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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 L-0064-9, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
This is the final interview in a nine-part series with civil liberties lawyer Daniel H. Pollitt. In this interview, Pollitt focuses on his work with various organizations over the course of his career. He begins by describing his work with the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), both of which he discusses throughout the entire interview series. For Pollitt, the AAUP and the ACLU were particularly important organizations, and they were both significant in his career from the 1950s to the time of the interview in 1991. Pollitt also describes his work with the National Sharecroppers' Fund—which was later known as the Rural Advancement Fund—and Southerners for Economic Justice. Pollitt notes their interest in helping organize southern workers and in providing them with legal assistance. A particularly vivid portion of the interview outlines Pollitt's work on the Citizens' Inquiry into the 1973 strike of Duke Power workers at the Brookside Mine in Harlan County, Kentucky. As a member of the inquiry committee, Pollitt witnessed firsthand the violent consequences of the strike, the deplorable conditions Brookside Mine workers and their families lived in, and the eventual outcome of the strike. While Pollitt notes that Duke Power eventually submitted to most of the requests of the inquiry committee, he maintains that they should have done more to alleviate the situation for Brookside workers. Pollitt also discusses his experiences as a member of President Lyndon Johnson's "Think Tank" Committee during the mid-1960s, emphasizing the committee's work toward eradicating poverty. The interview concludes with Pollitt's plans to establish a public interest law school.
This is the last in a nine-part series of interviews with civil liberties lawyer Daniel H. Pollitt. In this interview, Pollitt describes his work with a variety of organizations that shared his vision of protecting civil liberties.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
This is an interview with Dan Pollitt in the continuing series at the UNC Law School. Today's date is April 17, 1991 and the interviewer is Ann McColl. All right, I think we just agreed that today we're going to talk about some of the organizations you've been involved with. Maybe if you can start with the ones that you have had a continuing interest in.
Okay. There have been three or four continuing interests that
I've been members of for a long, long time. One of those is
the American Association of University Professors, the AAUP. The AAUP is
primarily concerned with academic freedom. It was born in World War I to
protect the conscientious objectors on the campuses. It's the
largest multidisciplinary organization and the oldest. I joined it when
I started to teach at the American University at night because one of my
colleagues was called before the House Committee on Unamerican
Activities and admitted that he had been a member of the Communist Party
much earlier on and they fired him. So, we were protesting his discharge
and the AAUP was the active group. Then I went to Arkansas and I joined
the AAUP. That was in 1955 and Brown against the School Board was 1954,
and we had all sorts of racial problems. They wanted to get the public
employees, namely the black teachers, but they didn't say
only black teachers. They said all teachers which includes university
professors. We were supposed to file disclaimers that we did not support
any Communist groups including the NAACP and so on. I refused.
That's why I had to leave. I wouldn't sign the
oath
Is it strong in this area?
Well, we've always had 150 to 200 dues paying members and the dues are about eight-five bucks a year.
And this would be people who might work at the different universities in the Triangle?
Here in Carolina. Then in a crisis, our membership goes up to 800.
So that's 200 out of about how many professors?
Out of about twelve hundred. But these are the people who are willing to
pay eighty-five dollars a year to keep an organization going; to be
there when trouble comes. And the trouble is the Speaker Ban Law or
something, and academic freedom. I've been on the state group
and there have been eight or nine episodes where I've been
asked to go and meet with people and try to reconcile things. Once I
went to eastern Tennessee. They fired a young sociology professor for
failure to attend a scheduled faculty meeting. The faculty meeting was
scheduled to
Who else was one of the founding members?
Bill Finlator. W.W. Finlator and MacNeil Smith and Bill Van Alstein and Charlie Lambeth. There were ten of us or twelve of us who were on the board. Mary Siemens over at Duke. And Lisbon Berry who was a black attorney, a partner of Floyd McKissick. So we met and did whether you can go out and give out peace leaflets on the military bases. We did a lot of haircuts. Schools had their haircut and grooming regulations. We had a lot of those cases. And the underground newspapers we had, and then the draft resistance. Those were all the things that came up during my term. I was the President for five years and I'm still a member. I'm on the National Board.
And that's something that you're elected to?
Yes.
And it's through the national membership?
