Oral History Interview with Galen Martin, November 6, 1999

BETSY BRINSON: This is November six nineteen ninety-nine. This is the second interview with Galen Martin. We are doing the interview in his office in Louisville, Kentucky, and the interviewer is Betsy Brinson. You’ll notice that there is background noise, which we are not able to eliminate.

GALEN MARTIN: All right. I think, and again a part of my problem is, if I do things one day and I come back the next day, I can’t remember that well, what we talked about. That’s not that surprising.

BRINSON: That’s okay, I’ve actually listened to the tapes that we did last week.

MARTIN: [Laughing] You can remind me, Galen, we’ve already covered that.

BRINSON: Right. I have some better sense, but I don’t always remember either.

MARTIN: All right. I just don’t want there to be any doubt, that by far, the most important thing in the life of the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights, school desegregation. And you know, other people may think other things, and that’s fine. I respect other people’s points of view. But there is no question in my mind that, that was the most important thing that the Commission ever did, and that I’ve ever done. Okay? And clearly we were a part of that lawsuit, and I know I’ve told you some of this...

BRINSON: And this was the lawsuit filed in...?

MARTIN: In seventy-two.

BRINSON: Seventy-two.

MARTIN: Yeah. Now of course I was here when the schools began desegregation in fifty-six, you know, and it’s all portrayed in Omar Carmichael’s book that told how they began. And they made good beginnings, but they rested on their laurels. They didn’t refine and revise and update. And of course, Carmichael, you remember, got invited by Eisenhower to come to the White House to tell Ike how he had done it. So it was big time.

BRINSON: Well, I have to back up, tell me who Omar is.

MARTIN: Was the [Laughing] --he was the School Superintendent for Louisville schools. And see they provided very clear leadership to achieve desegregation, unlike George Wallace and so on. They, they sent home, they took the initiative, now this was in the fall of fifty-six. And they devised a totally voluntary plan. You know there were thirteen or so other lawsuits brought around the state, but we didn’t have a suit at that time. So they devised a plan and they sent home cards, eight by five or something, you know, that size, whatever it is. And on those cards, they stamped in big, bold letters, about that big, the school where they thought the child ought to go, black and white children; and nearly everybody accepted it. So that was a big deal. And that was so early in the country’s history with Brown that it mattered a lot. But anyway, the big thing, of course the Commission wasn’t created then.

BRINSON: Well, let me ask you about that. If everybody accepted it, did that involve transportation issues to move people around?

MARTIN: No, no, the city of Louisville had no buses to speak of, they had some, but very few buses. So people were, as I recall, some of them were going on city buses, regular city buses. But it did not involve any, it didn’t involve any busing.

BRINSON: And you thought it was a good plan?

MARTIN: Yes, so far as it went, it did not include teachers, which was a gross failure, That Lyman Johnson of course, challenged the Superintendent on and properly so. And then they just, they just quit, they quit. And they rested on their laurels, and it got worse in the sixties; and by sixty-seven, we were pointing it out. And we at the State Commission, and a reporter was pointing it out. And then in the fall of seventy-two, well no not the fall, in roughly--well I’ll tell you exactly when it was, because despite what one might think, we decided that we were going to file that suit, and we waited until the Legislature adjourned; and wisely so. [Laughing] We knew what the heck we were doing. This stuff was just not stumbling around. And the Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP were both split, in that they didn’t really want to support merger of these districts. And so Tom Hogan and I, put together a suit for merger and desegregation. Now none of this I’ve told, have I? Is that correct?

BRINSON: No.

MARTIN: Okay, all right. I told Larry Knowles’ class, again, I meet with him nearly every year, but anyway I told them, so that’s getting me confused. But anyway, both the NAACP and the Civil Liberties Union were split over these issues at the outset, and they both had votes that ran like twelve to two, in favor of keeping the districts separate. Hogan was one of the dissenters and Lyman Johnson was one of the dissenters, so we got together a lawsuit, that Hogan of course drafted the papers and had me sign. And Hogan said to me, he said, “Well let’s go ahead and put you down there as on behalf of the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights, and then you can pay all the Xeroxing costs.” [Laughter] Saddler wrote the stuff and once we got into...

