START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A February 5, 1992

ROBERT KORSTAD: I thought we could just start by talking a

little bit about where you grew up and your family and something

about your eduction, so that people would have some sense of

where you're coming from, which is, as you know, talking with

Virginia Durr, the most important thing to establish, at least.

LESLIE W. DUNBAR: Have you talked to her?

RK: Not for this particular project, but I've talked to her

before for other things.

LD: Well, I don't know, Virginia and some other people have

got really interesting biographies. I don't think mine is very

much. I come originally from Greenbriar County, West Virginia.

My dad went broke a little bit ahead of the Depression, and we

moved to Baltimore in 1930 when I was almost nine. Kept going

back to West Virginia for years, visiting uncles. As a matter of

fact, my wife and I owned a place down there until, well, we

owned it for quite a while and spent a lot of time there until

just recently. We couldn't keep it up any more. Fact, I held a

mortgage on the house because the guy who bought it couldn't. . .

. So I held a mortgage on it until less than a year ago when we

wanted to pay it off. I was almost sorry. It kind of severed my

last [laughter] link. Anyway, I went down South in 1948, right

after I got out of graduate school.

RK: What did your family do there? What kind of world did

you grow up in?

LD: Well, he was from a very large family, and

interestingly, almost in a scholarly sense, a big family, not

just my own immediate family but the uncles and aunts and all,

they all seem to be gone. There's nobody left. They're all

scattered. True on my mother's side, too, except I do have a

couple of cousins on her side. I guess you would have called Dad

a small-town businessman. He had a lot of things that he was

involved with, nearly all of which went kapoop. He was much

older than I. I think it's an amazing statistic that my

grandfather Dunbar was born while Andrew Jackson was president.

RK: That's pretty amazing.

LD: It does suggest to you [Interruption], I think he was

born in 1829, and he was forty-six when my father was born. My

father was forty-six when I was born. Well, you can do the

arithmetic [laughter]. I don't know that we have families quite

like that.

RK: We don't.

LD: I was the youngest of my father's children, but he was

not the youngest of his. There were at least two other boys who

came after my Dad [laughter].

RK: Really? That's pretty amazing.

LD: They did live in the country up in Frankfort, West

Virginia.

RK: So they lived there for years. So you grew up in. . .

LD: I grew up in Lewisburg, the county seat. Dad and the

family originally had come from around Frankfort and Rennick,

which were quite very small places. The house that my wife and I

kept for until just very recently was up near Rennick, beautiful

country, no prettier country.

RK: You were rooted in the community with a long history

and family?

LD: Yes, I was but. . . .

RK: So did you grow up after nine in Baltimore?

LD: Yeah. Haven't gotten the Orioles out of my system yet.

I went to graduate school at Cornell, and after leaving there,

luckily by chance, the job offer I got was at Emory, and I went

down and taught at Emory. So it got me into the South quickly.

RK: Had you had much, I mean, Baltimore is still kind of a

southern town. When you were growing up, I mean, what got you

interested in going into political science and thinking about

going into an academic career?

LD: I don't know. I was always, oh, I don't know why I got

interested in politics. I did. At a very age I started reading

the newspapers. That was about it. I took my first political

science course, as most people did, as a freshman, and it didn't

sound like I wanted to learn more about that. I really thought

that by the time I got out of college I'd study law, and I

actually went to one year of law school, almost one year. I've

often been sorry that I didn't finish but I didn't. Contracts

and torts can turn you off pretty fast.

RK: I know. I didn't even make it that far. The thought

of it was enough to deter me. So you went to graduate school at

Cornell, and so ended up going down to Emory? What was that

like? When would that of been, in the late '40s?

LD: 1948. Well, it was interesting. Baltimore, you call

it a southern city and it was, Baltimore was strictly segregated

in every respect from the schools to residential areas to

swimming pools and everything else. We even had in the parks,

black baseball diamonds and white baseball diamonds.

RK: Were you aware of that as a child, when you nine?

LD: Well, you know, I spent my whole adolescence there.

Well, you became aware of it, but not in the sense that you felt

it was something you needed to do something about. We just saw

the order of things. You know, I came back yesterday afternoon

from Washington where I'd been attending a meeting of one of

these little foundations I'm on, the Ruth Mott Fund. In fact,

I'm chair now. But we made a couple of grants yesterday that had

something to do with the rural South. But I came in and I got a

phone call, oh, last evening from a young woman who's a member of

my church. I go to Watts Street Baptist Church. And Watts

Street has recently--it's a very fine church-- has established a

sister church or brother church, I'm not sure which, relationship

with Calvary Baptist, which is a black church at Morehead. So we

have a committee, and I guess they have a committee. I'm not on

it, but anyway, this young lady was calling last night. They're

going to do a joint program in a couple of weeks at the church

on, "What is it like to be black?" and would I be one of

the--they're going to have three speakers from each church--and

would I be one? I said, [laughter] "You mean you're going to ask

white people to talk about what it's like to be black?" She

said, "This was their idea." [Laughter] This was the other

congregation's idea. Well, I thought that was pretty strange,

but I said I'd to it. I got to thinking about it later, last

night. I guess maybe I was thinking about it when I was trying

to go to sleep, and I didn't know what you fellows were going to

talk to me about, but you've raised this question about when did

one begin to get ( ).

I had a very interesting experience when I taught at Emory,

and I may say some of this to that group. I don't think I will,

not the whole thing, but I think a lot of us, and Coles has

talked about this, a lot of us have had sort of shining light

experiences. I don't know that mine has been very shining, but

nothing else ever made quite the impact on me. They made me,

when I got at Emory, we had -- we used to have departmental

clubs. So being the youngest guy on the political science

faculty, they made me advisor to the political science club,

which had the few majors in political science. They'd have

meetings once a month or something, some kind of program. Always

a question of why are you having a meeting anyhow, what program

do you have if you have it. I had already gone out to Atlanta

University Center a couple of times, principally because we had a

very wonderful man there on the history faculty, Bill Wiley.

