Oral History Interview with Hal Sieber by William Chafe

              CIVIL RIGHTS GREENSBORO DIGITAL ARCHIVE PROJECT
William Henry Chafe Oral History Collection
INTERVIEWEE: Hal Sieber
INTERVIEWER: William Chafe
DATE: November 8, 1974
Note: This transcript is an edited version of an original transcript for which no audio recording
was available. Therefore, CRG cannot guarantee that this transcript is an exact representation of
the interview.
WC: Mr. Sieber told us how, when he first joined the chamber, he would use news stories as a
way of supplementing his message. For example, he would feature a photograph of Dr.
Benbow[?] treating a black child as a way of highlighting the interracial theme of a story
on Dr. Benbow. Similarly, he would take a quote out of context, such as the “total
community” segment, which would point toward race relations even though there was
nothing in the speech, which was being quoted in the journal, which would indicate that
race relations were an issue. [In] other words, there seems to have been a consorted and
manipulative effort to highlight and to exploit questions of race relations, as a means of
communicating a message for the community of the importance of mobilizing for a drive
to redress the grievances of blacks.
There is one thing you said the other day that kind of interested me. You said that
when you came to Greensboro for your interview, race was not something that was
mentioned. You were there to do complicated public relations and to—and, in your own
perception, this was that in order to create an image of the [Greensboro] Chamber of
Commerce as innovative, it had to become innovative, and then you moved into the
development of total community concept and things like that. I just want to probe a little
further the extent to which, when you came to Greensboro, you did or you did not
envision race relations as a major element to your work there.
HS: I don't think I really did, because I didn't know to what extent it would have to be. Before
I answer that a little bit further, I want to go back on something, because you have
mentioned it twice now that I had said—and I didn't say—that the reference was to a
complicated public relations job. I don't want that to sound pretentious and
presumptuous. It was complicated because the chamber was in good shape in many
respects, and in better shape than most chambers would be. So the question would arise,
what do you really do to improve the reputation of the organization? What do you do to
do a good public relations job when it is very hard to show that you are keeping the
elephants away when there are no elephants around? So I just want to put that into
perspective, that “complicated” would really mean it would be more complicated to me
than it would be complicated in the minds of the chamber, even though in the discussion
[unclear] [former public relations man for a chamber of commerce in Tennessee?]
And they asked me did I envision that race would become a factor in my work, or
that race relations would become a component of the chamber program. I don't believe
that I thought of it even in the slightest. Except that I probably did think, somewhere
along the way, in passing, that dealing with the chamber of commerce would give me an
opportunity to do some things. Because I recognized that the chamber of commerce was
an established institution. It would put me in the middle of the established institution
instead of at the periphery, and it is an opportunity not to do anything [unclear] or evil or
subversive or what have you, but it is an opportunity to do things that are constructive for
the community. And you know that your work is going to make a difference, so that if
you are involved with a committee one day and you issue a statement or you prepare a
statement for somebody else, it might well be within two weeks you start seeing some
results [unclear].
And I think another thing: I knew that in my own personal life and the way I
normally responded that I was usually fairly forthright. I never thought of myself as fool-hardy.
I never looked at myself as brazen. I think if you had been asked on that given day
I started, you know, if race relations are poor in Greensboro and it seems that the
chamber should be doing something about it, would you shrink from it or would you
think it is something the chamber should stay away from? I think my answer would be
just because it’s taboo for chambers to get into that normally or it’s controversial would
mean to me that we should stay out of it.
WC: Yeah. Did you see yourself as an outsider coming into the chamber business?
HS: Not particularly. In 1948, or ‘49—I'm not sure which year it is. I could find out for you. I
was the first college student ever to be made part of the board of directors of any chamber
of commerce in the United States, in Chapel Hill. I was the international chairman of the
National Students Association, and I developed something called the [unclear], which is
very similar to some of these discount plans for the elderly or students in some
communities now. It became then the center of International [Student] Association and
helped colleges develop programs for [unclear] in college communities. And part of the
negotiations with the business community in Chapel Hill ended up with their saying the
student might appoint a person to be on the board of directors of the Chamber of
Commerce and Merchants Association of Chapel Hill, so I was designated being
president. So I had that background, I felt, even though I was a little cynical about
chambers of commerce in terms of whether they really accomplished a lot, because I
really didn't know but so much about what they could do back in those days, or I thought
that they could accomplish a lot that would usually be toward preserving the past rather
than protecting the future.
Of course, I'm proud of the fact that I was the first student named to the chamber.
I didn't see myself as an outsider in that sense, and an outsider in the sense of a sheep in
wolves clothing, or a wolf in sheep clothing. I did see myself as an outsider in the same
way that I'm an outsider in Dallas, in that in Texas I'm a North Carolinian in Texas, trying
to learn about Texas so I can do my job in Texas. I was very keenly aware of the fact that,
since I was not from Greensboro, and I had never really spent much time in an urban
community, except in Washington, D.C.—and in that instance, I was dealing with a
national perspective and not a local perspective—I had an awful lot to learn about urban
and an awful lot to see. But I sort of liked the idea that I had a fresher perspective
[unclear].
WC: Did you have an image of Greensboro as—when you came there, what was your image of
Greensboro, in terms of race?
HS: My image of Greensboro, in terms of anything—race or community development, any
aspect—was that Greensboro was probably the most progressive city in North Carolina. I
knew of McNeill Smith. I knew of the sit-ins. I knew of the history related to the sit-ins. I
knew of the Quaker influence in Greensboro. I sort of liked what I saw when I visited
Greensboro—shopping or what-have you. I had a girlfriend when I was in college who
was in Greensboro. I visited Greensboro back in those days. Woman's College, which is
now The University of North Carolina [at Greensboro (UNCG)], was in Greensboro. All
those things mixed up in one. I saw Greensboro as a sort of a decent sort of city that if it
hadn't been Greensboro, I probably would not have become part of the chamber of
commerce. Greensboro was about the only city in North Carolina that I would have liked
to have lived in, other Chapel Hill for fifteen years off and on.
And Chapel Hill had an image that I, in my own mind, had conjured up. That sort
of dissipated a little bit when I got away from Chapel Hill. I think being in the middle of
Chapel Hill when all the frustrations—I felt it’s not being everything it's cracked up to
be. It wasn't the hot bed of liberalism. It wasn't the center of writers. It had a lot of retired
writers, but it wasn't a literary center to me. It wasn't a lot of things. It wasn't the southern
part of heaven that I thought it was; it was sort of the northern part of hell.
WC: [laughs]
HS: I didn't really see Chapel Hill as what it was cracked up to be, but Chapel Hill was the
nicest place I had ever lived in, to me. You know, you can get very romantically attached
to the village atmosphere, which was very pronounced until the last decade. I made a lot
of friends there. So if it hadn't been Greensboro, I think I probably would have left
Chapel Hill, maybe part of the American Heart Association out of New York, I don't
know. It just happened to be that there was an opening and I got the call from [Hargrove]
“Skipper” Bowles that was [unclear].
WC: To what point, if at all, did you change your image of Greensboro as being the most
progressive city in the state?
HS: I've never changed my view of Greensboro as the most progressive city in the state—
WC: Would you just talk a little bit then about the—
HS: —that's in the state of North Carolina.
WC: Yes, right, but the components of that image, of that reality—I guess what I'm asking you
to do is—
HS: Why would I think that Greensboro is such a progressive city?
WC: Let's say that in 1969, after having been in Greensboro for three years, you had initiated a
total development for total community. You had started the total community, and you had
started your discussion cells, coming out of the curbstone conferences.