BRINSON: Bob Saddler.

MARTIN: And see--yeah, whenever we marched to the Courthouse, why the Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP and the Legal Aid group and so on, they laid their papers down first. So they were the prime movers in the suit.

BRINSON: And Bob Saddler was representing the Civil Liberties Union.

MARTIN: Yes, yes. And then right, we marched in with them, right behind them, we laid our papers down on the Clerk’s desk, and but from that time on, we were all together, we were totally together. We also, Hogan and I, also tried to bring in Anchorage, which they finally threw out.

BRINSON: Now, for the readers, Anchorage is actually a little, what, community within Louisville.

MARTIN: Separate enclave, right, wealthier folk, and they got thrown out for whatever reasons.

BRINSON: Did the NAACP have an attorney?

MARTIN: Yes, they definitely did. Darryl Owens is the lone survivor among those folks. It’s me and Darryl, I think is the only, well nearly the only ones that are still around. But also Lunderman, Mr. Lunderman.

BRINSON: Lunderman?

MARTIN: Yeah, L U N D E R M A N. He was also on that suit with Darryl. Darryl is totally committed to all these things still and with us. But anyway--that’s--and frankly, you know, it was not like the Commission members ever, if the truth be told, it was not like they ever exactly voted on that suit. [Laughing] And nearly everybody if they looked at the record, they would say that the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights was in it. But it’s not like they were a plaintiff. We just put that on there, on behalf--and we got away with it. [Laughing]

BRINSON: So how much Xeroxing cost did you end up with?

MARTIN: How much of the Xerox? I don’t know. We sure never kept any records. These days, they’ve got these counters on the Xerox machines.

BRINSON: Was it a lot?

MARTIN: Oh, it was thousands. I don’t know, it wasn’t, it didn’t really matter. I mean, nobody could ever track that on a bet. And I think I did tell you, recite that stuff to you, where Oberst name got dropped in when we went before the Senate--well, that’s what they were talking about, see. They were challenging, the three of us, they were challenging Saddler, and Hogan and me, all of who were really on a state payroll of another

BRINSON: Well, now wait a minute, no, you didn’t tell me that. What was...?

MARTIN: Well, remember, I think I did, maybe I didn’t.

BRINSON: You talked about some of the hearings.

MARTIN: I said that we were before the Senate Committee, and these people were trying to--see there was a big backlash so to speak in terms of opposition to school desegregation. And you know Todd Hollenbach was the county judge then, and he called a National Conference on alternatives to busing. He was corrupt, totally bankrupt. But anyway, and this was all this stuff--all this backwash against school desegregation, and Julian Carroll got caught up in that. And so they called him to testify before the Senate. And so at that hearing--they asked him, the Republicans, it was a put up deal--forget who it was that asked, but it may have been, you know, someone like Oren Hatch, or one of the guys from Carolina. I know who that was, but my memory’s thin at the moment; and they asked Carroll, “Well Governor, if you say you’re opposed to busing,” which he did, see: at the very time that we’re trying to get the school thing started, Julian comes up there and testifies against busing. And the other senators from the opposition said, “Well Governor if you say you’re against busing, how come you’ve got these fellows on the state payroll, named Saddler, Hogan and Martin?” And that’s when he did this gymnastics of trying to claim that we were on other payrolls, and he wasn’t liable for us.

BRINSON: Well, let me stop a minute. I know where you were, and Bob Saddler was at the Law School...

MARTIN: Yes.

BRINSON: At the University of Louisville?

MARTIN: And Tom Hogan was a top aide to Norbert Blume, the Speaker of the House.

BRINSON: Okay, thank you.

MARTIN: So there was sort of an out, you know, none of us were really regular state employees, I was the closest. But Saddler was, you know, a Law School prof can do anything they can get away with, and similarly the Speaker’s aide. But it just, it’s just a dicey little thing. And again I don’t know that, that vignette has anything to do with anything.

BRINSON: Can you...

MARTIN: But the point I’m trying to make is, that this was extremely important. For instance, Gary Orfield, that you can call as an authority on this, it’s his view that we were frequently described as the best state Human Rights Agency in the country.