Bill was a civil war historian, and Bill had met me and he'd sort

of taken me under his wing. A couple of times I had gone out to

AU Center with him. So I had met a few people. So I suggested

to these students that, well, there's this man I've met out there

who teaches political science, let's ask him out. Well, they

thought that a pretty brave thing to do, but they buckled up

their courage. It was William Boyd. He was professor of

political science at Atlanta University, and Boyd was a

remarkable man, and he died, unfortunately, when he was probably

in his '40s, maybe not quite. Got leukemia. He would have been

a "leader," I'm sure. But he came out, and he was asked to talk

about race relations in the South. And he did. I sat in the

back of the room, and I listened, and I suddenly had an idea, you

know. You don't have many ideas, but I had an idea, which was

that we shouldn't have asked him to do this. The very first time

that the man had been invited out, he should have been treated

like a colleague. His own speciality happened to be

international relations. He'd been a student of Ralph Bunch's,

and his first visit out to this white campus, he should have been

asked to talk about foreign policy or something. So after the

class, he and I walked back to the office that I shared with a

couple of other people, and nobody else was there. I was moved

to tell him this [laughter]. He looked at me very knowingly and

wisely and accepted my apology. Then for some reason he opened

up with me and began describing to me what it was like to be

black in the South. Telling me just what he had to go through

when he took his family on a trip north. Well, you had to space

out your restroom stops and so forth, and pack your lunch. I

remember this very keenly. The elephant in the Atlanta Zoo had

died. They'd been taking up collections at the schools to buy

new elephants. I know my own child was in kindergarten at that

time. We'd given her a quarter or something. He said how do you

explain to your daughter when she wants to pitch in to help to

buy new elephants, and she can't see them. Blacks couldn't go to

the zoo in Atlanta. Well, he talked at length.

You see, Martin King used to talk the same way. One of

King's favorite stories in his speeches was to tell about how his

wife and a couple of the kids would pick him up at the airport,

and they'd drive in from the Atlanta airport up the highway.

There used to be at that time an amusement park off the side of

the highway, and his daughter would always say, "Daddy, why can't

I go?" And he'd have this problem of telling her about that. So

it was the same sort of thing that Boyd was telling me. Well, I

got my second idea. I mean, I don't often have one, but I got

two, which was that I didn't need to hear any of this because if

you take a moment [laughter]. . . Anybody who had lived in this

country who'd given it a moment's thought would have known all of

this. 'Course, most of us never had. So when Nancy asked me

last night to talk about what it's like to be a black, I don't

think it's such a preposterous idea because you can almost, if

you just think about it a minute or two, you can't get inside the

black person, but if you just think about it a minute or two, you

can pretty well at least get the broad outlines of the

predicament that black people live under in this country. I've

thought about that a lot since. I think I've learned a lot over

the years about the black situation, and almost every time I've

learned, it's been because some black person has taught me. And

almost every time I've been able to think, well, she didn't need

to tell me that. I should have been able to figure it out

myself. But that afternoon with Bill Boyd was a very important

one for me.

RK: That obviously changed how you looked at the landscape,

social landscape, around you. Did it change what you thought

about doing with your life?

LD: Well, in a way. I think when I came out of graduate

school and I went down to Emory, I think of all the social issues

I was concerned with, labor unions was probably the first, not

civil rights. But I think that changed. I did get at that time,

even while I was at Emory, I did begin to see a lot of George

Mitchell and people of the Southern Regional Council.

RK: Did you make contact with them as a matter of course?

LD: Well, I don't remember first. I know I had Mitchell

out to Emory to talk, and then I went down ( ). He was a

remarkable man. He did not like much. He was executive director

of the Council until '57, I guess, and then retired and moved to

Scotland.

RK: Is that right? I didn't know that's where he moved to.

LD: He and his brother once did a book, I forget the title,

but it was a book about the wage rates in the South. His brother

taught economics at Johns Hopkins. Was a perennial socialist

candidate up in Maryland. I had heard him lecture several times

when I was growing up. Broadus Mitchell.

RK: How had you gotten interested in the labor unions and

what was going on in the South at that point?

LD: Not necessarily in the South. Everyone growing up in

the '30s and '40s got interested in labor unions. Well, I

learned shortly after I got down there that there was something

called the Georgia Labor Education Association. I think I've got

the title right. One of the things that the old Rosenwald Fund

did was sprinkle these groups around the country, including the

South, like Highlander up in Tennessee. They were believers in

adult education. I mean, it was a fate, and they'd do all this

extension work. I had done a little teaching at Cornell in a

Labor Education Extension School they had up there, Industrial

Labor Relations. So I went down and offered my services, hoping

that they would also pay me a little bit. Unfortunately, it was

about the last year of their grant, but I did do a little work

with them and at least got to know them. Got to know a little

bit about labor unions, at least in Georgia.

RK: I'm suspecting that the '30s and the experience of the

Depression and the various mobilizations and things that were

going on must have had a big effect on your kind of teenage

years, when you're coming up, even before the war. How much of

that effected what you ended up doing?

LD: I don't know. I'm not a very introspective person.

I'm sorry, but I'm not. I just can't answer that.

NEIL BOOTHBY: I have one related question that's back to

the conversation with the fellow in Atlanta and the ( ) moment

when you realized a couple of things. Did that, and I'm sort of

back to that image of you in Baltimore, as a nine year old on a

segregated baseball field or whatever, did that moment ever get

you to look back and kind of reexamine or rethink your childhood

and adolescence? Did it get you to visualize those moments in a

different way, or was there any kind of anger attached to that

situation retrospectively, or was it just. . . ?

LD: I don't think so, sorry.

NB: No. [Laughter] I'm just curious. I got the picture

of sort of you as a kid growing up in Baltimore and having a good

time and enjoying baseball, but then at some point in your life

realizing it was a segregated baseball field, and what one does

at those moments. I never got angry either ( ) anybody

who did.

LD: I think I grew up in a family that prided itself, my

mother and father prided themselves, or at least she did, on

courtesy and civility. We must never say "nigger." We said

colored people, and we said Mr. and we said Mrs., though it was

hard for my mother to do that. She said. She did it. But

courtesy and civility represented good race relations in my

growing up.

NB: How do you look at that now? Does that still sort of

hold water?

LD: No. On the other hand, it's too bad that we've

forgotten about courtesy and civility [laughter]. They're worth

a lot.

RK: I think they're missed. Teach undergraduates these

days, it's something that's missing in their relationships with

each other, if not in their relationships with people older than

themselves. Kind of one of the things that fuel a lot of their

disagreements, kind of racial tension ( ), I think.

So then you left. Taught at Emory for a few years, and then

went North.

LD: No, first I went over to, a lot of it for economic

reasons. I had to make a little more money. It came down to

having a choice, and didn't seem to be any academic things

opening up at that time. It came down to having a choice to

going off to work in the, God help me, Air Force as some kind of

Intelligence Specialist, or going over to Aiken, South Carolina

and working for the Atomic Energy Commission, which I did. They

called me Chief of Community Affairs. Seemed like a good

administrative post. So I stayed there in South Carolina until

'55. You know, Aiken's a little deeper south than Atlanta.

RK: Yeah [laughter].