Well, there are two types. I'm on the National Board as a
representative of North Carolina and I get elected by North
Then, I've been a member of the National
Sharecropper's Fund which is also known as the Rural
Advancement Fund. This was started in the late thirties when the
mechanized cotton picker came in and started to displace the
sharecroppers in the cotton fields. Cotton was king at that time and
sharecropping was a way of life for many, many people. So they started
to displace the sharecropper and they organized the
Sharecropper's Union, the National Sharecropper's
Union. They were very active in Arkansas and Alabama and Mississippi.
Then they became the National Agricultural Workers Union for the
sharecroppers, cotton and every other kind of crop. When I went with Joe
Rauh in 1952, we represented Mr. H.L. Mitchell who was the President of
the Union. The Union didn't have any money, so Joe Rauh
assigned me to them because he had to earn money to keep the firm going.
So he represented the Auto Workers who paid and I represented the
sharecroppers who didn't pay. We had a lot of strikes hither
and yon and injunctions and organizing and activities. Then I think it
was when I came here, I was asked to serve on…. Van Hecke,
who had been the former dean, had written the "Van Hecke Report
of Migratory Farm Labor" which was done under Truman. That was
the guide for everybody. I was on the National Advisory Committee on
Migratory Farm Labor. It was totally unofficial. Nobody asked for our
advice. We met yearly and had a big public
Does the organization look at legal policy?
Yes, and we set up co-ops and we have irrigation equipment which we make
available in case of a drought. We have a big co-op in cucumbers up in
Danville, Virginia. We had
Then for not quite so long, but I've been very active in the Southerners For Economic Justice. This was started in the early seventies when the Textile Worker's Union started to organize the J.P. Stevens plants. And the J.P. Stevens Company fought the unionization with every foul means at its disposal and every illegal means. There are twenty-seven different court decisions upholding Labor Board things finding that J.P. Stevens violated the Labor Act and then there are separate decisions saying that they violated the Equal Protection Act and the Minimum Wage Act and OSHA and everything else. It's a very respectable, major, blue chip corporation that exploits its workers unmercifully. So the Southerners for Economic Justice was born to front for the union in the southern communities. The members include W.W. Finlator and Jim Ferguson who is a partner of Julius Chambers and Julian Bond, and the mayor of Atlanta, the present and the former. And so what it is is big-shot black people in Atlanta and lesser known people in North Carolina. And we're the Southerners for Economic Justice and we carry on various campaigns. Right now we are doing the repetitive motion illness.
Did you get the Poultry Workers?
Yes, the Poultry Workers. They get there where the beast goes by on a wire and somebody is there with a sharp knife to cut the neck or something. God knows, they have to do it eighty times a minute or something. And also, in the Hanes Hosiery where they make stockings or what do you call that? Panty hose. And we organized some people there. They go home after five years and their wrists hurt and they have to soak them in hot water for an hour. Just terrible. The idea was that we would work on these problems and then we'd get them into the union which would take care of more interests.
How are you pursuing these problems?
We have organizers.
So is it pressuring them directly?
No. Well, we do. We were going to do Hanes Hosiery which they sell L'Eggs, and we figured we'd go after them. Then we have the weapon which is to boycott the product. We can go to the major A&P or whatever and say, "Don't handle this or we'll picket your establishment."
So you use both legal and more sociable means of…
Yes. And oddly, most of our staff are nuns and former priests. They are free from their orders to come and do work with the rural poor and the depressed in the South.
How did this happen that they are mostly nuns?
I don't know. They were looking for something good to do to
help humanity. We got one and they are great people. We had two of them
in the plant. They'd go in the plant and get a job and work
from within. We had two who…. You can't say,
But while they are in there they're getting the information?
Yes, and they work and they get it and then they say, "Why don't we have a meeting at my house to discuss this?"
So they bring in some of their co-workers?
They bring the co-workers and then they say, "We need a traffic light in there and there are some other problems in the community."
That's pretty creative.
Yes. They are community organizers is what they are and they don't cost a dime since they are self-supporting. Their organization pays half and they have to raise the other half. They all play guitars and they go to the Catholic churches and this is their Sunday, whatever is dropped in the box is theirs to carry on their work. They explain what they're doing and that sort of thing.