BRINSON: And tell me who Gary is.

MARTIN: Gary Orfield is this guy right here.

BRINSON: Oh, the author of a book, Dismantling Desegregation .

MARTIN: Yeah.

BRINSON: Okay.

MARTIN: He is the world’s foremost expert on school desegregation. He’s a honey of a guy. He’s from Minnesota originally. His brother is in the legislature up there. When he first started he was at the University of Chicago, but he’s moved on to Harvard. He’s been there many, many years by now. But if you’re interested in that, or that subject matter, why Gary--and what he said was--we had an anniversary dinner here like, honoring Judge Gordon; and the judge wasn’t able to come. But Gary at that meeting said that, “No other State Commission on Human Rights ever got within ten miles of a school desegregation order.” And alas, that is pretty much true. Now, Pennsylvania has been into it a little, to some extent. And I’m not necessarily repeating Gary’s thing for the truth of it as compared with Pennsylvania. I’m just saying that, that is what Gary said, and he did. And you know, not only that, we put out these periodic reports on teachers. We put out a lot of periodic reports on school desegregation around the state. That’s I just think by far, and of course I was a full participant in all the pre-trial conferences, never the brains, but I was there and I learned from it. And it’s my most important education.

BRINSON: Tell me about the plaintiffs.

MARTIN: Well, of course we picked Lyman, very well known. Lyman was delighted to be involved. And then we had six or eight other citizen type plaintiffs, many of which were teachers, black and white teachers, some of them at Central High School and then other citizen plaintiffs, parents or grandparents of children in the school system. So those were our plaintiffs.

BRINSON: Was Susie Post one of those plaintiffs?

MARTIN: She was more involved on behalf of the Civil Liberties Union. I think generally she is considered a plaintiff; and her name is in the documents. You know if you--I can’t imagine that you want this, but we’ve got the docket sheet, because it is pertinent to our current litigation. And Susie’s name is listed in that docket sheet, as was, you know, the Legal Aid people and so on, the various attorneys. The docket sheet just tells you who the lawyers were and what the actions filed were.

BRINSON: So how long did the case last?

MARTIN: From seventy-two to seventy-five, and that’s when the order was issued, in July of seventy-five.

BRINSON: And the order was to do what?

MARTIN: To desegregate all the schools. And of course see, I don’t care what anybody says, it is the best desegregation order in the country. And Gordon, if I haven’t given you a copy of the leaflet, I know where I can go get one real quick. I think it is all characterized by this little leaflet, that said, Six Ways to Avoid Busing. But of course, my daughter was sitting on the couch one evening--we were watching T.V.--and she picked that up and read it. She was getting ready to go into the ninth grade at Central, where she stayed for four years. Anyway, she picked that up and she said, “But Daddy it all seems to me like it’s one way, just desegregate housing.” And that’s what, it was, you know it approached it from several points of view of what people could do to promote desegregation; and that was the genius of Gordon’s plan. And of course, we at the Fair Housing Council are mightily involved in this effort to maintain that plan.

BRINSON: So the...

MARTIN: And the crux of our effort was stated by one of the lawyers we met last Friday, on our side. Shirrell Snyder, I don’t know if you know him at all, but anyway he’s involved in it. He said this, but everybody else agrees with it, what we’re trying to do is to show that this district is different from every other city in the country, most of which have had their plans destroyed. They’ve been trashed. Charlotte is the most recent one, and Boston and San Francisco, you name it. It’s a shambles.

BRINSON: So, you need to provide some history here. So you got an order in seventy-five, and then the order began to be implemented.

MARTIN: In the Fall of seventy-five.

BRINSON: Right. And then what happened? It sounds like you are back in court again, now.

MARTIN: Well, we are back in court now, because a small group of black students and parents have sued to re-segregate Central High School. Now those later words are my words. What they’re, the essence of their suit, when it started out was, to increase the numbers of black students at Central above, so that they would go above fifty percent. You know, the plan has got amended. Many of the amendments were called for, others were never proper, never should have been done. But the plan has been amended, and so now the ratio that’s required, and that ratio has had to be increased, because the percentage of black students in the system has grown. Okay? So now the ratio required is a fifteen to fifty percent black in every school. Essentially what they want, the other group wants is to let Central go above fifty percent.