LD: But it was very enjoyable over there. Enjoyable is the

wrong word. It was very interesting over there. That [laughter]

was for the building of the big Savannah River plant. My one and

only government job. Curiously, my qualifications for the job

were my ignorance. When that big plant was announced, probably

be hard for you to recall this, but you know the Russians had

exploded their bomb and a lot of national panic, and then the

decision was made to build what was called the H-bomb. Savannah

River would have the H-bomb plant, and this was headline news

everywhere. Oh, three months down the road, a big land scandal,

a staff guy at AEC had tipped off some friends and they'd gone in

and bought up land before the announcement. Well, he was the

Chief of Community Affairs, an experienced housing man. Well, he

was fired. So in typical government fashion, they then went to

look for somebody who had absolutely no housing contacts at all

[laughter]. That's how I got the job. I was totally ignorant.

It was an extraordinary four years. Then I went up to Mount

Holyoke.

RK: What brought you back to the South?

LD: Mount Holyoke was a bore. I didn't think I was going

anywhere there anyhow. But the civil rights thing had heated up.

I had been offered a job at SRC by George Mitchell in 1954, and

I really decided to go up to Mount Holyoke. So I hadn't quite

forgotten that I had once been offered a job over there. In '58

I didn't have anything else to do that summer, and Harold

Flemming, who was then director of SRC, I got in touch with him,

and he said, "Come on down." So I worked there during the summer

of '58. I didn't want to go back to teaching. I went back up to

Holyoke and taught the term. Felt I needed to do that. Also had

to get my family resettled. So I went back and taught the fall

semester, and we moved down to Atlanta in '59.

RK: So you were really looking forward to that? There was

starting to be a lot going on.

LD: Oh yeah, '58, when I went down there for that summer,

just a year after the Little Rock explosion, schools were still,

where were they? They were closed out there, not closed, but

they didn't open. Virginia was in the middle of massive

resistance. North Carolina had not yet admitted a student black.

The student protest movement had not yet begun. Just seemed

like, well, you get caught up in it pretty fast.

RK: One thing, you did an interview with the Southern Oral

History Program, with Jackie Hall and Bob Hall, a good while ago?

LD: Long time ago.

RK: I think that a lot of the history of your time at the

Southern Regional Council, you went over with them. I haven't

looked at the whole transcript of the interview, but I've looked

at bits and parts of it. So I was thinking we might not need to

go back over that.

LD: That's fine. I don't think I have much of a biography,

I told you.

RK: I guess what I'd like to do is maybe talk more about

your work at the Field Foundation and since then, too, since the

'80s. I guess our starting point is looking at, well, we're

interested in how poverty issues and economic issues come out of

the civil rights movement, a lot of agitation around that, and

how people began saying it's just not a matter of legal rights,

but there's access to opportunity and a lot of other things. I

wonder what sense, just kind of beginning this, you had of the

kind of energy, because you probably were mixing with these

people at various different levels, why this whole emphasis on

poverty and the War on Poverty, and particularly it relates to

the South. The South was really the first area in the country

that becomes a focal point for a lot of this. If you could just

kind of remember what it was like at that point, why this became

such an issue.

LD: Which point?

RK: Say, in '62, '63, '64, something like that.

LD: You know the fact is, I think the fact is, that poverty

was almost a non-issue in the early '60s in the South. American

people, including the Vistas, are so focused, it's hard to have

two ideas at once, two concerns at once.

RK: [Laughter]

LD: Civil rights, you know, among liberals that was the

issue, and poverty was just sort of glossed over. King began

talking about poverty before he died, but if you look back at

King's earlier talks, I don't think there's much in them about

poor folks. It's about discrimination and denial of opportunity

and that's about it. When we talked about poverty, we talked

about it in terms of opportunity. So you created the Employment

Discrimination Law and so forth, and that was supposed to take

care of it. I remember coming back from lunch one day in

Atlanta--I don't know when this was, '60 maybe--with a couple of

my co-workers at the Southern Regional Council. A beggar came

up, black guy, stuck out his hand, and one of my co-workers said,

"Go down to the NAACP. You don't beg on the street." That was

almost an attitude, you know, a pervasive attitude. The answer

to poverty is to vote. Vote! And the white people's response is

to beat down these discriminatory barriers. Kennedy came out of

West Virginia and Kentucky in 1960, burdened with this

realization that real poverty did exist. But the concentration

was there in Appalachia. It was almost as though there were two

separate problems. The problem in the South is discrimination.

The problem in Appalachia is poor people. Harry Caudill wrote

his great book, Night comes to the Cumberlands. It was all about

Kentucky and West Virginia. The first Kennedy programs that had

anything at all to do with poverty were in the Justice

Department, juvenile, whatever they called that thing, juvenile

delinquency. Then they did sponsor, there was another one called

Manpower Development and Training. The focus was always on

opportunity. I remember hearing at some, used to be all kinds of

meetings, conferences, I remember hearing Secretary Works, who

was Secretary of Labor under Kennedy, make a great, big speech

which got a lot of attention that the only problem in the United

States was opportunity. There were jobs there. We just had to

train the people to get them. That was almost an ideology. It

was an ideology. I don't know just where the more accurate

realization began, how it began, but it certainly did. In part,

I suppose, because the events of 1965, on the one hand, the

Voting Rights Act which did, in many people's minds, sort of. . .

RK: Solve everything?

LD: Well, it didn't solve it, but you knew after the Voting

Rights Act you were sort of on the sunny slope of civil rights.

And at the same time, events happening like the Watts riots,

which got people's attention away from the almost sole occupation

with the South and with its problems. By that time, of course,

we already had the Economic Opportunity Act. When did it pass,

'65?

RK: '64, '65.

LD: But I think the realization of the depth of the

problems didn't begin until, maybe the word came in from the

ghettos. We had a couple of projects in Atlanta. SRC worked

with a couple of, there was a neighborhood called Ives City. Is

that right? I think so. One of the worst slums in Atlanta at

that time. We worked with a little self-help project down that

way. But the sense that poverty was a structural problem in the

United States had not begun. Did not begin, I think, until the

late '60s, and was powerfully resisted then.

RK: So you did start doing some things, kind of in

conjunction with more civil rights orientation, but starting.

Even at the Southern Regional Council you're starting to make

that transition that King and people did later.

LD: Can't remember exactly, I can't remember everything,

but we did, but we were doing it in very tentative ways. I think

that was true of the whole one-time civil rights movement, and

never became true of some parts of it. I don't know to this day

that the NAACP has any very strong sense of mission regarding

impoverishment of black people. Seems to me that to this day

that when the NAACP, the National Urban League, approach economic

questions, they approach them in terms of elevating individuals

into the middle class. I have nothing to complain about about

that, but it's still an opportunity kind of ideology.

RK: So you left and went to work for the Field Foundation

in '65. That was really the end in some ways of the civil rights

movement. The war's really heating up by that point. Things are

going on in northern cities. Was that a real conscience effort

on your part to begin focusing your attentions somewhere else?

