that you don’t resolve the whole identity issue.

Answer:
I really haven’t thought that through fully. I’ve seen attitudinal changes in South Africa where I’ve worked just as I have seen it in this country during school desegregation disputes. Does that mean the identity crisis, or the identity problem, is gone? No, just some people have changed, some views have broadened, there are some new understandings. Hopefully this happens more and more as you go forward. If you’ve seen children from different backgrounds working together on committees in newly desegregated schools you see them in a setting opens them up a bit. It is also the question of the political possibilities. When it's politically feasible, it’s good to have these good interpersonal things happening. If you launch political barriers, it becomes impossible to break away from the group with which you’re are identified. So whether it’s a political or racial, or whatever it is, you’re ok, but I’m still not going to say whites are ok, or blacks are this or that, or in this community this can happen because I still have to represent my organization.

Question:
Another similar sort of question relates to the statement that is being made quite a bit in the field now, that white Americans have what’s being called the dominant North American model of mediation. Many people think it doesn't work in other cultures and this has been very much said in relation to Africa, Central and South America. Some people are extending that to minority cultures within the United States. Do you, or did you see any need to adopt different approaches for different cultural groups?

Answer:
I was never involved in a formal of mediation with the American Indian Community, but I doubt it would be the same as the traditional mediation model that we know. More consultation would be needed, more time would be needed. I was told by a Korean-American mediator, who’s active in the Asian Mediation Center in Los Angeles, that he had a problem when the parties shared their problem with him and then they expected him to be a party to the conflict too. They refused to accept his contentions that his involvement ended when the agreement was signed. They wanted the mediator to immerse himself in the problem and stay involved in the event the agreement broke down. If you don’t know that culture from the outset, you are going to have trouble with another model. And if you try to impose another ground rule, you’re going to get into trouble. In El Salvador where I’m working now, we’re building a conflict resolution component, a local Zone of Peace to address violence in 86 low income communities. There are people who went in, before I had got there, who wanted a big mediation program as part of this. That won’t work. During our assessment we found out that what will work, is a system already in place where a directorate decides community conflicts. They come together, so that if the issue is over the availability of water in the community, it’s the directorate that makes that decision or resolves it. Does this mean that there’s no mediation? No it doesn’t. It means that you respect that current process, and maybe you give some mediation type training, teach the skills of mediators to the members of the directorate and the community so they have options and alternatives to make them better, more effective in the way they’re doing it. Is there a place for mediation or mediational behaviors to be used there? I think part of this is how you use the word "mediation." Formal mediation structured in certain ways, no, it’s not appropriate in certain places. But the techniques of mediation and being mediational in behaviors are.

Question:
What do you think are the most important skills and attributes of an effective civil rights mediator?

Answer:
The capacity to build and gain the confidence and trust of the parties and those listening skills that help bring this about. The total integrity of what you’re doing, sitting on your biases, knowing they are there and not letting them get in your way. And effectively blocking them from getting in your way if you are going to mediate a case where your tendency is to be an advocate. To suspend judgment. Reliability, when you say you are going to be there, you show up; it counts for a lot. Again, all this contributes to the building of trust. Knowing that when you are listening to somebody telling you their problem, you are probably the first person who listened to them that well. That you care and are there for them. You are there for them because when you say, "I’ll be back tomorrow," you are back tomorrow. You find ways to be of assistance. Send them a news clip, send them an article, send them something so you connect. That builds trust and effectiveness. Do those things and you can get away with all kinds of mistakes. I can tell you, I’ve made many! The parties, as long as they trust me enough, they aren’t going to let me screw up their settlement. If they basically feel good about my being there, they aren’t going to let my mistakes louse up their settlement.

Question:
We want to direct our attention to Wounded Knee, which is one of the highest profile cases that CRS was ever involved in. Perhaps you could just tell us a little background on the conflict, what it was about, what was going on, and how CRS got involved?

