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RG-50.549.05.0007

Were you armed?

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RG-50.549.05.0007

No. I never carried a weapon. I was in a, in a registrar’s office once in Yazoo County, Mississippi. And I was with a team of FBI agents, photographing voting records. And the registrar’s name was “Foot” Campbell. While they were photographing records, I went 1n his office and we were talking about a variety of things and he related to me that he had witnessed some lynchings. And I don’t know why... and I wasn’t going to try that case, I was just there with the FBI. And he got started talking and then he said, “John, let me show you something.” And he pulled this gun out of his drawer and he shot his pistol into the floor in front of me. And I said, “Well, why did you do that?” And he said, “Well I just wanted to show you the gun worked.” It was very odd. He shot a big hole in his floor. I think he was a little demented anyway. But it was the only time I know that... and he wasn’t aiming at me. But all these agents came in. Everybody heard this terrible noise in this old courthouse and came running in to see what had happened. And he said, “Well I just wanted to show John this gun worked.” But I never really was in fear, at least I don’t recall. I think we all knew that we were in such a different situation from the people who we were working with. I mean the blacks, who were so vulnerable, who were by themselves, who had to really display such courage just to go register to vote. We met so many wonderful people, these farmers, local citizens, who simply wanted to go register, to exercise their right to vote. I think you were mentioning what we were talking about the other day, how apathetic people are about voting today. It’s just quite... when you think about it, I mean I think that always, you just couldn’t help but be impressed by these folks, who were, many of them were just hard-working people, who wanted to have the same opportunities or just to have the same right as everyone else. I mean it seems so very simple. I will always remember a fellow named Eskridge. There was a farmer named William Eskridge in Carroll 38 Frank Schwelb worked with the Civil Rights Division from 1962-1979. 61 County, Mississippi, who was really a very bright, articulate man, who lived in a farm, worked a farm that he owned, way out, by himself, out in a very isolated part of the county. And they wanted their son to go to, to get a decent education and were willing to enroll him in a white school, a previously all-white school. And we went to court to desegregate the school. One of the earliest cases that the government filed. There had been other school desegregation cases, but the United States didn’t have the authority prior to 1964 to initiate school desegregation cases. We could only do voting cases. And we were able to... and whenever I went to see him, which was many, many times, I just always marveled at how isolated they were, and his willingness and his drive, just and his very simple desire to see the son go. We had an expert come in, and the black school was horrible. It was the same picture as it was with the voting thing. They were in this old, rundown building with a pot-bellied stove. I don’t remember whether there was running water or not. But it was just an incredible contrast. And actually he, I think he might have been registered. Everybody knew him. Everybody knew him. And he had a very good reputation among the white community and maybe that was why he was not so afraid. I mean he had a very nice personality and he was obviously pretty bright... End of Tape 5, Side A 62 Tape 5, Side B

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RG-50.549.05.0007

This is tape number five, side B.

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RG-50.549.05.0007

Well, I just, you know, I think it’s something that we saw repeatedly. It’s been probably eight or nine years, but a fellow, one of the people who worked... well he didn’t work on that case, another lawyer who became a judge, Nick Flannery, worked on that case with me*’. But one of our friends went by to see him maybe eight or nine years ago. I think he’s died now. Did he die recently? Jean and I went to Holmes, went to one of those counties, no, two or three years back and went to see him. He’s probably in his eighties now.

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RG-50.549.05.0007

This is the father of the child who...?

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RG-50.549.05.0007

Right. He had afterwards gotten involved in some Mississippi politics for a while and the Freedom Democratic Party. I don’t think he ever ran for office. I always thought he should. But there’s not much more to that other than... we won, the judge ordered them to allow his child to go, Judge Clayton, to enter that grade. And we sort of stayed in touch with each other for some time afterwards both in connection with that case, and whenever I would drive... and whenever I went to Mississippi after a while you get to know some of these people and if you wanted to learn about what was going on in the community or whether there were some other incidents we ought to be aware of, those were the sort of people who called you.

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RG-50.549.05.0007

Did you say his name?

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RG-50.549.05.0007

It was William Eskridge. I don’t know about the son. Did we meet the son who he was in school with? Actually I have some pictures at home. It was not maybe three years ago. The reason I said he died, I think somebody told me. One of the school classes in Holmes County, which is nearby, one of the high schools did a little project, they put a booklet together on sort of oral histories about black leaders in their area a few years ago. And it made its way to one of the legal services people who was living there. And they sent it to me and there was an interview of Mr. Eskridge, who recalled the case we did. I guess that’s really about it, except about, on this thing... we just saw those situations repeated over and over. Every county went to wherever the government was involved. And today in legal services, I mean whenever you have a movement or you have an issue like this, someone is going to, or some group is going to try, is going to stand out initially to see, try to help people get justice, or to see that the right result comes about. So, you have leaders like, you may never hear about Mr. Eskridge in Carroll County. You might hear about some of the more prominent, you probably hear about Mrs., some of the people, who went to the national scene, like Aaron Henry in Clarksdale, Mississippi, who was President of the NAACP, also*®. Who’s a very prominent figure and who continued to be a prominent figure after these, in later days when the Voting Rights Act was passed and blacks did get the right to vote. Then if you go to Mississippi today, you see the number of black legislators, who are in the Mississippi legislature. And that you had some part in, you see how far it’s come. So there are a lot of unsung heroes, I think, like Mr. Eskridge, in all these cases. °° Nick Flannery served in Civil Rights Division from 1958 to 1970. 9 Aaron Henry, 1922-1977. Became Mississippi state president of the NAACP in 1959. 63

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RG-50.549.05.0007

I wanted to ask you kind of a general question. I’m going to try to phrase it clearly, but it might not... take a little while. You mentioned something earlier about living in the South and how you wanted to live in the South and in a way you were proud of being a Southerner and you were aware of the things that were good and were motivated to be there because of that... to change some of the things that were not as good. I have kind of the idea that so many Northerners and maybe particularly Jews, who lived in the North, felt that the South was backwards and controlled by the Klan and there would be too much anti-Semitism and too much maybe lack of culture or something, putting it crudely or maybe over-exaggerating. But I’m wondering what it was that you saw about living in the South that was so positive, that made yourself identify as a Southerner and motivated you in this whole endeavor?

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RG-50.549.05.0007

I think it’s the same to some extent what you see in small towns. I think—or the rural areas— you get this, I mean 1n a simplistic way, the idea that people accept you for who you are. As a salesman I always used to say in the South 1f you have a customer, they’re going to initially assume you are telling the truth and will take you, at face value, what you say, and will welcome you in, and be happy to spend the time of day. And if you are fair with them, you can have a long lasting relationship as you would with anyone else. Whereas, if you were in the urban areas of the North, and then again this is very simplistic and probably not true in the sense that you can generalize, but I’m sure it indicates some of the way that I think and others think. In the Northern, when I was selling chemicals, I think in the North people say “This guy is a salesman, he’s out to get us and he’s going to be a con man or con woman of one sort or another.” And they have a much harsher attitude. And maybe because these towns are, these cities are so big, are not interested normally in forming another relationship and welcoming someone from another place that has nothing to do with where they live. I think the camaraderie of communities, the fact that people are, whether it is a slower pace. People do have an interest in where they live and in making it, and in the sense of place where they are. I think that’s maybe true of smaller communities across the board. I’m sure it’s true in New Hampshire and Vermont and in smaller places up North, but it was true of the South. Much has been written about the South, I’m sure you’re familiar with literature of the South. And I think there is some of that commonality. It’s like when I was in the Civil Rights Division, being a Southerner, itself, was probably helpful... 1t was helpful, I’m sure in many ways, especially in dealing with white officials. I mean not that you would necessarily be their buddy, but they sure couldn’t... There’s something about being able to say, “Oh you’re from way up there in New York or you’re from... you don’t belong here.” I mean, the South, I’m not proud of the Confederacy, but it’s part of its history. And to that extent, I think that’s why... I mean I like the tradition and the atmosphere and the welcoming of those communities, they were... with my family. We were strangers in this county, in Spartanburg and in Gastonia, and it became our home. And I think that it made a great deal of difference. And I suppose, I don’t know, I haven’t read as much about that, but we had many associations and many more friends who were not Jewish than the ones who were, probably because of our, because of the economics of the situation. I mean in a sense you have a sort of a class system, keeping up with the Joneses. Those people were well off and they were friends in the synagogue and were always very nice, but we weren’t... they would, you know, go to Florida, or they would travel, and do things that my family, my parents didn’t do, because we couldn’t afford it, because they weren’t interested in it. So, I think that’s the way itis. I mean, it’s the same way I feel about being here in some ways. Been here almost thirty years and it’s become home. And I think the people here share that same kind of feeling about their place and 64 their community, and Appalachia, it’s different than North Carolina, but it’s the same sort of environment.

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RG-50.549.05.0007

Did your work change a whole lot after the Civil Rights Act passed?

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RG-50.549.05.0007

In the Division? Well, we had more work in more areas. And after I worked in the Deep South, I became a Chief of what was called the Western Section. I started doing some cases in Texas and in Nevada. I litigated a case against the Electrical Workers Union in Las Vegas, believe it or not. They didn’t want to let blacks, who were electricians, into the union. Steel workers in Los Angeles. In my section in Texas, I didn’t have any... well, I did, spent the last two years or three years 1n a case against the Houston school system. A big desegregation case involving the Houston school system. We moved to Houston for several months, prepared this case that I tried. But it had been an ongoing case in Houston. And then I was also, I guess I became the Chief of what is known as the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division. Which is the section that has responsibility for the police brutality cases, these conspiracy cases like the civil rights workers. I didn’t, I was in charge of that and had a group of lawyers working with me and for me and the FBI. And the last thing I did was direct an investigation into the Kent State case. But that’s about the time I left, so I didn’t really get involved in very many more trials. The Houston case took a couple of years, off and on. I think I was actually the... was I the Chief of the Western Section? Maybe part of it was still going on when I was Chief of the Criminal Section. In all these, by that time the Division had gotten a lot bigger and it was sort of a re- organization and I had eight or ten lawyers working under me. And we were doing cases around the United States. After the Civil Rights Act and then the Voting Rights Act was 1965, then I was in what we called the Southeastern section, that was Alabama and Louisiana. And I did spend some time in Louisiana working on the, when they first brought in federal observers to watch elections, because under the Voting Rights Act people could register automatically by signing their name. In those southern states were covered by that. Then in 1964, the case that Jean was talking about, we had a case in Selma, Alabama, which was the first... I’m sorry it was 1965. It was the first case under the Voting Rights Act in Selma, where they were still using paper ballots. And it was the first election in which black officials, where blacks had been appointed to be election officials. And it was very interesting. Jim Clark, who was the Sheriff of Selma and had been such a repressive force in Selma, was running for re-election. There was a moderate named Wilson Baker.*! The election officials who were black had never done that and they were counting all these ballots and they wanted to be sure, they were trying to be careful. And it was taking them a very long time to finish counting the ballots at the end of the day. And all the boxes had come back in from the white precincts. And so the executive committee met, which was an all-white, democratic executive committee and they decided they would impound all of the... there must be something wrong, these people are taking too long. There must be some sort of fraud going on. So they went out and impounded all those ballots. And the next day decided that they would, the fair thing to do is not to count the ballots in those boxes at all, just leave them out as a group, which had the effect of not counting probably ninety-five percent of the black ballots that had been cast. So we filed an action under the Voting Rights Act to require them to count those ballots. We went to federal court and we got a judge named, whose *! On May 3, 1966, Jim Clark and Wilson Baker competed to become Sheriff of Dallas County, Alabama. Baker was the police chief of Selma at the time. This race was the first primary election held after the passage of the Voting Rights Act. 65 name was Thomas”, who had refused to desegregate the Mobile County, Louisiana schools. Each year he’d do just a little tiny bit and we’d, the government would appeal. The next year the Court of Appeals would tell him to do something more and he would only do a little tiny bit. So, he effectively kept them from being desegregated. But when we put this case on and I tried this case and John, for a change, John told me the day before the trial, he said, “Why don’t you try this case, John?” We had been putting it together. He was my assistant, if you will. (Laughing. ) The objections, some objections, I put the case on and he did the opening and he also did the closing. He did a very nice job. And Judge Thomas said that, he required them to count them. And he said, “You should not deprive a voter of his right to vote based on what might be a technical mistake by an election official. And we showed that all the ballots were in the boxes. There was no fraud. The number of people who signed in to vote equaled the number of ballots. There might have been one or two slight differences, but basically we proved that all the ballots were there and what they were doing was perfectly good. There was no reason not to count them. So he ordered them to be counted and the result was that Jim Clark was out. We didn’t file the action to get Jim Clark declared ineligible or anything. We filed the suit under the Voting Rights Act, in order to have those votes counted as they ought to be counted, so that their right to vote was protected and their vote would be counted. But it was the end of Jim Clark as an elected official in the county. So, I was always very pleased to have participated in that case.

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RG-50.549.05.0007

What year was that?

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RG-50.549.05.0007

That was 1960, probably 1966. I'd say ‘65, I think the decision was in ‘66. Because the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, which really changed everything. I mean, across the South there were black sheriffs, in these counties that had more blacks than whites or heavy black counties. I think it was really probably the most important legislation in many ways passed anywhere. Because it really gave blacks the right to vote and changed the political process.

