Oral History Interview with Galen Martin, November 4, 1999

BETSY BRINSON: ...Galen Martin at his office in Louisville, Kentucky and the interviewer is Betsy Brinson. Well thank you Galen we finally got this interview together.

GALEN MARTIN: That’s right.

BRINSON: With you having to put your honey up from your bees and making trips for legal reasons to places in the Southwest, I wasn’t sure that we were going to make it happen. But thank you for meeting with me today.

MARTIN: Sure thing.

BRINSON: I think you know, but this is more for the readers here, that we are doing a project for the Kentucky Historical Society to document the whole effort to eliminate legal segregation in Kentucky from nineteen thirty to nineteen seventy. And as part of that project, we want to interview the leadership, the early leadership of the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights, and of course, you were the first Executive Director. And what I want to do today, and this may be a series of conversations that we have, but what I want to do is actually go back and do a little bit of biographical background about you. And then once we get up to the commission I want to ask you about some of the staff, some of the people who were appointed to the Board and whatnot. And then we’ll see how our time is running.

MARTIN: Fine.

BRINSON: Let’s start telling, if you would tell me where and when you were born, please.

MARTIN: In Rainelle, West Virginia, it’s in Greenbrier county, on the other side of the state.

BRINSON: And what year was that?

MARTIN: Nineteen twenty-seven.

BRINSON: So that makes you seventy-two?

MARTIN: Two, any day now this week, or next week, next week.

BRINSON: Oh, you’re going to have a birthday. Okay, okay.

MARTIN: Yeah, yeah, I’m real close.

BRINSON: Tell me a little bit about your family.

MARTIN: My mother was a teacher. My dad was mostly a watch repairman. He sold guitars and banjos and one thing or another, but the way I remember him most, was as a watch repairman.

BRINSON: Okay. And did you have any brothers and sisters?

MARTIN: I have one sister, who lives. They lost a daughter at a very early age, and a brother at like, thirteen. I think he died of something that would nowadays, I think be called Polio.

BRINSON: And where did you fall in that?

MARTIN: I was the third. My sister, who lives in Louisiana, was the fourth.

BRINSON: Do you know about your family origins before West Virginia, like where did your ancestors come from?

MARTIN: Ohhh, I am not into genealogy. We do have, we have a family reunion...

BRINSON: Just the area of the world?

MARTIN: Well in terms of you know, we were Scotch, Irish, German, Scandinavian, I don’t know what all. It’s just, I know more about the, well there’s basically two families. My mother was a Ruckman.

BRINSON: A Rockman?

MARTIN Ruckman, R U C K M A N. Okay, they came into Pocahontas county in oh I think the eighteen thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, something like that. And there’s still--one of them was once the High Sheriff of Pocahontas County and West Virginia. And then my dad’s relatives, the Kesslers, were, they came out of Fincastle county, Virginia. But interestingly enough both my grandmothers were from Fincastle, Virginia, you know, just up north of Roanoke. Well, you have Virginia roots, so maybe I didn’t mention this before. And another person in the family, who is interested in genealogy, which I don’t pursue, came up with some church records that showed both of them were members of the same church. Nobody knew this, until I read it, and read their names, but both of them were in the same Methodist, Baptist, what have you, one of those anyway, church in Fincastle, Virginia. And then the Kesslers migrated over into Kentucky, I mean over into West Virginia around the time of the Civil War, a little before I think.

BRINSON: So tell me about your education growing up.

MARTIN: I went to a small, small high school in Rainelle, West Virginia.

BRINSON: Tell me how you spell Rainelle.

MARTIN: R A I N E L L E.

BRINSON: Okay.

MARTIN: It was a lumber town, in the midst of coal. Ours was--the overwhelming thing in our economy was coal, but this was a small, family owned--well wait a minute, I don’t mean--the lumber company was not small. It was huge. But for, as compared with Georgia Pacific and so on, it was a family owned lumber company. The influence of the lumber company was very significant in our town. Among other things, the Methodist Church got its heat from the burning of the sawdust. They piped the steam from that sawdust burning over to the Rainelle Methodist Church, [Laughing] and also to heat the high school.

BRINSON: Oh, that’s interesting. Why the Methodist and not the Baptist or Presbyterian?

MARTIN: Well, because I think to this day, the only real church overwhelmingly, in what used to be....There were two little towns. The one where the lumber company was, the only church there was a Methodist Church. It was, you know, it was a company town. And relatives and other folk lived in the company houses. And the people who ran the company were Methodists. [Laughing] So they heated the Methodist Church.

BRINSON: How big would you say the town was, while you were growing up?

MARTIN: Oh, two to three thousand, very small.

BRINSON: Now there was a period in West Virginia coal mining history, where there were a number of blacks who worked in the mines too. Was your town an integrated town at that point in time?

MARTIN: Rainelle was not. There were two families there, who lived down by the railroad junction. In later years, one of those families had their kids, who were a little younger than I was, maybe more than that, but anyway, who went to West Virginia State at Institute, and who played football and who were teachers; but just the two families. I had no, no experience with desegregation. A thing or two in our history, though, helped to educate me.

BRINSON: In your history that you learned at school or?

MARTIN: The most telling experience that I ever had on this area, was that in the thirties, hard times. My folks rented a room to a guy who had just gotten out of the CCC’s and gotten married. And we rented basically a couple rooms to those people, and they had a small baby and so on. He was a bus driver. [Laughing] Excuse me for getting choked up about this. But he got a new bus and--excuse me. [Laughing but appears to be teary] They ordered him to give the bus to the blacks. And the black bus driver, who had to come and get it, didn’t want to take it.

BRINSON: He was white, right?

MARTIN: The guy who lived with us was white, you can be sure of that, yeah. But, and Greenbrier county had segregated schools, no question about it. But all the blacks from all these little towns were hauled over to Lewisburg.

BRINSON: So that story of the bus was a very important piece of your early history.

MARTIN: Yeah, yeah, please excuse. I don’t remember any other experience.

BRINSON: You would have been about how old then?

MARTIN: Well, I don’t know. [Laughing]

BRINSON: In the thirties, you couldn’t have been more than thirteen at the most.

MARTIN: Yeah, something in that range, yeah, yeah. But my folks knew this was wrong, and said so; but we had almost no experience. There were just no blacks there. And we were never, you know, in communication with the family that lived down by the tracks. I talked with this woman, one of their children on the bus once, way, way after I was long gone from Rainelle. But Mosley, what was the other name anyway?

BRINSON: So you did all your early schooling there?

MARTIN: Yes.

BRINSON: Did you graduate from high school there?

MARTIN: Yes.

BRINSON: In what year was that?

MARTIN: Forty-five.

BRINSON: How many in your graduating class?

MARTIN: Small. It didn’t measure up to Conan’s or whatever his name was, the guy at Harvard who said you shouldn’t have a graduating class of less than a hundred, as I recall. We were, I don’t know, fifty maybe, something like that.

BRINSON: And then what happened to you?

MARTIN: Then I went to Berea College.

BRINSON: You went to Berea directly in forty-five?

MARTIN: Yeah.

BRINSON: Okay. Why Berea? What did you know about Berea?

MARTIN: I tell you, I was awful loose about all these things in high school, and didn’t pay very good attention. That was the only place that I applied. My mother helped with the application. There was one teacher at Rainelle, who had gone to Berea. We never looked at any place else.

BRINSON: And when you got to Berea, certainly, were there any black students in Berea at that time?

MARTIN: No, we were still deep under the Day Law in forty-five. The blacks came back to Berea in fifty, fifty-one. There was again two black families. What am I saying? Two black students. You know, the Day Law got watered down or opened up, or whatever you might want to call it, by the Legislature. Berea moved into that at the very first opportunity, also did Bellarmine or possibly Nazareth or one of the other Catholic Schools here. But Berea was into that. That was my last year at Berea and my wife’s last year.

BRINSON: So you met your wife at Berea?

MARTIN: Yeah, she had transferred there. She just did her last two years there.

BRINSON: What were you studying there?

MARTIN: Mostly Economics, my degree was in Economics with a strong major in Sociology.

BRINSON: And during that period do you remember any racial incidents in the town of Berea, or....?

MARTIN: No, not incidents. I very clearly remember when we collected money for the Herman Sweat or Sweet however you want to pronounce it, case. Texas, I think he was trying to get into Law School. The students collected money at a chapel, you know, there was a speech given, and we were into that. But it wasn’t, again there were no blacks, race was not a factor until my last year.

BRINSON: Right. Were you active in any students organizations?

MARTIN: Oh, oodles. [Laughing] Sure.

BRINSON: Tell me about the ones that were most important to you.

MARTIN: Well there was a Public Affairs Forum that had meetings on Friday nights. I was active in the student government. I was on the Student Council and so on, some of the years, not all four years. And I went, I zigged and zagged. I went in and out of Berea, and so on. I got drafted and I was in the Navy for a short time. And then in the Naval Reserve forever and I stayed in Washington, one semester. That was back when I was trying to be a Republican. And I worked, bless Patty for the Republican National Committee. I was a not very good typist for them. I’d been down there volunteering and there was a guy, who was office manager there, who had been to Berea. [Laughing] So I stayed, that was when Eisenhower, no that was when Truman got re-elected, the Fall of forty-eight. And stayed out of Berea.....

BRINSON: What made you think you wanted to be Republican? Had your family...

MARTIN: Oh my father was a lonesome Republican in Rainelle. You know everybody there had FDR’s picture and John L. Lewis’s picture. But my Dad, for whatever reasons, was always a Republican to his dying day. [Laughing]

BRINSON: How about your mom?

MARTIN: My mom was more a Democrat. He was, Dad was very active. He was, he was something of a frustrated, agitated, agitator. It was, I don’t know what made him a Republican, anymore than I know anybody else, you know, or Democrat for that matter.

BRINSON: Do you remember the...

MARTIN: But I gave up on that pretty soon, not too long after I got started into Berea. By the time I had graduated, I had given up trying to be a Republican. I just decided you couldn’t be as liberal as I wanted to be and be a Republican.

BRINSON: Then what party interested you?

MARTIN: Well I became a Democrat, sure what else? That was my only choices.

BRINSON: Well, there were a few others, but depending on where you were, you could conceivable have become involved in a few others...

MARTIN: Not many.

BRINSON: But very small.

MARTIN: No, no. I also became active in the Students for Democratic Action, that was an affiliate of ADA, you know. We had a Chapter. And the guy who had been the National President of Students for Democratic Action, transferred to Berea. He had gone to Michigan State and he worked for the Farm Bureau in Ohio. He transferred down to Berea and he and I roomed together. And I was, I was in all these activities before he came, but his coming enhanced it significantly. He’s the guy really, he and Ken Kurtz. Do you know Ken by any chance?