LD: Well, you know, you have to avoid making yourself sound

less self-interested than you are. It was to my economic

advantage to go up to Field Foundation, I'll tell you. I'd like

to think that I would not have taken most any other foundation

job. Field Foundation had interests that were almost the same as

mine. It had a long history of being involved in race relations.

It had a particular interest in the South. Never did understand

quite why it got it, but it did. Marshall Field insisted from

the beginning in having a couple of blacks on his board.

Channing Tobias had been an early member. He had Ralph Bunch

when I got up there. He was not a good board member, but he was

on it. At this time, the only other interest the Field

Foundation had was what we loosely called child welfare. That

[laughter] was sort of divided. On one hand, expressing Field's

own interests, abetted by a couple of people, like Helen Ross and

whatnot, in psychoanalysis. So we [laughter] remained to the end

to be Anna Freud's alterview view, her American supporter. And

on the other, a very strong interest in children's welfare, poor

kids' welfare, which was stimulated by people like Milton Senn

and Justine Pottier. He had made a foundation. Didn't work.

Didn't work at all, but his notion in setting up a foundation was

that his children could learn at the feet of wise people. So his

idea was to have a couple of his children on the board and wise

people. Ralph Bunch, Helen Ross, Milton Senn, Justine Pottier,

Lloyd Garrison, but his children didn't want much to do with it.

RK: [Laughter]

LD: So [laughter] it didn't work. But at any rate, it was

an interesting board. Coles came on the board about the time I

went up there. And Adlai Stevenson was president. That was one

of the incentives to me. But then in between the time I was

hired--I was hired, I think, in May and I went to work in

October--during that interval he had his heart attack. So I

never had the opportunity to work for him. As I said, the

interests up there were my interests. So I thought I could do

that. Also, one of the jobs any Southern Regional Council

director has is raising money, which I'd never done before. In

the four or five years I was executive director I had to make

more trips up to New York looking for money, and of course, got

to know thereby several of the foundation people. But in the

process, I'd come to have a very high estimation of what money

could do, and a realization that without it, you just couldn't

make much headway. So moving from running an agency in the South

to being able to handle money that would go into the South seemed

to me to be a good thing to do.

RK: Yeah, a lot less headaches in some ways [laughter].

LD: Well, yeah. Well, there's no getting away from it. I

don't know what the civil rights movement would have done without

money from the North. Up until 1965 really. . . .

END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A

START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B

LD: Which was to funnel money into voter registration work

by black groups, civil rights groups. But SRC became the

coordinator of that primarily because we could handle the money.

You couldn't give money then, I mean, foundation money could not

go to King or to the NAA. They just didn't have tax exemption.

In the later half of the 1960s, there was a great splurge, a

great proliferation of tax exemptions by civil rights groups. I

think nearly all of them. King got his own. The NAACP set up a

tax exempt affiliate and so forth. So the demands on

foundations, which had been fairly, well, much less complicated

up to the middle of the 1960s, became much more so. You just had

many more claimants. One of the strongest programs which King

ever had, maybe the strongest in the sense of being a sort of

continuing activity, was what was called a Citizenship Education

Program, which was based over in Dorchester, Georgia, MacIntosh

County, where they brought people in from all around the South

for training, literacy training, and teaching them how to go back

and give other people literacy training. Much of the impetus for

that had begun at Highlander, and the first teachers down there

had been taught up at Highlander, people like Septima Clark.

That program could not be funded directly to King. It was funded

through the United Church of Christ. The Field Foundation put up

all the initial money. Andy Young was brought from, he was an

assistant pastor some place in Newark. He was recruited and

brought down there. That was his job. He didn't do it. I mean,

he went and worked for King, but he was paid to run that program.

I guess he did do it, but King just found him more valuable in

Atlanta. But that chugged on for years, always through the

United Church, until finally they got their own tax exemption,

but by this time I was up there. We took the church out of the

picture. Made the grant directly to Citizenship, whatever they

called it. But that was just an example of the new status of a

lot of the groups, black led groups, which came out from under

the wings of, well, in that case, came out from under the wings

of a predominantly white church.

RK: Why did they not have this status? Was it difficult to

get or did people just not. . . ?

LD: Well, I think it's partly a matter of things were new,

organizations were new. It was all a mysterious field, tax

exemption. I think also, maybe Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy

had something to do with this, I don't know. It began to be

easier to get tax exemptions. We had to get a special ruling for

the Voter Education Project, which had never. . . .

NB: I'm curious. Back in the mid-'50s ( )

civil rights and then poverty and there's still the vision of

opportunity ( ). And then you went on to the Field

Foundation and began looking at issues from the perspective of

someone who's looking for good ideas to fund. How did your own

vision of moving from the concept of opportunity to what is to

come, what happened that your ideas about the problems of poverty

and one responds, how did those sort of change in your Field

Foundation move? How did those sort of ripen?

LD: Well, I think with me it was a very gradual process. I

just, honest to Pete, had not read a whole lot. I had not

studied economics, I mean these issues of the poor. I remember

when Oscar Lewis' book on the Culture of Poverty came out, I

didn't like it. I'm not sure I like it now either, but I didn't

like the kind of talking down. Maybe I misread it, but it seemed

like he was talking down to people. You know, I don't come from

an affluent background myself. Didn't have any false illusions

about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps or any of that kind

of thing, or yeoman independence. I never believed in that, but

I always, I think, had a little identification with poor people

because [laughter] I came from 'em. But I began to do a good bit

more reading, and I began, up in New York, to meet a lot of

people whom I hadn't met before. This word, opportunity, I'm a

little hesitant about saying this because I don't know just where

the social scientists, what the clarifications are right now, but

one kind of opportunity theory is at least suggested by what I

said about Secretary Worth. You knock down discrimination and

the opportunities are there. There's another kind associated

with people like Dick Cloward, whom I got to know after I got to

New York--and I still think a lot of Dick, I do think a lot of

Dick--that old Mobilization for Youth Project, which had a great

impact upon the whole poverty program. But opportunity theory

for Cloward meant more than just knocking down the legal barrier.

It meant making sure that access was there, and that the person

was equipped to go through it. Anyway, as I said, I did a lot of

reading, and I met people I hadn't met before. I met and I

talked and I got to know some people that I had known before,

like Kenneth Clark. Then I got to see a lot of things like that.

You know that book? It's a very bad book. It's a bad book.

That's a new edition. The old edition is over there. But it's a

bad book about a good subject. The subject is the Child

Development Group of Mississippi, the Mississippi Headstart

Program. With Polly Greenberg, Jan Wright claimed to be

godmother of, and Marian Edelman. That's where her first work

with Marian Edelman. Marian had gone back to Mississippi in

1964, something like that. She'd gone to Mississippi, not back.

