start of tape 1, side a february 5, 1992 robert … · leslie w. dunbar: have you talked to her?...
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START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A February 5, 1992
ROBERT KORSTAD: I thought we could just start by talking a
little bit about where you grew up and your family and something
about your eduction, so that people would have some sense of
where you're coming from, which is, as you know, talking with
Virginia Durr, the most important thing to establish, at least.
LESLIE W. DUNBAR: Have you talked to her?
RK: Not for this particular project, but I've talked to her
before for other things.
LD: Well, I don't know, Virginia and some other people have
got really interesting biographies. I don't think mine is very
much. I come originally from Greenbriar County, West Virginia.
My dad went broke a little bit ahead of the Depression, and we
moved to Baltimore in 1930 when I was almost nine. Kept going
back to West Virginia for years, visiting uncles. As a matter of
fact, my wife and I owned a place down there until, well, we
owned it for quite a while and spent a lot of time there until
just recently. We couldn't keep it up any more. Fact, I held a
mortgage on the house because the guy who bought it couldn't. . .
. So I held a mortgage on it until less than a year ago when we
wanted to pay it off. I was almost sorry. It kind of severed my
last [laughter] link. Anyway, I went down South in 1948, right
after I got out of graduate school.
RK: What did your family do there? What kind of world did
you grow up in?
LD: Well, he was from a very large family, and
interestingly, almost in a scholarly sense, a big family, not
just my own immediate family but the uncles and aunts and all,
they all seem to be gone. There's nobody left. They're all
scattered. True on my mother's side, too, except I do have a
couple of cousins on her side. I guess you would have called Dad
a small-town businessman. He had a lot of things that he was
involved with, nearly all of which went kapoop. He was much
older than I. I think it's an amazing statistic that my
grandfather Dunbar was born while Andrew Jackson was president.
RK: That's pretty amazing.
LD: It does suggest to you [Interruption], I think he was
born in 1829, and he was forty-six when my father was born. My
father was forty-six when I was born. Well, you can do the
arithmetic [laughter]. I don't know that we have families quite
like that.
RK: We don't.
LD: I was the youngest of my father's children, but he was
not the youngest of his. There were at least two other boys who
came after my Dad [laughter].
RK: Really? That's pretty amazing.
LD: They did live in the country up in Frankfort, West
Virginia.
RK: So they lived there for years. So you grew up in. . .
LD: I grew up in Lewisburg, the county seat. Dad and the
family originally had come from around Frankfort and Rennick,
which were quite very small places. The house that my wife and I
kept for until just very recently was up near Rennick, beautiful
country, no prettier country.
RK: You were rooted in the community with a long history
and family?
LD: Yes, I was but. . . .
RK: So did you grow up after nine in Baltimore?
LD: Yeah. Haven't gotten the Orioles out of my system yet.
I went to graduate school at Cornell, and after leaving there,
luckily by chance, the job offer I got was at Emory, and I went
down and taught at Emory. So it got me into the South quickly.
RK: Had you had much, I mean, Baltimore is still kind of a
southern town. When you were growing up, I mean, what got you
interested in going into political science and thinking about
going into an academic career?
LD: I don't know. I was always, oh, I don't know why I got
interested in politics. I did. At a very age I started reading
the newspapers. That was about it. I took my first political
science course, as most people did, as a freshman, and it didn't
sound like I wanted to learn more about that. I really thought
that by the time I got out of college I'd study law, and I
actually went to one year of law school, almost one year. I've
often been sorry that I didn't finish but I didn't. Contracts
and torts can turn you off pretty fast.
RK: I know. I didn't even make it that far. The thought
of it was enough to deter me. So you went to graduate school at
Cornell, and so ended up going down to Emory? What was that
like? When would that of been, in the late '40s?
LD: 1948. Well, it was interesting. Baltimore, you call
it a southern city and it was, Baltimore was strictly segregated
in every respect from the schools to residential areas to
swimming pools and everything else. We even had in the parks,
black baseball diamonds and white baseball diamonds.
RK: Were you aware of that as a child, when you nine?
LD: Well, you know, I spent my whole adolescence there.
Well, you became aware of it, but not in the sense that you felt
it was something you needed to do something about. We just saw
the order of things. You know, I came back yesterday afternoon
from Washington where I'd been attending a meeting of one of
these little foundations I'm on, the Ruth Mott Fund. In fact,
I'm chair now. But we made a couple of grants yesterday that had
something to do with the rural South. But I came in and I got a
phone call, oh, last evening from a young woman who's a member of
my church. I go to Watts Street Baptist Church. And Watts
Street has recently--it's a very fine church-- has established a
sister church or brother church, I'm not sure which, relationship
with Calvary Baptist, which is a black church at Morehead. So we
have a committee, and I guess they have a committee. I'm not on
it, but anyway, this young lady was calling last night. They're
going to do a joint program in a couple of weeks at the church
on, "What is it like to be black?" and would I be one of
the--they're going to have three speakers from each church--and
would I be one? I said, [laughter] "You mean you're going to ask
white people to talk about what it's like to be black?" She
said, "This was their idea." [Laughter] This was the other
congregation's idea. Well, I thought that was pretty strange,
but I said I'd to it. I got to thinking about it later, last
night. I guess maybe I was thinking about it when I was trying
to go to sleep, and I didn't know what you fellows were going to
talk to me about, but you've raised this question about when did
one begin to get ( ).
I had a very interesting experience when I taught at Emory,
and I may say some of this to that group. I don't think I will,
not the whole thing, but I think a lot of us, and Coles has
talked about this, a lot of us have had sort of shining light
experiences. I don't know that mine has been very shining, but
nothing else ever made quite the impact on me. They made me,
when I got at Emory, we had -- we used to have departmental
clubs. So being the youngest guy on the political science
faculty, they made me advisor to the political science club,
which had the few majors in political science. They'd have
meetings once a month or something, some kind of program. Always
a question of why are you having a meeting anyhow, what program
do you have if you have it. I had already gone out to Atlanta
University Center a couple of times, principally because we had a
very wonderful man there on the history faculty, Bill Wiley.