BRINSON: No.

MARTIN: Well, you will, sooner or later.

BRINSON: Kurtz is?

MARTIN: K U R T Z. He’s retired from Garvis’, Garvis Kincaid’s T. V. Station in Lexington, whichever one that is. It’s out there on Winchester Road as you are going toward Winchester, it’s the one that is on the left. I have to--you know the numbers run together, twenty-six or something or other. But Kurtz, Kurtz was also involved at that time in Students for Democratic Action. And Doug and Kurtz urged me to apply for the job as Executive Secretary for Students for Democratic Action. And of course that was a big thing. And I was there, you know...

BRINSON: That was a paid position after you graduated from...?

MARTIN: Yeah. I went off to Wisconsin to go to Graduate School in Labor Economics. And around Christmas time, why they asked me to apply for this job, and so I applied for that and I got that. And I finished out the semester and went on to Washington. See, I succeeded Fritz Mondale once removed. In other words, Fritz was the Executive Secretary and then another guy was Executive Secretary and then I succeeded the other guy.

BRINSON: So this would have been nineteen fifty-two, nineteen fifty-four?

MARTIN: Yeah, those two years.

BRINSON: That you were Executive Director, Secretary for the Students for Democratic Action.

MARTIN: Yeah, it was a revelation.

BRINSON: Do you remember where you were when the Brown Decision came down?

MARTIN: I was working then--yes, yes I do, I do. I remember I worked with--I had done the two years at SDA and moved on to work with the public power groups. We working to keep the Eisenhower Administration from dismantling the Tennessee Valley Authority. And we worked for the high dam at Hill’s Canyon. We were supported by the public, the city, the city owned municipal electric systems and by the TVA, but mostly by the Rural Electric Co-ops. Our offices were in a Rural Electric Co-op headquarters. And I remember coming out...

BRINSON: In Washington, D. C.?

MARTIN: Yeah, yeah....one evening and seeing the paper down in the gutter [Laughing] that reported the decision.

BRINSON: About the decision. Well when you left Berea, both during the time you were in the military, and when you were in Washington, did those experiences sort of expand your thinking about race relations?

MARTIN: Oh, big time. [Laughing]

BRINSON: Can you talk about that?

MARTIN: Sure. What we, in the Students for Democratic Action, we picketed the Amos and Andy show. Okay? Radio, obviously. But the more interesting thing is...

BRINSON: Now was that here? Or was that after you got to Washington?

MARTIN: No, that was in D. C.. That was in D. C..

BRINSON: Washington, okay.

MARTIN: Well, one of the earliest things that I did, by way of action, was when I was at Wisconsin, I did my very first testing for housing discrimination. You know like we’d do tests for rentals and discrimination. I did housing discrimination testing in the fall of fifty-one. I go back--when I go to these meetings of the National Fair Housing Alliance and I tell people that, it kind of blows their mind. But Jim Farmer, of course, was the head of CORE at that time. And as compared with the extremely sophisticated, scientific test we do now, our tests were not very scientific. But we would get the names from the housing office that helped students get rentals, and call those people and ask them questions to learn whether or not they would fail, whether they wouldn’t rent to blacks.

BRINSON: And this was in the Washington area?

MARTIN: No, this was at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

BRINSON: Oh, I see.

MARTIN: In the fall of fifty-one I went up there. One of the more interesting things, time wise, that I’ve ever done was that, I picketed the South African Embassy in that period when I worked with SDA, sometime fifty-two, fifty-three or something, one or the other of those two years, with another woman that I worked with. We picketed outside the South African Embassy and got our picture taken, and it appeared in the Baltimore Afro-American, a premier black newspaper. And then I went back several years ago, not that many years ago, and picketed the South African Embassy; and this time, things were a lot better organized and a lot more sophisticated. And of course, they wanted anybody who could to get arrested, so I went ahead and got arrested. So I’ve got the handcuffs. [Laughing] The plastic, plastic, not metal, the plastic handcuffs and so on.

BRINSON: And of course, the more recent time was the whole effort in front of the embassy against Apartheid?

MARTIN: Well, that’s when I got arrested, that was just a few years ago.

BRINSON: Right.

MARTIN: I’ve got pictures from that. And you know, you don’t have to believe this, but I’ve promised from the time that I went there in fifty-two or fifty-three ‘til the time that I went back and got arrested, there had been no change in South African policy. But see as a result of those renewed demonstrations and all those very fine people, Robinson and others, you know, who were involved in it. They forced the Congress to change it’s policy on Apartheid.

BRINSON: That’s right.

MARTIN: And what I once, I once went to the library--I don’t get into these kinds of things very much--but I did go to the Louisville Library, and ask them to get on loan from the Baltimore Library, a tape of the Afro-American for that period. Which I plan, I’m going to renew this. I’m going to mount that picture with the most recent picture of my demonstrating up there and my handcuff. And I’m going to put in there the caption that nothing had changed in this period. It hadn’t. The only difference was we were marching on the other side of the street. [Laughing] That was the only change in all that time, from fifty-two to, I don’t know when it was...

BRINSON: In the eighties.

MARTIN: ...eighties, eighties is when it was, yeah.

BRINSON: I had a graduate teacher who was actually one of the organizers of that against the embassy, Goranzer. I didn’t have her until after it was over, but I remember hearing a lot about it.

MARTIN: But that clearly was an action where, was a situation in which civil action brought about a change in the Congress and brought about a lot of change in South Africa.

BRINSON: You’re absolutely right.

MARTIN: Somehow or other when we ordered that tape, it came, the library had it, and I think some member of my family did not understand the significance of this; and I was in travel or something or other. And they said some words that caused it to be sent back. And I’ve just never got around to borrowing it again. One of these days I will, before I lose those pictures.

BRINSON: Let me ask you about your testing of open housing in Wisconsin. When you were doing that, were you looking more--what were you looking for? Whether they would rent to students?

MARTIN: To blacks.

BRINSON: To blacks, so it wasn’t...

MARTIN: Black students.

BRINSON: Black students

MARTIN: Solely for race.

BRINSON: Okay.

MARTIN: Yeah.

BRINSON: Okay, all right. I just wanted to clarify that.

MARTIN: Yeah.

BRINSON: So you stayed in Washington, until...

MARTIN: The other student thing, if I may go back.

BRINSON: Please do.

MARTIN: The other student activity that I was heavily involved in, was the National Student Association. I got really...

BRINSON: So was I.

MARTIN: Did you go to some of the National Congresses? Or the regional meetings?

BRINSON: I went to regional meetings in the early sixties. But go ahead, you tell me...

MARTIN: Well this, I went to four Congresses. And among other very interesting things was that—you know Al Lowenstein, he was omnipresence. [Laughing] And I liked Al, and he was a dear friend of mine and so on. But you know, I went to four of those, as I said. But Al’s term was up, and he was backing another very close friend of mine, Bill Denser, who won. But Kurtz, my buddy from Lexington, that I mentioned earlier, was the candidate against Denser. And we were operating what we called the Liberal Caucus. And at one point somebody raised the question as to why Lowenstein was not--since Lowenstein wasn’t involved in that Caucus--and they said, “He’s a liberal.” And this guy from Massachusetts, who was the, later the International Vice-President, said, “That has nothing to with it, we just object to him hypnotizing everyone.” And believe me, as you probably know, Lowenstein, he was, he was into practically hypnosis. [Laughing] He was a charismatic leader, if there ever was one. And a good person. And of course, I kept up with him over the years, as he headed ADA and--not regularly, not every year or everything, but I did see him at some of the ADA meetings, not that I’ve been every year. His was a very untimely death. But what I really wanted to lead up to was, I’ve been back to one of these reunion type things that the NSAers held in Madison. And I am really very frustrated with them over their reaction to the people who were there, to the whole business about the CIA involvement. They do not, they are writing now--where this is all that they are writing these, what the heck do you call them? It’s not an anthology, it’s not a ....

BRINSON: Is it a history?

MARTIN: Yeah, it’s a history, but they’ve got their own peculiar name for it. Where they’re asking all these NSA officers to write things about their experience, not about the CIA, no they don’t really want to deal with that. And I’m angry with them for their refusal or avoidance. Avoidance is mostly what they are into. Anyway their....What is the word, it’s obviously not a memoir, it’s a....anyway.

BRINSON: Well what was the issue with the CIA?

MARTIN: Well, I think the issue was that they were taking the money from the CIA, which they did from fifty-one or fifty-two, from that period when I was involved, all the way to sixty-eight, until Ramparts divulged what was going on; and then the CIA quit paying it. But they would bring, they would march these top elected officials, elected by the students, into the White House, or wherever they were doing it. I don’t know where the CIA was doing it—but--and swear them to secrecy. Well, believe me, I am absolutely certain, that if we had known at Berea College that they were taking the CIA money, with all those peace supporters down there, in the early fifties, that they would not have wanted us to be involved in an organization that was financed by the CIA.

BRINSON: So Berea had an NSA Chapter.

MARTIN: The Student Government was a member.

BRINSON: Okay.

MARTIN: I don’t mean to be technical with you.

BRINSON: How many people participated there?

MARTIN: Well, on the campus there was not that much to participate in. In other words, we did not have, like NSA meetings at Berea, except that I was, I happened to be the President for the Kentucky-Tennessee region--or Chairman, whatever it was called, I can’t remember. But anyway, and we did have one meeting of the various campuses at Berea in my time.

BRINSON: And which other Kentucky Universities had involvement in the NSA?

MARTIN: Certainly the University of Louisville, the small you-know-whats, Nazareth, and Spalding, and the Catholic colleges, were particularly active, U. K. was at times, coming and going. Several of the Tennessee schools were active. But you know, I don’t remember that Wesleyan was ever involved or Georgetown I just plain can’t remember. Villanova, I think may have been, up in Northern Kentucky. It was spotted.

BRINSON: Well Madison, even then, was a pretty big campus, compared to Berea.

MARTIN: Oh, absolutely.

BRINSON: And the size of the town that you grew up in.

MARTIN: Oh absolutely.

BRINSON: That must have been a real change for you to go there and then go to Washington?

MARTIN: Well, we lived in a trailer, right under the shadow of the stadium. My wife worked for the Extension Division. The biggest problem in those …

BRINSON: This was at Madison?

MARTIN: Yeah. It’s a tremendous University. We don’t have a University system, as compared with Wisconsin. We do not, as I think I discussed with your husband some, we don’t have a University system; this thing was built by politics. But she worked for the Extension division. The big thing in the day up there was, how many times she had to stop on the short little hike from our trailer to where the Extension division was, because it was so cold. She didn’t care for the cold weather. [Laughing]

BRINSON: That’s right. That’s right.