HS: And they had been going for two and a half years by then.
WC: Right. But you still had the school board, which was fighting desegregation, and you
probably had some—at least some opposition in the establishment at that point. So in
'69—let's just take an imaginary day in 1969 in the spring—
HS: Okay. I can answer the question sort of. If I was stranded on a desert island, and after
walking around an island and I ran into three beautiful ladies. One of them was bald-headed
and weighed five hundred pounds, the other was cross-eyed, bow-legged, and the
other was pock-marked and very distorted physically, so that none of the three would
somehow fit the image that sexiest society would help a young man develop what a
beautiful lady should look like. And I lived on that island long enough to know that those
were the only three ladies around, and somehow I got the notion that the five hundred
pound bald-headed lady was the most attractive of the three. It wouldn't really mean that
she would win a beauty contest.
In the same way, and I've never really had to think about that in terms of
Greensboro. But in the same way, the fact that Greensboro had gone 2 or 3%—100%
farther than some cities in some areas in community life, didn't mean it didn't have
90%—a damn long way to go. And I was aware of the fact that other cities had done
something that Greensboro hadn't done, just as I am aware of now that there are cities
throughout the country with the tradition of city in an arch-conservative atmosphere. [It]
might be that cemeteries, of course, are open. All funeral homes, of course, take care of
all people, regardless—all forms of people, regardless of skin color. In that particular
residential mobility—open housing, equal housing opportunity—which would be
unheard of. Even though it was the law, it would be subjected to a tremendous amount of
resistance. In another community, people might say, “Those people ought to be able to
live where they want to live. Hell no, funeral homes. Time of death is no time for social
experimentation,” and the tradition would be different. You can take your druthers and
decide which of those two communities are more liberal, and you might say to yourself,
“Well, maybe the funeral home business doesn't really affect the total economy and the
total lifestyle quality of blacks quite as much as the housing matter does. And maybe
because of the housing policy that the community seems to have, other things have
happened that have economic advantage and cultural advantage,” So that you will say,
“All right, so the funeral homes and the cemeteries are segregated, and it’s just not a
perfect community, and its got a long way to go in a lot of ways because there is still not
a lot of socialization.”
But to the truth of the matter is that that city has moved further along than any
other. In that sense, that's the way Greensboro was, and I hadn't thought of it that way and
I still think that. I noticed that Raleigh, with a very low—relatively low minority and
black mayor, and Chapel Hill, with an even lower population, has a black mayor. I still
have to say that Greensboro is much further along in housing. They are much further
along in socialization, further along in education, whatever it might be. But it doesn't
mean that I am making an absolute statement.
WC: Let's, if we can, talk a little bit about progression. At what point did you begin to
conceive of the discussion cells becoming more than an occasional conversation, let's
say, at what point?
HS: About the week before we started the first one.
WC: Okay, will you talk about that a little bit?
HS: To me it seems unfair that the same people who promote and support free enterprise in
the marketplace of goods and services are frequently reluctant to encourage open
controversial ideas and encourage free speech in the marketplace of free enterprise of
ideas. I used that phrase before. I feel like I am using a [unclear] of my own. But that's
sort of the way I felt. I felt that a chamber of commerce had to be open if it was going to
be true to what it said it was true to. The chamber of commerce normally starts off by
talking about how it supports free enterprise and the American way of life and all these
other things. The basis to that, of course, is the business community is helped to build the
country, and what's good for business is usually good for the community. And I had the
notion that probably the other way around on the ladder was [unclear], what’s good for
the community would be good for business probably. That might be a good way to sell
the need to take off rose-colored glasses or to try to squint enough to look through and
see something a little more clearly that related to the role of the business community and
the total community.
Now, in the discussion cells, the curbstone conferences, I had the feeling that the
chamber of commerce, which was catching a lot of hell from the smaller members—and
most chambers of commerce do—the small business people, people who own the little
stores and the small professional people, the lawyers and the CPAs [certified public
accountants] and the physicians who were on their own and not part of some large
corporate professional firm, they would normally say, “Hell, the chamber of commerce
doesn't really want to know too much about what we've got to say; they want our
money.” But the people that are running the show are the people from, in Greensboro's
case, Burlington Industries and Cone [Mills] and what have you. While I don't think that
that's a myth, I think that there is a reality that the larger industrial representatives tend to
be more aggressive, tend to know more about the value of the chamber of commerce,
tend to have more time to devote to community affairs, tend to want to put their mouth
where their money is, or whatever it might be. I also knew that it didn't have to be that
way, and that a lot of that was because of small business men just didn't take part or didn't
want to take part, or didn't push his way into a form where he had a right to be, or
because the chamber just didn't have anything in Greensboro. The only time that a
member had a sure bet of being invited was at the time of the annual meeting. And the
annual meeting just had a speaker, and you just sat there and listened and got up and left.
So I sensed that frustration among the members, and it had strictly to do with the fact that
the members wanted to be more of a part of what was happening in the community.
Then I also sensed that the chamber had very little credibility in the community.
People who were part of the business community say, “Hell, all those people are fat cats
and they look after their self-interest.” The college students talked about how the greedy
business people didn't particularly care about what young own people thought, that in fact
they had forgotten that they were young once themselves, and so on.
But it seemed to me that if you could get people together to talk about these issues
in some mechanism where there would be enough control so that it wouldn't be possible
for somebody to think the issue, so that if you were talking about desegregation that there
would be a moderator there to keep them on track, or if they were talking about
fluoridation—which was a hot issue then—that the first five minutes wouldn't be devoted
to fluoridation and then somebody would say—and then, you know, start talking about a
need for water and sewer and just drop it, because people are uncomfortable and they
tend to shift and they tend to defer the political leadership to people that they think are
strong and get off the subject. So I wanted to come up with a mechanism that would
assure an open, free exchange of ideas, but almost forced the exchange of ideas if people
felt uncomfortable until they could become comfortable. And then there was just a very
short period of time that I noticed the business people were very comfortable. I mean they
enjoyed talking about the things that they hadn't talked about before.
I think the word “discussion cells”—the term rubbed some people the wrong way,
but when they made a suggestion—I might hear as many as ten suggestions from people.
“Can't we think of a better name?” I always had to think for myself, “Would they even be
saying that if there had just been a dialogue group or discussion?” They would say, “Hell,
who wants to go to a discussion?”
And maybe the fact that it kept the whole business of what was going on in the
fore, and you couldn't pay but just so much for it promotionally, in terms of money for
public relations expenditure, it just seemed a simple way to just stick with it and be
stubborn. And normally on something like that, I just took the guff and kept right on
going. And it wasn't a big deal, in the sense that it was a big departure from what I felt
was right and what I thought the people around me thought was right. It’s just that I
thought that the chamber kept talking about how they wanted to hear what the people had
to say, and the same way I hear cities saying they want to have community participation
and deciding how the public's monies are spent. But if they find out that five hundred
people show up for the city council meeting, it’s natural for the city council members to
say, “Oh, my god!,” and then cringe, because they don't want to go through all that mess.
They would rather be able to get it all over within five minutes and go home.
WC: At what point did the cell concept move beyond chamber membership?
HS: From the very beginning.
WC: From the beginning. How did these other people get involved?
