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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview G-0075, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Leslie Dunbar served as the executive director of the Southern Regional Council (SRC) from 1961 to 1965. Before that, he was a professor of political science at Emory University. In this interview, he describes an event at Emory in the late 1940s when he invited Bill Boyd, an African American political science professor from Atlanta University, to come speak. Dunbar describes this as an experience that piqued his awareness of racial issues and discrimination in the South. He subsequently became increasingly involved in the civil rights movement and eventually went to work for the SRC. Dunbar discusses leadership in the SRC, focusing particularly on Harold Fleming and Ralph McGill, before his tenure as director. According to Dunbar, the role of the SRC was to serve as an example and leader in changing racial attitudes in the South. As the director, he sought to herald "a great historic mind-changing." Dunbar describes how the SRC interacted with the federal government during these years and especially emphasizes what he saw as a lack of interest in civil rights on the part of the Kennedy administration. After the setbacks the movement faced in Albany, Georgia, in the early 1960s, Dunbar explains how the SRC increasingly sought to work with other African American organizations rather than with the federal government. One accomplishment of the SRC that Dunbar emphasizes is the creation of the Voter Education Program, through which the SRC helped to raise and distribute funds to both national and local civil rights groups for the purpose of voter education and registration. Shortly after Dunbar left the SRC to go work for the Field Foundation in New York City, the SRC began to develop conflict within the organization and filed for bankruptcy. Nevertheless, Dunbar concludes by applauding the SRC's role in helping to push through some of the major changes in racial segregation and discrimination in the South during the 1960s.
Former executive director of the Southern Regional Council (SRC) Leslie Dunbar discusses his involvement in the civil rights movement, focusing on changes that occurred in the early 1960s. Dunbar describes the SRC as an organization dedicated to changing people's attitudes about race. He emphasizes the SRC's attempts to work with the federal government—particularly the Kennedy administration—and other civil rights organizations, especially in the Voter Education Program.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
I'm not a person who has great dramatic things happen to him. I don't
think I could ever be converted on a road to any Damascus. So I don't
want to give you the wrong impression about this story I'm about to tell
you. It meant a lot to me, but I think it also tells a little bit about
what Emory was like then, and, more important, about what we all were
like in the late forties and early fifties. Mentioning that Political
Science Club—that's what we called it, it was a club of political
science majors—reminded me of another thing that happened. I suggested
to these majors that we have somebody from Atlanta University. They had
never thought of that. Bell Wiley has helped me. Bell used to go out to
various things at the Atlanta University Center, and he took me with him
once or twice. So I'd met a couple people there.
I called him up, and I asked him to come out and talk. He said, "What do you want me to talk about?" That sort of stumped me. I don't know quite how I got through with that, but I got over the idea somehow that he should come out and talk with us about race relations. So he came. He was probably in his late thirties at that time. He was a cold, very reserved fellow. He had a certain stature around the city. Blacks thought of him as a prime intellectual. He died about two years later, of leukemia.
He had this manner about him. He was one of those people who just
demanded, by his manner, to be treated like a peer. There was nothing
"southern" about him at all. He'd gone to the University of Michigan,
and he was a specialist in international relations. As he told me later,
he had seen where Ralph Bunch went and was setting his career in the
same lines. Colonialism was a special interest. He began talking. There
was just this bunch of students and me, one evening, out there at Emory,
and I really went through a whole lot of intellectual development that
evening. As he began to talk, I knew that I should not have asked
He kept saying all these things, and I kept listening. I'd never really
thought in these terms. That was a second revelation I had, but I had
another one. It suddenly dawned on me that he hadn't said a single thing
that I needed to hear, in the sense that anything that he had said, I
could have figured out for myself if I'd ever given it one moment's
thought. If I had ever asked myself what a black man has to endure
driving his family north, I could have figured out every bit of that
scenario. But I'd never done that. He hadn't told me a thing that I
needed to be told. I've felt that way ever since, mostly, although black
people keep educating me. After very nearly every bit of education
After all this was over, Bill Boyd and I went back to my office. I'm not usually a very self-divulging person, but I felt that I should be. I said, "I want to apologize to you for asking you out here to talk about race and the South. I should have asked you out to talk about international relations, and I apologize." He was not an out-going fellow, but he sort of nodded. For the rest of the time I was in Atlanta, he was somebody I could talk with. It was really a great shame that he died. He would have been an important figure. That experience meant an awful lot to me.
What is the significance of the fact that you could have figured all that out? Do you think it shows how limited people are when they try to think about problems?
I think it shows that the existence of injustice of almost any kind in this world is something that ought to be apparent, even in detail, to a thinking person. A significant cause of the continuation of injustice is the willful blindness we have to it.
You asked me a little while ago, how I became a liberal, and I said that
I was intelligent. You said that there were intelligent conservatives. I
don't know whether I would altogether agree with that. I might,
depending on your definition of conservatism. I think that the blindness
that kept me, at that time, from knowing what a father went through
driving his children from Atlanta to Washington. . . . I wouldn't have
wanted to say it was willful. But it is willful in sort of a larger
sense, that we determine upon maximizing our
I don't think it's just a matter of intelligence that separates the people who are willing to see and the people who are not.
You could logically figure out the injustices of the system by just thinking about them.