BRINSON: And these are black parents that are bringing that lawsuit?

MARTIN: Yes.

BRINSON: What’s behind their motive to do this?

MARTIN: Well, it’s mixed. Some of them are--some of them are separatists, some of them represent a group in town that really would move Central and make it into a black, elitist academy. They would try to attract the best black students and the sons of political officials and so on, and make it super education for blacks. That’s our view of it. Now, nobody’s ever said that on paper. But from what we know of some of these people, and we’ve been in a lots of meetings with some of them, we think that’s an element. Others are caught up in rhetoric. [Laughing] I heard this again last night, or Saturday night, they say, “Well, if a school can be desegregated when it’s seventy-five percent white, why can’t it be desegregated when it is seventy-five percent black?” Well, that’s nuts. It’s reasoning in a box. The point is, that this district is thirty percent black, and so for Louisville, our schools should all be in a range of plus or minus fifteen percent or so, over that thirty percent. And the ideal thing would be to have all of the schools at the mid-point. And that’s what Pat Todd, a very good person who is in charge of trying to keep these schools even, that’s what she is trying to provide leadership to do, to keep them as near the mid-point as can be done. And if we start letting Central High go to fifty-five or sixty percent, then we’re convinced it will go to hundred percent. That’s immediately what Gary Orfield said. I called him, and he’s been to Louisville a lot of times. He’s the chief expert witness that the School Board has called. If they hadn’t called him, we would have called him. It’s good that they can do it, because they can pay for it.

BRINSON: So the School Board is actually opposed to the lawsuit?

MARTIN: Oh absolutely. And see what is crucial is, that we get a decision which says that this district is not unitary, meaning that it’s not achieved enough desegregation so that it can be declared unitary. Because if it’s declared unitary, then we lose all protections of the federal court; and we need those protections. We need those protections to achieve teacher desegregation. They’re way off where they ought to be. They just have a tremendous gap between the percentage of black students and the percentage of black teachers. So we want the court protections for--that’s just one of dozens of reasons why we need them in it.

BRINSON: Of course we are very short nationwide on black teachers.

MARTIN: Yes, yes.

BRINSON: And that must become an issue in all of this too.

MARTIN: Well, there are those who claim we can’t find them, but we are unwilling to accept that. And the point is, that they’ve got to try harder. And we don’t think they are trying hard enough. So it’s an argument, it’s like lawyers.

BRINSON: Right. It’s like the recent news that there’s not a single black School Superintendent in Kentucky.

MARTIN: Yes. Well, that’s old news, but it’s new, it’s recent, it’s ongoing. [Laughing] It’s been that way a long, long, long time. They have increased the number of principals a little bit, black principals. But the black teacher level has gone from seven percent, roughly, which it was under segregation. We are down to about four plus percent; so it is way down. But anyway, that’s what, I think that, that, in my opinion, is the most important thing that we did, ever, the State Commission on Human Rights.

BRINSON: After Judge Gordon issued the order in seventy-five, did the Commission put in place a monitoring process at all?

MARTIN: We’ve, we were never much for participating, in my time, you know, in monitoring with other groups. We fundamentally believed it was the responsibility of the lawyers and the school system to do the monitoring. Now the school system has had its own monitoring committee, including some segregationists on it. But what in my time, what the Commission tried to do was to put out periodic reports on the status of segregation and desegregation. You know, on page two here’s, “new elementary and middle school assignment plans creating dual school system”, eighty-five to eighty-six. Uhh, let’s see what else we had. But anyway this doesn’t reflect all the publications. This was just, whatever year this was done in. This tended to reflect the ones that were most current.

BRINSON: Well, I wanted to ask you about that, because that’s actually a very nice list. I looked too, on multiple topics. But is seemed to me, looking at the list, that most of your published reports didn’t come until the early seventies.

MARTIN: No, no, like I say, this is just....

BRINSON: So there were reports issued in the sixties?