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RG-50.549.05.0007

Did you have anything to do with writing that legislation, the Voting Rights Act?

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RG-50.549.05.0007

I, I mean it wasn’t me personally, the Division, the lawyers in the Division, John and our appellate section, Burke Marshall, who was at that time not the Assistant Attorney General, but he was still very... became a professor at Yale. But the lawyers in the Division and in the hierarchy of the Department of Justice... some of that language, some of that Act was based on the court cases that we had bought. It said if a certain percentage of voters had not voted and if they used a test or device, like a literacy test, if these various criteria were met then it triggered the application of the Voting Rights Act. And if that was triggered, the registration process then involved, meant that they had to allow everyone to register by a very simple procedure. And if they weren’t going to do that at the courthouse, they could do it where the federal observers were. Or that they did it in the courthouse with federal observers looking on. It is a forced process that covered virtually the entire South. There was a challenge to the legality of that, that went to the United States Supreme Court, which was upheld. I think United States versus Louisiana. Well no, it wasn’t Louisiana. Then there was also, I was involved with the poll tax. The Southern states used poll taxes to prevent blacks from voting for many years. And so I filed an action in Mississippi and then I helped the Assistant Attorney General and put together the case against poll tax in Alabama. Which was a fair amount of my time. In 1960... the poll tax * According to John Doar, the judge’s name was Frank Johnson. 66 was probably the Voting Rights Act of ‘67, after Selma. In ‘68, I think we did that case, in Montgomery.

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RG-50.549.05.0007

I wanted to ask you about the Civil Rights Movement in general and your perceptions of its various goals and conflicts within the movement. You mentioned SNCC being, and I thought maybe I should mention for the tape that, that’s the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. Right? I was thinking about that and the ideal of non-violence that King and people who worked in that spirit, people who worked with SNCC and people who worked in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, versus Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, a little later on. How did you perceive that? I mean you were talking a little bit earlier about how you don’t, about non-violence and how you don’t feel that if you were in a situation like that you would just turn the other cheek and let somebody gun down you or somebody dear to you. Whereas King was very committed to non-violence and some of his followers were as well. What were your perceptions of that and of Malcolm X’s agenda?

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RG-50.549.05.0007

Well, I think that, I mean I might tolerate somebody throwing an egg in my face, especially when you are together with other people, you know. I have a great respect for the non-violent movement and Gandhi and his teachings. I think Martin Luther King and his idea about using non-violence as the way to demonstrate love for your fellow man and woman, and that you have to, that that was the way that would be most effective. And that armed, an armed response wasn’t going to work. It wasn’t going to work anyway because they didn’t have... a number of people were going to be killed. People were killed along the way. So, I mean, I’m convinced really that you do, that the courts are only an adjunct to any movement of that sort. I mean the courts can help to insure that the rights of individuals and groups are protected within a very, within a particular sphere or frame of reference. But as I said, the Voting Rights Act, I don’t think, would have been passed, certainly it wouldn’t have been passed as quickly, and I’m not sure it would have been passed at all, without the Selma march and the demonstrations and, I guess, Martin Luther King’s conviction that gradually the country would recognize how wrong segregation was and that you were simply trying to provide to all citizens of this country the rights to which they were secure. I’m not, as far as Malcolm X and the Black Power Movement, I’m not a, I don’t, I haven’t studied all of black history anymore than many other subjects I haven’t studied. I think that there is an awful... that it’s important for these, for African- Americans to recognize their history and their culture. There’s a lot to be gained from that, just as itis in Appalachia. People ought to be, can be proud of their culture. And that you can do that in this country, within the confines of the law and that there is room for us to have an integrated social system, where groups that are Native Americans, and African-Americans, and the various cultural, ethnic citizens who are coming to this country can still retain and recognize some of their own history and preserve it. And I think that’s really what he was, in part, talking about. I suppose, whether Malcolm X would like to have separated this country into one that was white and black or not. I’m not that familiar with really everything that he wrote. But that’s the way I feel about that. I don’t know that 1t means how I would react in a particular situation. We don’t have any guns in our home, whereas... or in our cars. (Laughing.) And I don’t intend to carry any weapons or have them. And many, and in this area and the South, you know, you have a lot of hunters, which Iam not. And you have a lot of people who feel strongly about their right to bear arms 1n this area here, where we live. And they can do that. I would be happy for us to get rid of all the weapons in this country, hand guns. I don’t need them. But that doesn’t 67 mean that I, to me that if push came to shove, I might not feel it was the right thing to do. Or that I would not be a conscientious objector if I were called back into the military. I think that’s where those lines are. I don’t think it’s an absolute line. For me, even though I would think, I do believe that non-violence has its place and that... if we can achieve the ends that we seek. By mass marches, whether it’s for Vietnam or to break down barriers of segregation, then that’s what should be done.

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RG-50.549.05.0007

What did your parents think of your civil rights work?

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RG-50.549.05.0007

They, I think, well, I think they were quite proud of what I was doing. I think they were quite proud of what I was doing. I don’t know that my mom, I mean my father and mother more, I don’t know that my father was totally convinced. I think he was in some ways, he was a little bit of an elitist intellectually. As I said earlier, he was not, he was a very private person. He really had a difficult time making conversations with people who he didn’t feel had a great deal of education or that were on his level intellectually. And in that way he was a little bit of a snob, I think. And so I don’t know that he was in total agreement with the use of the nation’s resources to desegregate. I don’t know that he was, I think my Dad wasn’t a racist. I don’t think in that way, I don’t know that we... End of Tape 5, Side B 68 Tape 6, Side A

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RG-50.549.05.0007

This is tape number six, side A of an interview with John Rosenberg. So he wasn’t sympathetic to demonstrations?

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RG-50.549.05.0007

Well, I mean I think it’s complicated and hard to really articulate what my dad’s feelings were. I think they were very proud of the fact, after the fact. I don’t think they were necessarily understanding about why I went to law school, when they thought I had already found a career. And had a good job. Within the Jewish community for example, try to explain to somebody why a man who is, let’s see how old was I? In ‘59 I was twenty-eight. Why anybody would want to go back to school. I think they had the same reaction when my sister went back to school. You can’t tell them anymore that he’s a successful salesperson going, selling chemicals. You always want to tell somebody your kids are doing something that’s fine and they’re well and they’re taking care of themselves, whether it’s a chemical salesman, or doing great things, making a lot of money, which is what the Jewish community wants to hear, that people are making a lot of money, which is their symbol of success. Maybe my mother more than my father. So when I went to law school. But they were very, I think they were very impressed by and large with the lawyers and associates that I met in the Civil Rights Division. And certainly having the Division and John and the people who... I mean we didn’t have the Kennedys come to our wedding, but everybody, a lot of the people from the Justice Department and the Civil Rights Division and our associates. So, I think they were really, as a general matter, very pleased with what I was doing as a lawyer and the work I did there. And the work I did here. I think they would never, there was always the question of why I did I just not go into a law firm and make a whole lot of money? (Laughing.) Why spend your time doing this public service work? Which people still don’t understand, not only about me, but about a lot of other people who work here and work in other programs. The work that many people 1n Social Services do and maybe that people do as writers or artists, where they’re trying to live out their life in a way they are comfortable with and like, which may not be financially very rewarding. But that that’s not the test for them and probably it ought not to be the test in my mind. So, it’s hard... so I think they were very, you know, when I received some awards later on for my work here and that sort of thing, parents are always going to be happy with something like that. But I think my dad was kind of a complicated man when it came to the racial thing, because he worked on a daily basis in his factory and I think saw... was not as ready to believe that if you give everybody a chance, that poverty is like a vicious circle. If you live in a very poor environment you are going to have illiteracy, you’re going to have drugs, you’re going to have alcohol abuse and substance abuse. And if you don’t look, if you aren’t willing to deal with the causes, and you aren’t willing to try to deal with the elimination of poverty at that level, it’s easy to say, “These folks are always... they’re drinking, they could be... they drop out of school, and it’s all their fault.”” And the next thing you know... and they’re certainly true of... there are more poor white people in this country than there are blacks. But if you look at it as a Southern phenomenon or where you lived... I think that someone like my father, who had a history in the Jewish community, where we’re too often too quick to say, “We were able to take care of ourselves despite all this repression. We came out of Germany, with only the clothes on our backs and nothing in our pocket and look what we did. Why can’t they do the same thing? The same thing?” People say, “Look at Asians, Japanese have come to this country and whose kids achieve, who are motivated to achieve.’ 69

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RG-50.549.05.0007

What’s your response to that kind of remark?

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RG-50.549.05.0007

Well, I mean, I think it’s the same sort of driving force, in a way, that says they are, historically have valued education, and have seen that if you get an education, that you are motivated to succeed and you can be someone. And I think African-Americans see that, too. But I think, I think, as I say, part of it 1s a vicious circle, part of it is, that’s what Jean does, sometimes it’s one at a time, that people who are born into these poor economic circumstances, we have a whole generation, we have several generations of welfare in Eastern Kentucky and in the South. And it’s hard to break that cycle in a variety of situations, people, and we... I don’t know that welfare reform isn’t all bad. It can be done, in my mind, and I think Jean’s, in a more humane way. But people have to have some support systems, and if you come out from, if you have a series of generations where education isn’t valued, for example in Eastern Kentucky you could get a very good job mining coal, you didn’t need an education for years and years and generations, all you had to do... I mean, it was hard work, dangerous work in some ways. But it was the kind of work that people knew. It was all manual labor. As that ends, people don’t have those jobs, and they don’t have the options, they find themselves in those situations where there is disparity, they have to leave. And I think the black, in the South, you have the history of segregation for a couple of hundred years, where you don’t have equal opportunity. Where you have terrible schools, and where you’re expected to be a sharecropper, really don’t have an equal opportunity. Then you can’t have, those children can’t have the expectations of being successful. Now people debate that nationally. Black leaders debate that, you hear it all the time. “We can be successful. We should not have Affirmative Action.” I think Affirmative Action has been a very successful tool. But the pendulum has swung. Now you find Justice Thomas”, and you find black leaders who say, “Affirmative Action is unfair. It’s unfair to whites. It’s unfair in that it gives, we don’t need an unfair advantage,” or to label it as an unfair advantage. To some extent it’s subjective. Those are my own feelings about... I think you do have to make additional opportunities available to people who have been historically discriminated against. We have had it and to try to isolate that advantage to those very few situations where you can actually prove that this company discriminated in this bad way and so they’re supposed to overcome that. But I don’t, and I don’t think my dad, anymore than anybody else, was... I certainly wish he had been more broadminded about that, I’m just saying he’s not perfect, none of us are perfect and he had his imperfections and that was one of them. As far as philosophically, he didn’t go around making speeches about it. But I think he was still proud of what I was doing. I think it was easy, he would be the first, among others, he would say, “Well they should be, certainly not prevent people,” think it was wrong to try to enforce the right to vote or even the right to go to public facilities or to have the same legal rights as everyone else.

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RG-50.549.05.0007

Do you think that your awareness of and to some extent your direct experience of persecution of the Jews during World War II, affected your, influenced your interest in working for civil rights for blacks?

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RG-50.549.05.0007

Oh, I’m sure it did. I’m sure that my history and the persecution that Jews had, what we went through as a family and as Jews had a lot to do with my wanting to participate in the Civil Rights Movement. 3 Clarence Thomas, 1948--. US Supreme Court Justice 1991--. 70

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RG-50.549.05.0007

You talked...

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(Talkover.) It’s the same thing. I mean it is essentially the same thing. In a different way. I mean it’s the mistreatment of blacks, maybe it isn’t genocide, but there were certainly the lynching periods when many blacks were killed. Not in the scale that we’re used to here, that was true in the Holocaust. But I think it’s the same thing that motivates, helped to motivate me to work there. And work in legal services, where you’re essentially trying to do something similar to that on an individual basis. To provide those opportunities so that people are at least even in the courts and that they can find lawyers to advocate their positions, which they, in the courts, which they otherwise wouldn’t be able to do. And I’ve said many times, I think it’s the mark of, a good mark, one of the things that this country ought to be proud of, 1s the fact that it does fund programs like ours, so that people, and provide lawyers to low-income people. And even makes it possible to sue the government if necessary, that biting the hand that feeds you, if you have to. You don’t have to do that as much as we did. But we don’t get the funds that we ought to have, that’s regrettable. Just as regrettable as it was that it took so long to get to the days of the civil rights, it took... Brown against the Board of Education is 1954 and we aren’t fully at the end of it yet, with regard to higher education. It takes thirty and forty years. Court processes are slow. But I think it all has to do with human rights, treating people, giving everyone the same opportunity, whether they are young or old, or white or black, or... whoever.

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Would you tell how you met Jean?

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My wife, Jean?

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Get a chance to fill in the record. Your wife, Jean.