HS: By invitation. You couldn't very well discuss what was wrong with the news media if
that's what the business people thought. And I kept hearing the newspapers and what
have [you] had a closed shop. And the usual thing that you hear in a community—part of
which is true, and part of which isn't in any community—very well without inviting some
people from the media, for example. The big executives of the news media would belong
to the chamber, if you were talking about the large media, but the little weekly newspaper
might not be—ought to be, but might not be. The next week, if you were discussing
something that related to government policy, then all of a sudden you started talking
about the need to have the head of the waterworks or the head of the Human Relations
Commission there as part of the discussion and tell him to bring anybody you want to,
and they might not be any part of the chamber and might not ever be. And so as you
moved from subject to subject you, found the need to bring in people from the outside.
Well, a lot of them—it became very quickly apparent that a lot of the problems
that we were discussing were—that were urban problems—were problems because the
people that had the capacity to solve the problems never quite knew what the problems
were, or that they thought they knew and they thought they came up with a solution, and
they didn't quite know that the solution that they did come up with was one that was
either incompatible with the constituency involved, or one that just didn't produce any
results. It just believed—it's like the father who thinks that when he tells his son, “Look,
if you do this one more time, I'm going to suspend your allowance,” he thinks that he has
solved something. It might very well be that he never knows in the future whether his son
did or didn't do something, and his son gets his allowance. But it may be a little bit of
impression that just doesn't improve communications and solve the problem. So people
from the community were involved from the very beginning.
WC: The people from the newspapers and the waterworks are not people from the community.
HS: They are from the community in many respects. Because if you were talking about
sanitation workers, for example, and there was a sanitation workers strike possibly in the
making, or the sanitation workers were wanting to have the right to bargain collectively
or whatever it might be, it's all well and good that they have the director of sanitation
department there to explain what the sanitation department policy would be, which would
have been the traditional chamber approach. And the members would say, “Gee whiz.
Thank you very much, Mr. So-and-so, for coming. You have really informed us and
given us a good perspective for what the story is.” And then [at] next week’s Rotary Club
meeting and the Wednesday afternoon sewing circle and at the country club cocktail
party and over the poker game, it was possible to repeat the things that you had heard
from the sanitation department director, but that was only one side of the story.
So if you had some sanitation workers there, they would be part of the
community. [It] depends on what the problem is. And the sanitation director—who has
always been the director responsible for passing on information to the city manager, and
the city manager always speaking for him—also is a part of the community, in that he is a
resident of the community subject to a certain amount of [unclear] that comes from the
way the system operates. And I don't hold that the community involves only the little
people who have not been involved. I think that everybody in the community is part of
the community, and everybody in the community has the same responsibility to be part of
it.
WC: Was there a point, though, at which the discussion cells ceased being at 8:30 in the
morning meetings at Hayes-Taylor Y[MCA—Young Men’s Christian Association], and
became meetings which took place in people’s homes or at schools, and which involved
housewives and workers? When—
HS: That happened very early. Again, that happened very, very early in the game. I don't have
to go back very far. Just this week—the week that we are discussing this right now, in a
city that’s far away from Greensboro—but at that particular meeting, which took place in
the board room of the chamber, one of the people from the community, a Chicano,
brought up the fact that the meeting was held in the board room, in the center of town,
where people had to pay a dollar and a half for parking, at a time of day when business
people could come but housewives couldn't, under circumstances where nobody helped
pay for the babysitting, while the business representative, who was able to be at the
meetings, still had his secretary manning the shop at the office. So at that particular point,
without batting an eyelash, knowing that nonetheless that there might be a problem of
attendance among business people at the next meeting, because they are more
accustomed to going to meetings during the daytime, and knowing that people can always
say on one day that they will come to a meeting but by the time you get to that date there
are all kinds of reasons why people can't come—including the lady who raised the
complaint—we nonetheless decided to have that next meeting at nighttime, okay.
And in that same way, very early in the game, when we started discussing certain
things, people started saying, “Gee whiz. We sure would like to have this meeting at
such-and-such a time, but you may have it in the middle of the day,” and, “Hell, I can't
make,” or, “I've got to do such-and-such,” whatever it might be. And business people, as
well as some of the community people, who suggest, “Well, can't we have it at nighttime
at the library?” So the next time somebody might say, “Why have it at the library? You
always have it downtown, but where the people are, they live out.” Here we are
discussing sanitation workers, I'm mentioning, but it wouldn't necessarily have to be the
sanitation workers. It could have been anything. But a lot of those people lived in
southwest Greensboro. Why don't we have the next meeting at the Hayes-Taylor YMCA,
which was predominately black in its constituency? And somebody else said, “You
know, there are people that live way out on Highway 29, and they can't come on into the
meeting. In fact, they don't trust a meeting like this, and they really would trust the
meeting more if the man who is the most prominent person in the neighborhood invited
everybody to their home.”
And I saw a tremendous opportunity for whites and blacks to come to the
basement of somebody's home for a meeting, and we had discussions, cell meetings, in
basements of people’s homes or on front porches or steps. Some of them were really
curbstone. But it was just a matter of weeks. It wasn't any—and it wasn't, at the time,
anything that was so earthshaking as it was a complicating factor making the public
relations efforts more complicated, because you had to communicate with people why
you were having it at somebody’s home and it—twice as many phone calls to reach
people and to encourage them to be there. Whereas at the beginning, it took maybe ten
phone calls to everyone, one to encourage a townsman to show up at a meeting because
he wasn't accustomed to being invited to sitting with a businessperson, and he didn't
really believe that he was really wanted or needed, or what have you. It started becoming
more difficult to get business people to show up at the meetings. But since I was working
at that base, I was more willing to take that risk if it was to get community people. So it
might take ten or fifteen phone calls to get the mayor or the city manager or what have
you to show up at one of those meetings. But the word spread.
There was never any newspaper publicity about it. There were years before the
newspapers even noted that there was such a thing as discussion cell. The word spread
nonetheless by grapevine. “Do you know that the city manager was in the basement of
So-and-so’s house last week?” And, “Gee whiz. There's a new day in Greensboro. The
police chief was here last week,” or whatever it might be. And so promotion took care of
itself after a while, but I had somebody working almost all the time phoning people to
remind them of the meetings. We didn't send out notices.
WC: At what point did race become the single dominant focus of these meetings?
HS: I don't think race ever did become the single dominate focus. I think what happened was
that the subject matter that was discussed was viewed by most of the people as being the
dominate focus. For example, if you had a meeting this week on housing, the need for
public housing, the next week on education and the need for quality education [unclear],
and the next week a need to solve unemployment problems, especially for the hardcore
unemployed, and the next week had a meeting to discuss the need for streets and
highways in areas of the community where there aren't any streets and highways, and the
next week discussed the pollution problem in that there was a misty cloud of stink that
was hovering over a whole residential neighborhood because a particular creek was
clogged up with sewage, and each of those urban problems had race relatedness in the
sense that they had been unsolved in the past because of a public view of race or because
of public view of the constituency involved or whatever it might be. Then race was a
factor, but housing was a legitimate concern and employment was a legitimate concern
and what have you.
I'd say social economic development was almost from the very beginning,
because we would say we were talking about the community development. And not just
smokestack hunting, we're talking about what's good for the community is—so it turned
out to be that we were discussing problems where the people who in the community had
least [been] involved happen to be the blacks, in the same way that if 95% of the white
members, white businesspeople, are already members of the chamber, but only 5% of the
black businesspeople are members of the chamber. And you then have a drive to get
every businessman into the chamber, and it happens to be that most of your prospects at
that point are black. You then say, “At what point did your effort become primarily to
bring in black members?” Well, it didn't really become a primary focus except in the
prospects of other people. And I'm not being devious—
WC: No.
