How did the changing nature of the civil rights movement and protest activity affect your work?

Silke Hansen

Answer:
Certainly one difference is that there is less official opposition now to the concept of having civil rights. I think that nowadays, it's very rare to find someone who reports to be opposed to civil rights and equal opportunity and non-discrimination. Now what that would look like is another issue, and even as we were watching the [John] Ashcroft hearings [confirmation hearings for appointment as Attorney General under President George W. Bush] recently, I think we were certainly aware of the fact that opposition to civil rights is a difficult thing to recognize in a person. I think that from the perspective of communities of color, in many ways, the civil rights issues have been more difficult to deal with because the racism and discrimination that they see have become more covert. And because of that, you don't have the national outrage at the lack of civil rights. Many whites in this country who aren't somehow involved in or immersed in the civil rights and race relations issues, genuinely believe that everything's fine. Yeah, you have your occasional Jasper [Texas, referring to the dragging death of James Bird in 1998] which is oh, that was horrible and you have a Rodney King, which shouldn't have happened. But they really believe that for the most part there is no more racism, there is no more discrimination. Yeah there's some idiots out there, yeah there's still a few Klan folks and skinheads, but everybody knows they're idiots, it's no big deal. There is a perception that people are just "playing the race card," if you will, that they're just the troublemakers, and that things really are okay in the great scheme. And if somebody discriminates, they're prosecuted and dealt with. One of the stories that I always use in talking to white friends, is of a colleague of mine, a mediator from one of our regions who travels a lot. He's a tall, black man, athletic, and he likes to run in the morning. When he's traveling, he has learned that before he runs in the morning, it's a good idea to call the local police department from the hotel and say, "Look, I'm so-and-so, and I'm with the Department of Justice Community Relations Service. I'm staying at such-and-such hotel, and I'll be out running from five to six in the morning. I just want you to know about that." If he doesn't do that, guaranteed he's going to be stopped by a cop and asked, "Who are you? Where are you going, and what are you doing here?" You see a black man running down the street, and you assume he's running away from something. And he's accepted that, and most times he laughs at the whole thing. He'll see a patrol car and they'll wave at him, because they've gotten the word. If he doesn't make that call, though, they'll stop him. People don't think that sort of thing is happening, and what's even more sad and dangerous, if you will, is that even the cops who would stop him don't realize that their actions are racist and discriminatory. They think they're doing their job: If you see a black man running down the street and he doesn't belong there, you've got to question him. And so, now the whole racial profiling issue is hitting the papers. It's been there forever, though; it's not a new phenomenon. People of color have been aware of that for a very, very long time, and they're not surprised by it. But you know, the perception is largely that everybody is being treated fairly. And when that's the perception, it's much more difficult to make the case that "something's rotten in Denmark," or in this case, Colorado. Anymore, it's not so much the officially-sanctioned discrimination that results in outcries; it's much more subtle forms of discrimination that are ongoing. So, well- meaning, well-intentioned people really believe that some people will just never be satisfied and will keep playing the race card. They end up wondering, "What does Jesse Jackson want, anyway?" And so that mindset makes it more difficult to get people to acknowledge that there is a problem that needs to be dealt with. You'll find that, to some extent, in almost any white community that you go into. My job is to try to persuade and convince them that it's important to address some of these problems that they really are problems. You know, I tell them, "I'm not accusing you of being racist, and I'm not accusing this community of discriminating. I'm saying that as long as that perception is out there that there is discrimination and racism you're going to have a problem. So let's see whether we can get the parties together and deal with it." And then once you get that rolling, once that community of color has a chance to explain what they see as being racist, you can begin to deal with that. We have to get away from the finger-pointing, and cooperate to figure out a solution. And that's fine. But I don't know whether that answers your question.