MARTIN: But it’s a beautiful, beautiful city. It’s not diminished.

BRINSON: So when you left Washington did you come, in fifty-four, did you come, fifty-six you would have left Washington, then what did you do?

MARTIN: Then I got into Civil Rights, I went to work for the Kentucky Council on Human Relations. It was one of twelve or thirteen similar state groups funded through a group called the Southern Regional Council, run by George Mitchell.

BRINSON: Right.

MARTIN: Did you, you know of George Mitchell?

BRINSON: Uh hmm.

MARTIN: He’s a great man.

BRINSON: Uh hmm. He was.

MARTIN: And they had gotten funds for the Republic Ford Foundation money to set up these groups. I did that for thirteen months, and it just seemed like we weren’t going to be able to get the finances to keep it ongoing; and I got this offer from the Unitarian Service Committee, to help set up their office in Knoxville. Of course, I was essentially the only person they ever had down there to--what their slogan was, they wanted to try to see if they could avoid the same things in Knoxville.

END OF TAPE ONE SIDE ONE

BEGIN TAPE ONE SIDE TWO

BRINSON: ...the Council on Human Relations. Was Rufus Atwood a part of that group at that point in time?

MARTIN: [Laughing] You better believe it. He...

BRINSON: He was?

MARTIN: He’s got one of my most telling quotes. We had, we met in his office, okay, and we had pretty much negotiated the thing; and I’d pretty much told him I was coming and so on. I asked him to re-capsule for me, what it was they wanted me to do. And Rufus, sitting right across the table from me, he was a great man, a really great man. He said, “We want you to work to see that black teachers don’t become the victims of pupil desegregation.” That’s a challenge to me to this day.

BRINSON: And of course we know that many black teachers lost their jobs during integration.

MARTIN: Yes, and now admittedly, we’ve not been able to hold our own, but we’ve made it better--better ain’t good enough!

BRINSON: Right.

MARTIN: But, and you look at this publication list here, and you can see how the teachers run through that; and all the reports that we did to the Commission. And we did good reports--the Council on Human Relations. We worked on the teachers.

BRINSON: Tell me who else was involved at the Council during the time you were there. I’ve actually also tried to find the early records and I haven’t had much luck actually.

MARTIN: have no records to speak of, I’ve got a little, tiny, thin compilation of reports that we put out; and then I’ve got a thicker, thing, copy of mimeograph stuff. I’m confident I still have both of those.

BRINSON: Well, I’m glad to know that.

MARTIN: But in terms of bigger stuff, I don’t know, I don’t know that those ever got given to anybody meaningful. I don’t know what really became of them. But what we--it was just basically myself and one other person--we hired a black woman of Rufus’ recommendation, who was a commercial teacher. She taught, she was trained to teach commercial courses. And we had this office in the downtown, right on Main Street, up above a store.

BRINSON: In which town?

MARTIN: In Frankfort.

BRINSON: Frankfort? Okay.

MARTIN: Yeah. We did good things, you know. Particularly what our stock in trade was, we would gather up these clippings from papers around the state about what they were doing by way of desegregation; and get those put onto mimeograph stencils--that era, no Xerox. [Chuckling] And we could do facsimile reproductions of those articles. And then we sent them out to all the other school superintendents, try to get them to imitate what was going on. So they were getting sort of a press service from us about the progress we were making in desegregation. And it was significant. And I’m convinced that what we did had an impact. We did some studies and reports and so on. When I went to, when I was an applicant for the job with the State Commission on Human Rights, why the guy from U. K. Law School, that was on the Commission, making the selection of the staff.

BRINSON: Was that Paul....?

MARTIN: No, this happened to be a guy named Jesse Dukemenier, who was a Law School faculty member.

BRINSON: Can you spell his last name for me, please?

MARTIN: Sigh. I can get close, D U K E M I N I E R.

BRINSON: Okay, thank you.

MARTIN: Law prof, that’s pretty close. But he held this compilation of a lot of those little reports--we did press job. We did a lot of stuff with the press--and he held this compilation in his hand and said, “This is what we want you to do at the State Commission on Human Rights.”

BRINSON: Okay. How did your family feel about the activities and the work that you were doing?

MARTIN: Well, obviously my wife was all for all these things, as she was at college. We had two boys, at that point, both of which were born in Washington, D. C., at the same hospital where they took Nixon, no, no, not Nixon, Reagan, when he had gotten shot--George Washington Hospital. I, you know, I think they were supportive. The money, the money at the Fair Housing Council, I hate to even state what the figure was at this point, because it seems like nothing, which is about what it was. We lived, we were not living high, [Laughing] but it was enough.

BRINSON: Well, do you remember what it was?

MARTIN: I think something in the range of eighty-nine hundred.

BRINSON: A year.

MARTIN: As I recall.

BRINSON: Yeah, well for those times.

MARTIN: And even with inflation, that was not very much, but we had a nice, decent place to stay and to live; and I was working, you asked, I think you did, about some of the people. Other people who were very influential in this included a host of black legislators, I’m sorry, black educators, educators. It also included Doctor Alee Coleman, who was at the University of Kentucky. He was in Sociology.

BRINSON: Alee as...?

MARTIN: A L E E.

BRINSON: Okay.

MARTIN: Coleman.

BRINSON: Okay.

MARTIN: I don’t know if, he, I know he’s deceased and probably his widow is too, I’m just not sure. Sutton was another U. K. Prof. These were in, possibly both of them were in Sociology, maybe one in Education and the other in Sociology. Willis Sutton. They were very instrumental people. And we had some money to pay people as consultants at the Fair Housing Council. Again, minimal money, mostly mileage and so on. And so, these educators would go and talk with school superintendents.

BRINSON: Let me stop you, you said the Fair Housing Council.

MARTIN: I’m sorry, please excuse that.

BRINSON: That wasn’t right, right?

MARTIN: I don’t mean that. It is an understandable mistake.

BRINSON: You’re still talking about the Council on Human Relations?

MARTIN: I’m talking about the Council on Human Relations, yeah.

BRINSON: Okay, that’s what I thought.

MARTIN: But Doctor C. H. Parrish, who taught at the University of Louisville, he was the only guy, when they closed down the Louisville Municipal College, he was the only guy that got tenure, or who’s tenure was recognized. They had many other profs out there I think, eight, twelve, fourteen, whatever it was. I think it is in here, how many profs there were out there, people who had tenure, they just refused to recognize it. They just marched off and let them go. And of course a lot of, some of them, several of them went to Kentucky State and they helped us with all these activities.

BRINSON: So you had, you mentioned male faculty, both black and white. Did you have any women who were on the Council during that period?

MARTIN: Oh yes, Priscilla Robertson, Robertson? Yeah, I think, was very active in the Council. A woman named Dorcas...

BRINSON: What can you tell me about Phyllis? Where was she from?

MARTIN: From Louisville.

BRINSON: Okay.

MARTIN: Another woman that I can remember more about was, oh shucks, the name just jumped out of my mind quickly.

BRINSON: You just started with Dorcas.

MARTIN: Dorcas Ruthenburg. Yeah, she was the woman at WHAS Radio, who did the Moral Side of the News. The program still exists, but it doesn’t get the attention that it used to get. It was a very significant program that was broadcast like on Sunday mornings, and Dorcas had the undying support of the Binghams. And she really did a superb job with that program. And she was at times the Chairperson of the Kentucky Council on Human Relations. You know, there was, we were not half women, but there was a decent …

BRINSON: But you had representation.

MARTIN: Oh yeah, there was a good, clear representation of women.

BRINSON: So you stayed with the Council on Human Relations, I believe you said thirteen months?

MARTIN: Yeah, yeah.

BRINSON: And then from there went to the Unitarian Service Committee in Knoxville?

MARTIN: Yes, yeah.

BRINSON: And you were there until sixty-one.

MARTIN: Uh huh.

BRINSON: And then what happened?

MARTIN: Well, the Commission was actually created in sixty. It was created because Frank Stanley, Sr., the editor of The Louisville Defender, who’s a strong, strong guy, got a commitment from Burt Combs, that Burt told him if he was elected, that he would create a Commission on Human Rights, which he got elected and he did. One interesting little sidelight is that they copied a statute out of Missouri, even to a defect--there was what I would call a clear defect in the Missouri statute. They didn’t check, they didn’t talk with anybody, they didn’t discover it; and they passed it. The defect was that they left out religion. Somebody got up in the Missouri legislature, when that Bill was considered there and said, “There’s no discrimination on the basis of religion in Missouri,” and left it out. So they left it out in Kentucky. But it took, understandably, you know how the Bills, the laws go into effect the first of July. And it took a while to get the people appointed. They weren’t really appointed until September. And they met a time or two, and then they started considering applicants in December is when I came. I remember I was, well, I could not come the particular date that they were going to interview. It was the day I had a test at the University of Tennessee Law School. I was taking a little, few courses, part-time at UT Law. And so I had to kind of arrange a half interview or something. I met with a couple of the members at a different time. But then it took, then I got selected, barely. And then it took until, I came to work, I think in February or March.

BRINSON: What do you mean, you got selected barely?

MARTIN: Well, it was very close. It was between me and another guy who was a preacher.

BRINSON: Do you remember his name?

MARTIN: No.

BRINSON: No. Okay.

MARTIN: He was a good man, good person, but he was, when all was said and done, he was glad I was doing it.

BRINSON: Somewhere I’ve read that the budget that first year was something like twelve thousand five hundred for the whole agency.

MARTIN: Yeah, but that was--Combs never let that slow up anything. He just...

BRINSON: But how many of there were you on the staff?

MARTIN: Well, clearly we started with a beautiful woman named Jean Hogan. That wasn’t her unmarried name at the time, but anyway Jean, what have you--it will come to me--but she later married a guy named Hogan. And then the third person we hired was a flash from, who had gone to Yale Law School, named Clayton Jones, his dad was the minister at the Pleasant Green Baptist Church in Lexington. And he’s from very strong family. Clayton went to school with Eleanor Holmes Norton at Yale. He had gone to Howard. He was--you know, a good student and focused on writing and that kind of thing. He’s--I’ve been in touch with him again recently, and he’s doing good things still.

BRINSON: Where is he now?

MARTIN: He’s now in Atlanta.

BRINSON: Is he practicing Law?

