Answer:
I worked with the California Youth Authority.

Question:
What kinds of things did you do there?

Answer:
I was the program administrator with one of the institutions. Immediately prior to that I was a supervising parole agent, and before that I was a parole agent. I worked in the institutions, as well as out in the streets.

Question:
What drew you to CRS?

Answer:
Each of these is going to raise more questions. You realize what you're letting yourself in for? I was a consultant in Southern Africa, through the Church Center for the United Nations at New York City.

Question:
And what did that job entail? Give us a background.

Answer:
I would be presenting current developments and interpreting the dynamics that were involved. I would explain why these actions were being taken by various parties in southern Africa and, in particular, churches in southern Africa. They had taken particular reference to what was then southern Rhodesia.

Question:
What was your background?

Question:
What were you doing prior to CRS in 1972?

Answer:
I had just graduated from college. I was a police officer for a couple years and I was going to school part time and I decided it was taking too long so I went to school full time. Coming to work for CRS actually took longer because directly before coming to work with CRS I took a 6- month sabbatical where I just toured the country. So prior to CRS I was in college, and I had been a police officer.

Question:
Were you involved in any other Civil Rights activities?

Answer:
Nope, none.

Question:
What attracted you CRS?

Question:
What did you do before joining CRS?

Answer:
I was with the war on poverty program a jobs program called SER. I was the state director for SER for the state of Colorado.

Question:
What is SER?

Answer:
Service, Employment and Rehabilitation. It was a manpower program under the war on poverty program. You trained people to prepare for jobs, we gave people typing skills and so on. And we got into all types of training for employment and helped people phase in from our program to employment. Then the employment agencies would call us and say, "Hey do you have anybody that might be ready for employment and has a work ethic already" that we've been working with? then we branched out into very skilled areas, not only typing, but maybe electronics, or something on that order that person would be semi-skilled before he goes to work for the employer. Ironically, the director of CRS for the Denver region came into the office one day, saying that his secretary was ill for a couple days, and that he needed something typed. So I said "sure, my secretary can do it." So she did the work and I started talking to him because we were long time friends and I asked him, "What's going on?" He said, "well I'm getting ready to open up an office in Dallas. And we're going to have Denver as a field office. And Dallas is going to be the regional office, so that's great. "So are you recruiting here," I asked? I just happened to mention it and he said "yes." I saw an opening, because I'd already been in civil service before, so I thought "well from here I can go back in and then build my civil service retirement on that." Not thinking of retirement really, I was too young then, but just building. Sure enough, I was selected out of a group of five people. So that's how I got into CRS.

Question:
When you were at SER did you do any kind of conflict work, conflict management, or conflict resolution?

Answer:
No, not really, it was more just management and budgeting, time keeping, working with private industry for employment opportunities for the people that we were preparing, and working with the community groups in and around Denver in the area of employment. So you had to keep in touch with the community groups pretty much.

Question:
So you had a feel for community organizing and working with people?

Question:
What is the GI Forum?

Answer:
I was a part of the group that conceptualized CRS before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I was director of the Arkansas Council on Human Relations and we were trying to get the Civil Rights Act structured and passed going all the way back to 1962. A group was meeting in Washington to conceptualize how we could get an act passed, given what it contained. I was assigned to two workshop groups. One was the Community Relations Service, although we didn't call it that at the time. We simply called it Civil Rights, or we would call it the Human Relations Groups, or that kind of thing. I was also assigned to the EO [Equal Opportunity] workshop group that finally came forth with EEOC, which is Title VII. So we picked our brains for two days, deciding if we could get that passed. And then, the March on Washington forced Congress to enact the Civil Rights Act of 1964. (As you remember, the March on Washington was in 1963, and it forced Congress to pass the act.) Before then, various bills had been presented and there were various notions on what the act ought to look like. Lyndon Johnson had an idea of something like the Community Relations Service long before he was President. And now, he was President and he was pushing for it to happen. When it was finally passed, that's Title X of the Civil Rights Act, it didn't quite look like what we had envisioned. We had envisioned it having subpoena power, cease and desist power, and mediation and conciliation, but it didn't pass Congress that way. Now, about how I got involved in the profession and all that. After the Civil Rights Act was passed, they used the Commission on Civil Rights to present a series of hearings on the Civil Rights Act to make officials aware of what was contained in the Civil Rights Act. Civil rights activists, school board members, and members of city councils in Arkansas, mayors, and these kind of people were invited to come hear what the act meant. For the opening session, they found out at the last minute, though I knew all the time, there was not a single black on the program. The guy who used to be with the Civil Rights Commission, who later went to HUD, by the name of Sam Simmons called me and said, "Ozell?" I said, "Yes?" He said, "You know that we're opening this big conference in Little Rock tomorrow?" I said, "Yes, I know." And he said, "There's not a single black in the opening session." I said, "I know that, too. I don't know what you all were thinking, but there's not a single black on the program." He said, "You've got to speak." I said, "I've got to speak? About what?" And Sam said, "I really don't give a damn. Just speak." I said, "Sam, it's unfair that you've been planning this for six weeks and you've got all of the speakers. The governors' going to be there, and he's going to speak, and the congressman's going to speak and one of the senators is speaking. Now, you call me at the last minute and tell me that I must join in, now that's not equal opportunity." He said, "Oh hell, Ozell. Number one, you know you can do it, and I know you can do it. And number two, you know if I'd have told you six weeks ago that you still would have spoken extemporaneously. Now don't tell me that, I know you can, and I want you to speak." I said, "Okay." He said, "Fifteen minutes." So I spoke. There was a guy there from CRS, it was just getting started and after I had spoken, they invited me to join the staff of CRS.