She wasn't from there. But she became the legal counsel for the

CDGM. I got to know her very well. But working with those

Mississippi Headstart programs and their battles during

1966-67-68 was a tremendously educational thing for me. I got a

deepened respect for the rural and semi-rural, poor black of the

deep South, but also a deepened respect for, and I think

conviction about, the possibilities of poor people, given the

right kind of support, taking decisive steps in their own

interests. I think those Headstart programs out in Mississippi,

I can't claim that I've stayed up with them, they just struck me

as being really good illustrations of the possibilities for

governmental action, governmental support, federal action,

federal support, on behalf of the poor. The black people out

there could not put those programs together by themselves. Even

if you'd given them the money, they couldn't have done it. They

had to have a degree of guidance and had to be given a sense of

understanding of what can be accomplished and what purposes you

might want. But then they had to be left to do it. I think the

Headstart Program, as I worked with it out in Mississippi, was

the one truly valid expression of citizen participation, or

community action that the Poverty Act talked about. Because the

goal was there. It was a fairly simple goal, namely, take these

kids, do something nice with these kids. Teach them brush their

teeth. Teach them to come to class with clean hands. Give them

some motor instruction. Give them a little bit of cognitive

instruction. Get them ready for the first grade. These were not

[laughter] cosmic goals.

NB: Right, that was pretty concrete.

LD: And people could understand these things.

NB: This was an example of a kind of successful partnership

between federal programs and the people themselves.

LD: Between people and government, yeah.

NB: What was the role of philanthropy in this?

LD: Well, I don't know. Our role, the Field Foundation's

role, was that government cut off the funding for CDGM and we had

to assist CDGM in the battle to get themselves refunded. And for

about twelve months, maybe thirteen, the CDGM offshoot, called

the Friends of the Children of Mississippi, was without any

funds, unsupported. It's now one of the biggest Headstart

Programs in the country. Then even that, even after everybody

got their funds, because we were involved, I don't know, we gave

Friends of Children of Mississippi some training money. Sent

some of the teachers off for training. We set up a training

program at Tougaloo for Headstart teachers. I don't know whether

it continues. Some of these teachers didn't have much in the way

of--you know, they were good, they could do it--but they didn't

have, they would have been better off if they'd had a little more

training. So we got a program set up at Tougaloo to bring them

in for training. Give them some kind of certificate. So there

were still things for foundations, philanthropy, to do.

NB: But initially, if I heard you correctly, it was like

the Field Foundation sort of came in and bailed out--I mean,

after the government bailed out, you came in and sort of pugged,

as opposed to sort of initiated with the notion that federal

funding would take it over later. This was the reverse of that.

LD: Headstart, yeah. Headstart was created under the

Economic Opportunity Act. I don't think it was ever. . . .

NB: There was no forerunner of that, like a smaller. . .

LD: This woman, as a matter of fact, that crazy woman,

Polly Greenberg, she was sent South. Set up Headstart. I mean,

they did things in that kind of way in 1965. Polly, go down and

set up Headstart. Actually, she got a hold of me. I was still

at SRC then. We had turned our offices over to her one Saturday

and we brought people in from all around the South. People came

from Georgia, Tennessee, all scattered around. And she's going

around, "Now, you fill in that blank, you fill in that blank."

Writing [laughter] these damn applications there for hundreds of

thousands of dollars. Carried them back up to Washington. That

was the beginning of southern Headstart. She herself got in love

with Mississippi, and the program out there, CDGM. She quit

working for the government and went out there. Of course,

because that program immediately came into opposition with

Senator Stennis and Senator Eastland. And I'd say, it's a

classic story. Sargeant Shriver was catching so much heat from

the Mississippi political structure, that he wanted to get rid of

CDGM. The smart way to do it was to create another group. He

got all these great liberals in Mississippi--Hodding Carter, Owen

Cooper, Aaron Henry, whatnot-- to put together a new group, and

took the CDGM money away from them. And that's when. . . .

RK: That's when you stepped in.

LD: That's when the battle began at CDGM.

RK: I wonder if there were other experiences that were the

opposite. Like Neil was saying, where you--I mean, what kind of

proposals that were coming in from the South and what kind of

funding possibilities, say in the period of the late '60s, are

you seeing? Is it a matter of trying to fund innovative, new

programs that are trying to deal with some of these problems?

Are you doing more in terms of kind of funding projects and

programs that are ongoing? Are you trying to stimulate and

energize? I know that the Ford Foundation, for instance, was at

times trying to, through the North Carolina Fund from a little

earlier period of time, George Esser and people were trying to do

something that the federal government can't do, which is to put

funds into innovative and kind of risky projects and programs

that maybe have some kind of chance of developing some kind of

workable alternative to things. I don't know whether they did

much of that, but that was one image of what they were trying to

do, at least.

LD: Yeah. It may be because I never controlled the kind of

money that Ford Foundation had, but I developed a conviction that

government and philanthropy are two different things. I never

thought you could create new structures like that. I'll tell

you, I've always been skeptical and I remain skeptical of this

so-called community action, community organization type thing,

that Ford has delighted in doing. But I don't know, I think the

main service that foundations can perform is to be responsive.

That doesn't mean that you don't think sometime and wish that you

could put your own ideas into effect. That doesn't mean you can't

stimulate sometimes, thought you've got to be very careful, I

think, about it. It's not hard, when you're sitting, holding a

checkbook, to persuade some people that a good thing to do is

such and such. They'll do it, and sometimes it doesn't work so

well. But we worked with, I think Field Foundation, so far as I

know, we made the first grant that the Federation of Southern

Coops ever got. We stayed with them, and they shortly began

receiving governmental money, not shortly, but they did. I think

I once could have answered you with more detail, but I know that

there were a number of other groups active in the South to which

we were the original contributors, not only in the South but the

Southwest, too. I know we made the first grants to the Southwest

Voters Group, which moved the VEP idea out to the Southwest and

did a lot better, Willie Velasquez and those people. But we

didn't dream up the Southwest Voters. We didn't dream up the

Federation of Southern Coops. I would like to think that out of

conversations we early on had, that they may have picked up a

decent idea here or there from us. But the initiative was always

theirs. I don't know, I've been around now foundations and

philanthropy for some time, and I just think that's the best role

that foundations can play, is to be responsive. Luckily, this is

still a civilization and a society which contains the germs of

creativity. People do have ideas. People do want to do things.

I hung around the Ford Foundation a while myself, and the people

up there, you hire a bunch of bright people, mainly young. What

are they going to do? Well, they have ideas (

) [laughter]. They want to start things. Sometimes that can be

very troublesome, frankly.

NB: Your skepticism over their ( ). Is that

skepticism linked to the fact that that concept was born within

the Ford Foundation among the younger people? ( )

What is it about that that you don't like?