Bill was a civil war historian, and Bill had met me and he'd sort
of taken me under his wing. A couple of times I had gone out to
AU Center with him. So I had met a few people. So I suggested
to these students that, well, there's this man I've met out there
who teaches political science, let's ask him out. Well, they
thought that a pretty brave thing to do, but they buckled up
their courage. It was William Boyd. He was professor of
political science at Atlanta University, and Boyd was a
remarkable man, and he died, unfortunately, when he was probably
in his '40s, maybe not quite. Got leukemia. He would have been
a "leader," I'm sure. But he came out, and he was asked to talk
about race relations in the South. And he did. I sat in the
back of the room, and I listened, and I suddenly had an idea, you
know. You don't have many ideas, but I had an idea, which was
that we shouldn't have asked him to do this. The very first time
that the man had been invited out, he should have been treated
like a colleague. His own speciality happened to be
international relations. He'd been a student of Ralph Bunch's,
and his first visit out to this white campus, he should have been
asked to talk about foreign policy or something. So after the
class, he and I walked back to the office that I shared with a
couple of other people, and nobody else was there. I was moved
to tell him this [laughter]. He looked at me very knowingly and
wisely and accepted my apology. Then for some reason he opened
up with me and began describing to me what it was like to be
black in the South. Telling me just what he had to go through
when he took his family on a trip north. Well, you had to space
out your restroom stops and so forth, and pack your lunch. I
remember this very keenly. The elephant in the Atlanta Zoo had
died. They'd been taking up collections at the schools to buy
new elephants. I know my own child was in kindergarten at that
time. We'd given her a quarter or something. He said how do you
explain to your daughter when she wants to pitch in to help to
buy new elephants, and she can't see them. Blacks couldn't go to
the zoo in Atlanta. Well, he talked at length.
You see, Martin King used to talk the same way. One of
King's favorite stories in his speeches was to tell about how his
wife and a couple of the kids would pick him up at the airport,
and they'd drive in from the Atlanta airport up the highway.
There used to be at that time an amusement park off the side of
the highway, and his daughter would always say, "Daddy, why can't
I go?" And he'd have this problem of telling her about that. So
it was the same sort of thing that Boyd was telling me. Well, I
got my second idea. I mean, I don't often have one, but I got
two, which was that I didn't need to hear any of this because if
you take a moment [laughter]. . . Anybody who had lived in this
country who'd given it a moment's thought would have known all of
this. 'Course, most of us never had. So when Nancy asked me
last night to talk about what it's like to be a black, I don't
think it's such a preposterous idea because you can almost, if
you just think about it a minute or two, you can't get inside the
black person, but if you just think about it a minute or two, you
can pretty well at least get the broad outlines of the
predicament that black people live under in this country. I've
thought about that a lot since. I think I've learned a lot over
the years about the black situation, and almost every time I've
learned, it's been because some black person has taught me. And
almost every time I've been able to think, well, she didn't need
to tell me that. I should have been able to figure it out
myself. But that afternoon with Bill Boyd was a very important
one for me.
RK: That obviously changed how you looked at the landscape,
social landscape, around you. Did it change what you thought
about doing with your life?
LD: Well, in a way. I think when I came out of graduate
school and I went down to Emory, I think of all the social issues
I was concerned with, labor unions was probably the first, not
civil rights. But I think that changed. I did get at that time,
even while I was at Emory, I did begin to see a lot of George
Mitchell and people of the Southern Regional Council.
RK: Did you make contact with them as a matter of course?
LD: Well, I don't remember first. I know I had Mitchell
out to Emory to talk, and then I went down ( ). He was a
remarkable man. He did not like much. He was executive director
of the Council until '57, I guess, and then retired and moved to
Scotland.
RK: Is that right? I didn't know that's where he moved to.
LD: He and his brother once did a book, I forget the title,
but it was a book about the wage rates in the South. His brother
taught economics at Johns Hopkins. Was a perennial socialist
candidate up in Maryland. I had heard him lecture several times
when I was growing up. Broadus Mitchell.
RK: How had you gotten interested in the labor unions and
what was going on in the South at that point?
LD: Not necessarily in the South. Everyone growing up in
the '30s and '40s got interested in labor unions. Well, I
learned shortly after I got down there that there was something
called the Georgia Labor Education Association. I think I've got
the title right. One of the things that the old Rosenwald Fund
did was sprinkle these groups around the country, including the
South, like Highlander up in Tennessee. They were believers in
adult education. I mean, it was a fate, and they'd do all this
extension work. I had done a little teaching at Cornell in a
Labor Education Extension School they had up there, Industrial
Labor Relations. So I went down and offered my services, hoping
that they would also pay me a little bit. Unfortunately, it was
about the last year of their grant, but I did do a little work
with them and at least got to know them. Got to know a little
bit about labor unions, at least in Georgia.
RK: I'm suspecting that the '30s and the experience of the
Depression and the various mobilizations and things that were
going on must have had a big effect on your kind of teenage
years, when you're coming up, even before the war. How much of
that effected what you ended up doing?
LD: I don't know. I'm not a very introspective person.
I'm sorry, but I'm not. I just can't answer that.
NEIL BOOTHBY: I have one related question that's back to
the conversation with the fellow in Atlanta and the ( ) moment
when you realized a couple of things. Did that, and I'm sort of
back to that image of you in Baltimore, as a nine year old on a
segregated baseball field or whatever, did that moment ever get
you to look back and kind of reexamine or rethink your childhood
and adolescence? Did it get you to visualize those moments in a
different way, or was there any kind of anger attached to that
situation retrospectively, or was it just. . . ?
LD: I don't think so, sorry.
NB: No. [Laughter] I'm just curious. I got the picture
of sort of you as a kid growing up in Baltimore and having a good
time and enjoying baseball, but then at some point in your life
realizing it was a segregated baseball field, and what one does
at those moments. I never got angry either ( ) anybody
who did.
LD: I think I grew up in a family that prided itself, my
mother and father prided themselves, or at least she did, on
courtesy and civility. We must never say "nigger." We said
colored people, and we said Mr. and we said Mrs., though it was
hard for my mother to do that. She said. She did it. But
courtesy and civility represented good race relations in my
growing up.
NB: How do you look at that now? Does that still sort of
hold water?
LD: No. On the other hand, it's too bad that we've
forgotten about courtesy and civility [laughter]. They're worth
a lot.
RK: I think they're missed. Teach undergraduates these
days, it's something that's missing in their relationships with
each other, if not in their relationships with people older than
themselves. Kind of one of the things that fuel a lot of their
disagreements, kind of racial tension ( ), I think.
So then you left. Taught at Emory for a few years, and then
went North.
LD: No, first I went over to, a lot of it for economic
reasons. I had to make a little more money. It came down to
having a choice, and didn't seem to be any academic things
opening up at that time. It came down to having a choice to
going off to work in the, God help me, Air Force as some kind of
Intelligence Specialist, or going over to Aiken, South Carolina
and working for the Atomic Energy Commission, which I did. They
called me Chief of Community Affairs. Seemed like a good
administrative post. So I stayed there in South Carolina until
'55. You know, Aiken's a little deeper south than Atlanta.
RK: Yeah [laughter].