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I met Jean in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. She was, I was the Deputy of the Southeastern Section, which handled Alabama, Mississippi. No Alabama and not Mississippi, then. My section chief was Frank Dunbaugh™ and Jean came to the section as a research analyst, which she mentioned to you. They are now called paralegals. We call them also administrative representatives here. They do a little different work in my organization. But John Doar was invited to speak at Earlham College** in Jean’s senior year, or maybe her junior year. Her roommate, Dorothy, now Landsberg, was then named Shelton, was in charge of the speaking program, and for some reason she had heard about John Doar’s work and asked him to come to Earlham to speak. And he came there and then he, I believe first hired Dorothy for the summer to work for him and he also met Jean. Or she came to, or she came to Washington. I don’t know whether he hired her then. They were about, they were the two, I think, the first research analysts. Dorothy later on after I... and so, Jean came to this section and we began working together. Of course we were sort of... I was second in charge of the section and she was working on cases, and so I think we once... a group of us went on a skiing trip and that was the first time we had any opportunity to be together socially. ‘Cause we were still I guess drawing some lines when we were at work. She was just a new employee and working under, not directly under me, but with some other lawyers in preparing cases. What they would do is “4 Frank M. Dunbaugh served in the Civil Rights Division from 1958-1978. * Earlham College is in Richmond, Indiana. 71 analyze the documents, like the voting records we brought back. We similarly started doing the same thing with schools. Normally in a school desegregation case, someone like Jean might go into the Superintendent’s office under a court order or voluntarily and start analyzing where the white students and the black students in the county lived and why they were not being assigned... say, it was pretty apparent in the segregated school systems that you’d have, especially where there was bussing, that black children would need to pass a white school to be assigned to their black school. And to put those patterns together and to analyze how the school system assigned students deliberately, so that white students would be together and black students would continue to be together. Or route buses in a way that made sure that schools remained segregated. So they were really analyzing those records, which they would then present to the lawyers. And the same thing in employment cases, whether, you know, in a large factory, where you looked at the number of applicants for jobs and determined that a black was passed over, even though, let’s say that maybe he had made an application to get to a particular job and the company said, “Well you weren’t qualified,” in another area. By looking at several of those situations you could look, you’d only know from the records whether the person who was actually put in had the qualifications or not, or whether they passed over someone who was black, or they didn’t, the black who had applied was obviously qualified, or less qualified than the person they hired. That kind of analysis, which was then given to the lawyers. So, that’s what Jean was hired to do. And then we, later on when we were, she had worked there about a year... well, let’s see. It might not have even been a year. When we went to Alabama on this voting rights case, the Jim Clark case, Jean was there with me. She was involved in some records analysis. And I almost, we were not yet married, but I almost had to put her on the stand, but I didn’t. And there were a couple of other situations where she ended up in a place where, in a case that I was working on, where we began to suspect that John Doar was deliberately sending her to cases that I was working on, since we had started dating or people knew that we had sort of started dating. So, after we worked on this case involving Jim Clark, we went over to, it was sort of a night and day affair. She was telling you that we had this unfortunate situation where Lois Baker, who was our secretary. We hired the first probably, black secretary. We had an office in Selma, Alabama. There was a lawyer from the Civil Rights Division, named Chad Quaintance, who was the first lawyer that we had in a field office. He and his family moved to Selma and were there. And Chad hired Lois Baker as a secretary and she was an African- American. She was the one who had these epileptic seizures. She was just very young. I think she was only about nineteen. I went back to Selma for the thirtieth anniversary of the Selma, of the Voting Rights Act in 1995. They had a big get-together. And it happened that I was going to Birmingham for a legal services meeting and one of the lawyers who works in my program, Larry York, and I went over to Selma for a couple of days. There was a... they have a small voting rights museum there. There were some people around who we visited and I visited Lois, who had since gotten married and had two, several children. And we were thinking back... She’s the head of the computer section at Montgomery Air Force Base or something at this point in time. But after that Jean and I went over to Montgomery and helped work on another, on a school case for several days. It was the statewide school desegregation case, Lee Against Macon County*®. They needed some help. They were just going to trial and they needed some help in getting the thing going. And Brian, my roommate, I was living at the time with a lawyer named Brian Landsberg, who then subsequently married Jean’s roommate, Dorothy Landsberg, who *© On August 13, 1963, federal judge Frank M. Johnson ordered Macon County and all of Alabama to integrate its schools, after six months of deliberation on the Lee v. Macon County case. 72 was the one that John had invited to come out. And Brian was my roommate. We lived together in a small house in Washington that we had bought, that we had rented from a former lawyer in the Division. Anyway after that was over, Jean went back to Philadelphia. You asked me how I met her. That’s how I met her, after the skiing trip we started dating. And then after working together so much, I think we just decided, I just asked her to see if she didn’t think we ought to get married.

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Now will you tell the story of how you did that? You mentioned it last night, but we didn’t get it on tape.

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Well, I was with, actually John Doar, I think partially to see that I got home. But to assign me, Jean went back to Philadelphia after the Montgomery trip. And John asked me to go to Charlotte. My classmate from law school, Jultus Chambers, who as I mentioned was my African-American classmate, had gone, was practicing in Charlotte, had become a very well known lawyer, who was eventually, in later years argued the Charlotte desegregation case in the Supreme Court. But he had started a law firm and was involved in a lot of civil rights activities, and there had been an attempt to bomb his house. I think the mail... he hadn’t gotten hurt, it didn’t do a lot of damage. But the mailbox, there had been some exterior damage. And we had started an FBI investigation and it looked like it was fairly, clearly to do with the Klan. And so John asked me to go up there and look into that and maybe talk with the U.S. Attorney’s office. And my friend, Nick Flannery, who had done the Carroll County case with me, a wonderful lawyer, who, when he left the Division went to work for, in Boston with the Center for Law and Education, which was the legal services support center for education cases. He was the chief trial lawyer in the Boston school desegregation case, if you... then. But Nick went with me to Charlotte and we started doing some investigation. And we went out to eat, we were in line going out to eat and I said to Nick, I asked him to hold my place in line, that I would be back in a few minutes and I wanted to make a phone call. And I called Jean at her house. I don’t know whether I thought well maybe she would come down. It was just, my family... see Charlotte is only twenty miles from Gastonia. In fact I don’t think, I was staying with Nick in Charlotte and I had not, I’m not sure I had even been home yet. And I don’t know why, whether John sent me there so I’d have a chance to see my folks. I think he thought, literally being from North Carolina and he knew I knew Julius, that I would have some interest in this case, being from home. So, I called her on the phone and said, “Will you marry me?” or, “Don’t you think we should get married, since we’ve been together all this time and seem to get along pretty well?” We'd actually had been, I mean we had been dating pretty steadily by that time. Even had taken a trip or two with Dorothy and Brian. But we had not really talked about taking the plunge, I think. Jean would, reminds me that I told her, when I first started going out with her, that when we started going out, that I really would not consider marrying someone who was not Jewish. That I had announced that early on in our dating. And I must have let that one go by the board.

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You don’t remember saying that?

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Oh, I don’t know whether, I’m sure I did. I’m sure I did. I’m sure it came up early. Or once we started seeing each other and it became a consideration, I’m sure my influence and my history was still pretty strong. And I did not think I would ever marry somebody who was not Jewish. But I did. 73

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Was that premeditated, that phone call? It sounds like it was just all of sudden you’re waiting in line for food and you just felt like, I gotta go. I gotta go propose marriage. (Laughing.)

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I think it was clear, I think I put Jean on the plane and I suppose knew that I was pretty much in love with her and that we ought to do that. Why I did it at that particular moment, who knows’? Maybe it was the first free moment. We were working on this Klan case and I just had a desire to do it. And I knew we would go back to work on the Klan case, probably, and that there would be an opportunity for her to come down. That I would be at home. And then she said, her dad suggested it. I think I got on the phone with them. I don’t know whether I suggested they come down with Jean or her father was never one to sit around and wait. So, then I was able to tell Nick when I got back in line, ““There’s a wedding in the offing.” We were engaged for, I think from November, maybe I got home, whether that was the engagement call. We got married in February 1967. This was probably like October, November of 1966.

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And when did you meet her?

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Probably, let’s see the Selma case was earlier in ‘66, she came to work in ‘65. So, she came to work right, probably right about the time of the Voting Rights Act. She graduated from Earlham in ‘65. Because we just got a postcard, she will be having her thirty-fifth reunion next year. Just sent an e-mail out to Dorothy Landsberg. They got married, we were the first of about four or five, actually. She was living, at the time Jean was living in an apartment with Dorothy and another woman named Mary Lee, then Campbell. And all three of them married Civil Rights Division lawyers within a year of each other. And Mary Lee has spent most of her life working for the Children’s Defense Fund. She’s very up in the hierarchy with Marian Edelman*’. She does a lot of foster care issues, a lot of lobbying. She’s a terrific person. And then Dorothy went back to law school. When they, Brian became the Chief of the Appeals Section of the Civil Rights Division, which he held for a number of years. He worked in our Alabama Section, under me, we were living together, but he was in my section for a long, and he then became a section chief, I think. And became Chief of the Appeals Section and stayed there until, probably ten years ago, when he joined the faculty at McGeorge Law School in California.*® And then Dorothy went back to law school and she’s a lawyer with a very large, not a very large, but with a fairly prominent law firm in Sacramento. They live in Sacramento. And she’s been recently for the last year been doing a big case with John Doar in his private law firm practice. So most of these connections have sort of stayed together. It’s a little bit like the Civil Rights Division, fairly small family. The Assistant Attorney General who replaced him, Steve Pollak, was a... Jean and I... baby, they had three kids and they never had taken a vacation since he came out of the Navy. They were all small. So, one of our first volunteer actions was to move in and they took a two-week vacation, and we moved in with their kids and did child care for a while. All of them are now married or getting married or having children and it was quite an experience for us. I think even one of the gerbils died during our sitting. So, that’s how that happened. End of Tape 6, Side A *” Marian Wright Edelman, 1939--. Founder and President of the Children’s Defense Fund. First African-American woman admitted to Mississippi state bar. *8 University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law, Sacramento, CA. 74 Tape 6, Side B

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This is tape number six, side B. You were just talking about proposing to Jean and the immediate aftermath of that. Had Jean met your parents by then, by the time that you proposed to her?

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I think she’d been there once, I’d have to ask her. But I think she had been down once and that was probably a clue to them, because I didn’t bring women by. I’m pretty certain that she had been to the house once before. So, they knew of her and they knew... I’m not sure how I managed to do that. Whether it was on a vacation or whether we had been working on a case. I just don’t remember, but I think they knew that we were pretty serious.

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And that first meeting between her parents and your parents and you... would you like to describe that scene?