MARTIN: Somewhat. He, it’s not you know, I frankly don’t know exactly what he is doing by way of income. The thing he is doing, is he’s putting out a publication, a monthly report called The New African. Clayton is a--I always think about one of these songs that was done about the Left Wing, the Communist Party and so on in this country. It tells about this guy who was, who--he refused--he almost refused to work with anyone, because they weren’t Left enough for him. And when his house caught on fire and when the firemen came, he refused to let them in because they weren’t Left enough. Clayton is almost like that, I mean, I love him and he is a good person; but he is, he’s just had so many bad experiences in our society. He was involved in a horrendous police mistreatment case. The transit police in New York City killed a young man, who had come up there from Kentucky; and he could never get any justice out of that, and he just moved out of the city in frustration. But he’s a good person. I don’t know, I’m telling you things you don’t need to know.

BRINSON: Actually, no you’re doing just fine, because as you know, for the readers, the Commission is coming up on it’s fortieth anniversary next year, and there is going to be some celebrations. And we want to also begin to recognize some of the early players in the Commission along with you. Can you tell me a little bit more about this woman, this Hogan? What was her role and what were her skills? And where did she come from?

MARTIN: Well, Jean Hogan was again, like the woman, that I had hired in fifty-six. She was a product of the commercial courses section. She studied under Mrs. Lincoln, and she was a whiz. But of course both of them were very good people, very good people.

BRINSON: She was from Louisville.

MARTIN: No, the office in the first years of the State Commission on Human Rights was in Frankfort. See, I tried every way I could to get them to agree to move that office to Louisville. And they, the commissioners were so, they were so out of it, they thought if you took an office in the Frankfort office buildings, you didn’t have to pay rent. [Laughing] Well, that was an illusion, so I just settled in and I worked over a period of years to get the office moved out of Frankfort and up here. And it took us until roughly sixty-nine or seventy to get it moved up here. But Jean was in that office.

BRINSON: Well tell me why you did that? I have wondered, because Frankfort is the capital, and this is a state agency, but it must be about the only state agency that’s actually headquartered in Louisville.

MARTIN: Yeah, the Barber Board has been at times, and the Judiciary Board; and a few other things like that, Mental Health way back when, was up here, but they moved that down. Well, clearly the reason was, because I had learned from being in Frankfort, that the center of gravity in race and other things, was in Louisville. And we needed to be in Louisville, where there was a better constituency. And a little bit, this was not a big factor in my mind, but a little bit of a factor was to get us away from the political stuff down there; because there is entirely too much mixing of various things, including politics. And I’m sure that’s as you very well know. And so I wanted to get out of there. But mostly it was to get to Louisville, where Blacks were organized, and where women were organized; and where there were other groups that we could build a support network. And I didn’t want to live in Frankfort, not that, that loomed that big, that really doesn’t matter to me. So it took, it took those years to get it up here. And it was kind of a fluke that we managed to get it moved anyway. Because the move came basically in Louie Nunn’s administration.

BRINSON: Why was that a fluke? And tell me how Governor Nunn, what was his relationship with the Commission?

MARTIN: Deep, let me go to Nunn. Basically, I think he never quite understood us, but he wasn’t--somebody said at one point, that he thought it was like a pole cat that he was not about to try to grab a hold of. I just think that he felt, that if he got into it, that he wouldn’t know what to do with it. And also, he appointed some good people, very fair-minded people with a good sense of government, a business sense and so on, among them Albert Christian--Christianson--Christian. Albert Christian, who was the Finance Commissioner. And he, there was other people though, Gene, Eugene Goss, who still...

BRINSON: G O S S?

MARTIN: Yes, who still ran, who is a lawyer in Harlan county. High type, high type, clearly. And Louie brought him in and Larry Fogey. And the Budget Division people helped us a lot. Louie knew you couldn’t fire all the budget people and get your budget done, and so he kept them; and they were really professional. They were not going to play politics, that wasn’t the way--not partisan, not petty politics.

BRINSON: These are state budget people or are they budget people for the Commission?

MARTIN: Well, it’s both, in other words I’m talking about the budget, the staff and the Budget Division.

BRINSON: Okay.

MARTIN: And we had people that were assigned to us at the Commission on Human Rights. And those people over a period of many years were very intelligent, bright people and good people. And you know, all--they were caught up--many people were in the state, as I’ll tell you, in the Civil Rights Revolution. They understood. They wanted to see Civil Rights succeed in this state. And you know, Kentucky early on got a good record. And they wanted to perpetuate that record. I didn’t say this earlier, but one of the most significant things that happened in my time here was, in the fall of fifty-six, when school desegregation really got swinging, okay. There was this bunch of White Citizens Councils, that had gotten slightly organized in Western Kentucky, around Sturgis, and they undertook to re-segregate the schools. And even before that see, when the Brown Decision was announced in fifty-four, why Jiggs Buckman, who was the Attorney General, the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, and Governor Chandler--you know, Happy may have had his little problems, but he, he--but they all said, “This is the Law of the Land and we will abide.” So we were never anywhere near within, you know, Virginia’s massive resistance or George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door. That was never thought of, but anyway in the fall of fifty-six, Happy called out the National Guard, and the tanks to deal with this thing in Sturgis. Well, when they moved on, I wrote this recently in a letter to the editor, which got published in The Gleaner, and also in The Courier Journal. I recited this reference that I am making now. Quickly the people in Henderson, Kentucky organized to make sure that, that didn’t happen in Henderson, you know, it is just next door. And so they stopped them dead in their tracks. I wrote this--again stop me if I am digressing too much--I wrote this letter to the editor, tracing Henderson’s good history in terms of Civil Rights, i.e., Race, as laying the foundation for their being the second or third, whatever they were, to adopt the Gay Rights Ordinances. And I think that this follows, and I wrote in names of legislators and names of Commission members and names of people, Black leaders in the community and so on. And of course, the mayor down there, is the wife of one of the best legislators we ever had out of Henderson, John Hoffman. His wife is the mayor now, and she got the thing through apparently.

BRINSON: Let me ask you about Sturgis. You said it was the White Citizens Councils that wanted to re-segregate the schools.

MARTIN: Re, re like within a week or two after they started.

BRINSON: Right. How did they go about trying to do that?

MARTIN: As I recall, it was just one of these attempted boycott things, as I recall.

BRINSON: So they just didn’t send their children to school?

MARTIN: Yeah, I think that was it. I don’t know that they...

BRINSON: Were there any demonstrations or--that you remember hearing about?

MARTIN: I don’t know to what extent, how this thing got into the street. But I can’t believe that Happy would--again, I just don’t remember those details that well. I was definitely here.

BRINSON: But he, the Governor did call out the National Guard?

MARTIN: Yeah, and the tanks, and why--and even Happy, you know, he wouldn’t do something that was dumb--there must have been something. I just can’t remember what at the moment. Something going on in the streets down there, some hint, some threat to the public order. He would never have sent the tanks. I hate to apply logic to this, but he would never have sent the tanks unless there was some threat to public order.

BRINSON: I want to ask you, I had a gentleman call me recently from Monticello, Kentucky and he said...

MARTIN: Excuse me just a minute. [Blows nose] Okay, I’m sorry.

BRINSON: And he said, “That, that county”. Is that right, county? Something like that, I’m not sure I have the right county. He said, “People don’t know, but that was the first school in the country to integrate after the Brown Decision, because they went to school in July.” He said, “Had they been, you know, on a regular school year of September to June they wouldn’t have been.” Do you recall hearing anything like that?

MARTIN: I think so, yeah, it was one of these mountain schools, and just--there was nothing to it.

BRINSON: Well, he sent me an article from the local paper. But the article was really about a black family with seven or eight children that had home schooled their children until the Brown Decision, and then they were able to send their children to this school, which had about thirty-five children total, you know. So it’s a pretty small place. One of the questions I have is, was there no black school at all? And that might well have been the case.

MARTIN: In Monticello I bet you there wasn’t. You know that was the pattern all across East Kentucky. But clearly I remember, I’ve got to keep working on the Monticello per se, but I remember that definitely one of the very first schools to desegregate was one of those mountain schools. If you call it another name, I might think it was the other name, but definitely they started, they were first. They just went and did it. Are you aware of the situation involving what they called Indian-Blacks?

BRINSON: A little bit down in North Carolina.

MARTIN: Well, all right, maybe it was the same. Around Paintsville, particularly, I think this is an indication of the fact that there was not really the same kind of ill will. These people were practical. [Laughing] And they invented a ruse. They just decided that these black families were Indian-Blacks, and that they were entitled to go to schools. I’m convinced that this was what was going on down there. And not dozens and dozens, but several families in that Paintsville, in that Paintsville area, they just decided we are not going to play this nonsense. We are not going to ship these people off to Lincoln Ridge. You are aware of that?

BRINSON: No, tell me.

MARTIN: Well, when, you know, the, I’m talking about the Lincoln Institute.

BRINSON: Okay.

MARTIN: Okay, you know what I’m talking about now.

BRINSON: Yes, I do.

MARTIN: Split off from Berea.

BRINSON: From Berea, right.

MARTIN: A piece, a small piece of the endowment moved up there. Okay, well that’s what I mean Lincoln Ridge. They didn’t want to do that. They didn’t want to send those kids way up there. And so they just changed their designations and let them in the regular public schools. And that was more or less...

BRINSON: And that was acceptable because they thought they had some Indian blood in them.

MARTIN: That was the claim.

BRINSON: Where it might never have been acceptable if it was black?

MARTIN: Yeah, if it was totally black.

BRINSON: Okay.

MARTIN: That was the claim. Again, you know, it doesn’t mean that they required an Indian certificate from the tribe.

BRINSON: Right.

MARTIN: They just did it administratively. It was no, never any--so I think that’s somewhat what was going on in the Monticello schools and some of those other mountain schools. It seemed like to me like there was somebody in Perry county, Knott or Perry or one of those counties, where it was essentially the same story you’re telling in Monticello. Who was first, who was second, who was third, I don’t know; but it definitely happened and it happened quickly.

BRINSON: This Mr. Cole who called me about it, his wife actually has written a book and a play. And she died about six weeks ago. But the book, he says, is going to be published out in California next year, and the play has been given at least locally in his area. But it, I just got all, the manuscript and the play, I haven’t read it. It just arrived yesterday.

MARTIN: That’s wonderful.

BRINSON: Sounds like there is a real story there. In the early days of the Commission, what were the staff asked to do? What were the responsibilities that the Commission was charged with?

MARTIN: Well, it was just this vague thing, you know, to seek fair treatment for all people, as far as the Statute was concerned. But we got right into it, in terms of efforts to desegregate everything in sight. You know, we quickly were into the teacher business, and I guess in a little more gradual basis, we were into the school desegregation effort. But we went, we got into the lunch counter business: that was hot, you know, when I was still in Knoxville. That was when the lunch counters were--those demonstrations--and that was still going strong in Kentucky when I got up here; and we were into that. We did things that now would almost seem like Mickey Mouse, but they weren’t. They were good things. We would gather information. It’s just like we did with the Kentucky Council on Human Relations, we would gather information on what had been desegregated and we’d put that out into reports. And we would report the progress in terms of desegregation of lunch counters and other things.