We were down at the Gulf strikes, with the paper, the timber. We worked
with the people who cut the timber. They do it on a contract basis and
there was a big strike there for four or five years. Now
we're down in the Gulf area again working on poultry. And
we're big in sugar cane because that was an Agricultural
Worker's Union. H.L. Mitchell reorganized all the people who
cut sugar cane in Louisiana and went on a strike.
This is at the Rural Advancement Fund?
The Rural Advancement. And we lost Katherine Waller who was our director
for eleven years. She pulled us out of the red and put us in the black.
She had been one of the organizers on hunger. During the seventies they
discovered hunger and started to do something about it. She was one of
those who discovered hunger with Ray Wheeler who was our leader here in
Rural Advancement Fund and also the chairman of the Southern Regional
Council of which I was a member. So, in any event, she retired. Had to
get a new one and we got a guy who was a charismatic, black person, very
handsome. He played tennis with Mr. Ashe, played doubles with him.
He'd been doing voter registration in the South and he was on
our board for a year or so. Then he said he'd like to be the
executive director. We were very happy and elected him with a claim.
Then we found out that he was not very good at managing money. There
were about thirty-five against him in Danville and there had been a
criminal proceeding against him in Virginia Beach where he'd
passed bad checks worth eleven thousand dollars, but for a good cause.
He had a Miss Black America thing. He'd raise
Are you still involved?
Yes, I'm in a rival organization. I'm one of the three board of directors. I just finished writing a letter to our contributors. Here people have been contributing since 1938 and then they leave things in their wills. It's a three million dollar a year operation. Now they get fund letters from the Rural Advancement Fund, which is the old one and Rural Advancement Fund International USA, which is the new one. So I just wrote a four page letter explaining it all. But that goes on. That's too bad. It's really too bad.
Is this person still the executive director?
He was fired because he took his girlfriend to New York on a business meeting and stayed at the Heimsley Inn and spent six thousand dollars on the weekend. So they let him go.
But the organization is still…
It's falling apart is what has happened to it because all
their people resigned. At least half of the board resigned. So it was
really too bad. But it's part, I think of our growing pains.
Well, it's not part of our growing pains. I think it could
have been avoided. It's a black-white thing. The people who
stayed on the board said, "Look, you've got to
understand
How did you feel?
I felt terrible. These are my long time associates.
You've done a lot of work in that area.
But then the staff all quit and they wanted to continue the work. They
couldn't work with him. So we had the staff. We had the job
to be done, so we just started a different organization. Well,
that's RAF and those are my long time and then there are the
short time. A lot of things come and go. And most recently it was the
Triangle Citizens for Peace in the Gulf. We thought that the Bush study
was going to get us in the war no matter what Congress said. He
didn't care about Congress and that violates the War Powers
Act. So I wrote a couple of letters to the newspaper and then we had a
meeting. We had a meeting
Was this over Christmas break?
I forget. Somewhere in there. We got T.V. coverage and an open citizens meeting to come and say whatever you want to. I thought nobody else was debating this and that we could get some coverage. If Chapel Hill has a town meeting, maybe other people would have town meetings. So, we had a town meeting and then somebody thought we should have one. Kuralt came down about a month later, but they had a selected audience.
So it was by invitation only?
By invitation only. Ours was open to the public. On the committee, the
leaders are W.W. Finlator and me and Dave Barber over at the Political
Science at Duke and Leslie Dunbar who used to be the President of the
Southern Regional Council which was a hundred people, black and white in
the South, organized to bring about integration. And its forebears were
the Methodist women against lynching. It grew out of that. It had hard
times. I was a member for six years or so before Brown and right after
Brown. We used to have trouble finding a meeting place because half the
members are black and half are white. I got out. I decided not to run
anymore. At the time I decided to go for Southerners for Economic
Justice because I thought integration is…. The problem is
there, it remains, but economics is more important. So I was in that.
When I first came here, Chapel Hill was still segregated; the school
system. And we had an ad hoc committee to integrate the public schools
You mentioned some of the same people seem to end up on these, like W.W. Finlator.
There are a limited number of people who have the energy and the interest and the concern to do these things.
It becomes sort of a self-selected view.