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Well as Jean told you, she was there without me with the both of them facing each other for a little while, so I guess they were a little bit new to each other. But her father 1s a pretty extroverted person, who has a lot of interests and was then much younger, quite young. Was very interested in spiritual things and I think my dad was able to talk to him. And they got along very well. And Jean’s mother and my mother hit it off really well. I think Jean’s mother had been a secretary and was always doing transcription work of one sort or another. And in fact, in the last fifteen years or so she would not, well after we were married, Jean’s mother wouldn’t take a full time job, she worked for Manpower®’, so they could come down and see Michael or be with the grandson and then the grandchildren. We were both, in the sense that her father’s background was German and was the son of a tailor immigrant family. His mother was very strong. He grew up in New York City at a time when much of downtown New York was still farm, farming country. There are some old letters in her family that I was reading when I was home, where they were describing the winter and it was cold and they’d have to go outside to the outhouse to relieve themselves. And they were literally living in a farming area where the United Nations Building is now. But the point was that they were sort of both from old European generation backgrounds, where the fathers were working and more sort of the dominant, and they were making the money and the mothers were at home, and the household was sort of run the way the fathers said it was run. And in that way, I think, there was some commonality, even if the religions weren’t the same and the families got off to a pretty good start. They didn’t stay very long on that occasion and I don’t remember, I mean they saw, saw each other periodically and from time to time. Jean’s parents used to, as she said, came to visit us alot more. They came down here a lot. They really took a major interest in their grandchildren. My parents had moved to Florida and did not really come up, they made a trip up after we moved here from North Carolina, when they were still living in Gastonia. As I said my father, ‘65, let’s say in 1966... Let’s see, we got married in ‘67. He retired about that time and they moved to Florida shortly thereafter. So that we would go see them usually at Christmas. But they didn’t make many trips up. Right after we moved to Prestonsburg they made a, they drove over, got as far as Pikeville and the four-lane was just being developed, was being blasted open between Pikeville and Prestonsburg. So they got within thirty miles of home and then had to take a thirty mile detour around the back hollers from Wheelwright and I don’t think, I think * Manpower is a national employment agency for temps. 75 that sort of, was enough for them. Although they moved to Florida, they never really made another big driving excursion up this way. So I don’t know that I have many more, it’s one of those things I don’t have a lot of... Jean probably recalls better than I do. We went back for... after we got married and worked in the Civil Rights Division, when Jean then, when Michael was born in 1970 in April, we had decided then to leave the Division. That was when the Nixon Administration had come in, and even though I was Chief of the Criminal Section, they were not, pretty much still let me have a free hand. The Houston school case was one of the last cases that they filed in which the government, which I had written the pleadings in, in which we asked for bussing as a relief. And they were generally to eliminate segregation, to start bussing black kids across to white schools and whites to black schools. We didn’t get all of that in the relief. We did pair up some schools and we made some other major improvements. But they were, in my view, certainly, and others, were retreating on school desegregation. And it wasn’t really... the climate was not what it had been and I, we decided then, I think, that we had been there long enough. Besides I had been there, was in a very senior position and at that point you’re starting to almost price yourself out of the market if you want to make a career change. You might stay with the government and decide to go, to keep, to go up another notch or two or maybe make more and more money. Or if you’re going to a law firm, in order to get a reasonable salary, too, it was at the point where it was a good time for me to do that. So we, and Michael had just been born, it was a nice time to take off for the summer. And we decided then to, we would go on a large camping trip. We got our little car and the baby carriage, and folded it. We bought a Peugeot for eight hundred dollars that looked like it had a lot of miles left on it. And we headed North and we went North along the American and Canadian coast. We went to the Canadian — American National Parks, Fundy and all the way along, Cape Breton, out to Cape Breton and Prince Edward Island. Came back to Quebec and basically got away from it all. I think I had one call from a firm and decided to leave it, not to bother with it. And we weren’t really sure where, we knew we wanted to do something useful, where I felt I was using my legal talents to somebody’s benefit. And I had talked to some firms and that didn’t really excite me at the time, but I think I was just more, we were really more into making the decision to leave, which was a big thing, because we didn’t have a job. But we wanted to get away for a while and we had some money saved up, so we, while I was on that trip one of the... when we came back... what was it? --Someone left a message for us. One of my former colleagues from the Division, Terry Lenzner was the head of legal services for the Office of Economic Opportunity. And he was the one who suggested while we were on this camping trip that we might want to drive through Charleston, West, to come through West Virginia and to Kentucky. This is by way of answering you about my parents, because they had moved to Florida. And we were sort of on our way to be at the Jewish, to spend the Jewish holidays with my parents in Florida, which is about this time of year, in September. So we were off, I think we returned from, we were, went over to Cape Breton and we went back to Quebec. And it was really cold and we bought a tent heater. And then we went from there down to Boston and all of a sudden it was ninety-six and we were staying with former colleagues of the Civil Rights Division, who were in graduate school at Harvard, I think. And they had this small apartment without an air conditioner. We were burning up. Well anyway, we started back down and Terry Lenzner got in touch with us and we went through Charleston. And the program in Kentucky was then associated with this group in West Virginia, called Appalachian Research and Defense Fund, which had been founded by three lawyers, four lawyers, who wanted to start a public interest law firm. And they had begun some environmental work, but were having a tough time economically. And they had gotten in 76 touch with Terry Lenzner at OEO and he wanted to, was willing to do some, to fund an organization to do, under the auspices of legal services, to look at some of the symptomatic issues around poverty in the Central Appalachian area. Out-of-state mineral interests, black lung disease, environmental damages related to coal mining, deep mining and surface mining. And Paul Kaufmann, who was one of the four, there, of those lawyers—there were four attorneys, Kaufmann was a former gubernatorial candidate and was real active in Democratic politics, had been a private attorney. And John Boettner, fellow named Ratliff? and a woman named Naomi Cohen. And then there was a small group here in Eastern Kentucky of lawyers, who had worked as a group called Mountain People’s Rights. And there was a fellow named Howard Thorkelson, who was from Pennsylvania. And he had gotten a couple of other lawyers to come down here, although they were not yet licensed and they were having financial difficulties. So the two of them were sort of interested in working together and getting this federal money through the West Virginia organization. West Virginia then had a Republican governor, Arch Moore?’. And he was hostile to legal services, as was the Republican governor in Kentucky, Louis Nunn°”. So there was a, the West Virginia Technical Institute, was an educational institution, so Terry concocted a scheme whereby he would fund West Virginia Tech, because educational grants were not subject to gubernatorial veto as the other OEO grants were and then they would in turn fund Appalred>’. But anyway, I guess I’m getting a little ahead of myself. I was just, we were on this camping trip and so we came to Charleston and talked to the people there. And Paul said, “Why don’t you go down to visit with the Kentucky people, because Howard Thorkelson is going to leave and they need someone to replace him and we’re going to be funding them. If you’re interested we would seriously consider asking you to take over this group in Kentucky.” So, we came down here and came here to Prestonsburg on an August or a September evening and pitched out tent out there at Jenny Wiley**. Back then, oh actually the campground was at the other end up here near Auxier, at that entrance. Jean wanted me to go out and make sure there weren’t any bears or foxes, she had heard... there wasn’t anybody there but us. It was really after the camping season. But we met the people who were here and everybody seemed very friendly and we decided to go down and... I had already gotten some names of people, Harry Caudill, who you know wrote Night Comes to the Cumberlands, was on the Appalred Board in West Virginia>’. He was a friend of Paul Kaufmann’s, I think, and had been very, Kaufmann had put some people from Kentucky on his Board. He wanted this thing to be more of a regional program because there were so many of the issues were common to the Central Appalachia, and that the state lines really didn’t mean anything. The strip mining problems in Kentucky and West Virginia were the same. Unregulated strip mining, land owners having their land torn up without their consent, and that sort of thing. So, I went down and talked to Harry Caudill. There was a woman, here on Mud Creek they were doing a lot of, they were having a lot of problems around health issues. Hospitals weren’t taking people who couldn’t pay. Eula Hall was her name, she is a good friend, who still works at the, founded the Mud Creek Clinic here in our area®®. And I went over into Blackey, Kentucky. There was a fellow named Joe 50 Ray Ratliff >! Arch A. Moore, Jr., 1923--. Republican Governor of West Virginia 1969-1977 and 1985-1989. 2 Louis B. Nunn, 1924-2004. Republican Governor of Kentucky 1967-1971. °3 Appalachian Research and Defense Fund of Kentucky, Inc., headquartered in Prestonsburg. 4 Jenny Wiley State Resort, Prestonsburg, Kentucky. °° Harry M. Caudill, 1922-1990. Attorney, writer, professor. Published Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area in 1963. °° Eula Hall founded the Mud Creek Clinic in Grethel, Floyd County, Kentucky, in 1973. 77 Begley, who was running a country store, who was a very strong anti-strip mining advocate?’. And his wife, Gaynell Begley, she had gotten a Master’s in Education from the University of Chicago. She was a wonderful person. They... Joe was born here in Floyd County, and he was part Indian. We talked a lot about their history and the problems that he saw, poor people, and that people were getting run over by strip miners. Because Kentucky’s courts allowed mining without, strip mining without land owner approval. Because these out of state mineral owners had come here in the late 1890s and bought out all the minerals. We were talking about country people and being acceptance of outsiders. Have you ever read Harry Caudill’s book, Night Comes to the Cumberlands? Yeah. Well you know, he describes this situation so well where these land agents for the Northern philanthropists, like Rockefeller and large oil holding and mineral holding companies sent their agents down here. They would visit these farmers who lived in very remote hollers, where they were farming the mountain hills, really. And they would come in and tell their stories, and spend the night, talk about all the good things that were going on in the world and how nice this place was. And then they would present them, they would suggest to them that they ought to go ahead and sell over their mineral rights because it wasn’t really any benefit to them that they could see. No one knew what mining was. There wasn’t any huge deep mine there. The only use they made of their coal would be to cut into the hillside enough to get the coal to use for heating up their cabins and their homes, which is what most of them did. You could see the outcrop of the coal and they would run a scraper along the mountain and take out a little bit of coal. But no one... certainly they were aware as they were in other countries of deep mining methods. And I’m sure these agents didn’t talk a great deal about the possibility of having a huge, deep mine. This was in the 1890s, 1900s, was before the time of the railroads. And subsequently the railroads came in once all these minerals had been bought up, I mean they literally bought up all of the mineral ownership in Eastern Kentucky. And under the common law, the mineral estate 1s severed from the surface, so what you have left is the land on top. And they gave them, the deeds they signed as you know, were known as Broad Form Deeds because they were so broad in their language. They literally gave the owner of the minerals the right to take the minerals and all steps reasonably necessary to build roads and railroads and tram roads. Whatever might be necessary that’s incidental to taking out the coal. And then they would sign those minerals away. And the Kentucky courts held that those deeds were so broad that they gave the mineral owner the paramount right to the surface owner, as long as the mineral owner didn’t arbitrarily misuse that right. As long as he mined by reasonable methods and took the coal out by an acceptable method, the surface owner could not object to that. So those, Joe had one of those old deeds and told me what an awful instrument was, that even though at the time when they executed the deeds, no one could have envisioned these current methods of mining. Bulldozer, mechanic... and these huge, mechanized equipment that was in use seventy-five years later, that the courts would hold that to be allowable. In most contract law, the contract applies to those things that are within the reasonable contemplation of the parties, like deep mining. There was no doubt that if you were going to mine back then you would deep mine to get the coal out. We never challenged that. But the notion that they could use a method that was not at all in anybody’s contemplation was rejected in other states. Virtually. I mentioned West Virginia a while ago, I guess that wasn’t really right. The West Virginia courts had said you have to have landowner consent. You could get a surface mining permit and you could pay for that. And that was what Pennsylvania, and Ohio, and many of these others, Illinois, all the other states, courts had said, but not Kentucky. So Joe, we talked for >” Joe Begley, 1919-2000. Former proprietor of C.B. Caudill Store and History Center in Blackey, Kentucky. 78 a long time, was pointing out, also how poor people couldn’t get lawyers to challenge those deeds. And they couldn’t get lawyers to challenge a permit application if someone applied for a permit. But there were many situations where he thought it would be just a wonderful thing if we could have lawyers available to represent poor people. Because he saw these situations coming up so often. And so, we went on, we went on to Florida to visit my mom and dad and while on the way I think we kind of decided that this would be an interesting opportunity to try to come to Eastern Kentucky. It would be a worthwhile way to practice law and to provide that opportunity. There was a lot of interesting work to be done and useful and perhaps important work to do on behalf of low-income clients. And also to help start this legal services program, which was, had sort of a small beginning in mountain people’s rights. So then we came... decided to come, and we came. And moved to Prestonsburg. At first I looked around in Barbourville. We had a little tough time getting off the ground, because the, we had some disagreements about how to do this the best way. Some people, some of the mountain people’s rights members thought that it was more important to organize, to organize work with low- income groups like the Welfare Rights Group, rather than doing lawyering work. So it wasn’t quite as smooth sailing getting started as I had hoped. But after a little while we got on our way and Joe Begley’s son, J. T. Begley, who had just gotten out of the Marines and gone back to law school, turned out to be the first lawyer that I hired. And I hired a fellow named Mort Stamm, who is now in Australia, teaching. And we started off with, then a fellow named Paul Fauri, who is the Domestic Relations Commissioner in Franklin County, and we started in that little house I pointed out to you on the way up here. So, that’s how it began. And I was telling you, it wasn’t an easy beginning. I think the Bar Associations were very suspicious and I think they were threatened and thought really we were going to compete with lawyers for clients that would be able to pay. And then some, many lawyers, who were employed or retained by coal companies were not particularly sympathetic to the notion that lawyers might start to challenge some of these practices and give people representation in the courts. So we were not the most popular people in town when we started. I had difficulty renting an office. Finally found an office in the place where Jean and I ended up living for a long time on the other side of town, within a week of each other. And we got started. It was also a difficult time because at the national level, President Nixon had an Office of Economic Opportunity Director, who was opposed to legal services, bringing any of these sort of controversial cases against public officials, and challenging welfare rights practices and that sort of thing. And he, he decided to, he wanted to de-fund those programs. So I had only been here about a year when all of that began in 1973 and it looked like we might lose our money. We had half of the lawyers were on half salaries and the secretary, we had to hire, we got a lawyer in Washington, Steve Pollak, I mentioned to you, I used to work with, to represent us to threaten to sue OEO to get our funding. Some other programs similarly went through a period of that sort. Governor Reagan at that time, who would become President, had sort of declared war on legal services in California, who had represented migrant farm workers and had also won some fairly major welfare decisions with regard to hearing rights. And had showed that the California welfare system was violating the rights of welfare recipients and applicants. And he was angry and tried to start, established an inquiry, tribunal out in California, that sort of thing. Actually the tribunal came out with a report, this included some judges, that was very favorable to CRLA. Then when Reagan became President, he decided to do it all over again.