MARTIN: In other words, if we put this out in--yeah, if this list was put out in eighty-seven. We didn’t necessarily list all the things that we were doing in sixty. We just tried to list the most recent ones. See, here’s a clue. Here we say, “Black staff employment up at state universities, except for executives, seventy-five to eighty-five.” Okay. So we put out those reports. And then there’s a parenthesis, and that one was dated April eighty-seven. And then there’s a parenthesis, “previous reports on university non-faculty staff employment since nineteen seventy-seven available upon request.” In other words, so we were reporting, for many of these things we did for fifteen years. The reports on, and some of them longer, I’m sure, but the reports on--here’s another report, August eighty-four, “black teachers lose employment ground”, well again that was a report on thirty years, since the Brown Decision. Okay, so the reports we were into were something, most of those were done annually, or maybe ever two years on certain occasions. And we did the reports on public housing desegregation, we did those at least fifteen years. We did the ones on teachers, public school teachers, university faculty, public school desegregation, more in Louisville than in other states, I mean than in other cities. Some in Lexington, but less for Lexington than for Louisville. But here’s one, “segregation persists in Fayette County Schools”, eighty-five to eighty-six. Again as previously reported thrown in there.

BRINSON: Then in nineteen seventy-one, you published Kentucky’s Black Heritage, for use in Kentucky History courses. A good document which I use fairly regularly now and I’ve seen it among other places I’ve been. What went into deciding to do that project?

MARTIN: All right now, I’m going to repeat something that I can’t remember whether I told you before or not. Our staff looked at these histories that were coming primarily out of Kentucky history, you know, the required course in Kentucky History. And we had these texts that came, particularly out of Texas. And the wag was, among our staff members, that they undertook to show that slavery was a pleasant experience in Kentucky. [Laughing] Which we found--we didn’t believe it--but we were trying to get this adopted as something of a text for the Kentucky History course. What they ended up doing, was buying it for the black students. And you know, we didn’t print that many. I don’t what the printing, we did two or three or so printings.

BRINSON: They being the school system?

MARTIN: Yeah, the school systems. We wanted them to, we wanted this to be in the hands of every child, who studied black history. Because we wanted the whites to know that blacks had a history. They robbed us of that. We never, it never came down the way we intended it. They just wouldn’t, they just wouldn’t, we could never get this thing formally adopted. Some of the districts would buy, you know, enough for all their black students, but hardly any of them ever did much more than that. They thought, they treated it like black history was for black students, and white history was for white students and we’re not going to...

BRINSON: That’s unfortunate.

MARTIN: And you know, it’s not perfect. But I don’t know anybody who’s had anything comparable to it, hardly, in the country, you know. There’s just nobody else who’s doing much like this.

BRINSON: Well then at what point did you also begin to develop the poster series on Great Blacks in History?

MARTIN: I can’t remember the date, but I remember exactly the place. I was in Columbia, South Carolina, and visiting a guy who’s since gone on to bigger and better things. I think with the--it’s one of these big foundations there, they advertise on public radio all the time. McDonald? What the heck? McSomething Foundation, anyway, that’s irrelevant. He had one of these posters in his office about, from the gallery of Great Blacks for the Country, and this was the one about the guy in South Carolina. So, I came back and we started on that thing immediately.

BRINSON: Do you remember, would that have been during the sixties? Or was it later in the seventies?

MARTIN: Probably seventies, I can’t remember offhand.

BRINSON: And again you distributed them to school systems?

MARTIN: Yeah, yeah.

BRINSON: For posting in classrooms? That was...

MARTIN: Yep.

BRINSON: At what point, Galen, did you begin to address desegregation in higher education?

MARTIN: From the git-go, as best as I recall. I don’t think we ever held back. We might have gotten, we probably got a slower start. And I’m not that sure, that we ever did much by way of reporting. I don’t know offhand. I just don’t remember reports on student enrollment in higher education, those I think we were getting fairly decently from other sources. And clearly from the git-go, we got the faculty reports. We did some of those, as I recall, and I think some of them are cited here.