HS: I think it was very clear in my mind at that point that I wanted to minimize it, because I
knew that a [unclear] discussion of race, or a discussion of race as a discussion of
discrimination, per se, or a discussion of the need for socialization, or whatever it might
be, would be ill-received because it would be seen as no plausible community
development end. Even if I myself might think that it is an urban problem that people
don't know how to be good to each other. It’s hard as a sociologist or as a business leader
or as a chamber of commerce representative to make that point, because it sounds
romantic and it sounds unrelated to the chartered objectives of an organization.
So I would have been very careful to be fairly neutral about that, but also was
very much aware of the fact that even though people might not have wanted race to be
discussed at all to the extent that it was, it always became more apparent because it had
the sharp effect that it would have, and, you know, it would invite one black to be at
every cocktail party at the country club for a year. He might be accused of trying to turn
the country club into a black organization. He might be accused of trying to convert the
characteristic of the participants in the cocktail parties from white to black. But the fact is
that you are talking about only one black out of maybe a hundred whites, and percentage-wise
it would be a very small emphasis. But I'm sure that all ninety-nine of the whites
walking into that cocktail party would immediately see the black person, whereas if he
weren't black [and] he was just someone else who was not physically conspicuous, it
might take them [time] to realize that there was a non-traditional participant in the
cocktail party. Does that make sense?
WC: That makes a lot of sense. Let me, if I can, state my perceptions and then have you
correct it, if it’s incorrect—that you had a concern that the community become more open
in its discussions of community issues, and the chamber become open to the discussion of
those community issues, and that to the extent that such issues were discussed, they
would inevitably, at some point, touch on race, even though that was not necessarily the
purpose of having these discussions. But that this in turn would create a wider awareness,
both with the chamber and the community, almost incidentally, of the race relatedness of
these questions. That you in turn, in your editorial policy, in such things as the heads you
put on your stories or the photographs you used in the magazine, would emphasize that
this was community diversity and that it was a community which had many segments,
and that what this in effect might have done was to prepare the ground, make it possible
for both people and the chamber at a given point of crisis to have a foundation for,
perhaps, a more corporate response when issues of race did emerge the forefront as, for
an example, the assassination of Martin Luther King. That's not probably correct in all
regards, but is that how—
HS: That's more or less correct. When you said “chamber and people,” it's sort of like—I
know that I visited Rocky Mount once, and I asked somebody, “Where do the people
from Rocky Mount, North Carolina, come from?”
And he said, “Oh, 95% who live in Rocky Mount are Scotch-Irish, with a few
Germans around.”
But I said, “Aren't a large percent of the people from Rocky Mount black?”
He said, “Oh, yes, if you want to include them.”
So that when you said “chamber and people,” I would say that the chamber was
also composed of people. And one of the things I didn't mention before that was part of
that process was that, since early in the game—and by “game,” I don't mean anything
light-hearted—early in my working, and what I observed in the chamber and what I was
part of, more and more blacks became members of the chamber.
WC: That insured encouragement in part?
HS: In part. And certainly if there was no encouragement, there was one thing that was
absolutely sure, and that was professionally I had no right to discourage, and so I might
have been a little different from some other people who might have at some point been
reluctant because they felt that they had to follow a preferred social pattern. But at any
rate, the reality was that we had one out of ten, one out of eight, whatever the percentage
would have been, of our members who were black at a certain point. Now to me, if that
were case, then some of them should have been on the board, and some of them should
have been on committees, not because of any activist role that I would have felt should be
pursued by the chamber, but because unless you felt that you wanted to go along with the
preferred social patterns, it made as much sense as if you had one-tenth of your members
composed of the textile industries that you certainly wouldn't have a board of directors
without any representatives from the textile industries.
That meant that in 1966 within four months, after hours at the chamber, the
chairman of the beautification committee happened to be black, a man named Theodore
Mahaffy[?]. He was chairman of the business school at A&T. He was named chairman of
that committee for two reasons: one was that he supposed to be chairman of the
committee because he had been on the committee, and it seemed that there was no reason
not to put him on. Now some people said, “Gee whiz, you can't name him chairman of
that committee. That committee meets in people’s homes.” And mostly it was ladies who
were involved in what was known as the Greensboro Beautiful Committee, and they
won’t cotton to this meeting in their homes with a black man visiting their home or what
have you. “Maybe we ought to have another chairman.” Well, to me, that argument used
was to me something that triggered a response. Well, if people don't want to have it in
their homes, start meeting somewhere else. It didn't seem to be the chamber’s role to
accommodate a preferred social pattern that was contrary to the tradition of human
excellence, and so then it was a foregone conclusion.
As time went on, the members within the chamber who happened to be black also
helped to change policy and what have you. And if a black member who was involved in
a committee happened not to be invited to a luncheon because he was black, and yet he
was somebody who was very outspoken in the field that the committee was discussing—
blacks weren't assigned to committees because they were race-related. If they weren't
assigned to human relations committee any more than invited, ethics would get in the
way there. But that's about the extent of where my personal involvement might get. In the
rest of it I think was solely professional.
WC: Okay, I was misreading that—
[Recording interrupted]
HS: It was done by a man named Josephson, David Josephson[?], who was an intern assigned
to the chamber and a student of the Urban Center[ of Guilford College. [He] spent
months going through all copies of Greensboro Business and analyzing the way the
headlines were used and the way the pictures were used, the way that certain words were
used, the frequency of certain types of thrusts, the editorial policy as was reflected by
words, and then tried to tie them in with community events to see if they had any
responsiveness. Like, for instance, if the [U.S.] Chamber Magazine took a stand for—on
a particular referendum issue, he analyzed was this before or after the board of the
chamber took the position. Who else was involved in the community, and what happened
in the election? That Josephson report may not be available at the chamber. I do have a
copy, and if you remind me of it, I'll try to get you a copy. I think it is about a twenty
page document. And while it’s not necessarily professionally developed in the sense that
it was a group of professional consultants looking at it, the student was fairly
conscientious.
WC: Let me just ask a few quick questions. How much were you dependent upon, or acting in
corporation with, other organizations? And let me mention a few: the YWCA [Young
Women’s Christian Association]—how much contact would you have had with the
YWCA in any of its activities?
HS: How about asking—do you want to ask one at a time?
WC: Yeah.
HS: When you say YWCA, and do you mean the overall metropolitan YW—YMCA
structure?
WC: Yes, but not the YM, the YW.
HS: The YWCA, there was very little early relationship, except sort of an appreciation of the
fact, on my part personally, that the YWCA was becoming more and more conscious of
its need to become involved in doing something about what it was very forthright to
describe as racism. However, I also noticed that there was some community reaction to
their approach. They were forthright, but they were viewed as being very militant in some
respects.
WC: And who would have viewed them in that way?
HS: The people who are my constituents.
WC: The business community?
HS: The business community and some of the other people that I had dealt with and heard
from. So I learned from watching that process, and I sort of—and I was encouraging, you
know, on a personal basis, but it wasn't until the school desegregation discussion groups
that the YWCA got into the situation where we actually cooperated with them.
WC: So it was really, in a sense, a question of tactics, that it was not going to do you any good
become openly identified with the YWCA, in terms of your job.