LD: But it was very enjoyable over there. Enjoyable is the
wrong word. It was very interesting over there. That [laughter]
was for the building of the big Savannah River plant. My one and
only government job. Curiously, my qualifications for the job
were my ignorance. When that big plant was announced, probably
be hard for you to recall this, but you know the Russians had
exploded their bomb and a lot of national panic, and then the
decision was made to build what was called the H-bomb. Savannah
River would have the H-bomb plant, and this was headline news
everywhere. Oh, three months down the road, a big land scandal,
a staff guy at AEC had tipped off some friends and they'd gone in
and bought up land before the announcement. Well, he was the
Chief of Community Affairs, an experienced housing man. Well, he
was fired. So in typical government fashion, they then went to
look for somebody who had absolutely no housing contacts at all
[laughter]. That's how I got the job. I was totally ignorant.
It was an extraordinary four years. Then I went up to Mount
Holyoke.
RK: What brought you back to the South?
LD: Mount Holyoke was a bore. I didn't think I was going
anywhere there anyhow. But the civil rights thing had heated up.
I had been offered a job at SRC by George Mitchell in 1954, and
I really decided to go up to Mount Holyoke. So I hadn't quite
forgotten that I had once been offered a job over there. In '58
I didn't have anything else to do that summer, and Harold
Flemming, who was then director of SRC, I got in touch with him,
and he said, "Come on down." So I worked there during the summer
of '58. I didn't want to go back to teaching. I went back up to
Holyoke and taught the term. Felt I needed to do that. Also had
to get my family resettled. So I went back and taught the fall
semester, and we moved down to Atlanta in '59.
RK: So you were really looking forward to that? There was
starting to be a lot going on.
LD: Oh yeah, '58, when I went down there for that summer,
just a year after the Little Rock explosion, schools were still,
where were they? They were closed out there, not closed, but
they didn't open. Virginia was in the middle of massive
resistance. North Carolina had not yet admitted a student black.
The student protest movement had not yet begun. Just seemed
like, well, you get caught up in it pretty fast.
RK: One thing, you did an interview with the Southern Oral
History Program, with Jackie Hall and Bob Hall, a good while ago?
LD: Long time ago.
RK: I think that a lot of the history of your time at the
Southern Regional Council, you went over with them. I haven't
looked at the whole transcript of the interview, but I've looked
at bits and parts of it. So I was thinking we might not need to
go back over that.
LD: That's fine. I don't think I have much of a biography,
I told you.
RK: I guess what I'd like to do is maybe talk more about
your work at the Field Foundation and since then, too, since the
'80s. I guess our starting point is looking at, well, we're
interested in how poverty issues and economic issues come out of
the civil rights movement, a lot of agitation around that, and
how people began saying it's just not a matter of legal rights,
but there's access to opportunity and a lot of other things. I
wonder what sense, just kind of beginning this, you had of the
kind of energy, because you probably were mixing with these
people at various different levels, why this whole emphasis on
poverty and the War on Poverty, and particularly it relates to
the South. The South was really the first area in the country
that becomes a focal point for a lot of this. If you could just
kind of remember what it was like at that point, why this became
such an issue.
LD: Which point?
RK: Say, in '62, '63, '64, something like that.
LD: You know the fact is, I think the fact is, that poverty
was almost a non-issue in the early '60s in the South. American
people, including the Vistas, are so focused, it's hard to have
two ideas at once, two concerns at once.
RK: [Laughter]
LD: Civil rights, you know, among liberals that was the
issue, and poverty was just sort of glossed over. King began
talking about poverty before he died, but if you look back at
King's earlier talks, I don't think there's much in them about
poor folks. It's about discrimination and denial of opportunity
and that's about it. When we talked about poverty, we talked
about it in terms of opportunity. So you created the Employment
Discrimination Law and so forth, and that was supposed to take
care of it. I remember coming back from lunch one day in
Atlanta--I don't know when this was, '60 maybe--with a couple of
my co-workers at the Southern Regional Council. A beggar came
up, black guy, stuck out his hand, and one of my co-workers said,
"Go down to the NAACP. You don't beg on the street." That was
almost an attitude, you know, a pervasive attitude. The answer
to poverty is to vote. Vote! And the white people's response is
to beat down these discriminatory barriers. Kennedy came out of
West Virginia and Kentucky in 1960, burdened with this
realization that real poverty did exist. But the concentration
was there in Appalachia. It was almost as though there were two
separate problems. The problem in the South is discrimination.
The problem in Appalachia is poor people. Harry Caudill wrote
his great book, Night comes to the Cumberlands. It was all about
Kentucky and West Virginia. The first Kennedy programs that had
anything at all to do with poverty were in the Justice
Department, juvenile, whatever they called that thing, juvenile
delinquency. Then they did sponsor, there was another one called
Manpower Development and Training. The focus was always on
opportunity. I remember hearing at some, used to be all kinds of
meetings, conferences, I remember hearing Secretary Works, who
was Secretary of Labor under Kennedy, make a great, big speech
which got a lot of attention that the only problem in the United
States was opportunity. There were jobs there. We just had to
train the people to get them. That was almost an ideology. It
was an ideology. I don't know just where the more accurate
realization began, how it began, but it certainly did. In part,
I suppose, because the events of 1965, on the one hand, the
Voting Rights Act which did, in many people's minds, sort of. . .
RK: Solve everything?
LD: Well, it didn't solve it, but you knew after the Voting
Rights Act you were sort of on the sunny slope of civil rights.
And at the same time, events happening like the Watts riots,
which got people's attention away from the almost sole occupation
with the South and with its problems. By that time, of course,
we already had the Economic Opportunity Act. When did it pass,
'65?
RK: '64, '65.
LD: But I think the realization of the depth of the
problems didn't begin until, maybe the word came in from the
ghettos. We had a couple of projects in Atlanta. SRC worked
with a couple of, there was a neighborhood called Ives City. Is
that right? I think so. One of the worst slums in Atlanta at
that time. We worked with a little self-help project down that
way. But the sense that poverty was a structural problem in the
United States had not begun. Did not begin, I think, until the
late '60s, and was powerfully resisted then.
RK: So you did start doing some things, kind of in
conjunction with more civil rights orientation, but starting.
Even at the Southern Regional Council you're starting to make
that transition that King and people did later.
LD: Can't remember exactly, I can't remember everything,
but we did, but we were doing it in very tentative ways. I think
that was true of the whole one-time civil rights movement, and
never became true of some parts of it. I don't know to this day
that the NAACP has any very strong sense of mission regarding
impoverishment of black people. Seems to me that to this day
that when the NAACP, the National Urban League, approach economic
questions, they approach them in terms of elevating individuals
into the middle class. I have nothing to complain about about
that, but it's still an opportunity kind of ideology.
RK: So you left and went to work for the Field Foundation
in '65. That was really the end in some ways of the civil rights
movement. The war's really heating up by that point. Things are
going on in northern cities. Was that a real conscience effort
on your part to begin focusing your attentions somewhere else?