Answer:
The American Indian Movement (AIM), which was the first national and highly publicized civil rights organization representing the interest of Native Americans, had been conducting a series of demonstrations and protests around the country, trying to call attention to the government's miserable treatment of them and their concerns. They were protesting the horrendous disregard of their culture by the federal government and its to acknowledge and address the violations of treaties that had been signed with American Indians. While I was working on an Indian rights case, I recall the late Judge Noel Fox saying to me, "If I have to go by the law on this, I’d have to give all of western Michigan back to the Indians. That included Detroit, of course. There was no voting constituency for politicians, so there was very little political incentive for the Congress to help. There was a caravan to Washington that started on the West coast to take over the BIA building in Washington. There was a lot of damage to the building, which hurt the image of the AIM and its supporters. They skillfully negotiated their way out of that. So they were in a protest mode, and demonstrating in the Midwest. A caravan was headed to Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. That was out of my region, but earlier we had responded to some American Indian protests before CRS opened a Denver office. We had responded to some things in Nebraska, an incident involving the fatal shooting of an American Indian by some white ranchers. I was told to relinquish three of my younger staff members to accompany the American Indians march through the plains states, which was headed to Pine Ridge. John Terronez, Efrain Martinez, and John Sarver. They were reporting directly to Washington and I would only touch base with them peripherally. My initial interest was getting them back to work in my region. The team was accompanying AIM on its marches and helping to prevent problems along the way. As the American Indians would come into a community, CRS would perhaps precede them, talk to the sheriff or other local officials and try to help clear the way, give them an escort through town or let them sleep in a local park. They got to the Pine Ridge Reservation specifically to protest the actions of Dick Wilson, the elected tribal chief, who was accused of nepotism and improper use of federal funds and civil rights violations. They got to Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and the Feds were absolutely petrified because of the disastrous experience at the BIA building in Washington previously. They thought they were going to take over the two story brick building in the town of Pine Ridge.

Question:
How many people were involved in the march?

Answer:
Oh, there were a few hundred marching. I don’t know how many at this point, maybe 150-200. They weren’t heavily armed. I assume some had some arms, but they weren't intending any takeover at that time. But the BIA had stationed troops, US marshals were there, Wayne Colbert, head of the Marshal service was out there. Troops were on the rooftop of the two-story BIA building with machine guns, ready to prevent any possible takeover. I recall talking to John Terronez after the effort to have Wilson recalled had ended unsuccessfully. John told me, "Looks like we’re done. They are breaking up now and they are headed out and we are going to pack our gear and head home.” What neither John nor anybody else knew was that the caravan was going to the historic village of Wounded Knee on the reservation was going to take over the village. Russell Means talks about how this was kept secret because they thought people would be afraid, and they didn’t want word to get out. When the caravan got to Wounded Knee, the leaders announced, to the surprise of many, including the CRS staff, that they were staying.

Question:
Who was living in Wounded Knee?

Answer:
It was a village. There were American Indian families there and some white ranchers as well. Pine Ridge reservation was a desolate place. There were some jobs there, but at least 70% unemployment. It was February. They stopped there and took over that village. They didn’t hurt anybody; people were free to leave. For the record, -- Russell Means doesn’t tell it this way in his book, he says AIM communicated directly with the FBI Chief Trimbach the stories I heard was that Terronez and Martinez, both Mexican Americans who could be confused for Native Americans, and Sarver came out of Wounded Knee to the FBI officials up the road with AIM’s list of demands. The FBI chief immediately placed them under house arrest, notwithstanding their Justice Department credentials, the same as the FBI carries. It took a day until John could get through to Washington and get released. But they brought up the list of demands and thus started a saga, 73 days at Wounded Knee. CRS sent a team in to try to serve in the mediational and intermediary role. The FBI was there, Bureau of Indian Police, customs officials, they needed all the police types they could get there. There were rifles and firing and a few killings. CRS responded with a cadre of field representatives - - conciliators and mediators -- who were housed in a church in the town of Pine Ridge, five to ten miles out of Wounded Knee. There were blockades along the road. The first road block was maintained by the tribal chief, Wilson’s people. Then the FBI had a road block and the third road block was the American Indians right outside of Wounded Knee. We established our base in a church. There were beds and phones and a few rooms and we had anywhere up to a dozen people there at a time, doing a variety of activities. We would transport people in and out in conjunction with the other Feds. They knew we were there, but they didn’t accept us or like us. You had a situation where you had FBI agents who are really trained to work behind desks or in urban settings, and there they were out there in the plains and the cold. You had BIA police, and customs police, perhaps, and Marshals and none of them were very happy there. Many of them weren’t getting overtime and their families were back home. There were bunkers that the AIM members had built. There were armed people in them with gunshots going off at night sometimes. There were shots fired into the place. That was the setting. I don’t remember when I got a call to get in there, but I brought in a fellow from our Philadelphia office, Tom Hadfield, to do the administrative things, just to get it organized, keep track of who had what cars and who was where. Marty Walsh was there when I arrived and had helped get negotiations started. They had just declared a cease fire and there was a demilitarized zone and they were trying to get talks started. The Feds were all in the BIA building. Kent Frizzell was a solicitor of the Department of Interior which handled American Indian affairs. Dick Helstern from the Justice Department was there doing administrative and legal work with him. Stan Pottinger, the head of the Civil Rights division was there for a while with some of his staff. These were others who were assigned there from those agencies in Washington. They were in regular phone contact with the Acting Attorney General Snead who was in touch with the white House.