BRINSON: I’ve seen the early annual reports that you prepared, and you’re right, there’s a lot of detail about how many restaurants were now open, how many theaters, and just how many schools. You really....

MARTIN: Yeah. Yeah.

BRINSON: Work that took somebody time to track all that down and make sure it was correct.

MARTIN: Sure, sure.

BRINSON: When you say that you were involved, or not you, but the Commission was involved in the early sit-ins and the demonstrations, was that primarily here in Louisville? Or were you in other places as well?

MARTIN: Well I, that might be, you know, a little miscast. I did not--I was not particularly involved in the sit-ins in Louisville, in the lunch counter sit-ins, nor the ones in Frankfort. A little bit, a little bit in Frankfort, to some extent. We were living in Frankfort, you know, all through the sixties. And so we were involved in efforts to desegregate the movie theater, Heaven help us; and right in downtown Frankfort. And Frisch’s I remember particularly, but at a little bit different level. In other words we were, we involved the officials …

END OF TAPE ONE SIDE TWO

BEGIN TAPE TWO SIDE ONE

MARTIN: We had the Pink Pig restaurant, you know it is at the top of the hill there in Frankfort, near Kentucky State? A beautiful woman, I’ll never forget her as long as I live. We had this restaurant, I mean this meeting in the basement of Frisch’s. I hear Frisch’s has been torn down, or re-modeled or something or other. But anyway, we met--I assume they re-built on the same location--but anyway it was there, you know, up the road a little bit from where the Pink Pig--where I remember it being. But anyway we had this meeting of all the restaurant owners. And Felix Joiner, you know who was a really superb public administrator. Just, he was the Finance Secretary, just superb, brilliant. He went off later to North Carolina, and was a top notch vice-president at North Carolina University, University of North Carolina, which again is a lot closer a system than what we’ve had here. But anyway, I can’t remember whether--I don’t think the Governor came to that, but Felix was the top person there. And Bob Estill came.

BRINSON: And the Governor would have been Combs still.

MARTIN: Oh yeah. Definitely under Combs, yeah, Felix was with Combs, right. But anyway we had this discussion with the restaurant owners, trying to get them to desegregate. And this guy at Frisch’s, that was a horse’s patoot! [Laughing] He told about this Frisch’s in Ohio, and he said, “Well up there we served them, but we gave them a hamburger that was that big.”

BRINSON: Pretty small, right.

MARTIN: That’s right. And the woman from the Pink Pig, she said, “Well I will never do anything like that.” And she cut that guy, that guy dead. And he just, it was, the die was cast when she said that. She’s been active in the Democratic Party, and now I think works for the Housing Corporation that Lyn Luallen heads, the husband. But she’s a, what is her name? Bradley, Bradley, I’m pretty sure. But she--it was just so beautiful the way she did that: she just wiped him out. And basically that again is what we had in Kentucky, and this is running through everything we worked on, was a lot of goodwill, not massive resistance. Mostly it was people that sometimes hung back a little bit, hoping for leadership. But anytime we got leadership we moved ahead. It was about like the restaurant situation, throughout a whole lot of things that we were into.

BRINSON: Well, let me ask you about Frisch’s restaurant in Frankfort. I wonder, I interviewed a woman named Doctor Gertrude Ridgel at Kentucky State.

MARTIN: Yeah, yeah.

BRINSON: And she and her husband were involved with that...

MARTIN: Absolutely!

BRINSON: ...under the auspices of the NAACP.

MARTIN: Absolutely, yeah.

BRINSON: You knew them?

MARTIN: Oh, I know them very well. Yeah. I think we are dear friends.

BRINSON: Okay. Was there a CORE involvement there in Frankfort at all during that period that you were there?

MARTIN: I don’t really believe that there was much of a CORE. You know how these things are sometimes you organize them quickly and they fade away about as quick. But I don’t remember a CORE involvement there. Now there were, are you aware of the burning of the gym, probably heard of that?

BRINSON: Uh hmm, at Kentucky State.

MARTIN: Right. And there was, it’s not that all those names run together in my head, but just with the passage of time, it’s hard to recall. I don’t really think it was SNICK, it might have been SNICK, there was some other student group that was involved nationally, that supposedly was organizing things to demonstrate in Frankfort. And you know there was turmoil and there was, you know, frustration and anguish and demonstrations. There was definitely that at Kentucky State in this period. And I think it was probably not unrelated: I mean the burning of the gym probably was an outcome of that.

BRINSON: You mentioned Reverend Robert Estill, E S T I L L, for the transcriptionist, who was your first Chairperson. Your Chairman, I guess he was called.

MARTIN: Yes, yes.

BRINSON: Can you tell me about him?

MARTIN: Well, as I’ve told you on the phone a little bit already, Bob was an ideal person to be the first Chairman. And Combs got good advice, and he appointed Bob. And Bob was young and bright.

BRINSON: Young being about how old?

MARTIN: Oh, it’s hard to say.

BRINSON: In his thirties?

MARTIN: Thirties, thirties, I would be almost certain, conceivably high twenties, but thirties, I think. And Bob had gone to U. K. I think, and then to Harvard. I forget what the progression was, but anyway he had contacts everywhere. He just had entree like you wouldn’t believe.

BRINSON: And he was white.

MARTIN: Yes, yes. Which is what they needed at that point, no question about that. Combs got basically, generally a pretty good Commission. I think it was--we were twelve members, as I recall, something like that, something in that range. And he, nearly all of his appointments panned out. Seemed like there might have been one or two that kind of fell by the wayside pretty quickly; but Bob was a leader type. He believed in leadership. He came at these things out of his religious convictions. And he had a good base.

BRINSON: And he was an Episcopal priest?

MARTIN: Yes.

BRINSON: At that point, I believe at Christ Church in Lexington.

MARTIN: Yes. Yeah. How, could he have been--what is a Canon to the Ordinary, what is?

BRINSON: I don’t think he was Canon at that point. I think he was still Rector.

MARTIN: He, well somewhere--when he moved up here, then was he a Canon up here? At the Episcopal church here?

BRINSON: I’m not sure.

MARTIN: Okay. Well, anyway whatever it was. It doesn’t really matter. We don’t care. I know you’ve got to care for your things, accuracy.

BRINSON: Well, and because I’m actually going to interview him next week.

MARTIN: Well, he’ll clarify all that.

BRINSON: And so I have his resume, but I’m interested in seeing what you can tell me that might not be on his resume, for example.

MARTIN: He believed in leadership, he really did. And he saw the opportunity. He knew what he had to do. I think a lot of people, who went to school in the East, Harvard and so on, see these things almost differently. Now that’s just my own prejudice. But he wasn’t going to let this thing slip by him, he was going to be a part of it; he was good at conducting meetings, he was good at involving people. He was a good negotiator, if you needed to have him go meet with, Heaven help us, Garvis Kinkaid, and you know who I am talking about, don’t you?

BRINSON: No, I don’t.

MARTIN: Garvis was a self-made millionaire, who owned the hotels. These buildings have long since become City Hall, like downtown, between Vine and Main. What was it? The Kentucky Hotel. And those were the source of tremendous demonstrations.

BRINSON: In Lexington?

MARTIN: Yes, oh yes. Big time, a lot of the lunch counters, but particularly the lunch counters at Garvis’ hotel. And Garvis was from somewhere in Eastern Kentucky, I don’t know, Irvine or somewhere in that general area. And of course, Garvis, I think, at that time already owned the T. V. Stations, I can’t really remember. But he had plenty. [Laughing] And he was a power to be reckoned with. And we once had the unmitigated gall, Estill and I went, and I forget who else went with us, somebody though, to go talk with Garvis in his offices. He was not going to help us much. It was very clear. The only warmth, the only openness I ever got out of him, when somehow or other it came out and was germane in the conversation, and it came out that I had gone to Berea College. Well, he could pick up on that, because he was a mountain boy. But Estill was good on those negotiation sessions: he was good. And he was also good at going to the Governor and he, when we thought we needed something, Estill was good at going and asking for it, without particular regard to whether or not he concluded in his own mind we were going to get it. In other words, he was not one of these guys, who will never ask for anything if he thinks you might possibly get a no. No, no, no. That was not his style. And the funny thing, the strange thing about it is, practically everything we ever asked for, we always got. So we got a good track record going with Combs. And back to the money a little bit, lest I forget this later. Combs gave us these emergency grants, you see, the Governors, I’m sure they still have a lot of power to make emergency grants to deal with contingency things. So nobody ever thought that we could run that Commission even for the first year with twelve thousand dollars. And he gave us, made us an emergency grant. And then that...

BRINSON: For what kinds of projects did he give you emergency grants?

MARTIN: It was just general stuff, it was just for more staff, as I recall. I don’t think--he didn’t hold us, Combs never held us to saying well you’ve got to use these funds for X, Y and Z, that was not his style either. We would work with the budget people and you know, come up with a plan and he would approve it. That’s just--but Bob, he was very good at asking for things that we justified, you know.

BRINSON: Someone has mentioned to me that he comes from very long time prominent Kentucky families.

MARTIN: Well, I’m sure I told you that. I told you, because Estill county is named for Bob’s family.

BRINSON: Okay.

MARTIN: I think his father was a physician, as I recall. But he’s--as they talk in Lexington, not that he--not that I ever see any evidence he had a lot of money; but he’s old money. Or old--you know, he was in the Idle Hour Country Club, which I don’t want to talk about these days. But he took me to the Idle Hour Country Club, at least once that I can remember, probably twice.

BRINSON: Was probably an all white institution at that point, right?

MARTIN: Oh yeah, yeah. And then when the circle came around and years later we were trying to get the country clubs desegregated. I went to Happy, who was obviously well-identified as a member of the Idle Hour Country Club. I called over to....

BRINSON: Happy Chandler.

MARTIN: Oh yeah, Happy Chandler. Called over to Versailles one day, and I didn’t get to talk with him, but they told me that he was going to the Pink Pig, either that day or maybe it was the next day. Well, I just barreled right on down there to the Pink Pig and asked him if he wouldn’t help us on this Private Club Bill. But he said, no, no, I can’t do that. That’s private. [Laughing]

BRINSON: You said that what was needed at the time of the first appointments, were white people. And of course, you came on...

MARTIN: For the Chairmanship.

BRINSON: For the Chair. But you were hired as the first Director, as a white man. Tell me why, who thought that was necessary, and why was it necessary that whites become the leadership of the Commission in the early days?