LD: Well, you know, you have to avoid making yourself sound
less self-interested than you are. It was to my economic
advantage to go up to Field Foundation, I'll tell you. I'd like
to think that I would not have taken most any other foundation
job. Field Foundation had interests that were almost the same as
mine. It had a long history of being involved in race relations.
It had a particular interest in the South. Never did understand
quite why it got it, but it did. Marshall Field insisted from
the beginning in having a couple of blacks on his board.
Channing Tobias had been an early member. He had Ralph Bunch
when I got up there. He was not a good board member, but he was
on it. At this time, the only other interest the Field
Foundation had was what we loosely called child welfare. That
[laughter] was sort of divided. On one hand, expressing Field's
own interests, abetted by a couple of people, like Helen Ross and
whatnot, in psychoanalysis. So we [laughter] remained to the end
to be Anna Freud's alterview view, her American supporter. And
on the other, a very strong interest in children's welfare, poor
kids' welfare, which was stimulated by people like Milton Senn
and Justine Pottier. He had made a foundation. Didn't work.
Didn't work at all, but his notion in setting up a foundation was
that his children could learn at the feet of wise people. So his
idea was to have a couple of his children on the board and wise
people. Ralph Bunch, Helen Ross, Milton Senn, Justine Pottier,
Lloyd Garrison, but his children didn't want much to do with it.
RK: [Laughter]
LD: So [laughter] it didn't work. But at any rate, it was
an interesting board. Coles came on the board about the time I
went up there. And Adlai Stevenson was president. That was one
of the incentives to me. But then in between the time I was
hired--I was hired, I think, in May and I went to work in
October--during that interval he had his heart attack. So I
never had the opportunity to work for him. As I said, the
interests up there were my interests. So I thought I could do
that. Also, one of the jobs any Southern Regional Council
director has is raising money, which I'd never done before. In
the four or five years I was executive director I had to make
more trips up to New York looking for money, and of course, got
to know thereby several of the foundation people. But in the
process, I'd come to have a very high estimation of what money
could do, and a realization that without it, you just couldn't
make much headway. So moving from running an agency in the South
to being able to handle money that would go into the South seemed
to me to be a good thing to do.
RK: Yeah, a lot less headaches in some ways [laughter].
LD: Well, yeah. Well, there's no getting away from it. I
don't know what the civil rights movement would have done without
money from the North. Up until 1965 really. . . .
END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A
START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B
LD: Which was to funnel money into voter registration work
by black groups, civil rights groups. But SRC became the
coordinator of that primarily because we could handle the money.
You couldn't give money then, I mean, foundation money could not
go to King or to the NAA. They just didn't have tax exemption.
In the later half of the 1960s, there was a great splurge, a
great proliferation of tax exemptions by civil rights groups. I
think nearly all of them. King got his own. The NAACP set up a
tax exempt affiliate and so forth. So the demands on
foundations, which had been fairly, well, much less complicated
up to the middle of the 1960s, became much more so. You just had
many more claimants. One of the strongest programs which King
ever had, maybe the strongest in the sense of being a sort of
continuing activity, was what was called a Citizenship Education
Program, which was based over in Dorchester, Georgia, MacIntosh
County, where they brought people in from all around the South
for training, literacy training, and teaching them how to go back
and give other people literacy training. Much of the impetus for
that had begun at Highlander, and the first teachers down there
had been taught up at Highlander, people like Septima Clark.
That program could not be funded directly to King. It was funded
through the United Church of Christ. The Field Foundation put up
all the initial money. Andy Young was brought from, he was an
assistant pastor some place in Newark. He was recruited and
brought down there. That was his job. He didn't do it. I mean,
he went and worked for King, but he was paid to run that program.
I guess he did do it, but King just found him more valuable in
Atlanta. But that chugged on for years, always through the
United Church, until finally they got their own tax exemption,
but by this time I was up there. We took the church out of the
picture. Made the grant directly to Citizenship, whatever they
called it. But that was just an example of the new status of a
lot of the groups, black led groups, which came out from under
the wings of, well, in that case, came out from under the wings
of a predominantly white church.
RK: Why did they not have this status? Was it difficult to
get or did people just not. . . ?
LD: Well, I think it's partly a matter of things were new,
organizations were new. It was all a mysterious field, tax
exemption. I think also, maybe Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy
had something to do with this, I don't know. It began to be
easier to get tax exemptions. We had to get a special ruling for
the Voter Education Project, which had never. . . .
NB: I'm curious. Back in the mid-'50s ( )
civil rights and then poverty and there's still the vision of
opportunity ( ). And then you went on to the Field
Foundation and began looking at issues from the perspective of
someone who's looking for good ideas to fund. How did your own
vision of moving from the concept of opportunity to what is to
come, what happened that your ideas about the problems of poverty
and one responds, how did those sort of change in your Field
Foundation move? How did those sort of ripen?
LD: Well, I think with me it was a very gradual process. I
just, honest to Pete, had not read a whole lot. I had not
studied economics, I mean these issues of the poor. I remember
when Oscar Lewis' book on the Culture of Poverty came out, I
didn't like it. I'm not sure I like it now either, but I didn't
like the kind of talking down. Maybe I misread it, but it seemed
like he was talking down to people. You know, I don't come from
an affluent background myself. Didn't have any false illusions
about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps or any of that kind
of thing, or yeoman independence. I never believed in that, but
I always, I think, had a little identification with poor people
because [laughter] I came from 'em. But I began to do a good bit
more reading, and I began, up in New York, to meet a lot of
people whom I hadn't met before. This word, opportunity, I'm a
little hesitant about saying this because I don't know just where
the social scientists, what the clarifications are right now, but
one kind of opportunity theory is at least suggested by what I
said about Secretary Worth. You knock down discrimination and
the opportunities are there. There's another kind associated
with people like Dick Cloward, whom I got to know after I got to
New York--and I still think a lot of Dick, I do think a lot of
Dick--that old Mobilization for Youth Project, which had a great
impact upon the whole poverty program. But opportunity theory
for Cloward meant more than just knocking down the legal barrier.
It meant making sure that access was there, and that the person
was equipped to go through it. Anyway, as I said, I did a lot of
reading, and I met people I hadn't met before. I met and I
talked and I got to know some people that I had known before,
like Kenneth Clark. Then I got to see a lot of things like that.
You know that book? It's a very bad book. It's a bad book.
That's a new edition. The old edition is over there. But it's a
bad book about a good subject. The subject is the Child
Development Group of Mississippi, the Mississippi Headstart
Program. With Polly Greenberg, Jan Wright claimed to be
godmother of, and Marian Edelman. That's where her first work
with Marian Edelman. Marian had gone back to Mississippi in
1964, something like that. She'd gone to Mississippi, not back.