Question:
Now who was negotiating with whom?

Answer:
Nobody at this point, but they were opening negotiations. Frizzell was the top federal official. Harlington Wood (later a federal judge) had been there earlier. At an earlier time, there had been efforts to open talks and they hadn’t gone very far. Now Frizzell and his people were going to talk to Russell Means and Dennis Banks and the leadership of the American Indian movement. We had staff going back and forth as I said sometimes escorting lawyers in or bringing people out who were sick or wanted to leave. We were talking to people trying to gauge what we should be doing, and then trying to help get talks started. Marty had carried that ball with his staff, and then I came in to replace him and we overlapped for a few days. Nobody authorized us to mediate. I don’t think the parties felt any need for that, but we were there to participate and help facilitate. We were more in a facilitative mode.

Question:
Explain how you’re using those two terms differently. What do you do when you’re facilitating?

Answer:
Well you’re helping to get things going. You’re there to help in those roles to do what you can to keep it moving, but they didn’t want you sitting at the head of the table saying this is what we’re going to do.

Question:
Were you at the table at all?

Answer:
Oh yes, but our role was peripheral. We were often in an observing role, information role. We were not in a role to take charge. The first day I was there, unbeknownst to us, Frizzell held a press conference saying that the government had learned that there was a split in the American Indian Movement, that there had been a fight in the AIM office in Rapid City which was some miles away. This really antagonized the American Indians in Wounded Knee. We didn’t know anything about the press conference. Marty and I went down into a room where the leadership was early that afternoon, and they had just heard the radio report on Frizzell’s remarks and they just jumped at us. This was a day before talks were supposed to start and they were fuming. "They’re threatening in this way, they’re creating the wrong picture, they’re telling lies. Why is he doing this if talks are supposed to start?" They had already created a cease fire zone.

Question:
Why did he?

Answer:
I had no idea. I just knew nobody told us about it. AIM leader Vern Bellancourt told us "We want someone from CRS to stay down here tonight. We don’t trust them. They’re going to fire in and we want a couple of whites in here." They believed the government would be less inclined to fire into Wounded Knee if whites from the government were there. So we assured them that would happen, and I made plans to spend the night there with Burt Greenspan, a young white conciliator. Doug Hall was there that night, a civil rights lawyer from Minneapolis, who was providing legal counsel to AIM. The plan was that the next day there would be negotiations in a teepee that would be set up at noon in the DMZ, and the feds were not to come until that teepee was set up. They would come down to the road block and then walk over to the teepee. So I made arrangements with Kent Frizzell that I would radio him, when the teepee was set up and we were ready to start. It was scheduled for noon, but everybody knew that Indian time meant it would be later, that was a given. We were in the radio room in Wounded Knee at 4 a.m. At four in the morning, someone in a bunker radioed that there was someone in the DMZ, which was a violation of the cease fire. We wondered who would do that at four in the morning just before the talks were going to start? Stan Holder, the AIM security chief, threatened to have somebody shoot at the violators. I convinced him to wait until one of his people, accompanied by our Bert Greenspan, could go out and survey the scene. What they saw was that a jeep with a couple of BIA personnel had gone over a line to find some flat land where they could spread a blanket and have their breakfast. That was the violation. So Burt came back and we got that sorted out over the radio and they got the guys out of there. Finally, at midmorning, it was time to head up to the DMZ, only everything was late. The Indians were up late at night conferencing, negotiating, and celebrating. They went through the sweat, a spiritual ceremony, met some more, then got up late. Now it’s an hour behind schedule, and they’re trudging up the hill with the teepee, which was supposed to be set up an hour earlier. The leaders are walking up the road with the men who were carrying the teepee. Bert and I were walking with them. As we approached the site where they were going to set up the teepee, about 50 yards from the federal roadblock, a helicopter landed at the road block and out stepped Frizzell and Helstern. There were about 50 news men and women standing around as well. Stan Holder turned to me and asked, "What the hell are they doing here?" I told him that I didn’t know why they came in before we radioed them to do so. "Well, you get their asses out of here or there's not going to be any talks," someone else said. So I went running up to the road block and called Frizzell away from the reporters and said, "I thought you were going to wait until we sent you a signal." "Well," he said, "I decided this is going to be done on white man’s time not Indian time. We’re going to start when we agreed to start, not when they decide it’s time.” I said, "I think you’d better go back, because they’re really ticked off. Were you aware that last night there was an incident last night, that two of your men went over the line and stirred things up? We almost had a shooting incident.” "Nobody told me that," he said. "Well, people were up all night," I told him. "You don’t know what they went through." "All right, we’ll go back, but we’re coming back in an hour and they’d better be ready." So I ran back down the hill. "Stan, it was a mistake. I’m sorry, I must have screwed up on the timing. They’re going back. They’ll be back in an hour." So they proceeded to set up the teepee.