Question:
Was this Ben Holman?

Question:
You said you were from a political science background. What were you doing prior to joining CRS?

Question:
What were you doing beforehand?

Answer:
Before that, I worked for an anti-poverty agency in New York, one of the first of the 26 "community corporations” as they were called, on the lower west side of New York. Before that, I worked with street gangs.

Question:
Tell me a little bit about your poverty work.

Answer:
Okay. I came in as the coordinator -- this is kind of a paraphrasing of the title, but I was the coordinator of a block working group. The anti-poverty agency actually was an umbrella agency that passed funds through to smaller neighborhood groups, but reserved a certain amount of program activity unto itself. One of those activities was training and working with block workers, who were people that were hired from the community to do various kinds of work, like welfare rights organizing, and a lot of the elementary and secondary school education. The program put people to work, bringing community people into the school system so that they could have their voices heard about elementary school policy. So a lot of it was advocacy work. And then I later became the deputy director of the community corporation.

Question:
That was a government agency?

Answer:
Well, like most community corporations, the funding was a combination of federal funding and city funding. Technically speaking, it was a city agency.

Question:
Tell me a little bit about the gang work.

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?

Question:
How did you get into this field?

Answer:
I started in the 1960's coming directly out of the civil rights activity at the time in New York. I had a primary responsibility in the mid '60s in the creation of community corporations. Then I moved on to Neighborhood Youth Corps activity and then just setting up community corporations to deal with OEO (federal Office of Economic Opportunity) issues and the CAP (Community Action Program) agency. So I came out of that kind of background along with a civil rights organizing background in the South Bronx and East Harlem. Then I moved into city-wide responsibilities for pocket poverty areas in New York.

Question:
You were a federal employee?

Answer:
No, as a city employee. They were private non-profits, but they worked along with the city. Most of it was federal money passed through to the city. During that time the conflicts were arising between old kinds of leadership and new kinds of leadership in New York City. In that period I also spent some time in the (Mayor) Lindsay administration with the Model Cities program around the decentralization the city's public schools. During that era there were large numbers of conflicts between institutions and community groups looking for their share of political empowerment.

Question:
What were you doing specifically?

Answer:
There were two things. In the Model Cities program we were integrating college youth and interns into the process of doing community assessments. That included trash pickups, abandoned cars, drug hot spots, and then opportunities for economic development where the business community needed to be enhanced. That was primarily in East Harlem. The idea of utilizing neighborhood residents who were returning college students was pretty new. The whole notion of internships was brand new. Then, to utilize students of color in the northeast who were just entering college in larger numbers because of the changes in admissions policies.

Question:
Where are we at now on the calendar?

Answer:
1968 or 1969.

Question:
Were your jobs specifically administrative?

Answer:
Yes, each time.

Question:
So you were maybe functioning as a mediator informally, but that wasn't your job description.

Answer:
Right, but let me give you an example of how mediation was working. It was not formal mediation, but what was happening at that time was the evolution of conflict resolution work. That was part and parcel of what everyone got trained in. So whether I became an administrator early or not, you still had to participate and learn about conflict resolution work and techniques along with all the human relations training that was taking place at that time. Those two subsets of skills were always built into what we learned how to do and what we taught other how to do.