The Duke Power Company strike up in Harlan County, Brookside Mine. Duke Power decided that it needed a source of coal to generate the electricity so it bought two mines up in Harlan County.
Is this is Kentucky?
Yes. "Bloody Harlan" they call it because it was bloody. They were non-union mines and the United Mine Workers went in and tried to organize it and did organize it. Brookside, which is the same as Duke Power Company, refused to bargain with them in good faith. So they started to picket the place and Duke hired people to guard the mines on work release. They got them out of the Kentucky prison.
To guard it?
Yes, to guard it. Prisoners on work release.
Prisoners were guarding the mines?
Yes, and they started to shoot and they were up on a hill where you go up on the hill and you go down into the mine and there is a little curvy road down below. We would picket there. There mine workers picketing there and they'd have a fire going to keep warm. They'd start shooting at them and they'd shoot back. Then the governor didn't declare marshall law, but he sent the State Troopers to control the place. Then the coal company got an injuction against our picketing from a local judge by the name of Hogg who owned a couple of mines as well. So they enjoined the mine workers. Then the women went out and the women would go and picket and then they'd get the strike breakers. They'd get six patrol cars, cop cars, and then twenty scabs and then a couple of patrol cars and they'd come up the road. Hell, that was dangerous because some of our people would shoot at the tires and stuff. Then they'd meet the women who'd be sitting there blocking the highway.
These would be local women?
Yes, the wives. And then they would be arrested and they wouldn't post bail. They wanted to fill the jails and stuff.
How many women are you talking about?
I'm talking about fifty of them. They were carrying the battle. Their daddy had been a mine worker and their granddaddy and they'd killed this guy down in the holler and you know, the animosities ran deep. There wasn't too much publicity to any of this, so they thought if they could have a public hearing on what was doing up there they could bring the press.
Why do think it wasn't getting publicity with all that going on?
It was not so abnormal in Harlan County.
That's because it was called "Bloody Harlan?"
Yes. And so they created an ad hoc committee on the Brookside strike. I was the chairman of it.
This was an organization called "Citizens Inquiry into the Brookside Strike"?
Yes, this was the Inquiry into the Brookside Strike. We had Fred Harris
who had been the Senator from Oklahoma and ran for President and Willard
Wurtz who had been the Secretary of Labor under LBJ and W.W. Finlator
who is a minister, and the daughter of a guy named Mitchell who had run
against John L. Lewis for presidency of the mine workers.
She's currently at Cornell School on Labor Relations. I
don't know, there is somebody now in the
Children's Foundation. So we had men and women and there were
maybe eight or nine of us. We went up and we had three days of hearings.
It was open to everybody that wanted to come. And we had CBS and NBC and
the "Louisville Courier Journal" people. Fred Harris
wrote an article for "Harper's Magazine"
afterwards. Willard Wurtz wrote a series of articles for the
"Washington Post" afterwards. So it got a lot of
publicity. And Dave Barber at Duke who was then the head of Political
Science. All this is because of the Duke Power Company. So they wanted
some people from North Carolina and then famous outsiders who would draw
the press. There they were
Duke Power had?
Duke Power Company had the machine gun up there and we asked the President of Brookside, the subsidiary, to come and testify. He wouldn't come. But the others talked about the machine gun, so CBS took their camera up there to see the machine gun and they got tossed down the hill by the guards who were lifers out of the Kentucky penitentiary. We decided we would have it in the morning when we'd break into small committees and go see people who wouldn't come to see us. I had to go see the guy. He wouldn't see us, thank God. I went with Willard Wurtz and Fred Harris. So then we reported back and then we talked about other things other than the strike. What to do in this community. Everybody has bad teeth and the water is terrible because the water comes out of the hillside where they've been mining and somehow it's all poisoned. So nobody drinks the water. They all drink Seven Up or something, so their teeth are gone by the time they are sixteen or seventeen. Then there's the housing. It's all hollows and hills and there's a stream and you follow the stream. Every so often there's a wide place and you have the company towns and they are all four room houses on stilts and there is no water in them. There is a pump where you go and take your bucket and you pump. And it's mud because there's been water there.
How old are these houses? I mean, are these the houses they were living in in the seventies?