Question:
Now the parties were the Indians and...?

Answer:
The American Indian Movement and the Feds, and that was it.

Question:
Nobody else?

Answer:
Nobody else. They started talking, and I don’t remember the details of that talk, except I do remember that I was asked a question about Dick Wilson, who was an anathema. He was the tribal chair and I responded using his title "Chief,” and Russell Means chided me for using his title. That was an example of where you can make mistakes, and if people want you there, they’re not going to throw you out because you did something wrong.

Question:
Was he seen as a puppet of the feds? Was that why?

Answer:
In a way he was, but the feds just found him there. Nobody really cared about him and the AIM leaders deplored him.

Question:
And he was not at the table?

Answer:
Oh no, they wouldn’t let him near the place.

Question:
So what were the issues?

Answer:
Well, the American Indian Movement had an agenda. It ranged from recognizing Wounded Knee as a historic site, to going to Washington to renegotiate the treaties, to have Congress address the issue. They wanted to have the white House meet with them and talk about these issues. And they wanted the government to investigate the civil rights violations under Wilson’s regime. There were subsequent negotiating sessions, mostly in the meeting house in Wounded Knee.

Question:
Now they set the agendas themselves and ran the meeting themselves?

Answer:
Sure, the fed's agenda was, "Get out of here. Give up," with the threat of force at all times. So yes, they went back and forth in the discussion. There was no need for a mediator, there was no need for a formal agenda. It wasn’t called for at that time. They managed it very well. There was anger, but that was all controlled, very political as well.

Question:
Each side was willing to listen to the other?

Answer:
I guess. I don’t know who was listening or not, but people took turns talking. Again, this is where I say, you’re not going to listen to the American Indians and say, "I understand how you feel. And why you feel that way.” You’re representing the United States of America. As soon as you leave that meeting, you’re going to call the Attorney General, who’s going to call the Special Assistant to the President, and it will be on his desk. You’re not about to make a commitment to do anything without advanced clearance. The only word from the white House at that point was "Don’t shoot anybody." The CRS staff would move back and forth, as I said, and at times we had great difficulty. It could have been with anybody. The FBI resented us, because we were the ones promoting peace, prolonging the takeover. Or at times we were stopped at Wilson’s road block. The feds had made strategic errors. They’d left the phone line from the Wounded Knee trading post open for a long time, so the leaders of the American Indian Movement were on the phone to reporters all over the country. They were on talk shows and were getting a world of publicity. They finally cut off the phone and only opened it when they had to speak with their attorneys. They put a tap on this phone and that would come back to haunt them. The FBI started to stop our people. "You’ve got a can of gas in the back of your trunk. We’re not going to let you through. We’re going to confiscate it." Well, what happened is that in Wounded Knee, gas would be siphoned from our tanks. We’d get stuck on the road coming back. Someone would have to go out and rescue them. So, we put a can gas in the trunk as a security measure. Or I’d come out and go to the staff meeting, which they’d have every morning and someone would show me a picture. "This is Crazy Al. Is he in there? He’s wanted on felony charges in three states." Yeah, he was in there, and they knew he was in there because they must have had informers inside Wounded Knee and strong spy glasses on the outside. there. They knew he was in there, but they want me to say it. I would only say, "I’m not sure.” I had to make the point that they could not use CRS to extract information. They weren’t happy, many of them weren’t happy with us. Although, some of them, such as Wayne Colburn, the head of the marshals, understood what we were doing and appreciated it. Still they gave us a hard time coming in, they gave our people a hard time. Mark Lane was there as one of the AIM lawyers. He was involved in a number of high profile cases and was a very controversial civil rights attorney, not like William Kunstler who was also one of their attorneys, a very creditable person. Lane was not to be trusted, I learned. One of our jobs was to escort the lawyers through the road blocks. Anyone we escorted had easy access. I did that one day. I was alone in one car and they were following me down the road. We got through Wilson’s road block, and we got to the FBI road block, and then we get to the last road block, the American Indian road block. But before we get there, Lane, he was with attorney Beverly Axelrod, swings his car around mine, zooms up to the road block, says something to the guard there and zooms into Wounded Knee. When I got to the road block, the guard was standing there with a rifle pointed at me. "They told me not to let you through, no matter what," he said. I got out of the car to talk to this sixteen year old with his rifle pointed at my head. "Do you want a cigarette?" Finally he put the rifle down and let me through. That was Mark Lane. He hated anybody who worked for the Department of Justice, or the Department of Injustice as some people called it during the Nixon years. It was a frightening incident. Later, Beverly Axelrod, through one of the CRS staff, apologized for Lane’s behavior.