LD: Well, even if you're as big as the Ford Foundation, it

is very difficult to have decisive impact on the economics of a

significantly large section of the poor. Steve Suits was out

here a couple of weeks ago, and we argued about this a little

bit. I just do not know of a truly successful community, what do

you call it, enterprise, community development project. I just

don't. Maybe MACE out in Mississippi. I think we may have

[laughter] made a first draft of MACE. It started before the

Ford Foundation saw it, and it originated with the same bunch of

radical kids, and they were kids then, who thought up CDGM. I

don't know, Neil, we were talking a little while ago about the

basic situation of the American poor, and my feeling is that it's

a structural situation. If that's so, and I think it is,

community development enterprises which have the sole purpose and

intent of somehow linking this segment of people who happen to be

in this isolated pocket, linking them with the mainstream, it

just doesn't work. It works as long as the outside money

continues to pour in there. I don't know really where else the

success stories are. Where's George Esser and these Gray Areas

programs that the Ford Foundation under Ylvisaker created? I

certainly have not studied them, but the most famous were down at

Philadelphia. The ones I knew the most about were either the

North Carolina Fund here or the big program in Philadelphia and

New Haven, Connecticut. Are these success stories?

RK: This is going to carry this discussion to another

extreme, but one argument you could make here is that one of the

things it does is it takes a lot of our attention away from what

you were saying, from the more fundamental issues that we ought

to be dealing with which are the basic structure of the economy

and the political relationship of poor people to, I guess, people

who control the economy in ways. And that you can keep running

around, you can keep spending money. We can keep spinning our

wheels, thinking, well, if we just get this one little health

clinic here or if we just get this one school going here, or if

we set up a sewing machine factory here, if we just a little bit

more farm land for black farmers and figure out some kind of

alternative crop for them to grow, that somehow we're eventually

going to solve the problem when we're still. . . . I mean, we're

really deceiving ourselves from what the larger issues are.

LD: Setting up that clinic is a good thing to do. Setting

up that sewing machine factory is a good things to do, so long as

you don't think that that clinic is going to get outside itself.

What it's going to do is take care of sick people, and that's a

good thing to do, especially where sick people didn't have

anything else to take care of them.

NB: ( )

LD: That's right.

NB: Now, how important, you've written and talked about the

way in which policy makers, the way in which economists, the way

in which the rest of us usually visualize the poor. You

mentioned Oscar Lewis, the talking down, which I would share

that. The economists perhaps who don't, just the language. How

important do you think it is, the way we ( ). It's

their behavior that's wrong, not the fact that ( )

economy. You've written about that. How at this point in your

life, is that still in your mind a very fundamental issue that

needs to be addressed if any significant change is going to come

about?

LD: Yeah. Is what, behavior?

NB: The way in which we conceive of the poor and blaming

( ).

LD: I don't know. I had a depressing experience on a trip

this week up to Washington. My wife went with me, so we drove

up. I don't know how familiar you all are with the trip from

here to Washington.

RK: [Laughter]

LD: But finding a place to eat on I-95, I haven't

succeeded. Going up the other day, at lunch time we stopped at a

Holiday Inn on the south side of Petersberg just before you got

to the toll road. Coming back yesterday, we stopped at a Ramada

on the north end of Richmond just before you get to the toll

road. Well, these were two very unfortunate eating experiences.

RK: [Laughter]

LD: The service was awful. The food was not anything. At

least at the Ramada, the men's room was filthy! I haven't been

in such a filthy restroom. And both of these places were black

run. I tell you, I just . . . . Makes me feel depressed. The

same way that I feel whenever I read about some murder taking

place in Durham. I quickly hope it wasn't by a black man again.

I don't know what the Holiday Inn or Ramada does. Don't they

train their people before they turn over a franchise to them? I

don't know. I don't know, Neil, [laughter] most of my own black

friends are, you know, middle class, solid achievers, whatnot,

and that's probably the case with most people that we know. The

Japanese have now elevated to the level of statecraft the

complaint that's been going on now for several decades that

blacks don't do as well as Koreans or Cubans or what have you.

I've always thought they did about as well as Appalachian whites.

I think the problem, this kind of problem that the Japanese are

talking about or that we talk about or we compare black economic

performance with that of Koreans or Chinese or whatnot, I think

black people in the United States think so much like white

people. They just think the way we think. They're the most

integrated in the sense that they've integrated themselves so

psychologically--I'm getting into your field now and I

shouldn't--but psychologically they've integrated themselves into

the American public. So they don't think about group elevation.

They don't think about all the blacks working together like all

the Koreans. They work together. You and I don't think that

way. We don't think about all blonde haired fellows working

together or whatnot. They don't think that way. They think just

the way they've picked up from us over three hundred years, and

it doesn't help them move economically, as well as some other

breeds. I think it is very important how we think about the

blacks. I think what the country is so much in danger of doing

right now is to think of the black as the rapist, the murderer.

You know, you weep when more grounds are given for thinking that

way. It's a strange and very sad and very tragic kind of return,

because, you know, the black as the rapist was the Reconstruction

view. If we're back to that now, it is a very, very hard thing.

The problem being also if we're back to that now, we've back

with maybe more grounds for being there than was the case during

the Reconstruction period. Black behavior in the ghetto is like

people who live in ghettos [laughter]. I read this book. You

may have read this book by Lehman. The Promised Land. The book

irritated me badly in a lot of ways, but it's a good book. And

his description of the Chicago ghetto is very powerful, and I

think probably very, very accurate. You know, I'd like to think,

in an airy sort of way, about behavior being tied in with the

values they learned from a violent society and war mongering

people and so forth and all that. And, you know, I think there's

something to that obviously. But it's not the whole story by any

means. I don't know what the whole story is. Our schools are

certainly not doing it right. But the burden that has been put

upon our schools in the last twenty years is just too great. So

I don't have any answers. It's a very mixed up, as everything

about the United States is maybe, there's a very mixed up set of

reactions towards blacks. I mean we idolize some of them, you

know, these basketball players, Jesus. They're idols. The

American public doesn't seem to have any problem at all with

liking and admiring black entertainers including those who act

like white people, like Bill Cosby. Seem to be able to accept

that, fine. But we're making, and maybe some of our black middle

class are making the same judgment, that the lower ranks of the

blacks are not just troublesome, but they're a real menace to our

civilization and almost beyond recall. This word under-class, I

resisted that word for a long time, but you have to use it

because everybody else does. If the term means anything, and of

course, the term does get used very loosely as well as carefully,

but if the term is going to be used carefully, it has got to mean

that you're saying there is a class of people which is beyond

being effected by upward currents in the economy and the society.