MARTIN: Well, I’m not saying that anybody ever thought that. It’s just the way things kind of unfolded, but you know, even reflecting back on it, I think that Combs would have thought that this is a white problem. The problem of discrimination is a problem of whites, and we’ve got to provide leadership for whites. And as far as the Chairmanship is concerned, I could come up with a lot of reasons, I think, as to why it was better, what we were into in that time period, to have a white chairman. And then as far as the Director was concerned, I think it was just a question of getting somebody who had a little of experience, or who had a little bit of track record. I don’t know, I kind of seriously doubt that there were any white applicants for the job. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, misstatement, that there were any black applicants for the job. I don’t remember that well. I can only remember this one minister.

BRINSON: Do you remember what your paycheck was like in those days? Not much.

MARTIN: Well, I don’t remember that it was very much more than what I was making at the Fair Housing Council, about eighty-nine hundred. I don’t know. Believe me I may misapply these money things, it could be...

BRINSON: Actually that sounds pretty good for a nineteen sixty.

MARTIN: It wasn’t. I may, I could have, that could have been my beginning salary at the Commission on Human Rights. I can’t, I don’t have that kind of memory, I can’t remember what happened, whether a minuscule figure occurred in fifty-six or in fifty-eight. Maybe that’s what the Unitarian Service Committee was paying me. I know that was my salary in some one of those three jobs, beginning, but I can’t remember which one.

BRINSON: Right, right.

MARTIN: Memory tricks.

BRINSON: It’s always interesting to go back and look at those early salaries, especially for the young people today, who just can’t imagine that we lived on it. I remember my first job, which would have been like sixty-two. I was making two hundred and forty-five dollars a month, gross and I was taking care of a husband and a child on that. I had a husband in Law School at Chapel Hill.

MARTIN: All right.

BRINSON: And you know, we did okay. We sure didn’t have much money for anything, but you know, people don’t.

MARTIN: When were you at Chapel Hill?

BRINSON: And my children say two hundred and forty-five dollars a month, how in the world did you do that?

MARTIN: Yeah. When were you at Chapel Hill, and who was the President then at Chapel Hill?

BRINSON: Actually I started at the women’s college and Otis Singletary was the President there, before he came here.

MARTIN: Uh huh.

BRINSON: And then I was in and out of Chapel Hill, off and on. Bill Friday....

MARTIN: Who was the very illustrious President of the University in the fifties?

BRINSON: Bill Friday, well in the fifties, I’m not sure. In the sixties and later, Bill Friday.

MARTIN: One of the most beautiful stories, Frank Graham...

BRINSON: Frank Graham, right I remember him.

MARTIN: Frank Graham. One of the most beautiful stories in Al Lowenstein’s book. The book about Al Lowenstein rather, it’s the more recent one. Not the David Harris thing about his killing, you know, and the book was about Harris and Lowenstein and this guy who killed Lowenstein, not that one. But the other one, I think this guy went to Duke. Claire, Claire--I think is his name. Anyway, was this tremendous scene, and I know this is useless. I’m wasting your time. Tremendous scene, where Lowenstein discovered that they were segregating Jews in the dorms, and went to Frank Graham, who was in total disbelief. Total disbelief. Of course, that was Lowenstein, that was the way he was. [Laughing] And it was just a, an unbelievable, but you know it was true, you know it was coming down that way.

BRINSON: Right, oh it was, I have no doubt that it was. Well, let me go back and ask you one more question about the early leadership, both the staff and the Chair being white. What did people like Frank Stanley think about that?

MARTIN: Oh, Frank, Frank never had any real questions about that. Frank had ambitions of his own. He would, I guess deep down Frank would probably have just have soon that Combs had named him the Chairperson. But I never heard, I am confident that, that was not a source of frustration to Frank Stanley. Frank like to be involved and he felt like he deserved credit, and I always tried to get him credit everywhere we could, you know for getting it done. Because he definitely did that, that’s not just a pipe dream. That happened. Combs committed to him and Combs delivered. And we had...

BRINSON: What were his ambitions?

MARTIN: Frank Stanley’s? Well, ha. One that keeps coming back to my mind was, Frank really wanted to be named President of the Kentucky State University. He wanted to succeed Atwood. And he caught on to the idea, somewhere along the way that I had raised some questions about that with somebody. I probably shouldn’t have been raising them, but somebody told Frank. I think it was Thurston Morton that told Frank that I had raised some question, you know Senator Morton. And Frank was not too happy with me. He didn’t stomp my toes or try to get me fired or anything. But I never perceived that Frank was a worthy successor to Rufus Atwood, because Frank had no, you know, he had some degrees, but he had no background. That would have been, total, total racial politics, mostly politics. It wouldn’t even have been that racial, it was just mostly politics.

BRINSON: Well his was a newspaper business, not a college.

MARTIN: That’s right, and he hadn’t written book one or thesis one, or what have you. Not that he was an illiterate, no, no. He was, he was, what he was very skillful at, was business. And what The Defender in those days, in the sixties, what they, and of course now it’s just beaucoup of times. What they really made their money on, was these expositions, you know, like The Defender Exposition, and they’d get all these state agencies to buy booth space there at great expense, that’s what they--it’s like all--The Gazette is no better.

BRINSON: Right, I’ve seen the ads for those in The Defender. I have to tell you as a newcomer to the state, I took out a subscription to The Louisville Defender and also to The Community Voice in Lexington. And I’m sort of disappointed in The Defender as a paper. It just doesn’t give me much information about what’s going on in Louisville in the black community.

MARTIN: Don Cordray’s a hustler.

BRINSON: In fact, I get more out of the Lexington Community Voice about what’s happening in Louisville.

MARTIN: Well, he hustles, that’s the thing. I don’t know what his economic situation is.

BRINSON: Who is this?

MARTIN: Don Cordray, the guy who puts out the Lexington Voice. He works hard at it and he hustles, and he’s trying to be a statewide newspaper, which he should. And The Defender, I think they’ve got established incomes from their advertisers, and I just don’t think they are worrying that much about it.

BRINSON: So they’ve been doing the Expositions for a long time.

MARTIN: Oh yeah, a long time, long time.

BRINSON: And I can tell just by, they must have a hundred different people that they advertise in their paper, who are taking out exhibits at the Expositions now.

MARTIN: Yeah, I never liked it. I never liked taking a booth, and fundamentally we just didn’t take booths much when Stanley was there, partly I just thought it was a conflict of interest and we’d weasel out every way we could. But his, you know, Frank was a most result oriented guy. He was creative in certain ways and he wanted to see change. He liked, he liked particularly when the Commission would meet at the State Parks, and this is fine. I think that is good to get out around the state. And Frank was a participant, he attended regularly and he participated in the meetings. I don’t remember that he was particularly around still when we got into the enforcement, you know, when our focus changed, when we got power.

BRINSON: And that would have been?

MARTIN: In sixty-six.

BRINSON: Okay, with the new Civil Rights Act?

MARTIN: Yeah, yeah.

BRINSON: Okay.

MARTIN: I can’t remember where Stanley was in relation to those dates, but clearly he....I think he possibly didn’t get re-appointed at that point. I can’t remember when he died, I think it was much later. I still remember him as being very active, although not necessarily on the Commission.

BRINSON: Did you begin early on to help localities establish local Commissions on human rights?

MARTIN: Oh big time, big time. And I think that...

BRINSON: Where were the first ones?

MARTIN: That was provided for, I believe, in the statute, in any case, we did it from the git-go. And Estill helped with this, you know. We definitely had some role in the creation of the Louisville Human Relations Commission. I can’t remember, I don’t think it was instantly county. But I remember talking with Hoblitzell, and all these mayors; and so on down here. Again there’s lots of basis for getting something going even if the state wasn’t involved. But clearly the state was involved.

BRINSON: And with the local Commissions, did the mayors make those appointments?

MARTIN: Yes. Practically all these kinds of appointments are made by the chief executive, the Governor or the Mayor.

BRINSON: And any financial arrangements would have come from city money?

MARTIN: Yes. Yes. There was never any provision, no money was ever provided at the state level to finance directly those agencies. They all came out of local money.

BRINSON: Do you remember which towns the early ones started up in?

MARTIN: Well obviously Louisville and Lexington, I am confident were the first. And then the others came along pretty well in various forms and various levels. Now of course, we tend to have staff people, but the staffs came much later. These were mostly, in the early years, these were mostly just volunteer groups, who had no staff and not that much standing you know. But we met with them, in this letter I wrote about the Henderson thing why I recited that we once went down to Henderson, the State Commission did, to meet. Only thing was, we couldn’t find a hotel where the people could stay, so we had to stay in Evansville, Indiana, just to twist the knife a little bit. But...

BRINSON: Because you had blacks on your Commission at that point right?

MARTIN: Yeah. But you know pretty well which these communities are, obviously Paducah had a longtime Commission. Hopkinsville, we worked very closely with the people in Hopkinsville. Bowling Green, I think they may have come to it later, but they had one of the better Commissions. Owensboro had a Commission. And all of these cities that I’ve just named, had staff. Nothing ever in East Kentucky of any consequence. Ashland might have had a local Commission. There was a Berea Human Relations Commission, I think, that had some city backing, but they never had any staff.

BRINSON: What was the relationship between the state agency and the local Commissions? On sort of a...well, what was the relationship?

MARTIN: Well it was just one of co-operation, I mean we helped them a lot. We provided leadership for them, and we developed materials that they could use. We called state conferences. I kind of, over the years got out of the conferencing business; but we had, in the early years we had Governor’s Conferences on Human Rights. We had those for several years running, in which the Governor was actually involved. Typically we met, my vision tells me that we met in the conference areas at the State Education Department, in the old State Office Building, whatever you call it, there near Holmes Street. In other words, it’s down, down, two or three blocks away from the Capital Plaza Tower and the History Center, whatever that is. I think that’s just called the State Office Building. I don’t know what it is called.

BRINSON: I think so, yeah.

MARTIN: But typically I remember meeting in those auditoriums. At times though we met in the Capital. We would meet in the House Chamber. At times these meetings were held there.

BRINSON: Why was that? Just because that was a convenient meeting place?

MARTIN: The prestige, the prestige of getting to meet in the Chambers.

BRINSON: And were there themes for each of the conferences? Or how did they work? Did you have a keynote speaker and workshops?

MARTIN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, the usual stuff.

BRINSON: Right.

MARTIN: I don’t know themes, themes. [Laughing] I’ve forgotten all of them I’ve ever attended. And they don’t amount to anything. I’m sure they had themes, they always did.

BRINSON: Tell me about Paul Oberst, O B E R S T.