Question:
So to recap, CRS’s role involved running errands, getting materials that the Indians needed, getting people in and out, and facilitating the discussions to some extent?

Answer:
Helping to get the discussions going.

Question:
How did CRS go about doing that?

Answer:
Meeting with the leadership, interpreting what was happening to the Feds, meeting with the Feds and interpreting some of that on the other hand.

Question:
So you met with the leadership on both sides, interpreting what was going on at the other side. Is that what you mean?

Answer:
Interpreting to one what might be happening with the other. I don’t know how important that was. It was more important to let the Feds know. I don’t know how much they really cared, their hands were sort of tied. They had to find some peaceful way out of this.

Question:
Now when you say interpreting, do you essentially mean message carrying?

Answer:
No, it’s not message carrying. It’s helping them understand perhaps, that there was no serious threat. We were trying to motivate negotiations, and sometimes there were reasons why they couldn’t take place. It might have been an internal conflict within the leadership of AIM, where the leaders could not reach consensus. We might not be able to talk about this with the feds, but we could explain that they just had to be patient not press the issue.

Question:
Did you do any mediation within one side, like helping AIM to resolve some of these things?

Answer:
No, not to my knowledge. Marty Walsh told me that one morning he went to one of the leader’s rooms and pulled him out of bed to get him to a meeting. I told you that they showed me a mug shot of this fellow named Crazy Al. He was a tough looking white fellow who walked around Wounded Knee with a rifle. Well the first day we went into Wounded Knee for a negotiation and Frizzell asked me if I was sure it was safe for him to go in. I assured him that AIM was going to protect the Feds who came in. I told him that a security patrol would assure his security. They will meet us at the helicopter and walk with you to the church where we’ll be talking." It turned out that Crazy Al was heading the three-man security patrol. So you play different roles, some are unexpected, or maybe unimportant, you never know, you just do it. Then, when the decision was made that Russell Means would go to Washington to do an exploratory visit, we arranged to have John Terronez accompany him and to be available for any emergencies, and just to try to keep things as smooth as possible. But Russell gave John the slip and went off on his own, making the rounds of radio talk shows before he finally was arrested. At the final negotiation, where there was the signing of the peace agreement, there was a very colorful ceremony. They put a table out in the open, it was a sunny day, there was an eagle flying overhead which was symbolic. There was a signing of an agreement, that certain things would take place. Then Russell went off to Washington and there was a deterioration of the agreement. The trick was to try to get this thing concluded in some way before people lost control and did something. Before somebody got angry and pulled the trigger.

Question:
So what was in this agreement?