Question:
Teaching conflict resolution was relatively new in the late 60's.

Answer:
Absolutely. It was brand new. I was there right at the beginning.

Question:
Where were you trained?

Answer:
Partly at the Institute for Conflict Resolution in New York, at the American Arbitration Association, and another part came through Manny Diaz who ran a series of sessions for the Urban Coalition of New York which a few years later were picked up by the Urban Fellows Program at Yale University. Let me give you an example of what happened in New York if you had to use the conflict resolution work when I first worked for the city in 1970. The Community Council of Greater New York was a private non-profit that had Catholic Charities, United Jewish Appeal, and a wide range of actors participating in it. We had all the pocket poverty areas so everything that wasn't a community corporation was an area for our activity. Implicit in that work was to get youth services and programming and other forms of youth employment activities into each of the communities. In order to accomplish that we had to deal with conflict resolution and mediation activities with each of the community corporations adjacent and contiguous to these pocket poverty areas in New York, just to be able to do the outreach, to get the youth involved and to get the counselors on board. This is during the time of the war on poverty, so these activities were built in. The next level, and I'll just give you another example on civil rights, was that at that time New York City' did not include people who were disabled or wards of the city or state, in the city's youth employment activity or any of their youth programs. So we raised that issue, the legal question with the city Board of Estimate. I remember I probably didn't even know what I was asking. I knew what I was asking, but I didn't know the impact at that time. I asked them on what legal bases can these populations be excluded? Well that closed the meeting right away and within two weeks we were able to work with people at Welfare Island (now Roosevelt Island) with mental and physical disabilities and begin to include them in the mainstream. These included youths who were already abandoned in one form or another and then had a disability and were often times young people of color. This was a major breakthrough in terms of the kinds of work that was going on at that time. So in terms of conflict resolution work what it did was work with the system to understand what it is that it's doing in the posing of a question, the framing of a question, such that it might be exclusive of a population, or have a population in a power imbalance; the framing of an issue with institutions in such that it indicates that power imbalance, or a potential exclusion, was oftentimes enough to just open that system or that institution for greater inclusiveness.

Question:
So you were steeped in that systemic approach in this work?

Answer:
Right from the beginning. Then additional tutelage came from Whitney Young (former head of the Urban League). I was an early Whitney Young fellow with the Urban League, and that was very helpful. Robert Hill, who is now the president, was, in fact assigned as, what I didn't know, was a mentor at that time. I mean I had no way to know that. I just thought he was someone I was directed to work with on a regular basis. So I really had a lot of advantages that I didn't realize of at the time. Another important place on the conflict resolution training was Evaline Antonetti and the United Bronx Parents. They were critical in shaping the parental response of New York to parental inclusion and decision-making in New York City public schools and their decentralization. They had, in addition to their organizing approaches, conflict resolution training built in to deal with the development of the decentralization of the city schools. Then we built it into the youth enrichment programs and the educational enrichment -- it was called cultural enrichment and education. We built it into the training for Neighborhood Youth Corp people from the late '60's through the early '70's. We built in conflict resolution training as part of their exposure and then it was the first introduction of cultural enrichment, which is multi-cultural enrichment today into the New York City public schools, by training the teachers. The way this worked was that we were not only hitting people who were in school, but we were reaching kids who were at risk and already out of school. So these kinds of trainings and techniques were used with what are now call "gangs." They were the early youth gangs. So my primary focus of work from the late '60's to the early '70's was around the youth empowerment and in addition dealing with youth gang activity so they could have constructive outlets for the concerns they had because the nature of the issues raised by young people was very different then from what older people were seeing.

Question:
What were you teaching?

Answer:
When I came back from overseas, the New Society had developed a whole range of civil rights agencies that I had never heard of. For me this was a matter of becoming acquainted with as many of these as possible in a short period of time. Ultimately, pursuing and focusing on HEW, office of civil rights for one. The Community Relations Service with the Justice Department attracted my attention, because I felt like there was a need to go beyond the legal measure that had evolved under law of civil rights legislation. To get implementation, it ultimately comes down to working issues out at the local, community level. That's a position that I held for many years. Regardless of what state and federal government did.

Question:
We want you to get a little bit more specific and tell us about a typical case that you were involved in while you were at CRS. We want you to walk us through the entire process; how it came to your attention, what you did, did you have a game plan, who did you talk to? Walk us through.