But that wouldn't necessarily make you willing to give up your piece of private happiness in order to change things, just because you saw that they were bad.
That's right. I suppose there is a difference in people's tolerance of
injustice. Some people are willing to live in a comfortable relationship
with a level of perceived injustice, whereas to some other people, that
level would be intolerable. (omission) You can perceive injustice, but
there are finite limits to what anyone can accomplish. I think we are
more sinsible abou the finite limits to what we, as individuals, can
accomplish than to the finite limits of corporate action, when we're
part of a corporation like the American government. We need
So the summer you spent with SRC changed you?
At the end of that summer, it just didn't make any sense to go back to Mount Holyoke. I felt like I was part of this, and I wanted to come back. It just made sense to be here.
Harold Fleming was a very different sort of character than George Mitchell, wasn't he?
Yes, very different. I think, in many ways, Harold was harder to figure
out than George Mitchell. All of his instincts are conservative. Yet,
here is a guy, who, fresh out of Harvard, with his A.B. degree, came
back to his home state of Georgia, in the late nineteen forties, and
seeks a job with the Southern Regional Council, and stays at it. How do
you explain that kind of a fellow? I have a great liking for Harold. He
turned out to be a great asset to SRC. He went up there to New York and
raised all that money. He introduced an element of excellence around
that place, too. I wince sometimes when I read stuff coming out of SRC
now. People get their grammer all messed up. Harold was perfectionist.
I'm fairly good at that kind of thing myself. George, Harold, and I had
a sort of sense that, in
Why Ralph McGill?
McGill and Harold were good friends in an older man and younger man way. The fact is, it was McGill who said, "Why don't you go to work over there?" If you took Ralph McGill, and Mayor Hartsfield, and maybe one or two other people, you could say that was Harold's audience. He was always trying to make SRC the sort of organization which they would recognize as good and valuable and strong. That doesn't mean that he was following them all the way, but anything we did had to be seen by them in a good light. Part of that is that Harold imbibed McGill's strong anti-communism. Harold was not a terribly directive fellow. If Fred Routh wanted to go up to Highlander, Harold would say, "I wouldn't do it if I were you," but he didn't stop Fred from going up there.
George Mitchell had been chairman of its board for a while, and when he left and Harold took over there was an abrupt severing of all relationships with Highlander.
A person like Lillian Smith, whom McGill had this vendetta against. . . . McGill was a great man, and did much good for the South, but he also, like the rest of us, had his faults. But we had nothing to do with Lillian Smith as long as Harold was in charge.
Harold can make himself useful in ways that are just amazing. People used
to ask me, "What does Harold Fleming do, and what does the Potomac
Institute do," and I finally told Harold one day that I was going to
Do his organizational or administrative skills enable him to do that? He can just see how things should operate?
And he knows how to get people to do things. People trust Harold. I trust him. He was not a figure like George Mitchell. On the other hand, someone like Ruth Alexander disliked George. In fact, he didn't get along with women. He also was not especially liked by black people. We had a happy office there with Harold, probably happier than when I was there.
Why didn't George Mitchell get along with women?
I don't know. Ruth used to tell me he was anti-woman, and didn't believe that women could do anything. Mrs. Tilly was never very happy about George Mitchell either.
I know that in the public reports that SRC put out during the early days of Harold Fleming's tenure, that the word "professionalism" started to be used a lot. The idea seemed to be that it was necessary to be both morally right and professional about how things were done. It was a new set of values, really.
That's Harold. I always think of Harold Fleming and Jack Greenberg sort of together. You know who Jack Greenberg is? All right, here's a young guy, coming out of Columbia Law School, in the early nineteen fifties or late forties. Why does a guy, at that time, decide to go to work for the NAACP? There was none of the glory that attached to that in the sixties. Jack Greenberg did it, and he's done it ever since. His predecessor on that job sits on the Supreme Court, and two of his ex-subordinates are judges, and he'll never even make a judgeship. He continues to do it with the one thing that has distinguished the Legal Defense Fund's work, especially under Greenberg—quality. Jack Greenberg cannot stand to lose a case, which has something to do with why they won't take some cases. They don't want to lose them. Absolute quality comes out of there. The stamina of a Greenberg or of a Fleming, of just continuing at this stuff after all the glory and glamour is gone. . . . They did it in the tough days. They did it when things were much tougher than at a later time, in the forties and fifties.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
Harold Fleming didn't like to see a word like "nigger" in print. Even if we were quoting Roy Harris or some racist, he would be very reluctant to let the quote read "nigger." Usually we didn't. He had a fastidiousness about this kind of thing. He had, of course, his own moment of change during the war. Harold commanded a platoon of black soldiers.
What was your job in the SRC (Southern Regional Council)?
I went there as Research Director. We started putting out good pamphlets,
good special reports. [Laughter]
When had Harold taken over as director?
Nineteen fifty-seven.
Were you at SRC during the Little Rock crisis?
Not during the first one. The Little Rock crisis went on for several years. I was there during the rest of the school crises.
What was the relationship between SRC and things that were going on in Arkansas?