Yes. This was not that long ago. Then they have outhouses. They
don't have indoor plumbing, so you have the outhouses. Then
the toilet paper goes down and they overhang the stream. Then the stream
in the springtime comes and overflows and carries the toilet paper. All
these trees on the side of the stream have toilet paper hanging from
them. It's just terrible. Then there's no health.
They are well-paid, but if you've got to work in the mine,
you have to live there. It's company owned and life if
miserable and dangerous. Very dangerous. Everybody has a broken back or
something. And the store was owned by the company as a convenience. You
could go into Harlan, which was maybe twenty miles from where Brookside
was. It was on the side of a brook, which is why the called it
Brookside. And black lung. This was before they had the Black Lung Bill
and everybody was coughing. Everybody over forty-five had black lung. So
we talked about all the community problems and we issued a report which
was all of these things and then we recommended a series. Why
doesn't Duke and the United Mine Workers take this
opportunity to make the desert road, you know, bloom like a garden and
stuff. Why can't they do something? Why don't they
get some dentists up there and some Medicare and some Peace Corps people
and some Teacher Corps people? Duke put in some money and the mine
workers put in some money, and get the Vista volunteers and just show
that in Appalachia there is a possibility of creating a very good life
and so on. So we went to see the President of the Duke Power Company in
his office with our proposal. First we saw the President of the mine
workers.
What do you mean when you said they signed they signed the standard contract?
Well, the coal mine owners are in a multi-employer bargaining thing, and so instead of one mine dealing with the Mine Workers Union, most of the mines are in an association. So the Duke Power Company signed the contract. They didn't join the association, but the adopted the existing contract. So that was pretty exciting. There were a whole bunch of students from Carolina and Duke that went up. They had a big auditorium. I know there was a wife I talked to during one of the breaks of a doctor who lived in Harlan. She was miffed or something and she met her husband in med school and she said she had never talked to a miner before. They were sort of sub-human or something. The socioeconomic role they were in was a real stratified type of society.
So what was the resolution? This was in 1974, wasn't it?
Yes. The resolution was that they agreed to the normal contract and they stopped fighting the union and they agreed to renew the contract and take out the machine gun.
And the work release…
Yes, and send the work releasers back to their lifetime sentences in the prison. I think the Governor commuted all their sentences. But there were a lot of arrests and protests and singing and poetry. Everybody writes poems about, "Down in the darkness of the mines," you know. And songs. People play the guitar and sing songs, "Which side are you on boys? Which side are you on? You either are a Union man or you're scab for J.D. Blair." Or something like that. So that was the better part of a week and then we came back and we had press conferences.
Was there very much national attention at this point?
Yes. We got all the networks there. They were interested in the machine guns and they did the women, you know, who had been in jail. And they tried to see Judge Hogg. He wouldn't see them. So we brought about a settlement and then we had congressional hearings. I worked for Frank Thompson who had the sub-committee on labor management relations who put some more pressure on Duke. We scheduled hearings and we brought in three or four people who had been shot. One of them had been on picket line duty and he was about seventy years old. He's been on the picket line in thirty…
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
Now, was this also during the '74 strike?
Yes, yes. And this guy, he had something, a St. Christopher medal or
something. A metal thing and it had been around his neck and he put it
in his shirt pocket so it wouldn't jingle or something. A
bullet hit his St. Christopher's medal and he got up and they
said, "Brother Malcolm, will you tell the committee your
story?" And he got up and looked the wrong way and held up his
St. Christopher medal and in a high pitched voice, "The night
riders came and got me, you know, just like they got my Uncle
Jeb." We got out a pamphlet and we got a lot of attention in
Washington. All that put pressure to the Duke Power Company, but they
were just trying to break the union. I don't see why the hell
they wanted to break the union, but they did. We saw whatever the
President's name is. He was very nice. He saw us all by
himself. We had the top floor of the Duke Power Company in Charlotte and
he had a table about twenty feet long, all mahogany, and Dave Barber and
Bill Finlator and I went to see him and carry our suggestions of how he
can become a folk hero more than Iacocca, you know, by dealing fairly
with these workers and trying to look into their total needs as well as
the on the job needs. But he didn't buy it. So that was that
one. Then there was the Max Goldman group. That goes back to when LBJ
was elected President or maybe it was when he became the President after
Kennedy was assassinated, he was a New Dealer in the tradition of
Franklin Roosevelt in domestic ways. So he had a guy named Max Goldman
in the White House who was a professor of
Do you know how your name came up?