MARTIN: Well, Paul was a godsend for the State Commission. He just was an unbelievably dedicated person. I think he came at this partly from his growing up Catholic, in Owensboro. And Owensboro had tended to have a fair Catholic constituency, but nevertheless I think Oberst had probably felt some forms of discrimination as a Catholic. But Paul was you know, very well educated, brilliant or close or what have you. He was a good scholar and a fabulous Law prof.

BRINSON: At the University of Kentucky Law School.

MARTIN: Yes, yes. And a good person, went to Michigan, which Paul claimed and others agree, is better than Harvard Law School, [Laughing] But anyway--but Paul, he was, he just dug in kind of. He developed strong loyalties, and was a strong support type: he was a supportive type personality. I think that was his nature. And he knew the importance of this work. And of course, he was a constitutional law professor. I know I digress and wander around and so on, but one of the funniest things that ever happened was, let me see if I can get this, because I haven’t thought about it for years. Get this up in my memory bank as to the setting. Julian Carroll was the Governor. Oh! It was the time of school desegregation here. Unless, tell me if I’ve got my years out of whack. But it was the time of school desegregation in Louisville, and Julian Carroll was the Governor, and they were mucking around--trying to muck around school desegregation in the Congress. Okay.

END OF TAPE TWO, SIDE ONE

BEGIN TAPE TWO SIDE TWO

MARTIN: We were...and Wendell Ford was involved also.

BRINSON: And what was his role then?

MARTIN: Well, Wendell was a Senator then. Unless, if you find, if you discover I am in error about this stuff, well just correct it. I think I’ve got it straight. Wendell Ford was involved, was in the Senate at that point. And the Congress was conducting some kind of--Senate, the Senate was conducting some kind of dumb, ridiculous hearing on some kind of Bill that was going to undertake to constitutionally curb school desegregation. And there was a guy on the Commission at that point, named Eichelberger, who happened to be black. Part of it’s funny, I got to tell you the whole thing, but...Eichelberger and I went to those Senate hearings. Well, we came in and Dan Rather, I’m pretty sure it was Dan Rather, but it might have been some other of those national reporters: he had both our names, down on the program, you know, and he almost assumed that, that was a Jewish name, and that I had to be Eichelberger. [Laughing] If it was not Dan Rather, it was someone at that same level. But anyway, we got into the thing--let me get to my point. We got into the thing and of course, we had drafted the statement and Eichelberger was presenting it, which was proper. He was the Commissioner and I was the helper, okay? And that’s the way it should have been.

BRINSON: And was Paul Oberst there with you?

MARTIN: No, he was not there. But as I recall, see--.Julian, as I recall, had, oh how did this come down? Oh, it was at this same session. They were trying to play politics, and they asked Julian about the backing for school desegregation on the part of these three state employees. Okay? And the state employees were Bob Saddler, a teacher at the U. K. Law School, and Tom Hogan, who was an aide to Speaker Norbert Blume in the House, and Galen Martin; and Julian just went all over the map. He couldn’t get that straight on a prayer. But he weaseled out and he said, how was it he said that, “Hogan was appointed by the Speaker of the House, and that was an independent branch of government. And Bob Saddler was, had tenure as a University of Kentucky Law School professor, and Galen Martin was appointed by the members of the Commission.” You know, it was so ridiculous. [Laughter] But anyway, then we, there was this part in the statement that Eichelberger was reading that said something about the constitutional, or constitutional interpretation, or constitutional law. And so Wendell Ford asked Eichelberger if, what his source was on that. And of course, again I whispered to Eichelberger, I said, “Paul Oberst.” [Laughing] And of course, Julian is from Owensboro, well knows, I don’t mean Julian, I mean Wendell is from Owensboro, very well knows Paul Oberst. There is no mistaking Paul Oberst. And so when Eichelberger rolled out that this was a constitutional law professor, Paul Oberst of the University of Kentucky. Ford just looked crestfallen. He just--there was nothing he could say: he had boxed himself in.

BRINSON: That’s great. [Laughter]

MARTIN: So why I’m still on Oberst and lest I forget. I think I told you about this already, I’m pretty sure I did. I’ve got a copy here for you, which I didn’t have when we first talked. But see here’s, here’s this dedication to Paul.

BRINSON: And this is in a Kentucky Commission on Human Rights report, in the decisions from seventy-two to eighty-nine.

MARTIN: Yeah.

BRINSON: Okay.

MARTIN: And see what this is, we got West Law, the big book publishers, as you know, got their permission to reproduce these Civil Rights Decisions. And as I intimate in that dedication, I honestly believe, and I’ll believe as long as I live, that Paul’s being on this Commission was a real factor in these judges’ minds as they decided these cases. This is an oversimplification, obviously. But a lot of things need to be made simple. I think a lot of these people had studied under Paul, and they did not want Professor Paul Oberst to give them a “D” at that stage in their life. So they went ahead and decided these things out of his involvement. And he was, you know, Paul was never a loudmouth. I mean, you know, he didn’t make the news a lot, but he just doggedly pursued these cases and he was a factor.

BRINSON: Well, as you know, I can’t interview him, because of his health. But I’m going to be talking to his wife, Elizabeth in a few days.

MARTIN: Yeah. She’s very bright, very bright.

BRINSON: Well I want you to tell me what you remember about her. And I’ll tell you what little bit I know, is that I found the records, some records, not many, of a group called the Lexington Committee for Human Rights and Religion.

MARTIN: Yes! Yes.

BRINSON: That Bob Estill is credited with having played an early leadership role in it.

MARTIN: Yes.

BRINSON: And Elizabeth Oberst was a co-chair of a couple of committees of that group.

MARTIN: Yeah, yeah.

BRINSON: So what can you tell me about her? Did she come to meetings with Paul?

MARTIN: No.

BRINSON: Did she...

MARTIN: Almost never I would say, as we traveled around the state. I don’t remember her coming. I saw her from time to time, because I would go to their home. And she’s a good scholar, a brilliant woman, some might argue more brilliant than Paul, but that’s irrelevant any way.

BRINSON: She is a scholar of what? Do you know?

MARTIN: Well, I don’t know. I think, she’s a law school, I’m sure she’s a law school graduate, unless I’m loused up. I’m pretty sure she’s a law school graduate, maybe even Michigan. But she’s, she’s accomplished academically, I can’t tell you really what she’s written though.

BRINSON: Well, that’s helpful.

MARTIN: They’ve got several kids. One of his brothers still lives in Owensboro, or did, you know, I don’t know who’s alive now.

BRINSON: She...

MARTIN: And another brother lives here in Louisville.

BRINSON: Did she teach at the Law School at all, that you were aware of?

MARTIN: No, I’m almost certain that she did not. She worked as--I don’t know--let’s see. No ,that may have been somebody else. I was thinking for a minute that she had worked with the Bar Association some in Lexington, but I think that may have been somebody else.

BRINSON: Okay. Okay, well that’s helpful.

MARTIN: Umm, I just, well not much.

BRINSON: You mentioned Bob Saddler also. And of course, he was active with the Kentucky Civil Liberties Union.

MARTIN: Oh, absolutely.

BRINSON: And I wonder, was the Commission, did the Commission and the Civil Liberties Union, were you involved together on any issues? What were the relations between those two organizations?

MARTIN: Well, the obvious...

BRINSON: During the sixties.

MARTIN: During the sixties?

BRINSON: Uh hmm.

MARTIN: Well, you have to quit with the--you can’t get into the seventies?

BRINSON: Umm. Do we need to get, was there anything before seventy that you recall?

MARTIN: Well, obviously I’ve been a card carrying member forever.

BRINSON: Of the ACLU?

MARTIN: Yeah, I go back. What the heck, there was one of the Founders of the Civil Liberties Union, I had him come to speak to Students for Democratic Action at a National Convention. Anyway, I know his name well; but there was not that much of a call for, you know, a lot of joint co-operation in the sixties, especially after we got enforcement power. But there was certainly never any antipathy. Now, not all those members of the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights would have been card carrying members of the Civil Liberties Union; and I don’t even know about Estill necessarily. Estill was, you know, he picked and he chose; and I don’t know about his individual involvement in the Civil Liberties Union. He was not against it, you know, but he may not have, he may not have been involved. But obviously, Priscilla Robertson and other, you know, a lot of the other people we’ve talked about, were involved. It just wasn’t called, we just weren’t called upon to get into things they were involved in. Let me just tell you about the seventies.

BRINSON: In the seventies then, yes, please do.

MARTIN: Little bit, see. That’s the absolute most important thing that I have ever done in my life, or that the Commission did in its life, that’s my opinion, was to be involved in the Louisville School Desegregation Suit: and that is monumental. This is the most desegregated district in the country, as you know. If you didn’t get my recent report, I’d like to give it to you. And clearly this is the best desegregation plan, you know, not everybody agrees. But I think it is the best desegregation plan in the country. This is definitely, statistically, according to Gary Orfield’s reports from Harvard, the most desegregated district in the country, and clearly, absolutely, positively, Kentucky is the most desegregated state in the country. See, they’ve documented that for a decade or two. It’s a close race between us, or has been close, between us and Delaware, but we are well ahead of Delaware. And clearly one of the main reasons that Kentucky is in the lead is because of the Louisville School Desegregation Plan. We’ve slipped back since eighty, so we are not as desegregated in ninety-seven as we were, or ninety-eight. Ninety-six, ninety-seven is the most recent information. We’re not as desegregated then as we were in eighty. And I think, I don’t have evidence for this, but I wish we could get it. I wanted Cody to provide us that kind of report. He’s provided us a beautiful study on teachers. And you know Austin Tuning, don’t you? Maybe not.

BRINSON: No.

MARTIN: Well, Austin is a black man, who is in charge of that Equity thing for the Superintendent, or for the Commissioner. But anyway, they did a good report on faculty at, in the local school system. And of course, we get good reports on the faculty in the universities, I think. But anyway, the Civil Liberties Union was definitely one of the mainstays in that, of that suit. And basically the NAACP and the Civil Liberties Union and the Legal Aid, they were all involved in a suit for desegregation of the separate Louisville School system and separate Jefferson County School system. Tom Hogan and I brought the suit, and we asked Lyman Johnson to be our lead plaintiff; and we all went and filed the same day in the court. They laid their papers on the table for the separate--leaving the districts separate and desegregating them. And we laid ours on the table for merger and desegregation. And we also rolled Anchorage in there. Well Anchorage got out. And ultimately once we started, and I’m not in any way saying that I was...

BRINSON: And Anchorage is just a little municipality in the greater Louisville...