She wasn't from there. But she became the legal counsel for the
CDGM. I got to know her very well. But working with those
Mississippi Headstart programs and their battles during
1966-67-68 was a tremendously educational thing for me. I got a
deepened respect for the rural and semi-rural, poor black of the
deep South, but also a deepened respect for, and I think
conviction about, the possibilities of poor people, given the
right kind of support, taking decisive steps in their own
interests. I think those Headstart programs out in Mississippi,
I can't claim that I've stayed up with them, they just struck me
as being really good illustrations of the possibilities for
governmental action, governmental support, federal action,
federal support, on behalf of the poor. The black people out
there could not put those programs together by themselves. Even
if you'd given them the money, they couldn't have done it. They
had to have a degree of guidance and had to be given a sense of
understanding of what can be accomplished and what purposes you
might want. But then they had to be left to do it. I think the
Headstart Program, as I worked with it out in Mississippi, was
the one truly valid expression of citizen participation, or
community action that the Poverty Act talked about. Because the
goal was there. It was a fairly simple goal, namely, take these
kids, do something nice with these kids. Teach them brush their
teeth. Teach them to come to class with clean hands. Give them
some motor instruction. Give them a little bit of cognitive
instruction. Get them ready for the first grade. These were not
[laughter] cosmic goals.
NB: Right, that was pretty concrete.
LD: And people could understand these things.
NB: This was an example of a kind of successful partnership
between federal programs and the people themselves.
LD: Between people and government, yeah.
NB: What was the role of philanthropy in this?
LD: Well, I don't know. Our role, the Field Foundation's
role, was that government cut off the funding for CDGM and we had
to assist CDGM in the battle to get themselves refunded. And for
about twelve months, maybe thirteen, the CDGM offshoot, called
the Friends of the Children of Mississippi, was without any
funds, unsupported. It's now one of the biggest Headstart
Programs in the country. Then even that, even after everybody
got their funds, because we were involved, I don't know, we gave
Friends of Children of Mississippi some training money. Sent
some of the teachers off for training. We set up a training
program at Tougaloo for Headstart teachers. I don't know whether
it continues. Some of these teachers didn't have much in the way
of--you know, they were good, they could do it--but they didn't
have, they would have been better off if they'd had a little more
training. So we got a program set up at Tougaloo to bring them
in for training. Give them some kind of certificate. So there
were still things for foundations, philanthropy, to do.
NB: But initially, if I heard you correctly, it was like
the Field Foundation sort of came in and bailed out--I mean,
after the government bailed out, you came in and sort of pugged,
as opposed to sort of initiated with the notion that federal
funding would take it over later. This was the reverse of that.
LD: Headstart, yeah. Headstart was created under the
Economic Opportunity Act. I don't think it was ever. . . .
NB: There was no forerunner of that, like a smaller. . .
LD: This woman, as a matter of fact, that crazy woman,
Polly Greenberg, she was sent South. Set up Headstart. I mean,
they did things in that kind of way in 1965. Polly, go down and
set up Headstart. Actually, she got a hold of me. I was still
at SRC then. We had turned our offices over to her one Saturday
and we brought people in from all around the South. People came
from Georgia, Tennessee, all scattered around. And she's going
around, "Now, you fill in that blank, you fill in that blank."
Writing [laughter] these damn applications there for hundreds of
thousands of dollars. Carried them back up to Washington. That
was the beginning of southern Headstart. She herself got in love
with Mississippi, and the program out there, CDGM. She quit
working for the government and went out there. Of course,
because that program immediately came into opposition with
Senator Stennis and Senator Eastland. And I'd say, it's a
classic story. Sargeant Shriver was catching so much heat from
the Mississippi political structure, that he wanted to get rid of
CDGM. The smart way to do it was to create another group. He
got all these great liberals in Mississippi--Hodding Carter, Owen
Cooper, Aaron Henry, whatnot-- to put together a new group, and
took the CDGM money away from them. And that's when. . . .
RK: That's when you stepped in.
LD: That's when the battle began at CDGM.
RK: I wonder if there were other experiences that were the
opposite. Like Neil was saying, where you--I mean, what kind of
proposals that were coming in from the South and what kind of
funding possibilities, say in the period of the late '60s, are
you seeing? Is it a matter of trying to fund innovative, new
programs that are trying to deal with some of these problems?
Are you doing more in terms of kind of funding projects and
programs that are ongoing? Are you trying to stimulate and
energize? I know that the Ford Foundation, for instance, was at
times trying to, through the North Carolina Fund from a little
earlier period of time, George Esser and people were trying to do
something that the federal government can't do, which is to put
funds into innovative and kind of risky projects and programs
that maybe have some kind of chance of developing some kind of
workable alternative to things. I don't know whether they did
much of that, but that was one image of what they were trying to
do, at least.
LD: Yeah. It may be because I never controlled the kind of
money that Ford Foundation had, but I developed a conviction that
government and philanthropy are two different things. I never
thought you could create new structures like that. I'll tell
you, I've always been skeptical and I remain skeptical of this
so-called community action, community organization type thing,
that Ford has delighted in doing. But I don't know, I think the
main service that foundations can perform is to be responsive.
That doesn't mean that you don't think sometime and wish that you
could put your own ideas into effect. That doesn't mean you can't
stimulate sometimes, thought you've got to be very careful, I
think, about it. It's not hard, when you're sitting, holding a
checkbook, to persuade some people that a good thing to do is
such and such. They'll do it, and sometimes it doesn't work so
well. But we worked with, I think Field Foundation, so far as I
know, we made the first grant that the Federation of Southern
Coops ever got. We stayed with them, and they shortly began
receiving governmental money, not shortly, but they did. I think
I once could have answered you with more detail, but I know that
there were a number of other groups active in the South to which
we were the original contributors, not only in the South but the
Southwest, too. I know we made the first grants to the Southwest
Voters Group, which moved the VEP idea out to the Southwest and
did a lot better, Willie Velasquez and those people. But we
didn't dream up the Southwest Voters. We didn't dream up the
Federation of Southern Coops. I would like to think that out of
conversations we early on had, that they may have picked up a
decent idea here or there from us. But the initiative was always
theirs. I don't know, I've been around now foundations and
philanthropy for some time, and I just think that's the best role
that foundations can play, is to be responsive. Luckily, this is
still a civilization and a society which contains the germs of
creativity. People do have ideas. People do want to do things.
I hung around the Ford Foundation a while myself, and the people
up there, you hire a bunch of bright people, mainly young. What
are they going to do? Well, they have ideas (
) [laughter]. They want to start things. Sometimes that can be
very troublesome, frankly.