HS: But once it became part of—once we were trying to establish a total community coalition
on school desegregation—and it didn't make any difference whether it would be
American [Independent] Party or the YWCA or the Black Panthers or anybody else, and
I'm just throwing in the organizations regardless of theme their relationship to the
problem—then it seemed not only that the opposite would be the case, but maybe even
being involved with the YWCA—plus there was a lady—there were several ladies
involved with the YWCA who were especially supportive of what we were doing at the
chamber, and then it became a matter of [unclear] also. Mrs. Henry Frye, Shirley Frye,
who was the head of the YWCA, I think, was most instrumental in leading the YWCA
from the boondocks of provincialism into a very progressive stance. She was so
supportive of what we were doing in the chamber that it seemed unethical not to
reciprocate at a certain point. An associate of hers, who was the wife of her husband's
partner, Mrs. Johnson[?], was involved with the dialogue groups.
[End of Side A, Begin Side B]
HS: There was a foregoing conclusion that if Mrs. [Betsy] Taylor or anybody from the
YWCA called and said, “Look, can you from the chamber have a speaker for a panel next
week?” And even if it was an [unclear] last minute request—like everybody had turned
them down and they were now within five minutes of a program printing and they had to
have somebody—it was a foregoing conclusion that I would bust my tail trying to get a
speaker or to be there myself. If it was very conspicuously race related, I either [unclear]
refrained from open identification with the YWCA until about 1970-71.
WC: The Greensboro Community Fellowship?
HS: The Greensboro Community Fellowship I saw, when I first came to Greensboro, as being
maybe a little bit daring, but then as time went on, I noticed that they were the liberal
clergymen and people who were very predictable in their leadership styles and subject
matters that they were involved with when they were exercising leadership. I thought that
the Community Fellowship had a lot to do with maybe helping Greensboro not to lose
ground, but I didn’t see them as influencing as many people as they ought to. I didn’t
really. I spoke with them. I might be part of a luncheon program with them. I found out
who the people were there, and I found that they were—I would have counted on most of
them as being secret supporters of what we were doing, but I never had the feeling that
they were quite as effective as they ought to be.
I was very critical of—seemed to be and I still am, looking back on it—a
forfeiting of the leadership by the clergymen of Greensboro. I thought that during the sit-ins
period they did exercise some leadership in the way that some ads were sponsored,
and the way that some sermons were projected, and the way that some lay leadership
were trained almost to be a little more responsive by the church community. But during
most of the time that I was in Greensboro, I thought that the church was strangely silent,
with some exceptions. And it was not until 1971 and we started having the workshops for
clergymen sponsored by the community Concerned Citizens for Schools and the chamber
did I start seeing some perking-up and some fortification among clergymen against the
[unclear] that I thought that they ought to be a part of.
There were some exceptions all along. I'd say that most of the exceptions were in
the black community—that is, black clergymen I noticed along the way included many
clergymen who were involved with the community more so, and I think that had to do
with the tradition of black clergymen in the community. There were also some Lutheran
clergymen, a few Catholic clergymen, a Baptist clergyman and a tri-racial congregation,
who I thought was an extraordinary man.
WC: Who was that?
HS: His name Dr. Early of Immanuel, a Baptist church.
WC: Paul Early?
HS: Early.
WC: I think you mentioned some of the others the other day.
HS: Yeah, but to answer your question of the Fellowship, there were some people, like Vic
Nussbaum and others, who related more, and I thought that there was a need for the
fellowship in the sense that different strokes for different folks, and mild-mannered
people meet mild-mannered leadership, and so on down the line. So I'm not faulting the
organization for doing the best that it could under its circumstances. I just wished that it
had been more aggressive at times, or I wished that circumstances had been such that
there would have been some of the relatively conservative church churchmen—might be
pastor of the First Baptist Church, who had been publicly a little more conspicuously a
little more leader-like—
WC: Greensboro Citizens Association?
HS: I had tremendous respect for the Greensboro Citizens Association. And if there would
have been a distrust of the chamber among its members, people like Herman [Fox], I
think, would have wary of what the chamber’s trying to do, where it’s coming from. They
would have been cautious about me for a long period of time—
WC: So you would avoid contact with that kind of—
HS: I wouldn't avoid contact at all. I was constantly trying to make contact, and I constantly
was almost assuming that such contact would be only natural because we were all
working in the same direction. But the fact is that a creditable working relationship was
harder developed, and I was aware of the fact that it was very easy for a predominately
white organization to emasculate an organization such as the Citizens Association by
being too present or too much involved, and sort of preserved the integrity of the
association. I sometimes respectfully refrained from becoming a part of the discussion.
WC: How about the YM?
HS: I have the highest respect for that organization—the YM?
WC: Yeah.
HS: The Metropolitan YMCA, that is the predominate board and the top leadership across the
city for the major program. It seemed to me to be afraid of controversy, afraid of the
involvement of—in social issues. And so they were more concerned with making sure
that they had a good training [unclear], swimming pool, exercise program, character-building
programs, whatever it might be—summer camps. However, when you recognize
that Hayes-Taylor YMCA was a branch of the Metropolitan YMCA program—by
whatever name that overall program would have gone for those years—and then that
Dave Morehead and I, very early in the situation, decided to utilize Hayes-Taylor as one
of the places for one of the series of discussion cells, in that we had Martin Luther King
memorial observance at that YMCA, and that we had black history program that we co-sponsored
at that YMCA—and I was on the board at that YMCA for several years—and
on and on. The relationships with Hayes-Taylor YMCA branch were so strong that I
would say that maybe it was one of the strongest, if not the strongest, continuing
relationship over a long period of time, with the Y not being very activist, but making it
possible for—because of their promotional vehicles and what have you—making it
possible for us to have contact with parts of the community we would have otherwise not
have had contact.
WC: How about the United [Council of?] Church Women?
HS: No contact.
WC: How about the Junior Jaycees [United States Junior Chamber]?
HS: The Jaycees, when I first got there, were still mumbling about the fact that in 1936, or
’37, or whatever year it was, the chamber of commerce had sent a delegation to Raleigh, I
believe, to try to keep the Jaycees from being formed. In other words, the chamber of
commerce felt that there was a threat in the formation of Jaycees in the thirties, and so
there were some people who were very much annoyed or had their feelings hurt or they
didn't trust the chamber.
And then there were some people in the Jaycees who were—using a Korean War
term—who were gung-ho about doing things in the community and were constantly
making the established leaders in the chamber of commerce look bad because they were
so damn aggressive. They included such people as the man who is now mayor of the city,
Jim Melvin, who didn’t seem to be too respectful of the chamber of commerce, and I saw
a real credibility problem. But there was a former Jaycee named Carson Bain, who was
mayor of the city two mayors ago, and who didn't seem to be too respectful of the
chamber of commerce. And I was active in the chamber, and I saw him bridging the gap
in a lot of things he was doing.
I thought personally that there was a need to get the Jaycees involved within the
chamber structure and outside of the chamber structure and involved with each other. So
there were several direct attempts made by my department to work with the Jaycees, and
there were several things we co-sponsored. And we, one of the first moves we made in
the desegregation concerns—it was a school’s program—was to try to form a coalition
with the Jaycees on a human relations workshop. I would say that depending on who was
president of the Jaycees was—for example, the year that Chuck Whitehurst was
president, there was much more Chamber/Jaycee involvement. Another year it might
have been less. Depending on who the president of the Jaycees was, and depending on
the nature of the community [unclear], such as on bond issues, we would have more or
less relationship. I felt though that there was a steady improvement of that relationship,
for the most part.
WC: How about the National Conference of Christian and Jews?