Well, maybe there are. I just can't bring myself to believe

that. Even today, there's probably no group of Americans who

gets more attention from the public than do the people living,

say, in a big city ghetto. I mean, the police, the social

services, the schools, the welfare department, they're in touch

with government all the time, much more than you and I are. But

it doesn't, I don't know. I keep insisting that the fundamental

problem is jobs in this country. There are not enough of them,

and there aren't. But there are people who will even say, and

I've heard Kenneth Clark almost say this, that there's this

generation who you'll just have to wipe off and forget. But I

don't believe that. It is just wrong for us to have a society in

which there is not enough work to go around. And it's wrong to

have a society in which people are economically a burden,

superfluous. This society could get along better economically if

you lopped off a couple of million people there at the bottom.

They are a drag. The only economic service they perform is as

consumers. And you know, I just think that's an immoral

situation and it's also an impolitic situation. It can't last.

NB: You think most of our policies though are formed, even

the policy ( )?

LD: Yeah, I think so. Pay them off. Pay them to keep

quiet. Part of the problem with that is that they're not keeping

quiet. I don't think there's any doubt about that. Our welfare,

Clarence ( )'s view, our welfare program's have been

largely designed--nobody in his right mind can believe the

American welfare programs are a way out of poverty. They're

[laughter] just not designed to lift the person out of poverty.

NB: ( ) continually

produces the results ( ) we're not gaining any

ground. How would that vision have to change? What would we as

a group of people working across international boundaries have to

imagine? What would our vision have to be in order to shift

policies in a way that might be something different? How do we

get from the burden perspective to another perspective? What

would that perspective be?

RK: He asks the hard questions, doesn't he [laughter]?

LD: Well, I think that's a hard question but it's also one

that has to be asked of all of us. You have to get a different

view of what a successful economy consists of. Never mind for

the moment about a successful school system or anything else, but

what's a successful economy? I'd like to see us begin to define

that in terms of employment, opportunities for public or

productive work. At any rate, I'd like to see us get away from

the way we think now. It just continues to blow my mind that

people like the ones who rule us can talk about prosperity while

there are billions of people unemployed. We do intellectual

tricks. Economists, not run of the mill social reformers, but

economists used to define full employment as being employment of

everybody but three to four percent. They don't do that anymore.

Full employment now is defined at some place like 94, maybe 93%.

We just defined out. We talk now about recessions. I don't

remember hearing that word recession before, well, I don't know

when I first started hearing it. But you didn't hear that word

in the '30s or '40s. People talked about depressions and panics

and crises, but the economists came along and created a new

concept called a recession and they defined it. It's a purely

arbitrary, abstract definition. Recession is two successive

quarters when the GNP drops. So now you have this big argument.

Are we in recession? Are we not in recession? We can't tell

whether we're in recession or not until six months later when you

look--that's crazy. The old debate about whether we're in a

recession is a debate about whether we're in something that meet

or doesn't meet [laughter] academic economist's classification.

It doesn't make any. . . .

END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B

START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A

RK: One of the other questions, we were trying to think the

other day about what to do at this conference. We're going to

bring all these people like yourself, people from the Federation

of Southern Coops and MACE, communities in the mountains, Penn

Center, day care activists, educators, health care people, and

stuff like that, and kind of talk about what we're going to try

to get out of it. We're going to spend this money and bring

these people together for two or three days. What do we want to

come out of that. What do we want to know at the end of that

time that we didn't know. And I'm sure you've run dozens of

things and been to hundreds of them, and I'm not sure that this

is any different. Maybe the cast of characters won't even be all

that different either. I guess one of the things that we were

trying to think about, we were trying to go back and look at the

history of people's experiences and see what kinds of lessons we

could draw from it. This whole thing about these community

action and community development, I mean, I think that's a very,

particularly given the focus that so many of these organizations

have, it's one of those things that we need to talk about it and

be very clear about. At least, what the limitations are or to

what extent they can bridge some of these divisions to expand in

different ways. I was over talking to Mary Mountcastle at MDC.

She and another person were helping us conceptualize. One of the

things that we were talking about, observations we were making,

was in the '60s you had foundation and government support, and

kind of in some way a moral concern by the country, however

widespread that was. It lasted six years, seven years, or

something. And it's not something that you have today. But what

you have in its place are large numbers of grassroots

organizations that have sprung up since that period of time to

try to do something in all their different kinds of ways. And

you have a foundation for grassroots and community types of

activities that you didn't have in the '60s. It just didn't

exist in that same way. We were kind of wondering what

difference that would make today if, all of a sudden, you had

federal programs or more foundation support or the kind of

commitment on the part of the nation to start dealing with those.

What would you think about that characterization? Would it make

any difference, or what difference would it make today if we had

some kind of infusion of energy and money, resources, commitment?

I mean, you've answered that in some ways I know, I realize.

LD: Well, you'd also have to have an infusion of ideas and

goals, and that, in some ways, is harder even than the money. I

don't have to say it, but the goal of getting voting rights is a

different goal than getting a decent place in the economic sun.

So we're coming to an era of intangibilities. This man, Colin

Powell, a great black success story--I pretty well think one

general's like another general [laughter]--but he has to make an

annual report to Congress. You've probably seen this in the

paper. I was actually looking at his statement the other day

[laughter], you know, Communism is dead. The Cold War's over.

We don't have to arm against the Soviet Union any more, but now

the enemy is, and these are his words, "uncertainty and

instability." And we have to be militarily prepared to meet

uncertainty and instability. Well, that's crazy [laughter]. If

you're going to meet the Soviet Union, that's at least a finite

thing [laughter]. You can size that one. There's no possible

way of sizing up instability and uncertainty, you know

[laughter]. The needs are infinite. Well, I don't know how I

got into that, except that [laughter] we are deprived here, too,

of finite goals, like getting people registered to vote.

RK: If we were trying to devise an agenda for the future,

the near future, that came out of this conference, you know,

something we could at least think about we might do. I mean,

would it help mobilize people or get a greater degree of activism

if there were a set of specific goals that people involved in

these issues wanted to meet in ten years, by the turn of the

century. I mean, some realistic goals as opposed to kind of

George Bush goals of having the best educational system. I heard

on the news today that school children in the United States in

math and science, in ( ) or some system, Spain, all

these Third World countries test better than American students on

average now. We're in 20th place or something. I mean, some

realistic goals, would that make a difference?

LD: Well, I think you have two key words there. One is

goal and the other is realistic. An interesting thing would

be--whether you could do it at this conference or not, or whether

it's even possible--to examine how realistic are some goals that

we might all desire. I might say, for instance, that a goal that

I would like to see is the preservation of what's left of the

black farm base in the South. Is that realistic? Can the

deterioration be stopped? I don't know. Yeah, I think that

another kind of goal that you might examine the realistic quality

of would be whether the family farm, either of blacks or whites,

can be preserved. But then [laughter] the big problem would be

finding a family farm. I don't know. The main issue continues

to come back to whether a person, born into this country, can

with any realism look forward to a life of some self reliance and

independence. That may be very fuzzy, but I think that's what we

all have in mind.