Leo Cardenas

Answer:
Oh yeah, no question about it. The type of disputes where we can find success has been raised. An example is, right before I retired, there was a NCAA dispute that initially focused on the claim that not enough minorities at that time were on full scholarships playing basketball. Well, the Black Coaches' Association found the almighty dollar, the so-called Final Four Basketball Tournament, which brings in the majority of the revenue for all college basketball programs. Because the revenue, it's TV revenue, that's what it is. Well, it so happened that one of the finalists was the University of Arkansas. In 1995, they threatened to boycott the Final Four tournament and the University of Arkansas was sure that they would be in the Final Four and eventually were. It was clear that there would be no Final Four if U of A did not participate. So when CRS finally got them to the negotiations table, you are looking at the top black coaches who are articulate and know what they're talking about, and you're looking at college presidents on the other side. This is what we've come about, that level of community. The Black Coaches' Association was saying that they were not hiring enough black coaches. By the time they got to the table, the real issue was how many Freshman individuals can you get on a team and how long can you keep them, how many can you "red shirt", and all of those complicated things that were more complicated than the general public knows about. But eventually it was the dollars: If you don't hold a Final Four tournament, you're talking about the financial life-blood of the college basketball program. You're talking about the very survival of the program. The Green Dollar-Sign Monster talks.

Manuel Salinas

Answer:
No. It came about gradually over a period of time. The only one who could give you direction, naturally, was the regional director. He would sit down with you and say, "Ok, when you go into this situation, these are the things you ought to consider. Then we would write reports, so they were aware what we were doing. So they would help you along until the training came along. They tried to do the training at least once a year.

Ozell Sutton

Answer:
First place, I must recognize the changing nature of the animal. There once was a time when the whole issue was just black and white. The issue is no longer black and white, it's brown, it's red, it's yellow, in other words, Hispanics, Native Americans. There are more people in the pool now. They've always been there, they just haven't been raising issues among themselves. Like I said earlier, there's no issue unless somebody raises it. That doesn't mean that there's no discrimination, no repression, but until somebody says, "I want this stopped," it isn't a conflict. Other ethnic groups are now demanding that they too must be included. Now you must understand that, and you have to understand the cultural background out of which they come. So it becomes more demanding, now that I need to know more than just black and white culture, I've got to know Asian culture, or Hispanic culture. And even within those cultures, I've got to know there's a world of difference between Japanese and Chinese. And there's a world of difference between Cuban Americans who are Hispanic, and Puerto Rican Americans who are also Hispanic. And that they dislike each other with passion. The Cuban Americans don't like Mexican Americans, because they think Mexican Americans are submissive. Well I won't get into all that. Even within the so-called culture itself. And to say Browns are Hispanic does not define the culture at all. Sometimes the only thing they have in common is language. Even Spanish is spoken differently from one culture to another. So the mediator must understand the dynamic, they must also understand the dynamic of the change of approaches. We are no longer fighting to enter a restaurant and be served, we are fighting to have the money with which to buy food. It doesn't do any good to get the ability to go into the restaurant if you don't have any money. There's a shift from blatant and overt discrimination, to the presence of blacks in certain jobs, upward mobility, and hiring practices, and promotional opportunities and these kinds of things. A mediator now has to be able to grasp all of these things. It's a great shift.

Will Reed

Answer:
Only in the sense that they stopped doing as much of it. We don't have as many demonstrations and marches. In a lot of instances the perceived injustices are still there, I'm speaking to the volume of it. Do you remember Robert Vortier?