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What’s CRLA? 79

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California Rural Legal Assistance Program, a rural program much like we are here. But fortunately we managed to weather those storms, and we were able to, and in 19... we were able to reach an accommodation with legal services actually, in that 1973 when we were represented by Steve Pollak and we sort of severed our ties to West Virginia by establishing a separate corporation here. I mean it was... and they established, we added “of Kentucky” at the end of our name. We’re still very good friends with the people in West Virginia and some of the work we do is the same. But in West Virginia they ended up establishing a judicare program, which is a program where cases are sent to the private bar, instead of a staff attorney. And you have a small central office and the cases are... and then you contract with lawyers. It tends to be a lot more expensive. But Appalred’s office did maintain intact in West Virginia, just with a fewer number of lawyers. So then we started our own program here. And in 1974, one of the last things President Nixon did was to sign legal services Corporation Act, which he had vetoed once before. And then the corporations started getting larger amounts of money from year to year. And between 1975 and 1978 we expanded from the single office here in Prestonsburg to the ten offices that we opened and still have. And we went from probably three hundred thousand to about two million dollars a year in our budget. We had eleven offices by 1980, including we had a research office in Prestonsburg, I mean in Lexington, which we still have. So we undertook some very important day-to-day litigation. We represented a lot of people in everyday problems with family law, consumer rights, housing problems. And we did some of the larger challenges involved in, with regard to the coal mines. We found out that the agencies that governed all of these programs were not really very responsive at times. The state’s Mine Safety and Health Administration did not do a good job in protecting the rights of coal miners. So we saw that when miners were fired because they complained about unsafe conditions. I mean, that that’s what would happen to them if they complained. And so we were able to start representing them to get their jobs back and to get damages for them. And then in the environmental area we represented numbers of people who were challenging surface mining permits because they posed dangers to their homes and their property. And we gradually, as we kept after this Broad Form deed, we challenged it in the courts unsuccessfully. And we eventually wrote legislation that corrected the problem. We drafted a statute that said that if the kinds of mining methods were not described in the deed, that it would be assumed that it referred only to methods that were in existence at the time the deed was executed. And in Eastern Kentucky or in most places that would mean deep mining only. That was first introduced in 1994. There were some previous efforts, unsuccessful... there was an earlier statute that required surface owner consent and the courts struck that down. And then this legislation of ours was also struck down on a four — three opinion. The court said that the legislature could not tell the courts how to interpret deeds, which we thought was bad reasoning. But after that a legislator from Pike County, Clayton Little°®, introduced at the urging of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, that was then called the Kentucky Fair Tax Coalition... End of Tape 6, Side B °8.N. Clayton Little: Member of the Kentucky state house of representatives, 93" district. Elected 1973, 1975. 80 Tape 7, Side A

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This is tape number seven, side A of an interview with John Rosenberg.

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I was just saying that the constitutional amendment was passed in 1988, so it was introduced in nineteen, I guess in the 1988 legislative session. And it was passed by ninety-two percent of the voters. It was a great publicity campaign by KFTC, a lot of letters to the editor, it sort of put them on the map. We had started KFTC with a small group in Hazard, Kentucky. A group of citizens came together to talk about fair taxation of minerals, initially. Because the coal under the ground, not only did the land owner not have the opportunity to object to whether they could be surface mining or not, but they were paying virtually all the taxes on the property. They were not... and the Kentucky constitution said that all properties, cash... 1s taxed in fair cash value. But the minerals weren’t being taxed. So the group looked at that and decided that they would try to start an organization called the Kentucky Fair Tax Coalition. I’ve even been credited with giving, we were sitting around the room trying to decide what should this thing be called? People were throwing up names. (Laughing.) Somebody said, I think it was, whatever the various combinations people had been throwing out, was that I suggested it be called Kentuckians Fair Tax Coalition. But the other issue it took on was the Broad Form Deed. And the group started very small, it was just kind of a get together really. One of the members who, one of the folks who was there was a young man named Joe Zakos, who had come from Pennsylvania and was interested in working with local citizens groups. And he had come, was living in David, I think and had gotten involved in some issues over in Martin County. It didn’t have anything to do with the Broad Form Deed. It was really a proposal to move a low-income community out of a flood-prone area. And they were going to fill it in and put in new housing or industrial... the only thing was they forgot to discuss it with the people who were living there. And he organized an effort there to... which ultimately stopped that. They backed off on that project. But in the process began a group called the Martin County Concerned Citizens, who then were involved with a number of environmental and socially active, social... got involved in issues of social concern. We represented them one year in a case challenging the application of... Kentucky Power wanted to build another power generating plant. And the reason they wanted to build it was to sell more power to other companies, but it would have raised the rates of everyone, including the Martin County citizens, people who lived in that area. And we had a lawyer in legal services in Lexington, Tony Martin, who focused on energy work, and basically demonstrated that there was no need for the power plant, that all it was going to do was increase everybody’s power bill. They had plenty of generating power, they were just trying to expand themselves. And the stockholders might benefit, but the Martin County citizen group was the named party. And so that was just to say that, even though a group that was called Kentucky Fair Tax Coalition and decided later to rename itself Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, because local chapters were working on different issues of local concern. Didn’t necessarily involve minerals and that sort of thing. But they really put themselves on the map with the campaign to get the constitutional amendment passed. So that amendment was on the ballot in 1988, along with the lottery. And the lottery barely passed. It passed by, I think, fifty-one or - two percent of the vote. Ninety-two percent of the vote, people voted for the Broad Form Deed amendment, which showed people knew what they were doing. In fact, I remember when, early when we had been here not too many years, the Courier-Journal I think did an informal poll. And something like ninety-three percent of the people thought they shouldn’t allow anybody to 81 strip mine your land without your consent. But I was then, one of my, the coal industry decided they wanted to challenge the constitutionality of that constitutional amendment as violating the federal constitution. Because they claimed that mineral ownership rights had been established by these series of Kentucky cases in the Supreme Court over the years and that people when they bought mineral rights expected to be able to legally surface mine. And we argued... and I was representing an older couple in Johnson County, Garnet and Eugene Ward, who lived on a small farm... they really weren’t farming. It was in a holler that had not been mined. And there was a mining application by a company. And at the trial court, one of the attorneys who was here then was handling, handled that case, and it was on appeal and it came to me and I took the case over. And we ended up arguing the constitutionality of the amendment in the Supreme Court. And the Attorney General argued in our support and the court then agreed with our theory that they never had the right 1n the first place to grant the right to strip mine. So it took a lot of years, but finally the right was... you cannot today surface mine anybody’s land without their consent.

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When did that final decision come down?

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I think it was 1990. The Supreme Court decision was stated in 1990. Ward versus, Ward versus... I forgot the last name for the moment. I can talk about that case a long time, but that’s sort of the summary. Garnet, now both of the Wards... Eugene died while we were in the Supreme Court. And then Garnet died a couple of years back. She was a very feisty woman. She claimed... they never, no one else had ever paid any taxes on this property. And they didn’t know that anybody else had any claim to the minerals. She thought they owned the claim. When we were in circuit court we asserted that, and there was some basis for her claim, because when the minerals were sold, about 1910, really interesting, by... the local owner, the owner was in Johnson County and he sold the mineral rights to a company in New York, that wanted to develop these minerals. And he sold... and they promised to pay him with... they gave him shares of stock and said they would buy those shares back once their company was in operation. And a year went by and nothing happened, so he sued them to get his money. And actually in that suit someone, a deposition of him was taken. And when he sold that property he said, “I will give you the minerals and you may mine that property, but I want you to leave all the walnut, chestnut, and hemlock trees over ten inches,” which made it impossible to strip mine. And so we actually argued initially it was not a Broad Form Deed, that this deed specifically was limited to deep mining because it was impossible to strip mine, because he had said that. And on deposition, which was... the deposition from his testimony was still in the courthouse. And in the deposition he reasserted that, that he wanted those trees left alone. And that you could use the smaller timbers as people did in deep mines. Timbers under ten inches were used for shorings in the deep mine workings. So that made good sense. He was saying, “You can have the saplings, but I want those good trees left.” So our local judge agreed with that and said, “You can’t mine.” So they appealed to the Court of Appeals and they won. The Court of Appeals, the intermediate appellate court said, “Well that’s just what these deed provisions say, but the mineral owner still has the paramount right to mine under our decisions.” So then we took that case to the Supreme Court on discretionary review. We asked them to review that. They took the case and so the amendment was argued, we argued the amendment on that. So Garnet, they never, they did not... anyway, when these minerals were sold, he did some, there was very careful, plats were laid out and surveyed. And it was not, and when they filed this mining permit and claimed they owned the minerals where Garnet and Eugene lived, they didn’t 82 do that very well. Where they claimed their boundaries looked like went... she could make, we could make a colorable assertion that that didn’t coincide with those original plats. Because they didn’t prove that, clearly she should have had the right to those minerals, but we lost on that claim. It’s just an aside, but I think she probably didn’t own the minerals. It couldn’t clearly be shown that she owned the minerals. But we won the case, so that’s the law. It was a big, nice effort to have been involved in and I think one of the important achievements that we made along with many other cases I think the program’s been able to bring.

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When you first came to Prestonsburg, you and Jean, were you planning on really settling here, really staying for the long haul?

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I doubt it. I mean I think we probably thought we might be here two or three years. It was a real big transition for her, because she was, had never lived in a rural area or a town the size of Gastonia, which was 25,000 or 30,000. She was from Philadelphia and had lived in Washington. I mean she had been in Southern communities, but she wanted to... she said if... when I looked for a house, she wanted a sidewalk that she could roll the baby carriage on and be near a shopping area, not live out at David for example.

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Is that what happened?

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Yeah. Well, I found a house in town that was kind of in a residential area. It’s not where we live now. We moved after ten years, out a little ways, near a school where Michael was going to elementary school. The kids went to, both of them went to a day care center at David. In David, the development of the David community was another really major part of what we did in terms of economic development in a small community that we were able to purchase for a local community development group. Help the development in that town.

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Do you want to talk about David and your involvement there?

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David is about nine miles from Prestonsburg and in the 1930s, especially, it was a booming coal town. It was what they called a model community, sort of like Wheelwright, or many of these coal, you know most... Floyd county and this area had a number of coal camps. They were basically company towns, because a company owned the homes where the people lived and the company paid them with scrip. And they owed their soul to the company store, as it were. But some of the homes were quite nice. I mean, I think they were very nice communities and very close communities. There were some employers that were better than others. And there were the mine wars in Harlan County, all of the difficult history involving unionization. Where it was successful, and where it wasn’t. But David, the mine there was the Princess Coal Company. And David was mentioned, was named for a fellow named David Francis, who when I came here, lived in Huntington. He still, that family owned the minerals. The only swimming pool in this area, in this end of town was at David and people used to go out there to go swimming on the train. They had a little airport. They had a school. It was a very vibrant mining community and when the mine closed in the ‘40s, it kind of went downhill. And it was purchased by... the buildings, not the minerals, but the town of David, the ridge around it and the homes that were there were, was purchased by a small group of businessmen here in Prestonsburg. And people paid rent to them. And a group of Catholic priests from St. Vincent’s Mission came to David in 83 the late “60s and *70s and started teaching bible school and some literacy training. And apparently they were approached by the businessmen to see if the mission was interested in buying the town. I think they viewed themselves as absentee landlords and all they did was collect the rent. They saw the water system going downhill. They didn’t really, weren’t interested in developing the community. The homes were in pretty bad shape. They weren’t really slum lords, they just weren’t doing anything to keep it up. It was a private water system. So the Father, Matthew at the time, one day came to see me, and told us about the offer to buy the town. They weren’t interested in doing it, but they wondered whether we could, whether the community might be able to buy it in some way, if they, we could figure out how to, help them figure out how to do that. So, I asked a law student to do some research and we got a little help from the National Economic Development Law Center’. And we decided, we put together an economic development, a corporation, a Kentucky corporation. And we started having some community meetings in David. And there was a company... the town wasn’t working, but Island Creek Coal Company still had a store that they owned. The old company store. There was a fellow named Tiller®, who ran the store and who also, he read the Wall Street Journal. And he was a very smart guy. He was an interesting man. So, they elected him as Chair of this group. And he became the first Chair of our little community development corporation. We didn’t own anything yet, but they started planning. We started looking into the possibility of financing the purchasing of the town and how it might work. The problem was there was no water, the water system was unreliable. They had a pump that was literally held together by chicken wire. They were afraid to take the gamble unless they had water. So we were sort of diverted for a couple of years until we were able to figure out with our local area development district how to, ultimately we were able to get a grant, which helped one of the existing water districts bring water to a number of their new customers in the rural part. The Beaver-Elkhorn water district supplied water to a lot of the homes on Right and Left Beaver Creek. By getting them additional, those lines, they agreed they would run a line over to David, an extension. And we established a David Water District and went to the Public Service Commission to get approval to bring water to David through the water district, which would buy its water from this Beaver-Elkhorn Water District that agreed to extend its lines. And when we got that done, by that time Mr. Tiller had been transferred to somewhere, Western Kentucky. People were afraid the corporation was going to go in, go down, because he was really sort of a driving force. But there was an old coal miner, retired, who had black lung, named Ashland Howard, whose nickname was “Hawk”. And he had the energy and the spirit and the—even though he may not have had the formal education—to push this group along. And he took over, became the Chair of that group. And we then, once we got the water district in, we put together a financing package, where we had a first mortgage from the local bank here in Prestonsburg and a second mortgage from a group in Washington, called the Housing Assistance Council. And the idea was that if the corporation could buy the property, all of David, then the renters could buy their homes in turn and the local bank would make those mortgages. So the bank would turn its money over quickly and get its mortgage paid back as people bought their houses. And the Housing Assistance Council in Washington helped, encourages developments of this sort. They were, I think we paid them back twice as fast. So, we were able to purchase the town. We had another lawyer, by that time I had another lawyer named Kay Adrion, who works over in Virginia now as a private practitioner. And she helped sort of put the deal together. And then after the town... we did all, this was a >? National Economic Development and Law Center (NEDLC), Oakland, California. °° Claude Tiller 84 large amount of legal work. Public Service Commission, all this deed work. And we were also able to get the corporation to realize they needed to get some staff people. So we helped them to write a Vista grant to get a Vista out there. At the same time a young man named Danny Greene had come to David and started a, at home, he had taken in some foster care kids. He came down as a volunteer with the Mission. And he started this David school, which over the years has obtained some national recognition for helping high school dropouts. He realized there was no real alternative school here. Kids would drop out, that was the end of it. The schools really just wiped their hands of them. He bought the old store building. We bought most of the town, ridge to ridge. And he bought several others and was able to get some financing for the old store, which became the school. There’s now a brand new building, which 1s very beautiful, that has been built in the meantime, and the story of the school, I’ve been on their Board and we’ve done a lot of things together. But afterwards the corporation built and developed about twenty-five new homes, Farmer’s Home owned... put up new houses where the old ones were, had deteriorated in one of the hollers. It’s a very nice, attractive town now. It was sort of the Appalachian, we had this big battle over a strip mining permit at one point. There was a large block of coal left underground. I said strip mining. There were some strip mining attempts that we were able to fend off. But there was also a large amount of coal that had not been mined because they hit water in the mine. There was an attempt to re-open that, to start, to get a permit to mine that block of coal. And Danny and the community got very upset about that. And so we opposed that permit and there was a lot of community pressure, a lot of help. And thankfully that was, we were able to fend that off. But we’ve been very much, you’ve had deep mining and strip mining and coal truck traffic, all the problems that you see all over, in one little spot here in David. You have the craft co-operative as a little, as a new, which has become fairly successful. It’s anice community. There were actually, we had plans to develop other parts of David, to expand it, but basically the community sort of decided it didn’t want to get any bigger. It’s a very interesting place. And we learned a great deal and I think had a lot to be proud of in terms of what the community did and the role that we were able to play, because they could never afford it, that sort of legal work, help.