HS: When I first got there, I thought that they were Mickey Mouse. However, I started
detecting that the man who was the executive director of the Carolina region of NCCJ—
and who is now a professor at Guilford College—had excellent, extraordinarily good
relationship with the police department there because of the NCCJ program, which was
police-community directed for a period of time, and because he was himself personally
very much interested in improving the sensitivity of law enforcement officers. And so
he—
And Andrew Gottschall was doing some things in that area that I thought that no
one else could do effectively, because he had some creditability. He had some
relationship, even when he wasn't trusted by a lot of other policemen, and wouldn't have
been—he was more successful than anybody else in making initial inroads. And I thought
that one of the basic human relation problems in the community was the need for greater
sensitivity among law enforcement officers. So I was very grateful or that effort, just
from a personal—as a citizen. When Gottschall left and when he resigned, I was emcee
of the testimonial in his honor, if that gives you any indication of what I felt.
His successor was less professional in experience as an organizer—was a former
clergyman, a very committed man, a man named J. R. Johnson[?]. And during his entire
time that he was—and I think it was about three years—he and I worked very, very close
together. He was at one point the chairman of the Concerned Citizens for Schools for a
time. At another point earlier than that, he was chairman of the clergyman's training
program. He was active in the Community Unity division. He was a personal counselor.
And I think it’s because of that personal relationship that I would have thought more
kindly.
However, in retrospect, I would say that I respected the executive directors more
than I did the programs. And I'm not too sure whether NCCJ has done anything too
significant in Greensboro. I don't want to be critical of anybody, except that I think that
maybe a brotherhood day or a brotherhood month, brother week, is a sort of a silly way
of going about.
WC: How about—now, I obviously have not covered all of the organizations. I'd like you—of
the organizations that you can think of, who would have entered—
HS: Very quickly then, before the tape runs out. Talking about groups, there were four ladies
who were Junior League related. But it wasn't the Junior League that I was relating
myself to; I was relating to the four ladies who had taken on the job of serving as a task
force to study what was wrong with the school system, and the segregation question was
very much in the form of what they were studying. [The group] included Mrs. Joan
Bluethenthal, Mrs. McIver, Cynthia Doyle. Now—
WC: Mrs. McIver?
HS: McIver.
WC: Oh.
HS: And the ringleader of the group of four ladies—and I never knew exactly what they
called themselves; they were just a little committee, but one of the most successful
committees in the history of any community, let alone Greensboro—was a Mrs. Joan
Bluethenthal, who is now a member of the school board.
WC: How do you spell her name?
HS: B-l-u-e-t-h-e-n-t-h-a-l, who impressed me very much. And I would say that while they
were secretive, rummaging about, I was aware of the fact that they seemed to be so
successful in the way that they were able to bridge the gap with the conservative
community by explaining where they were working and what they were heading toward.
Then I sort of sometimes [unclear] what I was doing to what I thought was their
timetable, because I felt that it would double-up on both of our efforts. Mrs. Bluethenthal
is basically a little more conservative than I am personally, and there were times when
she and I would totally disagree about something, especially after she became a school
board member. But she and Cynthia Doyle, I think, are among the ten or so people that
had most to do with an improvement of human relations in the city of Greensboro. So I
would say that organizationally there was a relationship, a spiritual one.
There was a relationship with the Sertoma Club in that we helped to form a
Sertoma Club chapter which was half-black and half-white in the community, and so that
was the only civic club we had that you might [unclear].
The Human Relations Commission’s relationship was one of respect for people
like [unclear] Brooks[?], who was executive director, for whom I had respect for because
he was a good decent human being, and because he had at his age changed tremendously
in his views, and because he was successful interpreting two very, very conservative
people. Some things that were slightly less conservative—but not respect in sense that I
felt that the Human Relations Commission was necessarily a very competent
commission, because it didn't have certain powers, didn't have certain personalities, didn't
have certain relationships in the community that would have done the job. And I was
always very forthright in criticizing the Human Relations Commission, but I think that I
if we had an alliance going, we never tried to hurt each other.
And [unclear] Brooks and I had a definite understanding, and we were very
supportive of each other. So I think that there was a definite relationship there, and when
he—his assistant, who again somebody whom I admire very much—the man who is now
the director of the Human Relations Commission is—who came to receive my respect for
the potential Human Relations Commission—went way up. And after I left the chamber,
I really felt in a way that the probability was that a lot of things that we were doing in the
Community Unity Council would now be done by the Human Relations Commission,
because that man who was—the Human Relations Commission would make a difference.
I'm talking about Henry McKoy. He was a very young man, but I think a very
competent—
WC: I guess—obviously, I want very much to get into the whole question of the Concerned
Citizens and the Community Unity, and I know that it’s probably going to take longer
than we have left on this tape. Let's start anyway.
[Recording paused]
WC: We were talking about the Citizens for Concerned Schools—
HS: Let me correct you: Concerned Citizens for Schools.
WC: Yeah, I always get that mixed up. Whose idea was that?
HS: Mine.
WC: Why did you have that idea?
HS: I had the feeling that the time would come when the court would hand down a decision to
a community that pretended that there was nothing even in the courts, and where people
were saying we weren't losing federal funds because, after all, there is nothing really in
the courts. And we are talking about our way of doing everything to comply, and
nobody's really saying we’re not, and on and on and on. And I felt the day of reckoning
would come, and when it did come there was a need for a coalition of community leaders
to say that we in Greensboro are going to comply with the law, that we have a tradition to
uphold the law of the land, and that we support the public schools, and that we believe in
improved human relations and improving human relations, and that we don't feel that the
question of how kids are transported from their neighborhood to a companion
neighborhood, or companions neighborhoods, really is an issue that the people of
Greensboro could relate to, independently of the larger community of the United States.
So I felt that there was a need for organizing to have leadership ready at the
moment when leadership would be possible. I also thought that since there were so many
different points of view—now, until—if you could get people to say okay, you can do
what you want to in the meantime and fight like hell to get whatever you point of view is
across, but once the court decides whatever it is, whichever way it goes, they are going to
stick with it—that we are going to be in agreement. It would be easy to get agreement
then than at a time when the court decision and its nature would be known, and there
would always be the hope among people who were opposed to desegregation that the
court would hold that we were in compliance. There was a risk that was taken—except
that I could not see how historically it would be possible for the court to say that the
procedure that we were using was legal.
[Recording paused]
HS: We were talking about freedom of choice when I was speaking of the procedure of
using—and there were a lot of people who felt that we really had freedom of choice, and
that there was some constitutional reason why freedom of choice was automatically the
American way.
WC: When did you have this idea?
HS: Early in 1971.
WC: Early in 1971? To whom did you take this idea? How did you proceed with it?
HS: I didn't take it to anybody. Wherever I was in a meeting of people who were concerned
with the community development problems of the community, including education, I
always spoke about the need for leadership, and one by one started talking to people who
had different points of views. Finally I got the approval of the chairman of the
Community Unity division, a man named Richard Warden[?], to try to get a few people
representing different points of view together to be sort of a subcommittee. And then the
Community Unity division—now known as Community Unity Council, with under its
belt the successful handling of the Dudley [High School]/A&T so-called uprising—
because the chamber got into that with all fours and actually became extremely
controversial, got a lot of members to resign, actually, because of the chamber’s role, but
nonetheless ended up with a net gain because it got a lot of respect [for] what it did.
WC: Why don't we stop there and you can tell me about that and get into a discussion of
Dudley and A&T?
HS: Getting back then, in a few minutes, of how Community Unity Council then helped to get
this committee organized. Going back earlier a year before—more than a year before—
there were students at Dudley High School who felt somehow or other that their wearing
Afros and their studying black history and belonging to a black-oriented organization and
their style of protest, these students, they felt were being put down by the administration
of the school system. There ended up being a walk-out at that high school, and that later
then became the confrontation between police and the students, then later became a
situation where A&T students joined the Dudley students. Before it was all over with, the
National Guard was in the community. A young man named [Willie] Grimes was killed
on the campus of A&T. There was a curfew that became a part of the way of life of
Greensboro for several days. There were tremendous tensions related to the public school
system and the community. And the chamber initiated a study of what had happened right
in the middle of that episode.