BRINSON: And I’ve seen references to data that you were collecting in higher ed in some of the very early annual reports of the sixties, you prepared. But then I also came across some correspondence in nineteen seventy-four, where you wrote the Kentucky Council on Higher Ed, asking them to develop a statewide desegregation plan.

MARTIN: Yeah, yeah. Well, I see here now, August eighty-six--apparently we put out reports on black university faculty employment since seventy-seven.

BRINSON: Do you think this nineteen seventy-four request though, was the first formal request you made to the State Council on Higher Ed?

MARTIN: I don’t know.

BRINSON: No?

MARTIN: What I think was happening was, that regular schools, high schools and so on, that desegregation was moving along, and the focus got turned with the national suits to dismantle the system of dual higher education, the ones that the Legal Defense Fund brought, that my buddy, Joe Rohr. Joe, Joe, I knew at ADA. He was, again I know, there’s very few people that I tell you that were a prince of a guy. Joe was another prince. [Laughing] Like Bob.

BRINSON: Uh hmm, he was.

MARTIN: Did you know Joe at all?

BRINSON: Not well, but I know, I have a former colleague, Daniel Pollan, who taught Constitutional Law at Chapel Hill.

MARTIN: Yeah, yeah.

BRINSON: And he worked with Joe on a number of things.

MARTIN: Well, Joe is a beautiful, beautiful man. And of course I still can remember seeing him over the years, since I was at SDA. I know this is a total digression, but the beautiful thing about Joe was, he was the most tolerant of the ADAers towards the students. Some of the others...[Laughing] they wanted to squelch us, but no, no Joe was not, that wasn’t his style.

BRINSON: Well that’s what I’ve heard about...

END OF TAPE ONE SIDE ONE

BEGIN TAPE ONE SIDE TWO

MARTIN: ....to this...

BRINSON: Paul.

MARTIN: Paul Oberst, Paul Oberst, okay.

BRINSON: Oberst.

MARTIN: At this, I think it was the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, or some other group like that in Breathitt time, whatever, and also Lyndon Johnson’s time. [Laughing] And the cotton-picking meeting was held in this terribly ornate, Indian treaty room. That would be enough to force--seeing all these statues and so on, would be enough to force you to sign a treaty. It was in the treasury offices, the Executive offices there in the old Treasury Building, kind of, just west of the White House. But anyway, among others who were there, was the President of Berea College, Hutchins. And Hutchins got me up for a walk in the streets of Washington [Laughing] and Bless Patty, here comes Joe Rohr along. So here’s little old Galen Martin, introducing the President of Berea College to Joe Rohr on the streets of Washington. [Laughter]

BRINSON: Well, Hutchins, tell me, do you remember his first name?

MARTIN: Frances.

BRINSON: Frances.

MARTIN: Was this one, he succeeded his father.

BRINSON: H U T C H I N S?

MARTIN: Yeah.

BRINSON: Okay.

MARTIN: And he was there, Paul and I represented Breathitt somehow or another. I forget who he was representing, but anyway he was in on that same thing.

BRINSON: I interviewed Elizabeth Oberst on Saturday.

MARTIN: Oh yeah?

BRINSON: And I thought--at one point she excused herself to go and ask him if he felt up to talking to me; and he said, “No” so I didn’t get a chance to talk with him.

MARTIN: Oh gosh that’s sad. He’s a good man, good man.

BRINSON: Well, I want to talk a little bit about housing discrimination, because that of course, has been illegal in Kentucky since nineteen sixty-eight.

MARTIN: All right, that’s right.

BRINSON: Can you describe for me the Commission program to deal with housing discrimination?