I think it came up because I was to be on the Farm Labor, and also I had written a speech for LBJ earlier on farm labor when he had been the Vice President and he met a group of foreign journalists to talk about farm labor problems. So he sent the word over to the Labor Board where I was a consultant to the chairman, that he would like some notes. The chairman asked me to write some notes for the Vice President which I did and he has the speech and he gave it. John Ely was the other one from North Carolina who is a novelist who had been the consultant to Terry Sanford when Terry Sanford was the Governor. He was Terry Sanford's idea man. We had the guy who does the camera, he was my roommate at these meetings. Mr. Lens. They had the great anthropologist. What's her name?
Margaret Meade?
Margaret Meade was on it. It was big. We had the President of Berkeley.
How many people total?
There were about thirty-five of us and we'd meet periodically
and we'd break into groups of five or something, dealing with
subject matter. Then we would meet all together and
Moyers?
Bill Moyers. He was then on the White House staff and he was our liaison with us. He'd come to all our meetings. I thought he was a very pious young man; a very proper, pious young fellow who could pontificate at great length about not very much. So we suggested things. I remember at the time, I made two suggestions which were adopted. One was that here, a lot of kids came to school hungry and their first meal of the day was lunch which was a Federal lunch. Some of the teachers thought that they ought to have a breakfast. Dean Smith and I were co-chairmen of an ad hoc committee to get breakfast for the kids. We started something and we got some breakfast out of surplus food which is pancakes and eggs and cereal. So I suggested that at this next Goldman group and everybody thought it was good. That was when they had the War on Poverty and Sarge Shriver was coming to our meetings. So they started one, a national breakfast program, which was good. Then the scholarship was the third thing. I said we ought to recognize scholars. I forget what for, but for some purpose. They did that. They invited two from every state to come to the Rose Garden and be decorated by the President to something. And that was my idea. My third idea was Guantanamo Bay was a big issue, in Cuba.
What was the issue?
Well, the Cubans were starting to…. We had our military there
and the Cubans periodically would cut off the
At Howard University?
Yes. He didn't like to give up Guantanamo Bay.
But he liked the idea?
But he liked the concept of doing an inter-American health program. Then the Viet Nam war heated up and we were all invited to some meeting and many of us decided that we would go and picket the White House an hour before we went in to protest the Viet Nam war. That was our last meeting.
I take it you think it was more than coincidence?
We met every two or three months for about a year and a half.
I bet that was exciting.
Yes, it was, because we ate at the White House mess, you know. I'd always grab at least ten things at the White House mess.
You got to meet a lot of different people?
Yes. The President would try to make an appearance every time. Dr. Goldburg would come by and McNamara, you know.
What was your impression of the President from that?
Very favorable because he was very affable and very receptive and said, "It's so nice of you to drop what you're doing and come down here. I know you're all very busy," and so on. He'd always say very nice things and then he'd leave. You know, he'd say, "I'm sorry I have to go see the Ambassador of Great Britain. But I'm sure Secretary McNamara will be of use and be helpful and be glad to help." Then they'd all disappear by lunch time except for Max Goldman who was our titular leader and Bill Moyer.
So this would be an all day event?
A weekend. Yes, we'd start on Friday night and go through Sunday afternoon.
Do you know if other Presidents do the same thing, or was this an idea that he had?
Think tanks? Yes. Roosevelt had a think tank. A brain trust. He had a
brain trust of people and this was supposed to be modeled after that.
The U.S. News and World Report had a big story about us, as everybody
did who was on that think tank; a bunch of radicals. But I remember it
was the time of the Bay of Pigs. Adlai Stevenson came around a time or
two. And I remember, I forget who was sitting at my lunch table, but I
said something to the effect that I liked Adlai Stevenson very, very
much and had campaigned heavily for him both times he ran, but after the
Bay of Pigs he was our ambassador to the United Nations. He got up there
and denied that we had anything to do with it. And I said something
about he lost me there. I don't like people who lie and I
don't like people who lie publicly and Lady Chatterly's
Lover. No, Fanny Hill.