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Okay, we were just talking a little bit, off tape, about how many things we’d, I'd still like to cover about your time in Prestonsburg and working for, working with Appalred. And that we probably don’t have the time to get into it all today. So, I was thinking about, when we were just talking a little bit, off tape, about your time here in Prestonsburg, and maybe you can reflect on your work here and a little bit on just the, what you’ve, it turns out that you’ve devoted your life to. I mean you had the opportunity of becoming a chemical salesman and you decided that wasn’t what you wanted to do. And you’ve gone more and more in the direction of service. Any reflections or words on that?

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Well, I think what I’m doing now has been in many ways has been most fulfilling over the last thirty years. Working with the Civil Rights Division was a great opportunity to learn to practice law and to do something very worthwhile. The big difference is that in the Civil Rights Division, we didn’t live in those communities and that we came and went. Whereas, and I have great admiration for the people who stayed there and their courage and how difficult their lives were. The lives, the life we’ve had for the last thirty years in Prestonsburg has been here. And I wouldn’t at all compare myself to the African-Americans who lived in those communities and the life they had and how difficult that was, because we are white. And we live 1n an area where 85 there are very few African-Americans. And I think their life has been difficult at times although it’s gotten much better. I mean there is also a fair amount of blatant racism in this particular area, and some of it is direct racism. But over the years I’ve been able to recruit, at least the only practicing attorney in Eastern Kentucky right now, is the woman who has my office in Jackson". She’s been there a number of years. And we’ve tried unsuccessfully to recruit some others, because they don’t...

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You’re talking about African-Americans?

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Yeah, African-American lawyers, and paralegals. You have to have a support system as a minority person to live, I think, wherever you are. It’s difficult to be alone. And in Hazard we have a church to which Cynthia from Jackson belongs. And there are some black communities that are concentrated in our areas. So the few people who have looked, that have really taken a little look at it, I think were, very cautious about, or were not convinced they could feel comfortable living here. We do have a black secretary in Barbourville and one in Harlan and we have a paralegal in Richmond, Richmond having a fairly much larger African-American community. But the population is about ninety-eight percent white in our thirty-seven counties. But I think the point I wanted to make was that we do, legal services offices are in the communities where our clients are and so you are much more associated and you are a part of that community. I think we’re a lot closer to our clients and you get to know your clients. And you get to see the problems and live with the problems from day to day. Not to say that all of us are poor, but I think after your kids, especially when your children get into the schools, you begin to feel that you have much more of a stake in trying to develop, do something about that community. You find other parents who really want the best thing for their children, even though it may be what we’re doing in court is not always popular. Maybe our value systems are not on the same track as the other lawyers who for a large part are driven by the money they are going to make in private practice. They do some good things in private practice along the way, but generally in the social structure people are driven by money. So, I feel that the work we do, we represent about 7,000 clients a year and much of the work we do, whether for each of those clients, the case we help them on is the most important thing in the world, whether you’ ve got to talk about an abused spouse or someone who’s about to be evicted from an apartment or someone who we’re helping with social security benefits or something small, or whether we’re involved in some major issue involving the Broad Form Deed or safety discrimination, the cases that tend to get the headlines. Or working on black lung, working on trying to help make black lung regulations more responsive, little more liberal, where more than five percent of the claims are approved. Or something like David. Each of those are a real, I think, positive contribution to helping people lead better lives and making the society a more just one. So, I think it’s, you asked me a while ago did I think we were going to be here thirty years when I came and I said I thought we’d be here maybe two or three years. But I think the work has been so challenging and the opportunity to do this work has been a real privilege, that I always say we’re fortunate at least to be paid for doing something we want to do. And the government, state and federal governments are willing to provide funds to do it. I think the newer, our younger lawyers give up a great deal to work for us, because they are working at very low salaries and many of them have large loan re-payments. They start at 25,000 dollars a year and some of them have really huge debts of 80-90,000 dollars to their law schools. We have a small loan re-payment program 6! John is referring to Cynthia Elliott, who was the only practicing Black attorney in Eastern Kentucky. 86 now that helps them, up to 2,000 dollars a year. But they’re the ones in a way who are, I think, making a substantial sacrifice to work. I mean you’d hope that the government, we can do better than that. That eventually we could work out, and develop more programs that would encourage people to spend their lives in this sort of work. But I think it’s been so, in part satisfying and challenging and all those adjectives, that I’ve enjoyed it. I probably, there may have been times that Jean might have wondered whether we wouldn’t be better off going for a better educational system for our kids. Michael was academically very gifted and sort of ahead of the pack. And we had our difficult times, early times with... one of the teachers asked him to explain Hanukkah, the Jewish holiday one day, and when he, I think the, some kids teased him while he was doing that, made it a little difficult. Or when he was first learning to...

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Teased him in terms of...?

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Presenting this Jewish ceremony. I don’t remember all the details of it, but it hurt him because he was doing it at their request. And I think it was strange. It was a time when they were still, even still doing bible... End of Tape 7, Side A 87 Tape 7, Side B

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Tape seven, side B. Go ahead.

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I remember the teacher virtually threatened him because he couldn’t keep the crayons within the lines, which is still a problem for some children. I mean she was more concerned about his drawing, keeping the crayons in the lines. And what, how that would, then realizing how, what a negative reaction this could have on a child, who was basically an academically-gifted young boy. But you know, those were... the teacher eventually left, and we, I think we were fortunate that we had some teachers who saw how bright he was and that he began, that he was able to get the best for himself, was able to do quite well. And we had a principal who wanted, who was very interested in the best, in providing good education for mountain kids, and who encouraged Jean to help start a Gifted and Talented program in the school. And he never, there wasn’t a single swing on the yard when we first came there. And so we put together a little committee and gradually got a coal company to do some grading and developed a wonderful playground with the PTA, on the school grounds. And that he just, his name was John Pitts. He couldn’t figure out where he wanted to put the swings, so he hadn’t put them anywhere. But he just needed some help. And you know, and I think as people realize that what you want is the same thing they want. That what you’re trying to do is really not a turnover, turn everything upside down, that we’re filing law suits every time... but what we’re trying to do 1s help the community and be good citizens. Then you begin to feel that people are on your side, even if the few lawyers aren’t, and that we have a lot of support in this community. And I remember in our PTA when the movement first started to put the Ten Commandments up on the walls of the classrooms, which is something that’s come back today again. I don’t know if you’ve seen the paper, the Harlan County Board of Education voted to put the Ten Commandments on the walls, even though it’s against the law and the Supreme Court has said you cannot do that. We had a discussion in our PTA, a very thoughtful discussion. And we had, there was, we had at least one family of Indians, not Native Americans, but from India. A surgeon, whose daughter was in Michael’s class. And, you know, there were people, initially the reaction is what’s wrong with the Ten Commandments? They’re perfectly good commandments. And you know, I could say, “Well, they’re the foundation of our faith as Jews, but they may not be the foundation of our Indian friends, and religions differ. And I would be the last person to say there’s anything wrong with the Ten Commandments, but they don’t belong on the wall of the school right now.” And the attorney... at the time, they were waiting for the Attorney General to come out for an opinion. So, the resolution at that meeting was to wait until the Attorney General came out with an opinion. And people were quite comfortable with that. I’m sure that if we hadn’t been there, and I mean the point was... that was let’s see, twenty years ago, that people accepted what we had to say, and were respectful of what we had to say, and were willing to wait. And that wouldn’t be always the case, I think, where you had folks who are very strong in their... and I’m sure some of those people are, were members of fairly doctrinaire, Baptist and... churches, but they were willing to say, “We’ll wait.” And I think those things always give you some hope, I mean give you cause for feeling good about, being proud of the people you are with. I mean I’m not always proud of everything everybody does, and you always wonder, but... So I think as we, both Jean and I, got involved in a lot of educational advocacy work, that we sort of knew we were here. Then when our daughter, Annie, did not do well academically as she got into high school and had a lot more... she 1s a very social person and was friends with people who were 88 very, very poor and friends with people who were quite rich. And she had a lot of kids who were friends who were on the fringy group. And she was in high school and was not doing well. So anyway, she went to the David School, which didn’t have many girls at the time and they were able to take her. She hadn’t dropped out. She did really well there and thought the David School was a wonderful place because of the one on one. And she had a very good math teacher who helped her with her math. We got her back on the right track, academically. But it was very hard for me to take her... I mean I felt, I really wanted to stick with the public school, public education. But they were losing her, and she was a good example of a student who should have stayed, who had, at least then, average academic skills, but was just an example of someone that fell between the cracks because the teachers were not paying attention. Which is something, I think, we’ve changed. And I think that we’ve always continued to be involved in these kind of efforts to try to help out our schools and make this region a better place. And I think that education has a lot to do with that. And I think we see in my work here in the office, we do a lot of work, we represent parents of kids who have special needs and the schools tend to, they don’t want to bother with them so often, unless you have a very committed teacher, who’s going to work with students like that. It’s much easier to move them out of the way. So when we, I think a lot of the cases we’ve done, the consumer cases, all the cases I’ve made reference to, the black lung work, where it’s hard for, the organization wouldn’t have anyone to assist them in these very technical fields without spending a great deal of money. Helping them to write regulations that will benefit them. AII these things have been really a great place for me to work and for the lawyers who worked in this program. I mean I think people who work in legal services across the country who devote their lives or their careers to serving the poor, are a wonderful group, I have a lot of admiration for them. So it’s always nice for me to come to work every day, because it’s such a good place to be.

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I wondered, you mentioned that there is some racism in the area and you also talked a little earlier about how you had a difficult time when you first arrived, because people were thinking of you all as Communists or something like that. And you had trouble renting an office and so forth. Did you experience any anti-Semitism? Did people know that you were Jewish? Has that been a problem at all?

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I don’t think so, many people in this area don’t know, really have had no experience with Jews at all, or Quakers for that matter, I think. And so in the more recent years, I don’t spend a lot of time at it, but I’ve been to church groups and talked about Judaism. Maybe the Klan, the few members of the Klan, when they get together, their constitution talks about the white, Aryan race, and Jews, money-making Jews, and that kind of thing. I’ve never been conscious, really of anti-Semitism here in any major way. I know that those, I know that people who are strong Christians do feel that if you’re not saved, you’re going to Hell. And so they have a real concern about us, whom they may like and they don’t want us to go to hell. And they would like us, I’m sure, to be saved.

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Do they try to convert you?

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No, I think... Annie probably went to more church, was, went to church more, because she spent more weekends with friends who went to church, some of whom are more evangelical than others. We have been invited to many churches. And we have gone to, more to the Presbyterian 89 church than others because, probably the Catholics and the Presbyterians have run more programs for poor people. And in this area over time, St. Vincent’s Mission came in here. Or maybe not the Catholic church as such, but the ministry. They brought more, while they are also attempting to increase the number of Catholics in their ranks, I think their message of being socially concerned has been stronger than that of the other faiths, even though they are a minority. The Presbyterian church was always very active with its Christian Service ministry. And it’s not as fundamental as the Baptist church and some of their beliefs with respect to Jesus. So when Jean, as I said from the beginning was working with the Meals on Wheels program and a number of their related programs in this Christian Service ministry, we’ve gone there many times. But there’s never been any real, I mean we’ve known all of their ministers. In recent years there’s been a much more sharing between rabbis and ministers. Now here, the Ministerial Association, they had a Catholic priest that was here when we first came, named Father... oh gosh, what’s his name? Getting a little tired. Young Catholic priest was here. It will come to me ina moment. And they wouldn’t let him in, wouldn’t let him in the Ministerial Association. He’d tend to wear moccasins around and wear blue jeans and was always a little bit out front on some of the social issues, working with welfare folks, and asking people about this being the way Jesus would have it. He finally, I think, five or six years later, put a Christmas card in the paper, wishing all of his ministers well at Christmas, hoping they would have a nice Christmas. He guilt-tripped them into it. They finally let him in. But there was that kind of thing, but there’s never really been, I don’t know, people have always been very nice to us maybe because, more about who we are than what the religion is. I’m sure they would welcome our, many of the churches would have welcomed the conversions. Or the fundamental religion, especially. We’ ve been to many funerals, I mean, when you get to these, especially when you go to a funeral where they preach over, about salvation and that you simply, you know, you’re doomed if you’re not saved. And they’re looking at you. (Laughing.) But they mean well. I mean that’s what it is, they feel like we’re going to be lost if this doesn’t happen.