Well, why do you want to talk about Arkansas? Could we talk about one of
the other states? I was not there in 1957, but just generally after
that, the relationship was. . . . The Human Relations Council out there
was headed by Nat Griswold, who was not one of the most energetic
people, though he was a good man. It was active, more or less, in
Arkansas problems. We also had, especially while Harold was there. . . .
Harold was a close friend of Harry Ashmore. Many of Harold's friends
were newspaper guys. He was an absolute genius for working with
newspaper men. That really began SRC's role, which I was able to carry
on somewhat. But I just inherited it from Harold, being a source for the
newspapers.
We had a relationship with that women's group that emerged out there to keep the schools open. We used to have a little tension in my years there, because we felt, over in Atlanta, that we should work with groups other than, and as well as, the Councils on Human Relations, and sometimes they didn't think we should. We had a direct relationship with the "Save our Schools" groups, which emerged around the South, including that one in Little Rock, which was as good as any of the bunch.
Did you know Harry Ashmore?
Yes, but I've never known Harry well.
The reason that I was asking specifically about Arkansas is that a former student and a friend of mine is writing about the civil rights movement in Little Rock. She knew I had been doing some work on the Southern Regional Council, and she had asked me how involved SRC was in events in Little Rock. I know that there was an effort after 1959 to influence the response that communities made to school desegregation, by saying, "We must prevent another Little Rock." It became a kind of rallying cry.
Any little scrap of evidence we could put our hands on that Little Rock was suffering economically, we would use that.
How much success did you have in influencing business leaders? I know that was always a hope in that time.
Yes, it was a kind of pathetic hope, I think, and remains one. I
developed a very strong allergy, which I haven't yet gotten over, as a
matter of fact, to that whole kitsch. The phrase used to be, "reach
the
Your friend, who wants to study the Little Rock situation, could well broaden the study of the whole role of women in that school problem around the South.
I'm always a little irritated when Andy Young says, as he does about once a month, that the businessman took the leadership in the South and changed things. He even made a speech about a year ago in which he said, "Long before the Supreme Court ever handed down its decision in 1954, businessmen in the South were quietly doing this and that and the other thing." This is part of his calculated attempt to persuade South African people to do something, I think. . . .
American Corporations to do something.
Yes. But it irritates me, and annoys me, and is a perversion of everything. The record around the South, on the school question, over and over again, is that businessmen never did a damn thing until the situation had gotten to the point where dissent was allowable. That job of making dissent allowable was a job done over and over and over again by citizens' groups, which were predominantly women. That was the case at Little Rock, although I can't remember the name of the group right now.
We have an interview with Mrs. Vivian Brewer. . . .
She was great! She was a leader. . . . There was an even older woman than she, Mrs David Terry, and then under them was a whole cadre of others. And this happened all over the South. Somebody like Patt Darian cut her teeth in this work. The first time I ever met Patt Darian was when she was one of a bunch of women in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1964. And Winifred Green was one of that Mississippi group.
Where in Mississippi was Winifred Green?
Well, I associated her with Jackson. I don't know whether that was where her home was. She was married at that time, I guess Green was her married name.
There was a woman named Florence Robins, who's now, I think, the director
of the Washington, D.C. A.C.L.U. Florence used to live in Atlanta. She's
got a different name now because she's got a different husband. Her
first husband died. Florence used to live in Atlanta, and she was sort
of an ascerbic girl from New York. Her husband had a job in Atlanta.
Florence was active in things, and wrote a piece about Atlanta for [Laughter]Harper's or Atlantic, in which she
was trying to describe these women of Atlanta. I always remember one
line that she used. She said every meeting they have, they sit around
and they talk about how to reach the power structure, and after a while
you realize they're married to it.
Are there other women's groups that were important in the different states that I might not know about?
I think always in the context of the school scrap, but the group in Atlanta. . . . What was it first, Peggy?
Save Our Schools, was it?
No. It ended up being Oasis, but before that it was called something else. In Norfolk, you had the Norfolk Women's Committee for Equal something. And you had the group in Mississippi. Those groups in New Orleans were primarily women.
These were two groups working for the same thing that didn't have
anything to do with each other, and Paul Rilling was mediating
between
None that I knew of. They just felt like they were out of different social classes or something. I could never see any difference at all between them. They insisted on putting out their own literature, and holding their own meetings, making their own statements.
There was a group in Mobile—do you know Jim Woods? Well, Jim Woods wife was a leader in things down there in Mobile. Jim lost his job as a result of it.
What did the husbands of these women do? Were the women in these various groups mostly well-to-do women? Do you have any sense of what their social class was?
I think most of them were well-to-do, middle class or upper middle class. Certainly, most of the Atlanta women were. Yes, most of them were.
Why were they more outspoken than their husbands?
Well, you can answer that. [Laughter]
Your feeling is not so much that there was a real difference of opinion within families, between husbands and wives, but more that women were not as subject to economic reprisals?
I think so. Certainly, there was some reprisal that went on. Poor Jim
Woods got shoved out of Mobile. I remember a fellow who had been a
student of mine at Emory, a guy named Emory Daniel. He'd gone on to
Was Mrs. Tilly around during this time?
Mrs. Tilly was there all the time I was.
Tell me about Mrs. Tilly.
Well, what do you want to know? [Laughter]
What did you think about her? Did you get along with her?