Answer:
It was that Russell, or that a delegation from AIM, would go to Washington. They’d have a meeting with someone at the white House, and there would be consideration given to their demands. There would be a memorial established at Wounded Knee and the Civil Rights Division would investigate complaints on the reservation. I guess they felt that was the best they could do. They had their lawyers working with them. Kunstler from New York. Lane, Axelrod from California and Doug Hall, who stopped coming after awhile. Some of the lawyers wanted to be where the action was. I remember there was disarray at one point, and I took it upon myself to call Doug Hall, who was from Minneapolis and very highly regarded as well as low key. I said, "Doug, you’re needed out here." He said, "Well, they haven’t asked me so I won’t come unless they do." And he didn’t. And I sure wish he had, because there were antics going on, I mentioned what Mark Lane did to me, for example. That wasn’t the reason that I called him, I don’t remember what the specific incident was. The last negotiation I took part in took place on a school bus, which was in the DMZ. It was a convenient place, the people fit and it was pitch black. I was in the back of the bus, and they decided what they needed to do was find a way to end. It was agreed they were going to end and what terms would be. There would be no arrests, but those who had felony charges pending were subject to arrest. CRS would be the intermediary for turning in guns. Guns wold be registered and returned to their owners if the could show they owned them. That was our role at that point. Now there may have been more of a role played in other meetings. I left at that point.

Question:
So if guns were legitimately owned by Native Americans, they would give them back?

Answer:
That’s right. Native Americans or others who were with them. People’s property was not lost. I’m not sure how that played out. I think Leo Cardenas would know. He succeeded me.

Question:
So they agreed, essentially, that they would end the standoff if they got this document that said that they’d be heard in Washington?

Answer:
There was a signed agreement and they went to explore it and that’s when Russell disappeared.

Question:
Now why was it that everything fell apart when he left?

Answer:
I think people were tired. They had accomplished their mission. It was time to stop. They had milked this for the publicity, which was very important. They had heightened awareness throughout America of the plight of the American Indians, of the rape of the Indians by the US Government, of the treaty violations. That was all exposed, highly publicized. The media had it. People were more aware.

Question:
So why didn’t it just peacefully disband?

Answer:
Well, how do you end it? That had to be negotiated. I think the thought was that Russell and his group were going to go to Washington and confirm by good intent that people could do certain things and then come back. But I think he hit the talk show road and continued the publicity, and there was conflict inside AIM. We weren’t privy to it, but it was there. Russell writes about that. So then, how do you end the standoff? Finally, it was agreed that they would come out. Part of this might have been some of the civil rights lawyers too, who wanted to perpetuate the cause, rather than protect the individuals. At the end of the day, they worked out the agreement on how this would end and it did end peacefully at that point.

Question:
And this was several days after Means had left?

Answer:
Probably a few weeks. Some of the others had slipped away too. I think Dennis Banks left and certainly anyone subject to arrest. They were going to arrest these guys right on the spot, so they slipped off into the night. It was very easy. There was a very wide perimeter. You think of the village and some road blocks, but still a huge perimeter. Now one of the factors in the resolution was an idea that Ed Howden had. Ed was out there with me. He was a godsend. He aided me as a former journalist too, he’d write our daily reports. Ed went out on cold, snowy, windy day to help fix a flat tire for one of our people who got stuck on the road. It was Ed’s idea that they involve the tribal elders, Fool’s Crow and Black Elk. I think Ed, after I left, went to visit them or got somebody else to get them involved. Whatever that dynamic was, they got involved and helped, because the American Indian community respects and listens to its elders. So that is the story as I know it.

Question:
But you’ve referred off and on to the trials?

Answer:
A year later there were the trials. The initial trials were Russell Means and Dennis Banks. They were held in St. Paul. St. Paul, Minnesota in my region. St. Paul has a large Native American community. So there was the potential for anything to happen there, and a lot of people from there were from the Sioux nation

Question:
Now why were they being tried if the agreement was that there wouldn’t be any trials?

Answer:
I don’t think there was an agreement that they wouldn’t be tried for any illegal activity.

Question:
So this trial wasn’t related to what they did at Wounded Knee?

Answer:
Oh yes it was, it was the Wounded Knee trial. There were other charges against them from other demonstrations and protests in other localities, but this was the Wounded Knee trials.

Question:
And the settlement didn’t say that...?