NB: Your skepticism over their ( ). Is that
skepticism linked to the fact that that concept was born within
the Ford Foundation among the younger people? ( )
What is it about that that you don't like?
LD: Well, even if you're as big as the Ford Foundation, it
is very difficult to have decisive impact on the economics of a
significantly large section of the poor. Steve Suits was out
here a couple of weeks ago, and we argued about this a little
bit. I just do not know of a truly successful community, what do
you call it, enterprise, community development project. I just
don't. Maybe MACE out in Mississippi. I think we may have
[laughter] made a first draft of MACE. It started before the
Ford Foundation saw it, and it originated with the same bunch of
radical kids, and they were kids then, who thought up CDGM. I
don't know, Neil, we were talking a little while ago about the
basic situation of the American poor, and my feeling is that it's
a structural situation. If that's so, and I think it is,
community development enterprises which have the sole purpose and
intent of somehow linking this segment of people who happen to be
in this isolated pocket, linking them with the mainstream, it
just doesn't work. It works as long as the outside money
continues to pour in there. I don't know really where else the
success stories are. Where's George Esser and these Gray Areas
programs that the Ford Foundation under Ylvisaker created? I
certainly have not studied them, but the most famous were down at
Philadelphia. The ones I knew the most about were either the
North Carolina Fund here or the big program in Philadelphia and
New Haven, Connecticut. Are these success stories?
RK: This is going to carry this discussion to another
extreme, but one argument you could make here is that one of the
things it does is it takes a lot of our attention away from what
you were saying, from the more fundamental issues that we ought
to be dealing with which are the basic structure of the economy
and the political relationship of poor people to, I guess, people
who control the economy in ways. And that you can keep running
around, you can keep spending money. We can keep spinning our
wheels, thinking, well, if we just get this one little health
clinic here or if we just get this one school going here, or if
we set up a sewing machine factory here, if we just a little bit
more farm land for black farmers and figure out some kind of
alternative crop for them to grow, that somehow we're eventually
going to solve the problem when we're still. . . . I mean, we're
really deceiving ourselves from what the larger issues are.
LD: Setting up that clinic is a good thing to do. Setting
up that sewing machine factory is a good things to do, so long as
you don't think that that clinic is going to get outside itself.
What it's going to do is take care of sick people, and that's a
good thing to do, especially where sick people didn't have
anything else to take care of them.
NB: ( )
LD: That's right.
NB: Now, how important, you've written and talked about the
way in which policy makers, the way in which economists, the way
in which the rest of us usually visualize the poor. You
mentioned Oscar Lewis, the talking down, which I would share
that. The economists perhaps who don't, just the language. How
important do you think it is, the way we ( ). It's
their behavior that's wrong, not the fact that ( )
economy. You've written about that. How at this point in your
life, is that still in your mind a very fundamental issue that
needs to be addressed if any significant change is going to come
about?
LD: Yeah. Is what, behavior?
NB: The way in which we conceive of the poor and blaming
( ).
LD: I don't know. I had a depressing experience on a trip
this week up to Washington. My wife went with me, so we drove
up. I don't know how familiar you all are with the trip from
here to Washington.
RK: [Laughter]
LD: But finding a place to eat on I-95, I haven't
succeeded. Going up the other day, at lunch time we stopped at a
Holiday Inn on the south side of Petersberg just before you got
to the toll road. Coming back yesterday, we stopped at a Ramada
on the north end of Richmond just before you get to the toll
road. Well, these were two very unfortunate eating experiences.
RK: [Laughter]
LD: The service was awful. The food was not anything. At
least at the Ramada, the men's room was filthy! I haven't been
in such a filthy restroom. And both of these places were black
run. I tell you, I just . . . . Makes me feel depressed. The
same way that I feel whenever I read about some murder taking
place in Durham. I quickly hope it wasn't by a black man again.
I don't know what the Holiday Inn or Ramada does. Don't they
train their people before they turn over a franchise to them? I
don't know. I don't know, Neil, [laughter] most of my own black
friends are, you know, middle class, solid achievers, whatnot,
and that's probably the case with most people that we know. The
Japanese have now elevated to the level of statecraft the
complaint that's been going on now for several decades that
blacks don't do as well as Koreans or Cubans or what have you.
I've always thought they did about as well as Appalachian whites.
I think the problem, this kind of problem that the Japanese are
talking about or that we talk about or we compare black economic
performance with that of Koreans or Chinese or whatnot, I think
black people in the United States think so much like white
people. They just think the way we think. They're the most
integrated in the sense that they've integrated themselves so
psychologically--I'm getting into your field now and I
shouldn't--but psychologically they've integrated themselves into
the American public. So they don't think about group elevation.
They don't think about all the blacks working together like all
the Koreans. They work together. You and I don't think that
way. We don't think about all blonde haired fellows working
together or whatnot. They don't think that way. They think just
the way they've picked up from us over three hundred years, and
it doesn't help them move economically, as well as some other
breeds. I think it is very important how we think about the
blacks. I think what the country is so much in danger of doing
right now is to think of the black as the rapist, the murderer.
You know, you weep when more grounds are given for thinking that
way. It's a strange and very sad and very tragic kind of return,
because, you know, the black as the rapist was the Reconstruction
view. If we're back to that now, it is a very, very hard thing.
The problem being also if we're back to that now, we've back
with maybe more grounds for being there than was the case during
the Reconstruction period. Black behavior in the ghetto is like
people who live in ghettos [laughter]. I read this book. You
may have read this book by Lehman. The Promised Land. The book
irritated me badly in a lot of ways, but it's a good book. And
his description of the Chicago ghetto is very powerful, and I
think probably very, very accurate. You know, I'd like to think,
in an airy sort of way, about behavior being tied in with the
values they learned from a violent society and war mongering
people and so forth and all that. And, you know, I think there's
something to that obviously. But it's not the whole story by any
means. I don't know what the whole story is. Our schools are
certainly not doing it right. But the burden that has been put
upon our schools in the last twenty years is just too great. So
I don't have any answers. It's a very mixed up, as everything
about the United States is maybe, there's a very mixed up set of
reactions towards blacks. I mean we idolize some of them, you
know, these basketball players, Jesus. They're idols. The
American public doesn't seem to have any problem at all with
liking and admiring black entertainers including those who act
like white people, like Bill Cosby. Seem to be able to accept
that, fine. But we're making, and maybe some of our black middle
class are making the same judgment, that the lower ranks of the
blacks are not just troublesome, but they're a real menace to our
civilization and almost beyond recall. This word under-class, I
resisted that word for a long time, but you have to use it
because everybody else does. If the term means anything, and of
course, the term does get used very loosely as well as carefully,
but if the term is going to be used carefully, it has got to mean
that you're saying there is a class of people which is beyond
being effected by upward currents in the economy and the society.