Oh, I did, yes. How could one not get along with Mrs. Tilly? Mrs. Tilly was a presence. I didn't always know what she was going to do. She was a member of the staff of the SRC only because we were going the same place she was going. It was a different relationship than I had with any other staff person, I'll put it that way.
I remember the first time I ever met Joe Rawl. I was in Washington for
some reason, and I'd gone to dinner out at, in fact, I may have been
spending the night—do you know Daniel Pollitt?—well, Dan used to
spend [Laughter] [Laughter] [Laughter]
She really operated as an independent agent?
Oh yes, she just took on various identifications as she went along. Mrs.
Tilly's primary identification was as a Methodist woman. That was
central, and other things were. . . . But she had a great feeling about
SRC, so that's really not altogether true. I always remember Mrs. Tilly
coming in and speaking to me after the announcement was made that Harold
was leaving and I was taking his job. She said this was going to be
fine. We are going to miss Harold so much, he'd done this and he'd done
that, and she didn't know how anybody else could do it, and so forth.
And then she said, "But you, Leslie, you have got a spiritual aroma
about you." [Laughter] [Laughter]
How much connection was there between Mrs. Tilly's activities in the Fellowship of the Concerned and these Save Our Schools women's groups around the region?
Very little.
They were two separate things?
It was almost impossible to get Mrs. Tilly to articulate into something else. She was going her way. I never saw Mrs. Tilly have any problems with anybody. Of course there were in the past—Mrs. Ames. I don't think she ever went out to try to help any other group.
Did she see her function as inspiring her own group of women that would gather together?
Yes, and teaching, doing that. And actually, they did things, in their
quiet way. She could call up people, and people would do things.
Something in the old Women Against Lynching pattern. I would not be able
to say that during the 1960's, Mrs. Tilly played a strong role in things
that were going on at that time. But I think she meant an awful lot to a
lot of people. She meant a lot to a band of women, in particular, who
were not her age, but sho were well along in middle age. And she was
also a presence within the church, within the Methodist Church. She was
a factor they had to deal with. She had her various interests. The
United Nations was another interest. The fact that she had this
commitment to the United Nations was something that, in a way,
By "better," do you mean more liberal?
Yes, a little more liberal. Like Glen Memorial would have been more liberal.
One year—and she had worked for this for so long—she got her church to
agree to sponsor the annual American Association of the United Nations
meeting in Georgia. This was a great triumph, and Mrs. Tilly lived for
triumphs like that. It also involved me in what I always think back on
as one of the most poignant evenings I've ever spent. She got as speaker
Dr. Frank Graham. Well, that was another triumph. The triumph was not
getting Dr. Frank Graham, the triumph was that her
church would have Dr. Graham. Because, you know, years ago, they
wouldn't have had him there. So, he came down. I met Dr. Frank, and took
him to his hotel, and sat around and talked a bit. He said, "Well now,
who's going to be there?" I said, "I don't really know that Dr. Frank.
It's Mrs. Tilly's meeting." "Well, I'm sure my old friend, Benny Mays,
will be there." I said, "I don't think he's going to be there." He said,
"Oh, I know that any meeting of Mrs. Tilly's, Dr. Mays is there." I
said, "I don't think so." He said, "He must be invited." And I
communicated this to Mrs. Tilly, and she said, "Oh Leslie, we have to
cross one bridge at a time." I spent the next several hours mediating
between these twoher talk, you
know. It was really one of the most poignant evenings I've ever had.
When you assumed the position of Executive Director, what was your view of the Council and its role in the South? How did you contribute to it? For example, the whole thing of the use of the press, and the role of the Council as interpreting events to the press, and how important that was to the Council's role as an agent supporting change. How self-conscious was the staff of that role?
Do you get that question? Do you think of yourself as having been taught by Harold Fleming, or as following in his footsteps, or did you have a different sense of what the role of the Council should be than he did?
I think I came to have a different one. I've never been terribly good in
anything I've done at conceiving strategies and staying with them. I
think I felt in 1958, '59, and '60, that the work of the SRC was to be a
leading part of a great mind changing going on in the South. I think
that pretty well accorded with Harold's view. I think the kind of
publications I started putting out in 1959 and 1960 represented the best
I could think of at the time, of the sorts of things we could do along
that way. I think, at the time I took over, in 1961, that was still my
view. We were primarily aimed at the white South. We were working within
a context of a great historic mind-changing. Our role was to be
something of a guide to it. So far as I might have ever formalized
anything, that would have been it, I think.
Things had been very hard and very tough, but spirits were lifted. And then Kennedy brought in a lot of new people, and people suddenly began coming down and talking to you. There was a whole elan that developed there.
At the annual meeting in November, 1960, a number of the Kennedy people
came down. I think, a year before that, Harold had managed to bring the
Field Foundation down to Atlanta for a board meeting. Stevenson, who was
then President of the Field Foundation, came. That was a kind of
invigorating thing to a lot of people at SRC. It was these good people
from the North coming down to cheer you on. By 1960, it was different.
Harris Wofford and a few others came through Atlanta, and you suddenly
felt that you were on the same side as the people running the
country.