MARTIN: Louisville School System, yeah, but they are not a part of Jefferson county schools, separate system. But from the git-go, and I’ve never implied that I was the brains of this suit or anything. I was there, and I went to all those pre-trial conferences. And it’s by far the best education I’ve ever had, sitting at the feet of Judge James Gordon, because he was a great, great, great man. And so from the git-go though, Saddler was the lead lawyer. And we forgot about what they had asked for, everybody was for merger. They knew it had to be merged. And you know again, if you’re not into that, why that’s all right.

BRINSON: Well, I know a little bit about it, and I actually thought I would talk with you more about it next time, but I’m glad to have this background.

MARTIN: Whatever.

BRINSON: And also any documents that you want to give me, just kind of think about that before next time. I thought when we got together again next time, we’d kind of focus on the issues of housing and employment and education that the Commission has worked with.

MARTIN: Wonderful.

BRINSON: Today, as I said, I just sort of wanted to do more biographical background and ask you about some of the early members. One thing I do want to ask you again, is you mentioned that you had started Law School in Tennessee and then you obviously moved to Louisville and took this job with the Commission. But you went to Law School also, I take it, at the University of Louisville?

MARTIN: Yeah, I was halfway through UT when I came back up here.

BRINSON: How did you do that?

MARTIN: It was not easy. I pondered long and hard about not taking the job, and should I finish Law School, but I knew I wanted to be active, more than I wanted to be educated. That’s true all of my life. I came back and I did nothing with the law for those several years in the sixties. And then about the time I started back in sixty-six, was about the time we got the law. I was frustrated. I thought that Breathitt had done, you know, was not getting with it quick enough, and I was beginning to wonder, you know, if we were ever going to get a law. And if you know, other people getting laws in sixty-four and so on. But can I--Is there time for me to tell you another story?

BRINSON: Uh huh, please do.

MARTIN: We made Ned Breathitt a Governor, we made him, absolutely. And Estill was a part of that deal.

BRINSON: We being the Commission?

MARTIN: Yep, yep, well those of us that were trying to get the law passed. In sixty-four, Ned is one of these guys who had good intentions. I never found him to have bad intentions. But he is a person, that I think fundamentally tended to know pretty much what he was for, but I was never always sure he knew why; and he waffled. He waffled in the sixty-four legislature and he let Shelby Lenear, no, no, not--Shelby Kinkaid, who was a good man, a good man from Lexington, who got caught up in this thing, and who got defeated because of it, I believe, in large measure, and later somewhat admitted it. Shelby Kinkaid was one of Breathitt’s real leaders. And I don’t remember if he held an actual floor position or what, but he was definitely the one. He was the point man for Breathitt on this legislation that we offered in sixty-four. And of course you know, that’s when we had the huge march, in sixty-four. It’s in here.

BRINSON: Were you part of that?

MARTIN: I was out there in the crowd. I was not one of the planners of it. Again I, you know, again I took what--I did not see my role as peculiarly one to be involved in the lunch counter demonstrations or necessarily in a lot of the demonstrations. Now in earlier years, when I was in Washington, as I told you, I demonstrated at the Embassy, I demonstrated at Amos and Andy, and a little bit at the lunch counters. This is in the fifties. CORE was demonstrating against the lunch counters in D. C. in the fifties. It didn’t catch on. But they were into it long before Greensboro or anybody else. But...

BRINSON: But you were at the Frankfort Rally?

MARTIN: Oh yes, I was definitely there. The thing I peculiarly remember, it was cold. But when I finally worked my way into the middle of the crowd, with the Berea Students, it was warm, or relatively warm. [Laughing] But it was a wonderful, wonderful day, and it made a lot of difference. And of course, I was in on the sessions where Breathitt was planning what he was going to do.

BRINSON: Why do you think he sort of waffles?

MARTIN: Because I think he tried to apply the same concepts to Civil Rights that you apply to other concepts and it didn’t fit. See he had Shelby, or he allowed Shelby, I don’t know whose initiative it was, to come in with a watered down version of the Public Accommodations Law. And that was all we were seeking in sixty-four, Public Accommodations Law, that had been made the issue. The lunch counters were still problems, you know. They were not desegregated in sixty-four. We’re still demonstrating, and hassling over it and arguing over it. And sometime or other be sure that I talk with you about Governor Combs’ issuance of his Public Accommodations Executive Order. I can share stuff with you that is extremely important historically. But anyway, they, see we had drafted, I went to the American Jewish Congress, and got them to draft Public Accommodations language for us, that would be all encompassing. And these were the best people in the country at that point. And they drafted us this language. It was tight, it didn’t try to list everything, but it was extremely well crafted language that would have covered everything, unless they added a specific exemption for something politically, you know, to get them out, to let them out to get enough votes. But Breathitt allowed Shelby Kinkaid to come in and offer an amended version that would have only covered the same thing as the national law was going to cover, or covered at that point, covered, which was places that were in interstate commerce. Well, that made absolutely no sense. There was no reason why we would kill ourselves getting a state law that dealt only with interstate commerce. And Estill and the ministers were scheduled to meet with the Governor the next day. And Estill went in there and rejected it.

BRINSON: Rejected it?

MARTIN: Rejected this compromise. And of course this cut to the core with Breathitt, because Breathitt and Estill had been in school together at U. K.. When you talk about leadership and feeling the sting of rejection from Bob Estill. And Estill was not, he never did anything hostile. He could do that, you know. He kept his cool. He’d just mind it out. And so it couldn’t be repaired at that point. There was not way to go back and change the law back and undo the watering down that Shelby Kinkaid had done. So Breathitt, he got determined, determined that he was not going to let the same thing happen in sixty-six, as he let happen in sixty-four. And so he told us, you bring in the law you want and I’ll get it passed. And we did. We went to the Uniform, National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, and we got that law from them. And we got it introduced. And John Y. Brown, Sr. got it passed in sixty-six. It was a glorious time, and you know we--but if we, if Estill had not gone into that meeting. If he had gone into that meeting and said, “Well this is as much as you can get, we’ll take a half a loaf, because it’s all you can get, Mr. Governor.” We would never have gotten the country’s best law in sixty-six.

BRINSON: Right.

MARTIN: Again, other people may disagree with this, but I know it.

BRINSON: And the first law in the South, as I understand it.

MARTIN: Oh yes, definitely in the South. Definitely the first Civil Rights Act, but it was not--it was better. See, these Conferences of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, they’d done this on a host of other laws, you know; and so they just did the same thing on Civil Rights. They sucked up the best provisions of all the Civil Rights Acts around the country and they put them in this one Bill. And almost nobody even after that, really got it enacted as well as we did. We didn’t get it--I don’t know, they jerked us around on a little thing or two, but it never really mattered. And so then, you know, then we were in business, in sixty-six. And then of course, we have the twenty-one year long arrangement with Senator Powers, that was a fabulous record. See, she, all of her twenty-one years, we would bring to her, amendments that we needed to the Act; that woman got them passed nearly every time. And she again, like Breathitt, took our stuff and got it in, she took our stuff and got it passed. Now sometimes the black leadership of the House would get confused and want credit, instead of Georgia and jerk things around, and sometimes we failed, once or twice maybe. But she was consistent, persistent, never sold out.

BRINSON: Okay, what about May Street Kidd?

MARTIN: May was a very good person, and I’m sorry with her passage here just a few weeks ago. I was out of town. I would have been right there at the services. May was very good. She was, she always wanted to be treated like a lady. [Laughing] She had a certain elegance about her. And I knew her. Our first office here in Louisville was in the old Supreme Life Building, over a burlesque theater.

BRINSON: Right, and she worked for the insurance company, right?

MARTIN: Yeah, you know where, Mammoth Life is still there, okay. Right across the street from them was this burlesque theater on the first floor, and we were in this, God help us space. You know, we wanted to be in the black side of town, so we were on the black side of Sixth Street, and May worked there. So I know her, I know her well. I like her. She was, she was especially helpful on the housing things with the Kentucky Housing Corporation. But she was not as directional and consistent and so on, as Georgia. I am not putting May down in any way. Obviously she didn’t serve twenty-one years. But she...

BRINSON: Was she controversial at all? In the black community? How was she viewed by the black community?

MARTIN: Well, I’m not aware of anyway, anything that would bring her to be controversial. I mean, she worked in the community and she was a legislator. And she didn’t pick fights with people. She didn’t get into things that were ridiculous as I recall. She didn’t bring--you know, Georgia had street smarts. Georgia didn’t go four years to college; but Georgia, Georgia is from, and of course May, may be also, but I know Georgia’s family. Everywhere you turn up at any event, those Montgomery boys show up, and they’re big and they’re strong. They’re postmen and bankers and people like that. And Georgia just had a lot going for her.

BRINSON: Is her family restaurant still operate down there on Twenty-eighth? That’s gone. The Senators?

MARTIN: The one that I remember....The Senator? Oh no, that has been gone...

BRINSON: A long time.

MARTIN: Yeah, a long, long, long time. See, Georgia’s from down around Springfield, somewhere down in that part. I’ve been down there to a family reunion once. Maybe it’s Bardstown, no I don’t know, Bardstown, Springfield, one of those, one of those little towns down that way.

BRINSON: The reason I ask you about whether May was perceived sort of controversial by the black community is that we’re getting ready to host a symposium on Civil Rights in February. And with her death recently, I suggested to someone that it would be nice to dedicate the program to her in some way.

MARTIN: Uh huh.

BRINSON: And the response I got was, well you know, she’s such a controversial figure. And I wasn’t aware of that. I’ve read her book, you know. I couldn’t interview her either, because of her health.

MARTIN: Uh huh.

BRINSON: But I have never picked up--now I know her book, a lot of it is about how she was very light skinned and could pass as white. And I’m wondering whether there were people in the black community, who had negative feelings about her, because of that.

MARTIN: I don’t know. I don’t know the answer, but I would not accept that response. I would test that thing out on six other people before I ever backed down. Ask Georgia.

BRINSON: Okay.

MARTIN: Ask Georgia, or Darryl, Darryl is the leading, by far, he is the leading black office holder in this state.

BRINSON: Darryl?

MARTIN: Darryl Owens. I’m not trying to put him above the members of the legislature. But Porter Hatcher, I deal with Porter all the time, because I’m the first vice-president of the NAACP branch now and Porter was last year. And he’s the guy that got me into this mess [Laughing] in the branch. But again, or Crenshaw wouldn’t know, you know, Lexington types wouldn’t know.

BRINSON: Jesse Crenshaw.

MARTIN: He’s good, very good. But he wouldn’t know May. If you needed an out of town reaction, he could give you that, probably. But Georgia, Georgia or Darryl or both, you know, if you ask them, I think that is nonsense.

BRINSON: Okay, well I...

END OF INTERVIEW