Well, maybe there are. I just can't bring myself to believe
that. Even today, there's probably no group of Americans who
gets more attention from the public than do the people living,
say, in a big city ghetto. I mean, the police, the social
services, the schools, the welfare department, they're in touch
with government all the time, much more than you and I are. But
it doesn't, I don't know. I keep insisting that the fundamental
problem is jobs in this country. There are not enough of them,
and there aren't. But there are people who will even say, and
I've heard Kenneth Clark almost say this, that there's this
generation who you'll just have to wipe off and forget. But I
don't believe that. It is just wrong for us to have a society in
which there is not enough work to go around. And it's wrong to
have a society in which people are economically a burden,
superfluous. This society could get along better economically if
you lopped off a couple of million people there at the bottom.
They are a drag. The only economic service they perform is as
consumers. And you know, I just think that's an immoral
situation and it's also an impolitic situation. It can't last.
NB: You think most of our policies though are formed, even
the policy ( )?
LD: Yeah, I think so. Pay them off. Pay them to keep
quiet. Part of the problem with that is that they're not keeping
quiet. I don't think there's any doubt about that. Our welfare,
Clarence ( )'s view, our welfare program's have been
largely designed--nobody in his right mind can believe the
American welfare programs are a way out of poverty. They're
[laughter] just not designed to lift the person out of poverty.
NB: ( ) continually
produces the results ( ) we're not gaining any
ground. How would that vision have to change? What would we as
a group of people working across international boundaries have to
imagine? What would our vision have to be in order to shift
policies in a way that might be something different? How do we
get from the burden perspective to another perspective? What
would that perspective be?
RK: He asks the hard questions, doesn't he [laughter]?
LD: Well, I think that's a hard question but it's also one
that has to be asked of all of us. You have to get a different
view of what a successful economy consists of. Never mind for
the moment about a successful school system or anything else, but
what's a successful economy? I'd like to see us begin to define
that in terms of employment, opportunities for public or
productive work. At any rate, I'd like to see us get away from
the way we think now. It just continues to blow my mind that
people like the ones who rule us can talk about prosperity while
there are billions of people unemployed. We do intellectual
tricks. Economists, not run of the mill social reformers, but
economists used to define full employment as being employment of
everybody but three to four percent. They don't do that anymore.
Full employment now is defined at some place like 94, maybe 93%.
We just defined out. We talk now about recessions. I don't
remember hearing that word recession before, well, I don't know
when I first started hearing it. But you didn't hear that word
in the '30s or '40s. People talked about depressions and panics
and crises, but the economists came along and created a new
concept called a recession and they defined it. It's a purely
arbitrary, abstract definition. Recession is two successive
quarters when the GNP drops. So now you have this big argument.
Are we in recession? Are we not in recession? We can't tell
whether we're in recession or not until six months later when you
look--that's crazy. The old debate about whether we're in a
recession is a debate about whether we're in something that meet
or doesn't meet [laughter] academic economist's classification.
It doesn't make any. . . .
END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B
START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A
RK: One of the other questions, we were trying to think the
other day about what to do at this conference. We're going to
bring all these people like yourself, people from the Federation
of Southern Coops and MACE, communities in the mountains, Penn
Center, day care activists, educators, health care people, and
stuff like that, and kind of talk about what we're going to try
to get out of it. We're going to spend this money and bring
these people together for two or three days. What do we want to
come out of that. What do we want to know at the end of that
time that we didn't know. And I'm sure you've run dozens of
things and been to hundreds of them, and I'm not sure that this
is any different. Maybe the cast of characters won't even be all
that different either. I guess one of the things that we were
trying to think about, we were trying to go back and look at the
history of people's experiences and see what kinds of lessons we
could draw from it. This whole thing about these community
action and community development, I mean, I think that's a very,
particularly given the focus that so many of these organizations
have, it's one of those things that we need to talk about it and
be very clear about. At least, what the limitations are or to
what extent they can bridge some of these divisions to expand in
different ways. I was over talking to Mary Mountcastle at MDC.
She and another person were helping us conceptualize. One of the
things that we were talking about, observations we were making,
was in the '60s you had foundation and government support, and
kind of in some way a moral concern by the country, however
widespread that was. It lasted six years, seven years, or
something. And it's not something that you have today. But what
you have in its place are large numbers of grassroots
organizations that have sprung up since that period of time to
try to do something in all their different kinds of ways. And
you have a foundation for grassroots and community types of
activities that you didn't have in the '60s. It just didn't
exist in that same way. We were kind of wondering what
difference that would make today if, all of a sudden, you had
federal programs or more foundation support or the kind of
commitment on the part of the nation to start dealing with those.
What would you think about that characterization? Would it make
any difference, or what difference would it make today if we had
some kind of infusion of energy and money, resources, commitment?
I mean, you've answered that in some ways I know, I realize.
LD: Well, you'd also have to have an infusion of ideas and
goals, and that, in some ways, is harder even than the money. I
don't have to say it, but the goal of getting voting rights is a
different goal than getting a decent place in the economic sun.
So we're coming to an era of intangibilities. This man, Colin
Powell, a great black success story--I pretty well think one
general's like another general [laughter]--but he has to make an
annual report to Congress. You've probably seen this in the
paper. I was actually looking at his statement the other day
[laughter], you know, Communism is dead. The Cold War's over.
We don't have to arm against the Soviet Union any more, but now
the enemy is, and these are his words, "uncertainty and
instability." And we have to be militarily prepared to meet
uncertainty and instability. Well, that's crazy [laughter]. If
you're going to meet the Soviet Union, that's at least a finite
thing [laughter]. You can size that one. There's no possible
way of sizing up instability and uncertainty, you know
[laughter]. The needs are infinite. Well, I don't know how I
got into that, except that [laughter] we are deprived here, too,
of finite goals, like getting people registered to vote.
RK: If we were trying to devise an agenda for the future,
the near future, that came out of this conference, you know,
something we could at least think about we might do. I mean,
would it help mobilize people or get a greater degree of activism
if there were a set of specific goals that people involved in
these issues wanted to meet in ten years, by the turn of the
century. I mean, some realistic goals as opposed to kind of
George Bush goals of having the best educational system. I heard
on the news today that school children in the United States in
math and science, in ( ) or some system, Spain, all
these Third World countries test better than American students on
average now. We're in 20th place or something. I mean, some
realistic goals, would that make a difference?
LD: Well, I think you have two key words there. One is
goal and the other is realistic. An interesting thing would
be--whether you could do it at this conference or not, or whether
it's even possible--to examine how realistic are some goals that
we might all desire. I might say, for instance, that a goal that
I would like to see is the preservation of what's left of the
black farm base in the South. Is that realistic? Can the
deterioration be stopped? I don't know. Yeah, I think that
another kind of goal that you might examine the realistic quality
of would be whether the family farm, either of blacks or whites,
can be preserved. But then [laughter] the big problem would be
finding a family farm. I don't know. The main issue continues
to come back to whether a person, born into this country, can
with any realism look forward to a life of some self reliance and
independence. That may be very fuzzy, but I think that's what we
all have in mind.