Fanny Hill was the big book. He didn't buy
it. He wouldn't. But I bought it and then he took mine home
with him. So those are my organizations and largely they are ad hoc. It
all depends on what the issues are. Most recently was the peace in the
Gulf. We had four thousand people protesting in Durham and our group
sponsored the march from the church to the post office and so on. Last
week we had a meeting to see where we should go from here; if we should
go from here at all. We had eight people present.
The tides have turned.
Yes. Nobody cares anymore. So we talked about whether it's worthwhile to keep the organization going in case Bush wants to go somewhere else next. We decided we all know each other and we can, with a few telephone calls, we can mobilize again. No more meetings. So that's that.
I'd like to change pace for a minute. We've been talking about the organizations you've been involved in in the past or are a current member of, and I'd like to switch to some of your future plans. I was wondering if you can tell me something about your ideas for a public interest law school?
Well, this goes back a long way into the seventies. I worked with Frank
Thompson who was the Congressman from New Jersey and the head of the
Labor Management Relations and a very popular Congressman and a good
friend of Kennedy's. He'd been the co-chair with
Whizzer White on Voter Registration and McGovern asked him to be the
same thing in his campaign. Gene McCarthy was his old-time buddy. They
all were in the House together when Jack Kennedy first came. So it was
sort of an Irish mafia crowd. They all liked to laugh and live it up. In
any event, he was on the Woodrow Wilson Foundation at Princeton
University and Nick Katzenback who was later the Attorney General and
the Secretary of State was also on the Woodrow Wilson. And President
Kohene, I think his name was, at Princeton found out that the Woodrow
Wilson School is for public administration. And public administration
was sort of losing some of its attractiveness to law schools. So
President Kohene asked Katzenback and Frank Thompson to see if they
could not work some sort of a program in the Woodrow Wilson School to
bring in law. So Frank Thompson asked me to make some notes and I did.
The Woodrow Wilson was a two year program and they spent time in
Washington interning in the Congressional offices and working for the
agencies. We thought we would expand and have a two year and
This sounds a little bit like what you talked about this Law School being like when you first came here. The professors had been very active and had maintained their interest.
I thought we should have people like Nick Katzenback and Frank Thompson
and Ramsey Clark; good lawyers, fine lawyers. But also people who have
done things. There is a friend, Mary Smith, who is a fellow trade
commissioner who thought she'd like to do things like that.
People who have done things in government. And that would be the
faculty. And the students would be a hodgepodge of some superachievers
like the normal ones and a lot of late bloomers who had been in the
Vista Corps or had been community organizing or in ACORN out in Arkansas
and Texas. The guy who had been the head of the Young Democrats or the
editor of the school newspaper or the head of the debate club or
whoever, and who had a C average, but was interested in public concerns.
And then the other group we thought of would be the people who had been
teaching English or selling insurance and are now in their early
thirties and want to do something else. And then the woman whose
children are now in school and she is free
So they only have one and a half semesters?
Then you have to go to summer school. Then in the summer we have a group of visitors who come in for a week or ten days and give free lectures in the evenings. It's at Wilmington so it's near the beach. Julius Chambers talks about civil rights and you know, we'd get an environmentalist and a women's rights. Miss Lichtman, who is the head of the Women's Legal Defense Fund, she's all signed up. All these people are signed up. So that's the proposal. And then the faculty would be half senior people who, again, have achieved. Like around here, Judge Martin who is a great judge and a great lawyer.
The Supreme Court Justice?