Wallace Warfield

Answer:
Well again, it goes to....what kind of identity does CRS want to have? I mean, CRS was, I thought, incredibly wedded, or was certainly split between competing identities. One identity I would call the "Wounded Knee” identity, flying into a situation, bullets whizzing over your head. What did you really do? Well, that was secondary. The main thing was the excitement. You were in the thick of things, and it was tangible, the fear was tangible, it was exhilarating. Not the kind of ambiguity from doing some of the more long-term kinds of processes where you can’t see the outcome. Our field [of Conflict Resolution] is a field where you have to live with ambiguity. If you can’t live with ambiguity, you have no business being in the CR field. But in that way, CRS, at the end of the day, could say, "Well, I stopped these two guys from burning down a store in this community. These other two guys were about to pull out a rifle and shoot across a ridge and I stopped that....” You could count that; you could measure that. It doesn’t matter whether or not you could actually see what you did. The other part of the agency -- and I would think that I was one of the people that made the transition -- I was never really wedded to the fire-fighting notion to begin with, you know -- and so many of us, who saw the handwriting on the wall, said, "Those of you who think about CRS in the Wounded Knee fashion are perpetuating a myth of communities that no longer exist. The minorities in the communities are becoming more sophisticated than we are. Why do they need us? They don’t really need us -- you’ve got other groups and other organizations.” By that time, the field of dispute resolution was becoming more professionalized, as there were community-based DR centers, the justice centers were coming online, and people were just sort of nibbling away at the flanks of CRS, I’d say from the mid-’70s on. And, you know, much of the agency had sort of surrounded itself in this reactive approach, and many of us were saying, "Listen, things are changing and we’d better change.” But there were people who came out of that Civil Rights era, who knew protests, in fact were comfortable with that because that’s who they were. The old militant leadership, who knew nothing but protests in communities, began to lose out to more sophisticated people who had more skills like the Atlanta-based NAACP, and to negotiating. Not that the protests still weren’t useful from time to time, but the landscape of disputing was changing, and the agency had a very difficult time making the transition. From what I understand, from the few people I stay in touch with, there still is some of that difficulty there.

Stephen Thom

Answer:
The civil rights movement is very dynamic and it's very political. It changes all the time with every administration in terms of how we get impacted. It means different things because if I'm working a school case and I'm talking to the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Education, and they'll say, "You ought to get a mediation agreement because we're not going to be able to make a finding." There are a lot of dynamics where politically officers are constrained for what they can do. It affects all the leverage that we have in our mediation cases. If you think about it, I've been very frustrated lately with our civil rights leverage and our due process in the sense that when you look at the state and you look at the federal government and you are hard pressed to find sanctions for schools that may be discriminating. There is very little muscle in these agencies to really say to a school district that you are not protecting the civil rights of your students. That all affects what we can do. We're trying to get mediation agreement, but some school districts have this attitude that "there is nobody to make me do that." That has a direct impact. I'm trying to work with the Office of Civil Rights, the State Department of School Safety with the State Attorney General's office to look at where we draw the line? Is there any muscle? The state can take over a school. It can take a school in trust over academic failure or mismanagement. But, can it take a school over for civil rights violations? I think that's a form of mismanagement. I think we need to broaden that term and send a message to the school systems that there is a level that is not permitted. The only muscle that is out there in civil rights now is a court suits. They file for millions of dollars, and yet, I'm told, the attitude of some school leaders is that it's not my money. We'll just pay them. They are only conveyers of public money. That all reflects on the civil rights attitudes and enforcement mechanisms that impinge upon the leverage that mediation can get parties to seriously take the mediation process and discrimination and civil rights issues. Housing is a whole other area. At times we had strong support in the area of discrimination in housing. Now we have the problem where we have the Department of Housing and Urban Development putting people into situations in housing areas where they're not safe. We're mixing people into dangerous communities because of their race or ethnicity. We're not doing any preparation to recognize that we're creating very violent situations. Again, I think those are some of the civil rights issues that aren't even being understood or looked at and we are involved in.

Angel Alderete

Leo Cardenas

Answer:
It raises it to a different level. Using the NCAA case as an example, once we were able to find someone in authority that had an impact on the dispute and we were able to express the type of services that we were able to offer, the acceptance was there. And because there are more resources, they're able to investigate us rather quickly and either accept us or not accept us. In this particular case, we were able to say, "We'll offer you a three-member team and it will be one Hispanic, one black, and one white, and at least one female and one male." It's those types of things which, in the final analysis, don't make any difference at all. But in terms of gaining an entry and getting everybody to the table, they become very important.