Sometime near the date of Kennedy's election, Harold got a little extra
money from the Rockefeller Brothers. We put together this project, which
eventuated in a publication you may have seen around, called The Federal Executive and Civil Rights. It was a very
heady thing for me, because I did that. Harold got the money, and he
said we'd do this thing, and he asked me to do it. The process of
putting that together was, to me, almost more important than the result.
I got Dan Pollitt to do a first paper, and then I recruited twenty or
thirty people to review Pollitt's paper. Then we had a meeting up in
Washington, where I got about a dozen people to come. We all sat around
for a whole day at the Hotel Willard, talking about it. That meeting was
attended by several people who were, by that time, in the Kennedy
Administration. There was Harris Wofford, and Adam Yarmalinsky, and Berl
Bernhard, who was a likable fellow. I can't remember whether Burke was
there or not. Anyway, we began to feel like we were part of that thing
going on up there. And Harold left to set up at the Potomac Institute,
his main function was to be a sort of private outpost for the
government, which is the way it was until Kennedy was assassinated.
Was he encouraged to do that by key members?
Well, I don't know. It was Stephen Currier's idea, but Currier was always
talking so closely with people like Burke Marshall and others that, who
knows? This is parenthetical, but the main
I think, by the time I took the directorship, I was not only thinking of SRC as playing a part in the mind-changing in the South. I was seeing it also as being part of this thing coming out of Washington, and as being supportive of the leadership coming from there. I changed my mind about that at Albany, when I got into conflict with the Department of Justice. It was my emancipation from the view that we could play a role supportive of. . . .
Did other things happen along the way before Albany that began to change your mind, or was it a very sudden change?
Well, Albany was not sudden. Albany went on. I can remember once saying to Burke Marshall over the phone that he must stop trying to play a mediating role, or at least to stop asking me to be part of it. I didn't say it quite that tactlessly. Thenceforward, Burke stopped talking to me, that is, he stopped talking to me about Albany. And I think that was my emancipation from the role of being part of the government.
Can you give an example of how you did succeed, and then how the Albany thing did not?
It's become fashionable, in the way things unfortunately become
fashionable in our so-called intellectual circles, to say Albany was a
failure. Well, it may have been. But Albany was a failure, I think,
objectively, of the Department of Justice. They were new to the job—we
were all new, in a way, then. The Department, through Burke Marshall and
others, refused to exercise any kind of an official role, and tried to
be informal mediators. What I told Burke that day was to stop trying to
be a private person. Again, I won't claim that those were my words, but
that's what I was saying. "Stop trying to be a private person. You're
the Assistant Attorney General of the United States. Go down there and
act like an official." And they did not do that.
Their intention was to mediate, to settle it, to get everybody. . . .
And it did not work. People ended up in terrible frustration in Albany.
It had as much to do as anything with the souring of some of the younger
SNCC people. It had a good bit to do with embittering relationships
between SNCC and SCLC. Everybody came out of Albany feeling frustrated
as hell, mad as hell, bitter as hell. I think the Department of Justice
has a fair share of that blame.
Was Burke Marshall the main representative of the Department of Justice who was on the scene at Albany? Was Harris Wofford also there?
Harris got shunted aside very quickly. He had played a role in the
campaign. He'd been Kennedy's so-called Civil Rights Advisor. I don't
think he ever fit in with those people. I think he wanted to have the
job that Marshall got. Harris just isn't tough and all that. Anyway, he
ended up being the White House Advisor on Civil Rights. But he didn't
really have any. . . . The White House Advisor on Civil Rights was
Robert Kennedy. Robert Kennedy's advisor was Burke Marshall. Harris was
sitting
Were John Doar and John Seigenthaler in Albany?
I just don't know. I can't remember whether they were down there. Seigenthaler was a troubleshooter. He was not a lawyer, of course. He was Kennedy's aide, and just did various things, including getting his head bashed in badly in the freedom rides. I admire Seigenthaler. I like him. I suspect he was sort of a hawkish fellow, but he's a man of integrity.
I went down a year and a half ago to Atlanta for that Easter march about prisons. I was startled when I looked around the line marching, and there's John. How many other newspaper publishers just went off on their own to march against prisons in Atlanta? He's that way.
Was Burke Marshall in direct contact with SNCC and SCLC leaders that were in Albany? Did he know what was going on there?
Well, Burke is an extraordinarily intelligent guy, so I assume Burke knows what's going on wherever he is. The one thing that the Kennedy Administration meant to the civil rights people was a chain of communication. Yes, Burke talked to them. He knew them all.
Then Burke Marshall was their communication to the White House?
Oh yes. Or John Doar. John was a holdover. John was in the Civil Rights Division under Eisenhower—he was a Republican—and he was there when Robert Kennedy came in. He stayed. He's so much a kennedy. It's hard to imagine anybody more in the Kennedy pattern than John.