MARTIN: Absolutely. I remember it like it was yesterday. We, of course got, since we wouldn’t agree in sixty-four to the compromise for public accommodation; we got very solid, beautiful coverage for employment and public accommodations in sixty-six. Good, descriptive language that covered infinitely more than the federal law did in both employment and public accommodations. We went back to the original public accommodations language that I mentioned to you before, from the American Jewish Congress. And we got it. And Breathitt got it passed, he got it passed, incidentally as the second Bill, only after the budget. He got his budget passed and that’s what he told us he was going to do. And of course, John Y. Brown, Senior was the one. He gave this great speech about Garibaldi and so on. Among other things, I don’t think this is really a total digression, but in the most recent biography about Pritchard, you know, Ed Pritchard? It attributes to Ed Pritchard the writing of a speech in support of the Civil Rights Act. A speech that was given by a black member of the House, named Jesse Waters. And, Bless Patty, that book claims that Pritchard wrote that speech. Pritchard didn’t write that speech. I know the guy who wrote it, and he was a staff member of ours, a guy named, Archie--Oh shoot, I can’t think of Archie’s name. Anyway, Archie wrote the speech, and I’ve never gotten around to telling the author that; and I’ve not been able to track down Archie. But one of these days, I’m going to track that down and get that corrected, just for the final record, not that I’m asking him to change the book. It doesn’t rise to any much magnitude as a matter. But anyway, in sixty-eight, Georgia had gotten elected. Georgia as she was, for twenty-one solid years.

BRINSON: Georgia Davis Powers.

MARTIN: Yes. Every year, we went to her with the legislation we needed, and nearly every session, she got it passed. And so we went to her, and we got again not only the Federal Bill, but we did better than the Federal Bill, the Federal Fair Housing Bill. We were clearly first in the South on that again, as we had been in sixty-six. And it was good legislation. It wasn’t that much of an improvement over the federal legislation, but it was--their exclusions, exemptions were--a fourplex, in other words if you were in an owner, owner occupied fourplex, you could get yourself exempt, you could discriminate in the other three units. We cut that to two. In other words, if you were an owner in a duplex, you could exclude people from, you were not covered for the other one of your two units. But if you had three or four, you were covered. And there were other important distinctions.

BRINSON: So how did you go about documenting housing discrimination? Did you wait for people to bring individual complaints to you?

MARTIN: Never. [Laughing] Never.

BRINSON: Did you send out testers?

MARTIN: We did not at that stage do much testing at the State Commission on Human Rights. We advertised widely. We publicized the Bill, and we encouraged people to file complaints and we aggressively went after those. I would have to look here to see. This is the other thing that I had in my notes that I wanted to be sure that we covered. I would have to look here to see what year it was. But we immediately discovered that we weren’t getting very good recoveries in our housing cases. Okay? I’m sure I’ve told you...

BRINSON: Recoveries meaning like damages?

MARTIN: Money, money.

BRINSON: Right.

MARTIN: Damages. Okay, I told you that wag before about Oberst and another day, another hundred dollars?

BRINSON: Hundred dollars, uh hmm.

MARTIN: Okay. To solve that problem--because see, with the state of the law, you, we didn’t have any--you can’t put fines into these things because that becomes repugnant, and you can’t get the legislatures to adopt them. And so under the law, you can only get damages for out of pocket costs. So we weren’t getting any recoveries. And the difference is important as compared with employment. In employment you have lost wages, so if you can recover lost wages, you can get a piece of change. Okay? But you didn’t have that in housing. They just, you know, if they had to go and pay three hundred and fifty dollars, as compared with three hundred and twenty-five dollars, you might be able, in the right circumstances to get that difference, but not otherwise. Okay? So whenever it was, I think roughly seventy-two, to remedy that fact, whenever it was. It tells us in here. You know, whatever year it was, it was in the seventies, I’m almost certain. I can, there’s no sense in holding you up and I just failed to look this up before. But clearly we decided that we had to be able to get damages for embarrassment and humiliation. And this was not a well developed concept in the law. Well, what actually happened was, well yeah--out of our learning experience we were finding that we needed an additional remedy. Okay? So we went back to Georgia and we got her to put in this amendment that said they could recover damages for embarrassment and humiliation. Okay? We were riding along real well at getting damages for embarrassment and humiliation, but then we had this case that Judge Meigs decided out of Frankfort.

BRINSON: Meigs?

MARTIN: M E I G S. He was kind of a Bourbon. I mean he was, again, came from wealthy families, and I think he didn’t fully appreciate these things. He and his wife, Sally, were very prominent socially. And that’s all right, I’m not knocking that. But he decided this case, involving the Clays against us, even after we got this statute. And he said that, “You can’t get damages for embarrassment and humiliation, even though the statute was there”, you know. He essentially declared that unconstitutional. So we set out to prove the importance of damages for embarrassment and humiliation.