Yes. And he's facing retirement. Also, Richardson Preyer who
was a lawyer, a state judge, a Federal judge, a Congressman. He knows
what it's all about. He was the Vice President of Wachovia
Bank for awhile. So the idea is Mark Hopkins on the one end of the log
and a student on the other. So you get somebody who has something to say
that's worth listening to with as intimate as possible
contact with the student body. The others have to be sort of young,
because you feel more comfortable going to see somebody who is not
Richardson Preyer, you know. Emily Preyer, you know. So it would be half
and half. So that's the essence of it all and where we are is
that I have a place in Wilmington at the Tyleston School where they have
agreed
Why do you think they would…
Well, Tom Lambeth runs the Z. Smith Reynolds and I've known him for a long, long time, so I went to him first. He was enthused and he thought it was a good idea. He was going to sound it out one on one with the members rather than taking it to the Board as a Board; to get some support that way. He was going to take it to the legal people. Well, I know them all. Half of them are former students. And I thought, "That's great, because they will be for it." What I wanted was a million dollars over five years and they said it would cost far more than that to have a law school. I underestimated. And secondly, is there really a need? Wouldn't it be better to find people who do go into public service and pay off their debts? Wouldn't that be a better use? A tuition rebate type of thing. And third, did we really want to isolate all the good people in North Carolina in Wilmington when they ought to be dispersed around. These are the reasons I got. I saw Mary Siemans whom I'd known since we started the ACLU together and she's the Duke Foundation and she said that the original grant identifies seven institutions who get the money and then what's left over goes for the arts and the music program, and so on. So, I'm discouraged. Very discouraged.
One of the things you said they told you that the people in public interest should just go to the regular law schools and get their loans paid back. I wonder if you see any problems that people who are interested in public interest law have in going to…
Well, you're a rarity; your interest in public interest law.
And you've done well in the law school, but this law school
like every other law school is staffed by people who come from the big
firms and they are big-firm oriented. And then we have three or four tax
professors and two or three corporate law professors and so on. They
talk about doing tax work and doing corporate law, and am I not right
that the one who gets the job in Covington and Burly to do corporate
litigation or something is the one who is the esteemed star in your
class? And who gets the flybacks to the big firms. They've
got four of them and what are you going to do? Well, they're
despoilers and they pay well and they're respectable. And
that's it. And if you say, "Well, I'd
like to do something else," there's something wrong
with you. So you're driven by a social pressure where the
idea of the big bucks and the big firm and the big corporate world.
People who aren't that sometimes sort of feel,
"Well, I don't like that law school. I'm
going to go and do my classes and then get the hell out." You
hardly ever see them. Some join the Lawyer's Guild and some
join the Speaker's Bureau and the women's groups
and so on. And they may be very bright and do well or they may not be,
but they are a minority. Then there's not much discussion in
law school as far as I can tell. Certainly not in the classes. I
Well, I certainly personally agree with your assessment and think that people who are interested in public interest probably have the hardest time in law school because they aren't in any strong way supported in their efforts. Until your law school comes into existence, do you have any suggestions or words of encouragement for people who are doing this track for how to make them get through law school and not lose their sense of mission?
So many come to law school because law is a tool for social engineering or whatever, and that is quickly sort of driven cut of them somehow. I do my best in all my classes.
What's going to happen once you leave, though?
I wrote all this up in the Nova Law Review. They had a big symposium on legal education and so I wrote it all up, so it's all down in black and white. I have two foundations left, and then I don't know of anymore.
Do you think there's a possibility of private money? You know, not through foundations, but just wealthy individuals?
I don't know too many wealthy individuals and most wealthy
individuals put it into foundations or something. But I got a call last
week from somebody who says he's forty and he's
always wanted to go to law school. He's an engineer and
he's in
You've already got a customer.
Well, I've got a lot of customers. But I said, "Well, I need money." And he said, "How much?" And I said, "Two hundred and fifty thousand a year for five years." He says, "That's not much. Why don't we sell stock?" I don't think you can sell stock in a nonprofit institution or something. And he said, "Well, get fifty people to put up ten thousand each," or something. Well, I mean, you know, it's very hard to do. So I don't know. Maybe some day somebody will…. There was Antioch which was built different. And then there's Northeastern in Boston where they have a work study program. After the first year, you spend three months outside in any number of things and then back for three months. So it's rotating back and forth which is common at Antioch and a lot of undergraduate colleges do that. Then there's Queen's College, the city college in New York, that started a law school about five years ago which was to be different. They have different names for the curriculum and they get elderly and middle aged and young and late bloomers. They had seven thousand applications for the first class of a hundred.
Wow. So there's definitely a need out there.
Yes. They are all union organizers. You needed to know law, you know. And
you get reporters who want to…. Every time I am interviewed
by a newspaper or a radio station,
END OF INTERVIEW