RK: I think that's well put.

NB: Well, you've talked about this some. I can't remember

which book it was that made reference about that FDR document of

1941. It was presented three days before the war, and there are

four or five goals and objectives. If I remember correctly, you

compared that against some of the more recent stuff (

). Those are four or five pretty good basic notions

that we might take a look at those or read those.

LD: I think what you're referring to, I have dug up the old

National Resources Report of 1941, before we went into the war,

which was completely forgotten after that. There's Roosevelt's

own State of the Union Address in 1944, '45, where he talked

about, "We must move ahead now." He was confident that the war

was about to end. "We must move ahead now to establish the

social rights"--the right to work, the right to health, and so

forth. I think it would be wonderful if the American people

[laughter] sort of reevaluated themselves in terms of the kind of

idealism which Roosevelt could, in his time, think was realistic.

He was no visionary. He tended to be a very practical man. He

thought practically, and he could see those things as possible

now. I think that would [laughter], for my money, be a great

framework, Roosevelt's 1944 State of the Union Address.

NB: Those were four or five very concrete goals that were

put out there that would take a particular vision. One would

have to ( ) social project and see what that entails to

perhaps have some sort of historical retrospective. Begin

perhaps with maybe the Jay Rockefeller thing that just came out.

When you read those and you look at ( ), there's

not a whole lot of difference in what's good about this and

what's good about that. Again, ( ) there's not a lot

that's changed. There's not a lot that's changed in what the

problems are, how we look at the problems. I think the goals

would ( ), and then what are some of the barriers. I

think this is where, in my mind at least, some of this perception

stuff kicks in. If you look at poor people as burdens ( )

you do what the Japanese have suggested, lop them up. We'll be

better off without them. Or X-percent of the people are going to

be unemployed, then this is full employment. I mean, what the

implications of those are vis-a-vis the goals of the economy.

( ) I may be just over

whatever, but I think it really is a question of

conceptualization and vision. Statistically, you get two

different ( ). Poverty amongst the elderly has been

reduced, if not statistically eliminated, over a relatively short

period of time. We all know individuals who are poor and old,

but that's an example of an effort that kind of worked. But we

haven't done that with kids. ( ) I don't

know.

LD: Have you read this book by Lehman about the promised

land? [Laughter] I used this line with my own review of the

thing. That woman, who he follows through, she finally makes it.

She gets on Social Security [laughter]. And that's really all

that somebody in her situation can look forward to. She has got

to survive to age 65. She has to deal with the ghetto

for--anyway, that's a bitter prognosis. Well, you see, Social

Security came out of Roosevelt's administration. And when was

it, back in the early '70s, when we built the cost of living

increase into the Social Security, it really did make it the most

effective anti-poverty program we've got. It's maybe not fair to

the rest of the population, but, you know, there's a lot of

inequity in that now. I don't really need it. I get it. I have

a notion someday I'm going to give it back. I don't know. Maybe

I will. Maybe I won't. And it has taken, well, you can look at

the figures. The elderly in this country used to be

disproportionately disadvantaged. They're now disproportionately

advantaged.

NB: ( )

LD: Well, yeah, I think so. The fellow who wants to be

president, I heard him talking the other night. Kerry kept

saying National Health Insurance, and that, even though it would

cost 264 billion dollars a year, it would cost that in federal

outlay, but it would probably save. I think he may well be

right. At any rate, I don't think we can continue to afford this

kind of health system we have, which is one that truly sets

people at each other. In addition to all the gross inadequacies

of it and the cost of it--and it must cost like the devil, I

mean, just the paper work--it does have the effect of putting

different segments of our population at each other's throats. I

mean, the federal government and the doctors of this country

become adversaries. Well, that's no way to run it. Not only

that, but we put different groups of sick people at each other.

I mean, this group wants money for AIDS, and this group wants

money for cancer, and this group. . . . I mean, we shouldn't

support AIDS at the expense of supporting cancer, or vice versa.

And to have different sets of sick people lobbying against each

other, it's just wrong. And we have a system which is just, you

have to have some ticket to get into it. You have to be old, or

you have to be wounded, or you have to be especially poor. It's

intellectually, but also politically, corrupt.

RK: ( ) the idea of taking that document--thinking

alone and thinking about as we do this discussion of what the

future is--is talking about some real possibilities. Thinking

about particular goals in the context of those, as opposed to

just vague generalizations like ending poverty or fighting

poverty. I mean, those are all in their nice mobilizing and

phrases at some point in time, but they don't. . . . I mean, I

think that's one of the reasons the civil rights movement was

effective in the period of time it was. They had a very concrete

set of goals that were very obvious to people. Jobs is one, and

health care is another, basic education, another. If you can put

these down in front of people with, you know, these should be

rights that people have as citizens of this country, as opposed

to everybody should be well off. I mean, I think the phrase--I

forget what the phrase you used a little while ago--but a simple,

a kind of a decent life or simple decency.

LD: I said could realistically expect to be self-reliant.

RK: ( )

LD: I think all the terms that I, you know, be realistic to

be able to expect. Well, more power to you. How long will this

conference be in Greenville?

RK: We're going to start Friday and end Sunday. So just a

couple of days.

LD: Where will it be?

RK: Greenville.

LD: Holiday Inn?

RK: ( ). We're going to stay at the

Ramada Inn. Hope it's better [laughter]. We've sent someone out

there to see it.

LD: I think Ramada Inns are usually okay.

RK: If Moyers comes out and films this, this will make it a

little bit different. Also there's the potential to get on

television, and the potential of reaching ( )

an audience and have some kind of impact.

LD: There's a fellow named Mike Clark who was one of John

Gavena's predecessor's at Highlander, and most recently has been

executive director at Friends of the Earth, an environmental

group, who left that, just screaming, about six months ago, but

is now working on a grant that Moyers is responsible for. Moyers

is connected with a foundation up in New Jersey called ( ).

They just gave Mike some money essentially to be helpful to

other environmental groups around the country. So he's drifting

around. You were talking about Moyers, Mike might be helpful to

you, getting him interested.

RK: Because I'd thought about having him come to the

conference.

LD: What do you mean?

RK: Mike.

NB: You know him?

RK: I know who he is. I don't know him. But I wasn't sure

whether I was going to. We don't have money for that many people

( ).

LD: Maybe he could use his own grant money.

RK: Yeah, to come down. Well, maybe we should stop.

END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A

END OF INTERVIEW