Bob Hughes

Answer:
Well I think formal mediation was a very useful tool for CRS to get at complex issues and to get a handle on things. Especially when a conciliated verbal agreement on the street or in a meeting room lasts as long as the memory of the people who are sitting there. But in Fairbanks some of the school cases we had mediation between the Fairbanks Native Association and Fairbanks North Star School District. For two years we met every six months or so to review the progress on the mediation agreement. For two years not a single person was involved in those sessions that were in the mediation. The Fairbanks FNA leadership had changed and others had been elected. The school superintendent left there and went away.

Werner Petterson

Answer:
Oh yeah I started out during the days of demonstrations in the streets and so that's what we did. We would respond and go to some sort of conflict that was happening in the streets. That's what we did. We would go into situations and be a presence and reduce the tensions and get people talking. Then of course, in the process we would also help the local communities build their own resources. What happened is we would see communities forming human relation commissions because we had been a part of helping them set that up, and of course they were better able to handle situations so they didn't escalate up to conflicts on the street. I think the community shifted away from demonstrating on the street to taking issues into court. I started spending a lot of time being a mediator in the Federal courts, not so much in the streets anymore, but in the courts. I started '60/'69, the Federal Government was the way to get things answered on civil rights and solutions around those issues really needed to happen at the local level. Then I started getting involved with trying to set up these review boards so that the local communities could form solutions. Taking issues to the federal courts might not have yielded much of a solution. So in this way people themselves saw that they could get things done.

Dick Salem

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.

Bob Ensley

Answer:
I can honestly say that the civil rights movement has provided me an opportunity to realize how much more work needs to be done. We are just beginning. You've been able to look inside to get to see the bigger picture. And, quite often, you're able to discern what actually needs to be done and how difficult it's going to be to get there if certain things aren't addressed. Once certain policies and procedures and methods actually become legality and it's not challenged or anybody's going to contest it. With all these things in place, I realize that we are just in the beginning stages to address all the inequities in this world. It results because of people having a feeling that they are superior, or certain people are not deserving, or they don't have the need for it, they don't appreciate this. Well, you can't appreciate that which you've never had. So this, perhaps more than anything else, the civil rights movement has provided me with this. It also has allowed me to meet and work with a lot of people who's efforts will never be recognized. People who have been involved in the "struggle", as they refer to it, without a lot of fanfare and a lot of notoriety. There are people who could make a lot more money doing other things, but no, they are still involved in the struggle. I tried to keep some of them from becoming disillusioned, saying that they've been there long enough and certain other people have benefited from it and are still benefiting from it. I try not to let that detour them at this late stage, because they've been there all these years and they don't know another way of life. They have made a difference. That's another thing, I've been able to stay in contact with a lot of people who have made the difference. It's very rewarding for me as an individual to say I work with John Lewis, that I know Jesse Jackson, Coretta King and knew Ralph David Abernathe. I know Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and these people. It's made a difference in my life. It's also had me realize that, as I said earlier, we have this struggle. It goes beyond black and white. You have the people who are very, very wealthy. The only thing they're trying to do is maintain their margin of credit and level amount of money they have on deposit, and certain stock. They watch the stock market fluctuate everyday. But people out here now down in South Georgia are watching the water table because they are without water. The wells are not pumping. The rich farmers who have the irrigation systems wells are deep and are still enjoying all the water. So therefore, you have to realize that the people will care less about the people without. There has to be a balance where certain people, not all people, are giving to the less fortunate who have been in a terrible state. So there has to be some more parity and more equity, and it's only going to come about when we can get more people to realize that this world was made for all. We should share as much as we can together.

Efrain Martinez

Answer:
I think that at some point a significant part of the country felt that minorities already had what was coming to them or even more. They went into the mode of they've got too much already, we have to knock down affirmative action. But if you look at all the data, the facts, and the statistics, you see where minorities are and where minorities think they should be. Even as far as reaching parity with almost anything. Still, I go back to letting the community describe their situation, what they think they need to do, and how they can do it together. All situations are politically local, so what good does it do me here in my block that something is happening? It might have some effect but I still have to earn a living, I still have to go to work, I still have to be in the environment where I work.