WC: Who initiated it?
HS: The Community Unity division. At the time, the president of the chamber was Albert
Lineberry, and he can give you a lot of background on that. The chamber started studying
the facts of that, and also trying to get the various parties of students and the
administrators and the community people together for discussions. The Human Relations
Commission was failing. The school board officials more or less said, “We have no
reason to discuss this with the students. They either go back to school or let whatever it
is—.” But there seemed to be some conflicts in the school’s official position and the
students’ statements, as we could check up on. So we got into in-depth, and made some
recommendations right in the middle of the controversy to the school board.
WC: Who got into it in-depth?
HS: The Community Unity Council got into it in-depth, and I was staff at that study. Richard
Warden was one of the key people, but it was a committee of the Community Unity
Council division, and a man named Bill Zukerman was very much involved in it. The
record is available of that, and there were press stories on it. A copy of the statement is
available. Among the people that you should talk to would be William Zukerman and
Richard Warden. Both of them are attorneys. At any rate, the chamber made
recommendations not only to the community, but to the school board and to the students
and to other agencies, and got a lot of criticism from school board officials for meddling.
The irony was that the chamber’s representative on this had to be the president of
the chamber, so he had to be the key spokesman on this, and he later became the
chairman of the school board [Albert Lineberry]. I think that this experience was a single
most sensitizing experience in the life of that man, which prepared him, I think, to
become the extraordinarily able school board chairman at a very critical time in the city’s
history. The A&T/Dudley episode can be, I think, examined by looking at the report
issued by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission [sic—U.S. Commission on Civil Rights],
which held hearing in Greensboro, and where I testified as to the chamber’s role and also
what seemed to be the problems, and where the chamber’s position was pretty clear: it
was more on the side of the students than it was on the side of the school board—
although, obviously even being on the side of the students was on the side of the
community, because we wanted to have the facts out. We wanted to make sure that the
problems resolved.
WC: Did that bother you at all that the chamber came out on the side of what was perceived by
most of the community, probably, as a radical group?
HS: What do you mean? Did it bother me?
WC: In terms of the—in terms of your overall desire to not appear biased, to not appear
supportive of one faction up against another—
HS: All right. I would say that precisely because we weren't biased made it possible for us to
examine the facts and not to be involved in politics [unclear]. The decision would have
been possible, and made possible for us to at least to feel that we had been objective and
to be able to defend our position as being one objectively arrived at. Now, once a position
was made, the statement was released—because I hadn't had slept for days, spent night-long
negotiating with students, going on to the campus of A&T to work with students, at
the time the National Guard was even there, going into a dorm on campus that was under
siege more-or-less, or whatever it might be.
The day that the chamber's position was released, I went to Washington, D.C., for
a meeting, and then went on the New York for another meeting, which would have lasted
only a day. I met with—the man who was the head of the [National] Urban League,
Whitney Young, and then called Bill Little to make a report on something that we were
working on. Bill Little said, “Why don't you stay away for a few days and just rest?” And
so I slept several days. And while there was a reaction in the community, I was really
unaware of the reaction.
So when you say, “Did it bother me?” I suppose I didn't realize what had really
happened until after I came back. I was not as aware of the impact, because what we had
done resulted in the resolution of that problem of breaking the ice so it could be resolved.
But I wasn't quite aware of how quickly things would move until I came back and saw
what had transpired. One of the things that had transpired was that the report, which was
privately communicated to the school board, somehow or other got into the press, and I
didn't know until I came back how it got into the press or what had happened.
WC: How did it get into the press?
HS: One of the members of the Community Unity Council apparently let somebody from the
press have it—was his responsibility to do so.
WC: The Community Unity [Council] had started when—after King's assassination?
HS: The Community Unity Council was started in 1968 on the initial recommendation of
Allan Wannamaker. And it was Allan Wannamaker who gave the name Community
Unity.
WC: Is that before or after King died?
HS: The recommendation was made before King died. The organization of it took place later
that fall.
WC: What kind of opposition did that generate within the chamber?
HS: Considerable. I think the chamber lost about thirty or forty members directly related to
the Martin Luther King post-assassination activity and the formation of the Community
Unity Council. I think we lost about fifty or sixty more members as a result of the
Community Unity Council’s activity related to A&T and Dudley.
WC: Now, you say the post-King assassination?
HS: We probably lost another fifty or sixty as related to the school desegregation [unclear].
WC: But you say the post-King assassination period. You mean your activity in going on the
radio and planning of related service?
HS: And having meetings that were related to it and participating in neighborhood meetings.
The fact that during that period, four board members were named—the four black board
members were named—[and] the fact that the chamber was a little bit more outspoken on
race relations.
WC: So that, in a sense, this period marks the real crystallization of opposition, would you
say?
HS: I don't know what you mean.
WC: To the direction that the chamber was moving in—that is to say that you have the
assassination of King—
HS: You’re talking about did those events cause a polarization which clearly drew lines
between the chamber and other groups or within the chamber?
WC: Well, actually within the chamber. Did these events kind of crystallize factions within the
chamber? Would that be correct?
HS: Probably, except that the faction that was opposed to the chamber's leadership position
was relatively small and remained small throughout until about 1970, end of ‘72. And
when I mentioned that the chamber lost so many members, there probably were some
other reasons also why those same members resigned—for instance, the fact that they
didn't like the whole social economic development thrust. But it should also be said that
during that entire period, the chamber's membership kept climbing and climbing and
climbing and there was always a net gain, so that I suppose every time a member
resigned, there were two others brought in. Or if anybody cut his dues, somebody else
increased his.
WC: Okay, so the community—a sub-committee or a committee of the Community Unity
division begins to work with you to implement your idea for a Concerned Citizens for
Schools. Why that title again?
HS: Concerned Citizens for Schools name was picked over some opposition within the
committee that had developed a plan in order to preempt the Concerned Citizens types, if
you want to call them that—the Whites Citizens’ Council potential from grasping that
[unclear]. All over the place there were concerned citizens for schools or concerned
citizens who opposed to busing, as they put it, and opposed to desegregation. It seemed to
me that a conservative organization, such as the chamber, backing a group like that
Concerned Citizens’ group would be more successful. The initial publicity would not
unduly alarm people who were very conservative. And secondly to create some confusion
among the ranks of people who would be potentially resistant to the change.
WC: And did you have any trouble mobilizing blacks support for this idea?
HS: I think that there was trouble mobilizing any support because people didn't really believe
that such an organization would be very effective, [that] they would be spinning wheels.
[There were] those people who didn't think necessarily that the chamber needed that kind
of a coalition, or that if the coalition was formed, the chamber would be an honest party
to it. There were some people that felt that if the chamber really wanted to do something,
they could just go ahead and click their fingers and do it and they could get by with it
through all kinds of points of views. There were many blacks who felt that the history of
chamber’s involvement in community affairs, as they related to race-related matters, was
too short a period to be a reliable indicator of future behavior.
WC: Who were some of these blacks?
HS: George Simkins was one who was reluctant to identify with CCS. Initially Herman
Fox[?] was one. But the effort was made to get a coalition, and there were about—I
forget now whether there were thirteen hundred or seventeen hundred people. I don't
know why I can't think of the distinction, but there was either thirteen hundred or
seventeen hundred people who were identified during that year's period, before the court
decision, put on mailing lists, and were involved in meetings to prepare them to take
leadership once the court decision was handed down.