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Would you just talk a little bit about your and Jean’s practice as far as faith, religion? You go to synagogue once a month? You go to a Quaker meeting once a month?

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Yeah, well we, while the kids were, we sort of maintain the Jewish tradition, Friday nights, Saturday, not every Friday night, but especially when everybody is together. And we go to services now more regularly since we go to Williamson West Virginia, for the Jewish services. They are on Sunday night, as I mentioned. It’s a rabbi comes down from Huntington, so he has a Friday night service on a Sunday night. The Quakers meet monthly in somebody’s home. And of course you can have a Quaker meeting whether you have three people or three thousand, because they are silent meetings for worship. And people get up and say something during the silence, if they are led to say something. And it may go on for half an hour, it may go the whole hour and nobody says anything. Or it maybe that someone has a comment that is on their mind and many people speak. In the more organized communities in the East, you have this group of overseers. I mean the meeting has to have an administration with dues and Sunday school and all of that. But this is a very informal group. There is an annual meeting of Quakers in Kentucky which we haven’t been to in a while. But the participants here are generally a couple in Hazard and a woman who teaches at the Pine Mountain Settlement School and a woman who is a doctor in Hyden, who is in her seventies and has been there for maybe twenty-five or thirty years, I guess, who’s a teacher. But he was a doctor and she’s a Quaker, very interesting person, 90 who lives up a holler in Hyden in a small house with... all these hundreds of goldfinches that are usually there. A very nice location. And then there have been some Mennonite volunteers, who have come to Quaker meeting during their volunteer period. So the group is a little bit fluid, although there is this permanent group, if you will. The couple in Hazard work for the rural health system and they’ ve been there for several years. So they meet once a month and they were in Prestonsburg a few weeks ago. The next time will be in Hazard or at the Pine Mountain Settlement School. That woman is in her seventies, also.

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And do you always go to the Quaker meetings, too?

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And I always go. I’m a very big fan of Quakerism. I mean I would not, not to convert. It is a very tolerant religion, built on faith, and the light that shines on everyone. And I don’t know that there’s a great enormous amount of difference, except that it’s built on the teachings of Jesus, essentially. But they don’t dwell on salvation and the other parts of it. I think they really dwell on living your life out in a full life and serving others, and the principles of humanity that I share and that I feel good about. So I think it’s been pretty easy for us to adapt to each other. I’ve probably spent more time now with the Quaker part of it. I really haven’t studied Quakerism that carefully. I’ve read a lot of books and probably will some time, as I should read about Judaism. And I haven’t done as much of that also, a little here and a little there. But I’d like to that a little bit more. I’ve got plenty of other things I also want to read. Right? Like you do.

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And how did you raise your kids? Were they involved in both religions?

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They were involved in both, although as I said, Michael, we didn’t have Quaker meetings back then. We had some of the state gatherings. This group is a relatively recent phenomenon of the last three or four years. It was really sparked by the people in Hazard. And we didn’t go initially. We were when Michael, I guess in our earlier years, we pretty much went to services in Ashland and took Michael when he was little, and Annie. They were the only children their age at that time. And we would go fairly regularly, but we always went during the Jewish holidays. And the Quaker tradition doesn’t have a lot of formal ceremony with it as Judaism does around these holidays. So we would celebrate those and we would go to Passover. We had Passover Seders at our house, which Jean and maybe the others would, she did the cooking and became fairly well-versed in what’s involved. Did some reading and embarrassingly probably knows more about some of those traditions now than I do. But that’s the way the kids were raised. And Michael, as I told you, I spent more time with Michael probably talking about, doing sort of a light Sunday school lesson every Sunday for several years. That was part of our tradition at home. I didn’t do that with Ann Louise for, I’m not sure exactly why. I think... who knows why? But I didn’t. More recently she has become much more interested in both. I think she was, as Jean was relating to you, very concerned about the Nazis, the history, the danger that it posed and still is worried about some goofy Klansperson coming to the house and doing something.

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To you in particular?

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Yeah. She has become, both of the kids will be home for the Jewish holidays, I think. I don’t know about Annie, for sure, because she works on Saturdays. But neither of them... and 9] Michael will be home. Rosh Hashanah falls on a weekend. I don’t know if he will come on Yom Kippur. Now someone would say, “How could you work on Yom Kippur?” And he might or might not. But those are their lines to draw. I mean it would have been unthinkable for anybody to work on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur when I was growing up. And so they still have to find their own, figure out, I guess, what they want to do in terms of their religious... or how religious they’re going to be. Either way, either way, I think though Annie’s now becoming a little more interested. Although she hasn’t been going to the synagogue in Louisville. She and I went to a Unitarian service together in Lexington a couple of years ago. But we feel okay about it.

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Do you want to say something in closing now?

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Like a prayer? (Laughing.)

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Would you lead us in a prayer?

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No, I can’t imagine anybody listening to all these tapes. I was saying to Jean, “Maybe...” She said, “Well, can I listen to them?” And I said, “Well, you wouldn’t want to listen to all this.” I said, “Well, maybe somebody wants to listen to this history years from now or maybe the kids would want to look in some archive, right?” No, it was nice of you to be interested to do it, to listen to it. And I’m sure we still haven’t covered a lot of ground. But it would be true if I did one of you, even though you probably wouldn’t think so, but we all could spend a lot of time. I’ve just been fortunate, probably to have had such an interesting career in these two legal jobs, with the Division and with legal services. And now that I’m also interested in the Science Center and other community activities that we’ve been involved in. Just have a lot of interests that I'd like to pursue, that happen to be, I think, in areas that can affect other people and help them in a positive way, besides me. And I like to do it, so I think that’s been a real reward. And you can come back in thirty years, and maybe when [ hit a hundred, I'll reflect on the last forty.

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Yeah, that’s a good idea. Okay, Ill see you in thirty years. Well, thank you. End of Tape 7, Side B 92 Tape 8, Side A

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Okay, it’s May 27", 2000 and we’re several months later, picking up on our interview with John Rosenberg and so this is actually tape eight, side A.

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Tape eight?

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Yeah. So, going back, we were just talking a little bit off tape about some of your, about some of your speaking experiences and things that you’ve brought up or drawn upon when you’ve gone to commencement addresses and so forth. And one of the things that you mentioned was the last case that you had before you left the Justice Department which had to do with the Kent State University violence. Can you talk about your role in that and your point of view about what happened?

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Well, I mean my role was, at the time was as Chief of the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division. Because this involved the National Guard and potentially other police officials, state officials, the Justice Department is called in to investigate. Potentially there is a federal crime when police officials act illegally or summarily and what we call summary punishment by not arresting, for example, students who do something wrong, but rather they overreact and shoot or punish or beat whoever the victim might be. So, when this happened, this incident happened and was called to our attention, my job was to write a request to the Federal Bureau of Investigation to investigate, to see whether a violation of federal law had occurred. And so, that being May of—how many years ago?—1970, thirty years ago, I drafted that request, which then was sent out under the name of the Assistant Attorney General of the Civil Rights Division, who I believe at the time was Jerry Leonard. And I’m sure I’d have to go dig it out or I don’t even know if I have a copy of it, you know, it would be fairly thorough about where they would be interviewing any witnesses who were there and whether they, the police officials in fact were threatened or there was any reason that would justify their having used force in shooting those students who were killed. There was a long grand jury convened after I left. As I recall it was actually inconclusive. I think there was no federal trial. I think there were civil trials later which I’m not sure, it seemed to me they may have recovered some damages for the families of the children, of the students who had been killed. It was just a very tragic event. There were others at the time. I recall, I think when we were speaking, I had seen an article recently before I gave the commencement address here at Prestonsburg Community College, which happened to have been written by the President of Kent State University. It was sort of a memorial column or just recalling those tragic events and the fact that they were in the memory of the President and people who were at Kent State now. And that the school itself had made great progress in the intervening years and that this awful event was a milestone, obviously, in the history of the school, which sort of marred its reputation, along with... or which they felt marred its reputation. It was not forgotten, but that since then the school had progressed and had moved into the age of technology and that she was very proud of their progress. And I happened to be particularly moved by the way that she ended the column, which was that in this age of technology, it was important not to lose our humanity. And so I was, used her, some of her quotations in concluding this address that I gave to the local students. And it reminded me that it was also sort of one of the last things we did, that I did at the Justice Department, before we left on our vacation, but really left. And then were headed for Appalachia. 93

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So you just filed the case, but you didn’t investigate it?

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Well, I didn’t, no. My job basically, if... had I stayed, the office, the lawyers who worked with me and for me as Chief of the Criminal Section... after, the way those things would work 1s that when the FBI goes through its investigation and prepares a report, those are usually turned over to the United States Attorney for prosecution or for determination of whether a crime has been committed. And generally then if there is some conflict, in other words when the officers say, “I thought that it looked like the student had a gun and that we had to shoot the student or we would have been killed,” those factual disputes, someone has to resolve them by generally going to a grand jury, which is what happened. And then either the U.S. Attorney co-operatively with lawyers from the Civil Rights Division, or... would make that presentation, but we left. That was at the point after I had authored and drafted this report, this request, was when we left. And so the investigation really went on and I believe one of my colleagues, Jim Turner, who was sort of one notch up in the hierarchy as a Deputy Attorney General, was sent out there and that he spent several months, along with reviewing the reports and working with the grand jury and then determining whether someone should be indicted or not. I want to think that there was never, that there were no federal indictments, but I may be wrong. It seems to me that was one of the sad things, that this was one of those, one of those sort of inconclusive... there were, on the face of it you would think that there was no reason to shoot students, because they were certainly not armed. And that they got caught in the, were victims of what happened. But I’m not sure that anyone was actually ever accused of having, of criminally having done this. That there was some evidence in the heat of the moment that these folks felt threatened, their lives were threatened. And that they, while they may have been negligent or they may have, whatever they did, that there was enough justification to make them question, that they made a bad decision, but it wasn’t, certainly wasn’t intentional on their part. And that it may have been enough to warrant civil proceedings. But that’s the way those things always, you know, went. And so in other circumstances, like when I was in the Houston case, we also asked the FBI to investigate and to assist us in determining, looking at records and other areas. And then the lawyer who is responsible for the case, as I was in the Houston case with other lawyers working with me and were working under my direction, then I would present the case to the judge. That’s how those things work. We’re done. I didn’t do any more in Kent State. I mean that was, most of that then happened after I left. So it was a memory and this article that I happened to see in the newspaper sort of jogged my mind back. It’s sort of the punctuation mark. It’s the point at which we left.

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I wonder also if you had, at the time if you felt, you had mentioned in the earlier sessions of this interview how much you idealized this country and its constitution and the principles on which it was founded, and that you really held, had high expectations of it. During the Vietnam War did you feel disillusioned with this country and its government? Or did that change your perspective at all?