I never met Robert Kennedy more than three times. Did you ever hear about
that little off-the-record lunch that we had? I think this sort of
symbolizes a lot that was happening then, too. It suggests some of the
naivete, and the stupidity, and the ignorance, and everything else that
was going on. Early in 1961, Robert Kennedy asked Ralph McGill, or maybe
McGill suggested it to Kennedy, I think that's the way it happened. At
any rate, the idea was that McGill was to bring a few southerners up to
the Department to give a seminar for Robert Kennedy and some of his
leaders. So, McGill recruited a bunch of us. I think he pretty much
turned the recruiting over to Harold, who by this time, was already in
Washington. So, we went to Washington to have lunch with the Attorney
General. I can't remember everyone who went. The only black I can
remember being there was John Wheeler. I think Will Campbell was there,
and Johnny Popham was there. I think Claude Sitton was there too. There
were probably about ten-fifteen of us. We all assembled in the Attorney
General's anteroom at the appointed time, and then were led through the
Attorney General's office. It's huge, like an auditorium. He wasn't at
his desk, but we were led by that, and behind his office was the
Attorney General's private dining room. That's where we were all taken
and seated. Kennedy made his appearance, and walked around and shook
hands with everybody. My first realization was that he had a very limp
handshake. That's something I guess a lot of politicians develop,
because they don't like to get beat up. The small features of that lunch
stay in my mind more clearly than the big ones. I don't know whether we
were given seats, or whether we just sat down, but I ended up sitting
next to John Doar, whom I'd never met before. There was Kennedy and Doar
and Marshall, and
Had you written "Federal Executive and Civil Rights" before that?
Oh yes.
So that had been circulated in the Kennedy Administration?
That had been circulated. That was a big hit up there. They consumed that. We had to reprint a couple of times.
Why did they respond so positively to that? What was the impact of that report?
Because it told them to do what they wanted to do anyhow. It didn't tell them not to seek legislation, but it told them that these are things you can do without legislation, and that's what they wanted to do. They were not going to take on Congressional battles, but the White House was prepared to make a number of significant executive moves. There were some things they were not prepared to do. You know, the big agitation in 1961 and 1962 became housing. And the slogan became, "The President could do this with a stroke of the pen." That phrase, "stroke of the pen," became a slogan. There were things they were not prepared to do, and housing was one of them. But there were a lot of things they were prepared to do. Our little book itemized these things for them—"things that are available to you with your powers." I know it had a lot of influence, because they did a lot of those things. We put out one the next year, in 1963, which chronicled how much of that had been done. It was pretty impressive.
Were you talking to anyone in the Administration as you were writing "Federal Executive and Civil Rights?"
Well, we got it out before they got into office. No. Except at that
meeting that I told you about at the Hotel Willard, where we had about a
dozen people go over the thing. There were a couple of them there. No, I
think I was very independent in writing the thing. There was also a
sense that they wanted all of this, "Tell us what to do, and we'll do
it,"
I think after Albany, though, I continued to see SRC as playing this mind-changing role. And I continued to see SRC as playing a role supportive of other people's leadership, but the other people were no longer the Administration, the other people were the blacks. I think that, fairly consistently after Albany, anything we did at SRC was predicated on the conviction that the leadership here was black, and that our role was to be supportive of their leadership, but somewhat independent of it, in the sense that we could be critical, and also in the sense that we could sometimes help avoid mistakes. I don't know whether we did that or not, but we tried. From the time we set up the Voter Education Project, it seemed very clear to me that the Southern Regional Council's main role, during the tough days of the early sixties, was to help the black organizations, specifically through VEP, but in other ways too. I remember making my report at the annual meeting, maybe in 1961, and saying—we'd just set up the Voter Education Project—and I said, "This has to be a case where the tail does wag the dog." I meant that, too. I don't think we ever did anything after that that I could see would have an adverse influence on VEP.
What's your sense of why the Justice Department acted as it did in Albany? Why wouldn't they be more aggressive, and use the powers that they had?
I think there were a lot of reasons for that. To begin with, John and
Robert Kennedy had a very cautious. . . . At that time, I don't think
they had any personal commitment to civil rights. I'm not sure that John
Kennedy ever acquired one. He may have. I think that Robert Kennedy
probably did. They did not in 1961 and '62. They also had an
exaggerated
As a result, he'd appoint these terrible people to the bench, Robert Elliot, right out of southwest Georgia, being one of them, for instance. They did not want to do anything to antagonize that crowd.
You know, if you take Burke Marshall and put him down in any situation,
Burke is going to try to talk the thing out, to reason it out. That's
his nature. He wrote a little book—gave some lectures at Columbia
University Law School around '63 or '64—called federalism and something.
Burke Marshall was one of the last state's righters around. He really
was, at that time. He believed that. He didn't believe
Did you know James Grey?
I never knew him, but he was the editor of that terrible newspaper down in Albany.
He's now the major. Do you know what role he had?
Well, I would assume he had none particularly, with them, because he was a Republican. He was a vicious guy.
There was one of those old-line Georgia politicians down there—Ed Peters maybe—who they were close to, and whom they did stay in a lot of communication with.
Albany was a bad one all around, except for people writing about it. You still get a lot of writing about it.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
I know something about how VEP came to be set up, and why it happened
that the Southern Regional Council became the conduit for the money to
VEP. I've read some of your letters to your executive committee
I'm going to take strong exception to that word "conduit." In Climbing Jacob's Ladder, Pat Watters' and Reese
Cleghorn's book, the section in there about the origins of VEP are
historically accurate, to the best of my knowledge, they having been
written under my direction. Also, there's a little pamphlet that we put
out at SRC once. It's about the movement. There's one little section in
it about the Voter Education Project, and I wrote that, and it's
accurate I think.