WC: What kinds of preparations?
HS: I mean it included many, many blacks.
WC: What kinds of preparations, in terms of meetings and things like that?
HS: Making sure that they fully understood that busing would not be the issue, would not be
discussed; make sure that they fully understood the implications of support of the law of
the land; understood what had gone wrong in other communities where school systems
had not received adequate support as a result of people being miffed with desegregation
policies that were beyond the control of the school system; making sure that they
understood the value of socialization. Make sure that they were party to the formation of
policy, so that there would be an involvement that was creditable and that would move
beyond that to being a committed involvement. Such things as slogans were developed,
like the slogan “Maybe we will all learn something,” “It will work.” The fact that you
needed a volunteer corps to work with clergymen—who were outside that seventeen
hundred or thirteen hundred group—and you would have volunteer corps to work with
young people, you had to plan certain things like an open house, had to do all sorts of
things.
WC: Now these activities came after you started doing sensitivity workshops, didn't they?
HS: By the way, I have to take something back. I made a mistake a little while ago when I
was saying when this was [unclear] thought of. It was thought of first in 1970-71.
WC: When were the first—you had done sensitivity workshops on race relations?
HS: Since 1968—since August 1968. Before it was all over with, we had more than four
thousand people. We kept a running tab of this. We had more than four thousand.
WC: Different individuals?
HS: Different individuals involved, from twelve hours to one week, [in] what some people
called sensitivity training, some people called race-related personal growth workshops, or
whatever it might be.
WC: This began in?
HS: August 1968, as a result of some leadership taking by Dr. Francis Dunham, sociology
department—take that back, not sociology—education school at UNCG and Henrietta
Franklin, psychiatric social worker, with Dr. Robert [unclear]. That first workshop was a
pretty true [unclear] type of experience.
WC: This one at Guilford College?
HS: Which was held at Guilford College and involved several [unclear] groups, which
professional [unclear] group leaders that were in a position, psychologists. It was one of
the few times before 1970, anywhere in the country, that a community cross-section was
involved.
WC: Who provided the money for that?
HS: It was supplied by [unclear] to UNCG, but the organizational work was done at the
chamber with the help of North Carolina [unclear].
WC: And how did you find the correct section?
HS: Well, we felt that a cross-section, first of all, had to be black, white, poor, affluent, male,
female, young, old, what have you. And we were trying to get a random stratified
proportioned sample. We were really trying to just find people in various categories, so
you just tried like hell. And then one person would say, “You know, I don't really want to
be a part of something that I don't know anything about.” Some people had heard of
sensitivity training programs and thought it was like brainwashing and were scared of it.
You had to just keep trying to get the people who were influential in the community and
at the same time.
WC: Are you saying that—
HS: That was the first one. After that it wasn't so difficult anymore because we had
procedures developed. And once it got out from under Fran Dunham and Henrietta’s
control—which was a professional, more designed experiment with the [unclear] group
technique—and got into a goal-oriented human relations workshop process, rather than a
process-oriented one, I think we knew what we were doing and at that time. We used a
format which was similar to the Bell and Howell format[?] that we would just have as our
goal. And the group would be half black, half white, half male, and half female. That
anything else, as to age and what have you, we would just go by the wayside. We would
hope to get a cross-section, but if it wasn't, it wasn't. And we sometimes had workshops
that were just students and workshops that were just older adults.
WC: Would these always have a trained person leading them?
HS: Yes. We would have, too—because I think of the risks involved, and possibly damaging
someone or not being able to control the group, or the public relations risk to the chamber
of commerce’s response was so great—
WC: Who were these?
HS: —without very tight control, it would have been very dangerous. I don't mean dangerous.
I mean it would have been professionally fraught with too many possibilities of the
negative outcome. And so it was very tightly controlled. But even when people suggested
something else, it was controlled by certain processes. For instance, if a person
volunteered to be part of a workshop, he would not be allowed to participate. For
instance, somebody called up and said, “This is Jane Doe. I would just love to be a part of
your workshop. I heard about the workshop.” I felt that the statistical risks that such a
person might be not sufficiently stable or might be a professional [unclear] group, or
whatever it might be, would be so great that it would be better not to use that person. And
that person might crop up at a later time because we asked, but it was not because that
person asked to be a part of it. That was one of the controls.
When we say we had trained leaders, periodically we took certain people who
were college professors, who have got a master’s degree in sociology or what have you,
or they might have been psychologists with PhDs. We took them somewhere such as in
Chapel Hill. One time we had a four day session where we trained them in the techniques
as we had developed them, and they were trained in using our techniques, and trained to
look for set certain problems and what have you. But it was a low-risk type of procedure
that was not as intense as the usual sensitivity training encounter. The risks came from
the inability of the individual to cope with any insight the person may develop as a result
of that prolonged exposure to people from the other race more so than it came from any
psychiatric damage. We had certain people who were working with us from other
institutions who were, you know, helpful to us. Dr. Will-somebody from UNC
[University of North Carolina] School of Medicine—I have forgotten his sane name. Dr.
Whitener[?], who I have mentioned.
WC: How do you spell—?
HS: W-h-i-t-e-n-e-r—that was involved in that first workshop with Fran Dunham. People like
Henrietta Franklin. We then had trained people, like we had in each group usually an
assistant leader. If a man like Ralph [unclear]—who was a professor at the Urban Center
at Guilford—was the leader. And you would have somebody like [Eula?] Hudgins as an
assistant leader, and she knew what to look for and what to participate in. But you usually
had a backup system. I personally took the responsibility for the techniques used and was
always present in some fashion of the workshops. We hired, however, a staff of people
who had been trained on the funds received from the Emergency School Assistance
Program.
WC: This is your sixty-two thousand dollars?
HS: Yes. And most of the staff hired worked in workshops as well as other things. There was
a young lady named Beverly Mitchell—who then became director of our program under
me, as my assistant manager—who was I think as skillful as anyone. She happened to be
a participant in a workshop—very militant, very reluctant to identify with whites, showed
tremendous disdain for whites and the process of the encounters that we were following.
And as a result of exposure to the workshop and sticking with it and trying to learn about
what was going on, she became actually one of the best supporters of the chamber before
it was over with. We wanted her. She was working for Cone Mills, [unclear]. And her
working with us then was the first human relations work she was involved in. She is now
the assistant human relations director for the City of Raleigh.
WC: Good, I'll go talk to her.
HS: Beverly Mitchell.
WC: Right. So you had four thousand people. Would every one of those people have gone
through twelve hours of this kind of thing?
HS: Yes.
WC: Not just three hours, but twelve hours?
HS: Not three hours. We didn't have any three-hour sessions, except for a series of three-hour
sessions for one unit, which ended up with those people be being involved in more than
twelve hours before it was all over with—related to Woodmere Park.
WC: Yes.
HS: Trying to help with the stabilization process, where we had people who were involved
three hours a night for eight weeks or something like that.
WC: That had to do with the housing problem?
HS: That was related to trying to stabilize the black flight.
WC: Right.
HS: And when I say twelve hours, it’s over a twelve hour period. It doesn't mean twelve hours
of sustained participation in the group. Like, for instance, it might have been that the
person was involved in a group for eight until twelve and was free for a couple of hours,
but we usually programmed even lunch periods.
WC: Yes.
HS: So that the person would have had to eat under certain circumstances with someone
particularly assigned—
[End of Interview]