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Well, I mean, I think there are lots of times when you wish political decisions were made, were different. I mean I think that everyone 1s, that a lot of people are sad about our involvement in the Vietnam War. I was in the war, served during the time of Korea. It was obviously... and as I probably said before, there were lots of reasons I enjoyed the time I spent in the Service. We ° Actually was Deputy Assistant Attorney General. 94 made a lot of very close friends, who I continue to see and hear from, and get together with periodically. And I think you feel that you are doing something worthwhile when you’re in the Service. And helping this country in a small way. But that I also noted that when, during the Suez Canal Crisis, when we were on alert for a week and no one was quite certain which side we were on, and that because the United States hadn’t made up its mind which side we were on, and Israel was one of the partners, was one of the main parties involved in that dispute, the thought that we would be in a conflict with Israel was not very appealing to me, but that it just let me know how much of a, that this was not what I wanted to do (laughing), to be regimented 1n that way. So that staying in the Service was not anything that I wanted to do. On the other hand, I always, I think that it’s a very dangerous occupation. And I feel those people who are in the Military for a career, who really believe that this is an important thing to do, often that we owe a lot to people who have been, who have served in our Military, and who have either given their lives or come back wounded or who are veterans. And I’m sure now we much, recognize much more the people in Vietnam, who may not have won a war, were nevertheless there because they were doing what they were told to do. And of course a lot of people were willing, were Conscientious Objectors and didn’t go. My personal feeling is if someone’s a Conscientious Objector they ought not to go. And we ought to let them not go. There are plenty of people who want to go or who were willing to go or there were and there were things that could be done. So, I don’t know that I, I’m not disillusioned. I’m still very much a, feel very strongly that, I guess maybe it’s a little rhetoric, but I feel that this is still the best country in many, many ways in the world. There are a lot of imperfections with it, that we... and some of the issues that we have to resolve are very difficult issues. When we see in this area the economy being as poor as it is. We’ve lost a lot of jobs here. Trying to catch up. What I spoke about at PCC, of course, that, that the Kent State thing related to, I asked, I emphasized to the students how much they should be grateful for being in this free country. It was also the, the week of the graduation was also the week of Law Day, in which we celebrate our freedom and the Constitution under which we live. And it was also the anniversary of Holocaust Remembrance Day. And it was the anniversary, the thirty year anniversary of Kent State. And I think all of those are messages that we need to remember and reflect upon. I think we do have a legal system that really is the basis for the freedom that we have. And a lot of those freedoms are at times tenuous. You worry when the Klan, you wish we did not have the Klan around, but the fact that we allow them to exist under, in a restricted way still is part of the freedom that we can enjoy. And I think all of those kinds of issues sort of tumble around together. And yet we, we have to be, we’re always balancing those things. And I think the political system that we’re under, where we flip back and forth between a Democratic party in control and the Republican party in control at the state and national government, kind of keeps everybody off balance, at the state level and the federal level. But it seems to make us sort of come out in the middle and even though lots of things go on that we don’t like. I mean I wish we had greater funding for legal services at the state and federal level. And sometimes Congress, the legislation we have on, that affects welfare moms seems very punitive, at times. And I know we could do better with that. We clearly need a better health care system, there are lots of places where we can improve, where we ought to improve, being as rich as this country is. We seem not to regard people, the problems poor people have as seriously as we ought to. Well, that’s a rambling answer. I can’t even remember, it seemed to me that we started with Kent State and we kind of got into what I was talking about, but it all kind of goes together. 95

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Yeah. Kind of related to what you were saying, can you talk more, you had mentioned that sometimes, you mentioned off tape and I’d like to get this on tape, that you mentioned when you go to speak at various places within the community, people are interested in, partially interested in hearing you speak because of your Holocaust-related experiences. And maybe you can talk about your, your invitation to speak at the hundred-year anniversary of one of the black churches here and also talk about why you think it is that people want to hear about that particular aspect.

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Well, I think that the black church, the name right now escapes me, probably shouldn’t. The hundredth anniversary was an event they’d worked on, was quite a significant event for the church. There are two churches in Wheelwright, Kentucky and this is one of them. And they had been planning this anniversary for some time and have had a series of ministers over the years and it’s a very cohesive community. And I think, probably, one of the reasons they asked me to speak was because they related, they knew that I was Jewish and that I had been involved as a legal services lawyer and perhaps as a Justice Department lawyer in some civil rights issues over time. But also that I was a, that my family had escaped from the Holocaust and they knew some of that history. And I think they analogized it in their own way to the discrimination that they had felt and that they wanted me maybe to reflect upon the f act that there were people who were white and who were discriminated against because they were Jewish or for reasons other than race. But that someone, a family lived in this community that had shared some of that history that their own families and ancestors had experienced over their lifetime. I know that, I think in the schools, I think that the schools now have made the Holocaust a very much a part of their curriculum. When I go, I’ve spoken to middle school students and elementary school and high school students. And when I ask how many of them know who Ann Frank was or whether they have done a unit on Ann Frank, almost every hand goes up in the room. I think that unit is probably done in the fifth and sixth grade and in the seventh grade. And that, but the fact, I think teachers tell me, the fact that they see someone who 1s alive and who can come into their class and say this is what happened to my family. I was eight years old when they arrested my father and took him to the concentration camp. Or I was standing in the courtyard when they were dynamiting the synagogue. That is always more, it makes a stronger point than having heard it from a third person. And if it’s someone in their own community that I suppose has been identified as having some credibility, that doesn’t just make these stories up. I think when you, you always tend to put some faith and trust 1n people that have lived with you a long time, who are part of the community. It’s kind of like any other, listening to older, someone described the history of the May house or the May family or their own family history. When they’ve grown up here it means more. At least I think that’s, whenever you find someone, whether it’s the war, my neighbor used to, my neighbor must have been on every beach. He died a few years ago, but he was one of those Appalachian soldiers who was drafted and lived through every beach assault in the Pacific. And even if he tells it in a low key sort of conversational way, it’s very powerful to talk to someone who lived it.

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It’s interesting, considering your significant experience, you spent a lot of time working on civil rights and a lot of time here in Appalachia working on helping the poor with legal services. And it’s interesting that the thing that people would pick out when they want to hear something from you, is this thing that really happened in your distant past and really has to do with your roots, which hasn’t been so much the focus of your very significant work and interesting work. Do you think, I’m trying to... there’s kind of a question in there somewhere, but I think, you know, 96 there’s some key maybe to your roots which came up in the earlier interviews, too. That you mentioned that where you come from and your escape from the Nazis has been a very important part of the work that you have subsequently done. Or that it’s something that you’ve kept in mind, but we didn’t really go into very much detail about that. Has it been... is that something that you really think about a lot, about the Holocaust era and about your family and about... maybe can you just talk more about that?

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I don’t know that it’s with me every day. I think that... and I think I’ve spoken about this before. Well, before I forget it, I think in my earlier, when I talked about commencement talks or just generally about legal services, I really did not speak, talk much about the Holocaust unless I was, unless... I mean some of the church groups, when we first came Jean was... we were involved with the Presbyterian church a good bit because they did a lot of social, were more involved in local social projects. They started Meals on Wheels and Christian Service Ministry that she was involved with. And so the ministers who knew that we were involved, had Passovers and that I was Jewish and some of that developed into, people, by word of mouth realized that I wasn’t born in this country and that I did have this experience. But it wasn’t, I guess in more recent years, I’ve had more, probably as people learned and as I spoke more about the Holocaust and about being Jewish, that there have been more, there’s been a bit more of an awareness about the Holocaust. I think partly because of the Holocaust Memorial and there’s been more publicity generally about the importance of this whole era and trying to make people remember it and not let it be forgotten. That all probably is part of the reason why this has come up. And I think that tying it into Law Day is something that has gotten around among the teachers, that that’s something I’m willing to speak about or can speak about on Law Day, that may be more meaningful to students than just talking about the Constitution or how the legal system works, which is the other thing that we generally do when we go to the schools. Well, I don’t have any doubt that the history, that our fleeing from Germany and coming to this country and being grateful for the opportunity to be free here, has sort of moved me into public service work. I think that’s pretty clear. When I was in the military, I think it probably in a way helped move me to go to the Service as well. I don’t know that I went into the ROTC, which helped partly also with tuition. Back then it was one of the ways of making Duke affordable, which was an expensive school. But I mean, whether it’s just the rationalization or the reason, I think I certainly felt that being in the Service was one way of trying to help fulfill my, help me give something back. You can stay out of the Service. I’m sure I didn’t have to do that. But that was during a time that people also were being drafted. And that if you didn’t want to be an enlisted man and wanted to do more with your career in the Service... I guess my bigger decision was that I was, I did have the option after coming out of Duke as a chemistry major, of going to work in the Military as being in something that was more science-related back then, working, using my chemistry degree. And I decided really not to do... I decided I was either going to fly and then ultimately became a navigator. Because the pilot training didn’t really work out. But I, so I’m sure that was probably, sort of an adventuresome kind of thing to do. It would be more interesting than being in a lab. I knew that I probably might want to sell chemicals some day. I really hadn’t decided my long-term career goals. But I flirted around when I came out of the Service and went back to Rohm and Haas as a technical representative for a chemical company. I don’t know whether we... did we talk about that?

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Yeah. 97

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RG-50.549.05.0007

So, I flirted around for a little bit at one point about going to Rabbinical school and decided not to do that. But I’m sure that what, that going into the civil rights work and being, and wanting to do public service work has been to some extent influenced by, and maybe a large extent, probably a lot of it is subconscious, the fact that I want to feel that the contribution I can make in helping other people in this country, who are not as well off, is just a way of helping to give back. I don’t know that it’s any sort of sacrifice. I just feel like there are lots of ways to spend your life. And if some people want to spend it practicing law in one way or another, that’s their choice. But it’s a much more, this is part of it, but I don’t feel that I had any obligation to do this. I just, I’m sure that having that history in our family in a major way influenced us, as well as... I mean, my father and mom, my father worked in the textile plant. He was a teacher. My brother is in public service, worked for the government all of his life. My sister was an architect working for the state on issues affecting handicapped people, an architectural barriers person. So, and just recently finished law school, and is now thinking about how to use the law degree in a helpful, probably together... I don’t know that she will be going into legal services, but I... I mean I don’t know that my motivations are really, I think all of the lawyers and people who do public service work, whether our daughter, who 1s in social... working on a social work degree, and working with developmentally-disabled people now in Louisville. Or our son who works with students who have academic difficulties. Or your or whoever the other people, who are in public service life, who choose to make that their life and feel that service is a way to live out your life in a meaningful way... End of Tape 8, Side A 98 Tape 8, Side B

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RG-50.549.05.0007

All right, this 1s tape eight, side B. And uh, related to your work or to your experiences with speaking to groups, you had mentioned a little bit earlier that you have on Law Day talked about the Holocaust. And what do you talk about when you talk about the Holocaust on Law Day’?

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RG-50.549.05.0007

Well, I talk about the contrast between a society that we have in this country, where we have a government and a nation, which is governed by the rule of law and what happened in Fascist Germany where the legal system was basically put aside for a dictatorship. And that the kinds of things that were able to happen in the Holocaust, which was a result of Hitler’s fanaticism. And what did happen in that dictatorship, and how, again, grateful we need to be and how they, students, can reflect on or ought to reflect, and their teachers and all of this ought to reflect on the system we have in this country, which would not, hopefully, permit anything like that to happen. That the checks and balances in the legislative, executive and judicial systems would keep that from happening. And that we have, that free speech 1s important and that all of the guarantees that we have under the Constitution and under the Bill of Rights are very meaningful and that it’s important to talk about them. So I use, I guess the family’s personal experiences, and I talk a little bit about the history of how all this came about in the 1930s from Hitler’s rise to power. How during the war, I mean even afterwards, how people would like to pretend in Germany that no one knew about it and this all sort of just happened and people are looking the other way. At least were looking the other way and most, I suspect, did know about what was going on in the Death camps. That’s what I try to focus on and I think the teachers seem to appreciate that and seem to feel that it’s a good way to have their students appreciate Law Day.

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Why don’t you just talk about... you had mentioned in the first sessions that we did, something about the relationship between Judaism and justice, and it was something that you said that you had thought about. Would you elaborate on that some?

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RG-50.549.05.0007

Well, I don’t remember what I said at the time, but the important tenet, I guess, of Judaism is the emphasis on justice, study and justice. That the Ten Commandments and having a society where being just to each other and where you have a governing, legal codes that govern Judaism, which are principles of living really. The major ones. I might have said that those principles probably helped to influence me and the work that I do. I remember when we were just talking about Law Day, usually when I begin a talk, I talk a little bit about the fact that we’ve been, who we are and who I am, that I’m here in Prestonsburg. We’ve lived in Floyd County all these years. And talk a little about our legal services agency and try to describe that we do have a system in this country that provides lawyers for people who can’t afford lawyers, on the criminal and on the civil side. And that what this program, what Appalred and other civil legal services programs do and how difficult it is. Many times it 1s basically impossible to navigate through the legal system without having a lawyer to help you, so that poor people are often on the short end of business transactions and many other people lose rights. They lose benefits to which they are entitled. And the kind of work that defenses in eviction cases, consumer cases, all the work that we have done. The Broad Form, environmental work. So I try to also mention that. So, going back to what you were asking me, I don’t know that it’s any easier... I mean I think all religions, whether it’s Christianity with Jesus’ sort of different, somewhat little different spin on the loving aspect of God, that it’s not as much of the retribution and thunder that you read about in the Old 99 Testament. But that any, I know there are a lot of people in legal services and folks have written about, who, even who have had backgrounds in Divinity School, or who feel that by helping, by using their legal talents to help people who are oppressed or who are poor or have been discriminated in one way or another, that that is a good way for them to live out their life and their principles and their values. And providing legal services for low income people, I don’t think that that’s... there’s anything particularly unique about being Jewish in that way. I just, probably anyone who feels that their, that religion and a belief in God is part of their personality or their person, would feel the same way about that, I think. I mean, we have people in legal services who are very religious. They’re Catholic, Protestant, Jewish. And we have many people who are not religious, just as, I’m sure, other professions do.

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The question that had come to my mind before, that had slipped out, was kind of related to something that, when I’ve interviewed other Holocaust survivors, that gets brought up a lot. And I don’t know whether you’ ll have anything to say to it or not. But often I hear people say that they feel, hear people state an opinion about whether a Holocaust could happen again. And many people say, “I think this is going to happen again.” That there is going to be some kind of mass persecution of the Jewish people. And some people feel like that’s not going to happen, but a lot of... 1t just comes up, and I’m wondering whether you feel like... you were talking a little bit earlier about the legal system in this country. Do you feel like that system 1s really stable enough so that there is not potential for that kind of disruption or do you feel like it is possible for something like that to happen in this country?

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