So this is on the record?
There was always a feeling that something had to be hidden here, and I don't think I ever did anything to encourage that.
A feeling from whom?
Well, various people who wanted to be suspicious about how the thing began.
I first heard about the idea from Harold. He asked me to come up to
Washington, and I did. I met with Burke Marshall and Stephen Currier,
and they had had prior meetings, but this is where I came in. I don't
think there's any doubt about the fact that the idea for concentration
on voter registration began with the Department of Justice. Whether it
began with Robert Kennedy or with Burke Marshall is immaterial. They
were identical twins in these things. They talked to Currier. Marshall
was very close to Currier, and so was Wofford, and so was Berl Bernhard.
Berl Bernhard was the Executive Director of the Commission on Civil
Rights. Currier had established a close relationship with all these
fellows, and
I came in at that point. The idea was very startling when it was broached to me. I don't remember exactly what went on in sequence after that, but we did have a couple more discussions. I will tell you that in every single discussion in these early weeks and months there was an understanding that there would be much more money made available than was, and that the Kennedys would see that money was provided, in addition to Currier. It was never said clearly that the money would be from the Kennedy Foundation, but that the Kennedys would take some responsibility for shoveling some money in, which they never did.
One meeting led to another. Everything moved pretty fast. By the end of the summer we had this thing pretty well organized, and we hadn't begun talking about it until April or May. We had a couple of meetings in New York, and you apparently read a report that I wrote after one of them.
John Wheeler was of enormous help to me in that I was a new boy, and I'd never met most of these people, and certainly they'd never had to deal with me. Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young were the only ones I knew. I knew Whitney before he left Atlanta. But they'd never had to deal with me, and it just made life bearable that John Wheeler sat beside me. I don't know whether people realized it, but John had a lot of stature with the civil rights leadership at that time in New York.
Anyway, we put it together. I think I may have made my own contribution
to VEP by insisting on a couple of things. One is that we wouldnot be a conduit.
That the decisions would not come from the Taconic Foundation.
Secondly, I insisted at the very beginning, that VEP money would go to the five main groups but we would also reserve our right to distribute money to other groups. That was not what Wilkins, King, Young, et. al., had in mind. They resisted that very strongly. They had in mind that VEP would get a chunk of money, and we would then meet and decide how we could divide it up among them, and that was it. We didn't do that. They got their largest share in the first distribution, and from then on, their share began to decline, until, by the time Vernon Jordan took over, they were getting hardly anything.
SCLC?
Well, the big five. The money was going to local groups.
What kinds of groups did the money go to?
There were all kinds of little groups, all around the South, who would do voter registration. In Durham, for instance, you had your Durham Negro Voters' League. It didn't make any sense to give money to the SCLC, for example, to organize voter registration in Durham.
In administering the voter project, we had our biggest trouble with SCLC. They weren't any good at voter registration. They wanted money for their own uses, and we had a couple of tense times with them.
With whom?
Well, there was Wyatt Tee Walker, and others. I remember once that Martin asked us to have lunch, and Wiley and I went over to one of those Negro restaurants, Frazer's I think, and had lunch with him, and Wyatt, and Abernathy. Abernathy was pretty unhappy with us.
Because you wouldn't give them as much money as they wanted?
That's right. Martin was much more understanding. During the early
organizing days, Martin had said he wanted to meet me. He didn't really
know me, and he wanted to talk to me. We couldn't work it out at any
other time, so I went into the office one Saturday and he came. He and I
sat in the office, and he got to know me [Laughter]
He had made the motion?
He had told somebody, like Currier or Marshall, that he didn't know Leslie Dunbar well enough to know whether he wanted to do all this. So, I think I was told that, so I called him up and said, "Let's talk."
I have in my notes that this meeting was on August 23, 1961, and that Martin Luther King was the first one to say let's let the Southern Regional Council. . . .
Yes, I think he did. This is what we were all building up to—a sort of a formal motion—and he made it. At that meeting Whitney Young began acting up, and saying all kinds of things.
Also, very perceptively, you said at the time, that "Although the NAACP is being sticky about this thing right now, I feel sure that they're not going to be our main problem down the road."
Whitney had realized that he didn't have much to offer. The Urban League had virtually nothing going in the South at that time. They had a local league in Atlanta, which was quasi-independent of the national. They had one in Little Rock, and one in New Orleans, and there wasn't much more than that. Whitney had realized that he didn't have much to offer, and that he wasn't going to get much out of this. So he got to be pretty sticky in that meeting.
What was he wanting?
He wanted money. Everybody wanted money.
The NAACP was complaining not that they didn't have much to offer, but that they historically had been in the forefront of voter registration efforts, and they didn't want it to seem that they were on a basis of equality with these newcomers in the movement. How did you deal with that?
It was never dealt with in total peace and harmony.
One of the other contributions I made was to decide on, and recruit Wiley Branton to run the thing. Wiley was a lawyer from Arkansas, and a good NAACP type. He'd handled the Little Rock case with Thurgood Marshall. Wiley is tough, and has a healthy ego, and wasn't really deferential to anybody, especially the NAACP. He was able to make decisions and be pretty tough about them. So I didn't have to deal with them so much. He did it. Wiley's just become Dean of the Howard Law School.