RK: I think that's well put.
NB: Well, you've talked about this some. I can't remember
which book it was that made reference about that FDR document of
1941. It was presented three days before the war, and there are
four or five goals and objectives. If I remember correctly, you
compared that against some of the more recent stuff (
). Those are four or five pretty good basic notions
that we might take a look at those or read those.
LD: I think what you're referring to, I have dug up the old
National Resources Report of 1941, before we went into the war,
which was completely forgotten after that. There's Roosevelt's
own State of the Union Address in 1944, '45, where he talked
about, "We must move ahead now." He was confident that the war
was about to end. "We must move ahead now to establish the
social rights"--the right to work, the right to health, and so
forth. I think it would be wonderful if the American people
[laughter] sort of reevaluated themselves in terms of the kind of
idealism which Roosevelt could, in his time, think was realistic.
He was no visionary. He tended to be a very practical man. He
thought practically, and he could see those things as possible
now. I think that would [laughter], for my money, be a great
framework, Roosevelt's 1944 State of the Union Address.
NB: Those were four or five very concrete goals that were
put out there that would take a particular vision. One would
have to ( ) social project and see what that entails to
perhaps have some sort of historical retrospective. Begin
perhaps with maybe the Jay Rockefeller thing that just came out.
When you read those and you look at ( ), there's
not a whole lot of difference in what's good about this and
what's good about that. Again, ( ) there's not a lot
that's changed. There's not a lot that's changed in what the
problems are, how we look at the problems. I think the goals
would ( ), and then what are some of the barriers. I
think this is where, in my mind at least, some of this perception
stuff kicks in. If you look at poor people as burdens ( )
you do what the Japanese have suggested, lop them up. We'll be
better off without them. Or X-percent of the people are going to
be unemployed, then this is full employment. I mean, what the
implications of those are vis-a-vis the goals of the economy.
( ) I may be just over
whatever, but I think it really is a question of
conceptualization and vision. Statistically, you get two
different ( ). Poverty amongst the elderly has been
reduced, if not statistically eliminated, over a relatively short
period of time. We all know individuals who are poor and old,
but that's an example of an effort that kind of worked. But we
haven't done that with kids. ( ) I don't
know.
LD: Have you read this book by Lehman about the promised
land? [Laughter] I used this line with my own review of the
thing. That woman, who he follows through, she finally makes it.
She gets on Social Security [laughter]. And that's really all
that somebody in her situation can look forward to. She has got
to survive to age 65. She has to deal with the ghetto
for--anyway, that's a bitter prognosis. Well, you see, Social
Security came out of Roosevelt's administration. And when was
it, back in the early '70s, when we built the cost of living
increase into the Social Security, it really did make it the most
effective anti-poverty program we've got. It's maybe not fair to
the rest of the population, but, you know, there's a lot of
inequity in that now. I don't really need it. I get it. I have
a notion someday I'm going to give it back. I don't know. Maybe
I will. Maybe I won't. And it has taken, well, you can look at
the figures. The elderly in this country used to be
disproportionately disadvantaged. They're now disproportionately
advantaged.
NB: ( )
LD: Well, yeah, I think so. The fellow who wants to be
president, I heard him talking the other night. Kerry kept
saying National Health Insurance, and that, even though it would
cost 264 billion dollars a year, it would cost that in federal
outlay, but it would probably save. I think he may well be
right. At any rate, I don't think we can continue to afford this
kind of health system we have, which is one that truly sets
people at each other. In addition to all the gross inadequacies
of it and the cost of it--and it must cost like the devil, I
mean, just the paper work--it does have the effect of putting
different segments of our population at each other's throats. I
mean, the federal government and the doctors of this country
become adversaries. Well, that's no way to run it. Not only
that, but we put different groups of sick people at each other.
I mean, this group wants money for AIDS, and this group wants
money for cancer, and this group. . . . I mean, we shouldn't
support AIDS at the expense of supporting cancer, or vice versa.
And to have different sets of sick people lobbying against each
other, it's just wrong. And we have a system which is just, you
have to have some ticket to get into it. You have to be old, or
you have to be wounded, or you have to be especially poor. It's
intellectually, but also politically, corrupt.
RK: ( ) the idea of taking that document--thinking
alone and thinking about as we do this discussion of what the
future is--is talking about some real possibilities. Thinking
about particular goals in the context of those, as opposed to
just vague generalizations like ending poverty or fighting
poverty. I mean, those are all in their nice mobilizing and
phrases at some point in time, but they don't. . . . I mean, I
think that's one of the reasons the civil rights movement was
effective in the period of time it was. They had a very concrete
set of goals that were very obvious to people. Jobs is one, and
health care is another, basic education, another. If you can put
these down in front of people with, you know, these should be
rights that people have as citizens of this country, as opposed
to everybody should be well off. I mean, I think the phrase--I
forget what the phrase you used a little while ago--but a simple,
a kind of a decent life or simple decency.
LD: I said could realistically expect to be self-reliant.
RK: ( )
LD: I think all the terms that I, you know, be realistic to
be able to expect. Well, more power to you. How long will this
conference be in Greenville?
RK: We're going to start Friday and end Sunday. So just a
couple of days.
LD: Where will it be?
RK: Greenville.
LD: Holiday Inn?
RK: ( ). We're going to stay at the
Ramada Inn. Hope it's better [laughter]. We've sent someone out
there to see it.
LD: I think Ramada Inns are usually okay.
RK: If Moyers comes out and films this, this will make it a
little bit different. Also there's the potential to get on
television, and the potential of reaching ( )
an audience and have some kind of impact.
LD: There's a fellow named Mike Clark who was one of John
Gavena's predecessor's at Highlander, and most recently has been
executive director at Friends of the Earth, an environmental
group, who left that, just screaming, about six months ago, but
is now working on a grant that Moyers is responsible for. Moyers
is connected with a foundation up in New Jersey called ( ).
They just gave Mike some money essentially to be helpful to
other environmental groups around the country. So he's drifting
around. You were talking about Moyers, Mike might be helpful to
you, getting him interested.
RK: Because I'd thought about having him come to the
conference.
LD: What do you mean?
RK: Mike.
NB: You know him?
RK: I know who he is. I don't know him. But I wasn't sure
whether I was going to. We don't have money for that many people
( ).
LD: Maybe he could use his own grant money.
RK: Yeah, to come down. Well, maybe we should stop.
END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A
END OF INTERVIEW
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