Answer:
No, the leaders of the takeover would be charged with felonies. They were fair game. I didn’t follow all of the trials, just Russell Means and Dennis Banks trial.. There was a very fair judge. Now the beauty of that trial was that the Wounded Knee defense committee, which had been set up in the Twin Cities and had provided money and support from the time of the takeover, had a network throughout the state. Jurors are selected from voter roles from around the state. Every time a name came up, they checked it out through the network. Somebody came from a small, rural community they checked her out thoroughly. They did such a good job at jury selection that when the trial ended the jury formed a Wounded Knee committee of their own to protest what had happened up there. It was extraordinary. They used all of the modern skills of jury selection and outwitted the prosecution. I sat in a few days of the trial. Two things hit me that were interesting. One was related to the record on Terronez and the other related to the FBI testimony. FBI agents were questioned. I was there while two FBI men and one woman were questioned. They had been assigned to the road block, and at the road block was an armed personnel carrier. It’s a small tank, but with doors for entry and seats in it. First, they brought up somebody from the telephone company who testified that he had installed a telephone in the armed personnel carrier. which was linked to the telephone line that ran from Wounded Knee to the outside world. The defense charged that telephone calls between the parties and their lawyers were monitored by the feds. The three FBI agents got up there and denied having any knowledge of the telephone, even though they admitted that they signed reports describing conversations on the tapped line. They obviously were perjuring themselves. The other thing that’s perhaps more relevant is how you gain trust. People often don’t know who you are when you’re with CRS, so there’s always a question of credibility. I told you that as the American Indian Movement approached Wounded Knee, the BIA building had armed guards with machine guns and heavy equipment sitting around on top of the roof of the BIA building to prevent another takeover. Well, Terronez had been with the AIM group coming toward Pine Ridge. He went ahead and he talked to a U. S. Marshall. He said, "This is overkill. You guys have all this equipment here. You’ve got a few people down there. You’ve got 150 people maybe, they’re carrying sticks and bats, a few firearms maybe, but there’s no weaponry out there.” And that was his plea to ease tensions and prevent a catastrophe from occurring. It’s an appropriate role. The way that I found out about that was when the entire Marshals’ logs were entered into the Wounded Knee trials. One marshal wrote, saying that "agent” Terronez of the Community Relations Service informed us that there are approximately 150 to 200 marchers armed with sticks and bats and a few might have firearms. It was out of context so that anybody reading it might assume that Terronez was an informer. I’m sure it wasn’t intended to capsize us or anything, but that’s the risk you take in this work. So that is what I remember of the Wounded Knee saga. I’ve got notes and press clips and whatnot, as do some of my colleagues. We got some media there because there was a United Press International reporter up there for a while. He did a feature story on this band of seven people huddled in a church basement trying to keep the peace, moving back and forth stealthily between the parties. So that is most of the Wounded Knee story. Some of us got letters when we were done. All kinds of letters started flowing out from the white House, the President commending us on this and the Secretary of Interior and the Attorney General. It was almost farcical.

Question:
But did you get any more money?

Answer:
You never know what or how things are regarded. I think there was true appreciation in some quarters for us. I got a beautiful letter from a lawyer with the Civil Rights Division, Dennis Ickes. He thanked us for being there, saying it’s very important that we were there to help keep the peace. It was important because we were the only ones who were saying, "Well, maybe there’s a better way than to just go in and shoot up the place.” Others knew it but couldn’t say it. After the agreement was signed, Kent Frizzell got on the radio that reached every federal official said, "I want to thank everybody who helped bring this to a peaceful conclusion and the FBI and the BIA, you were outstanding and I really want to thank you and credit you for what happened.” And that’s all he said. Our guys were livid when they heard that. I went over to Kent and I said, this was late in the day, I said, "You didn’t say anything about CRS, and I’ve got a team of guys who’ve been hanging out there, strung out there, being hassled, having their car searched, being accused of everything. Someone would pick up a shell as a souvenir, a bullet shell off the ground, and then all of a sudden they’re being accused of carrying ammunition. We’ve gone through so much.” He said, "Oh I’m sorry. I neglected that. Let me come over and talk to your people.” So he came over to our quarters in the church basement and said, "I want to tell you guys what a great job you did.” But he was scared to put it out over the air and let the others hear that, because they were so angry with us. These were guys who had been out there in the cold, just standing by a barrier with the cold winds blowing on a March night and from a bunker comes someone singing, "While you’re out there in the pale moonlight, and an Indian’s in bed with your wife tonight." How would that make you feel?

Question:
Did they ever get any concessions once they went to Washington?

Answer:
I don’t know. I don’t think so. There might have been a memorial promised to be built. I’ve never been back. I think it heightened awareness of some terrible abuses and was an important chapter in our nation’s civil rights history.