NAACP was a problem all the way. They had a man named Brooks, who was based in Richmond. He was in charge of their voter registrtion work all over the South. He wasn't worth a darn. Under Brooks was a man named Patton. Patton was from Alabama, and was based in Birmingham. Mr. Patton was field director of voter registration. Some of Wiley's tactics were to get money directly to Patton and away from Mr. Brooks. Mr. Patton's main interests were: (a) in getting some people registered, and (b) in protecting the NAACP's eminence, and sometimes the priorities were switched around. He, at least, was a worker.
When I asked the question about how the decision was made to make SRC a
conduit, I wasn't really thinking of SRC as just a funnel for money that
was controlled somewhere else. But given all the conflicts and
rivalries
I think the answer to that is that this was the only way that they were going to get anything. The other part of the answer is that we were the only group that they would have trusted enough to do this. We were the only possibility.
Why?
Well, certainly, the SCLC was not going to the NAACP, and vice versa, and there was no other group. I just don't think that occurred to anybody. It was Stephen Currier's thought that we should do it. He felt close to SRC, and he had come to be very close to Harold, and he liked me. We had a trusting relationship. He was an odd sort of fellow, but a good man. I think Stephen said, "If you want my money, it's got to be something like this."
Was that just because it's too hard to divide money five ways?
Yes, and also, we were tax exempt, and none of them were. We had to get a special ruling from the Treasury, you see. The ruling said that we, a tax exempt organization, could receive this and distribute it to non-tax exempt organizations for this specific purpose. Bill DeWynn handled that with the Treasury.
There was this son of a bitch, this guy who was working for the CIA,
Mitchell Rogovin. I'm sure you know him. He was the CIA's guy within the
Internal Revenue Service, and then represented the CIA before the Church
Committee. He had become a big liberal lawyer in Washington, doing all
the
What about Jack Anderson's accusation that SRC was given CIA money?
It's just not so. I never really think one should need to counter that kind of stuff. The Department of Justice did originally get Currier interested in the thing. The three foundations which supported VEP were Taconic, which was Currier's, Field, and Stern. They were the three basic supports. Currier brought in Field. Harris Wofford made his contribution by persuading Sterns. I think Harris had a personal relationship with Sterns. Later on, we got a little money from the Rockefeller Brothers, who gave us no money at all until Winthrop Rockefeller wanted to run for governor in Arkansas. They asked if I'd take some money for a campaign in Arkansas, and I said, "No, we don't take any earmarked money." Then they said, "If you had more money, probably then Arkansas would get a little larger share of your larger pot." And I said, "Well, that's probably right." I already had all I could do to keep Wiley Branton from dumping everything into Arkansas. So that's when we got some Rockefeller Brothers money. We lost money from the Democratic National Committee because Wiley and I were uncooperative.
At the Democratic National Convention in 1964, the party sold advertising
in their brochure. Big corporations gave a lot of money for space in the
brochure. This was apparently illegal on some grounds. They ended
As far as I know, the truth of that CIA money is that the Norman Foundation did take some CIA money as a conduit for some things that the CIA was doing in Africa. One of the Norman's had a personal interest over there in Africa, and they were glad to be of service. People at that time, felt that that was the way you were of service, and they did it.
Whether New World ever did or not, I don't know. Vernon Eagle was just
about the closest friend I had in foundation circles until he died. But,
knowing him as closely as I knew him, and knowing his background and his
political opinions, I do not find it inconceivable that Vernon would
have helped out his friends. The Norman stuff is out in public. It was
documented.
Do you think that VEP would have gotten more money if it had been the sort of operation that would have given money back to SCLC and NAACP?
That's conceivable. I could have walked out of Bailey's office with a couple hundred thousand dollars.
In about 1963, Currier started doing something else. He began
fund-raising for the civil rights movement. He began holding breakfasts,
and calling rich friends for the civil rights movement. Again, following
his own instinct that he didn't like to make these decisions, he set up
two groups, one to receive non-tax exempt money, and one to receive tax
exempt money. One was called the Council of United Civil Rights
Leadership, and that's where this little pin, which the National Urban
League people still wear, began. You know, the little pin with the equal
marks on it? That was Currier's design. He liked to do things like that.
He designed that pin. Now the Urban League has taken it over. One of
Currier's fund-raising notions was that people should sell these for a
dollar. I used to keep a pile of them on my desk at SRC, and any time
somebody came in, I'd try to sell one. The other one was called Welfare
and Education Defense Something. He co-opted Wiley.
Currier was out beating the bushes raising money. About once a month, Wiley would have to go up to New York. Currier had these lunches at the Carlyle Hotel, and there'd be King, and Young, and Wilkins, and Jim Forman, and Farmer, and Dorothy Height—for whom Currier had a special fondness—and Wiley, and they would cut up the pot that they had that month. Wiley said that some of the sessions were pretty awful. They'd decide who was going to get how much of what. According to Wiley, the usual thing was for Jim Forman to come in and claim it all. SCLC would say that it wanted it all.
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
You said that VEP might have gotten more money had it gone directly to these outfits. Well, this channel was set up for money to go directly to them. I would assume that whatever they got would have been the limit of whatever might have come in.