BRINSON: Now these were cases that were going into state or federal court?

MARTIN: No, nearly all the things we did, we did in state court. Well, we need to build the law in Kentucky. That’s what we were into. And like I said before, part of this process was built on the development of the new level of the Court of Appeals. You had all these new judges, you know. In other words, we for the first time, got three levels. We got the Circuit Court, we got the Court of Appeals, and you got the Supreme Court. We hadn’t had a Supreme Court before. And so when the Circuit, when the Court of Appeals got themselves elevated and rightly so, to be the Supreme Court, then we had all these new judges that came along at the same time as the Civil Rights movement. And so they, you know, you look at some of these names, well I don’t know why I’m looking for the names, their names aren’t going to be here. But in that other publication, here. Look at some of these names and these were people, who in the nature of things were, you know, they knew, they had a sense of history. I think that’s what’s so important in so many of these things we were working on. They had a sense of history, and it wasn’t like they were just dumb bells out there floating in a boat in the river. They knew that these things were important. Judge Stevenson, Ray Stevenson. Let’s see, let me find some of these other judges here. The guy out of Lexington, who was just a prince on every one of these things he could get a hold of, he just took it and ran with it—well that--let me come back to that fair housing case. But anyway I wish I could come quicker with some of these judges.

BRINSON: Well, while you’re looking for those Galen, let’s...

MARTIN: Martin, Judge Martin, out of the Court of Appeals, Judge Martin was out of Lexington. A lot of these other judges, it was just...

BRINSON: So they had a sense of history and they were also empathetic to the issues being brought before them.

MARTIN: Yeah, that’s right. And that’s why, and so they, we were, we had lost. Judge Meigs had decided against us. Well, that case was coming on for appeal from the Franklin Circuit to the Court of Appeals. And so a lot of the reason we went to all this trouble was to build the background and the history for this type of damages. And the reason we held the first hearing in Covington was so we could get this extremely prominent psychiatrist out of Cincinnati to just simply come across the river as distinguished from coming to Louisville or somewhere way down here. Come across the river and testify. And he was the country’s foremost expert on this matter of psychic damage. And he had worked a lot on this case out of West Virginia. Offhand, I think it was called Buffalo Creek or something like that, where this dam, this sludge dam at the coal mines broke and killed all these people. Okay. And he was an expert witness for the people that were trying to recover from the coal mines, the coal mine companies in that action. And whatever his name is, it doesn’t really matter that much, but he is a superb...

BRINSON: But he was, you called him to testify about psychic damage to individuals denied housing?

MARTIN: No, no, not housing, but to, psychic damage because of things like discrimination. In other words, it wasn’t...he wasn’t...

BRINSON: It was more generic.

MARTIN: Yeah, it wasn’t....It’s the whole theory of compensatory damages and restitution. James Tichenor, that was the guy. And see we brought in, we brought in national people, you know, Schwemm appears later on, but I don’t know offhand.....He was the U. K. Prof, still is a U. K. Prof. I don’t know at that point whether he was still at Chicago, which he came to U. K. from Chicago. But he was a preeminent housing discrimination lawyer.

BRINSON: Robert Schwemm, S C H W E M M ?

MARTIN: Yes, he is definitely a compatriot of Oberst. And see, all these other people, this guy’s from Cleveland, one was from Philadelphia and so on. We brought people from all around the country at both of these hearings. But Tichenor was the lead guy. And then Lofman had done a lot of housing cases, and so on. All I’m saying is we had method to our madness. [Laughing] I’m perfectly willing to be considered mad--but this was not, we were not just sloshing through the swamp. We knew what we were doing, and the amazing thing about this is; we developed this theory of the law, for damages for embarrassment and humiliation, because we saw the need in housing, but it’s had an even more significant national impact in employment. Now early on we had a case, and it’s one of the cases in here, I think, involving a restaurant in Richmond, Kentucky. It was named the Bonanza Steak Pit. I knew what was going to happen the minute we went to that hearing. I knew somebody was going to slip, fortunately it was their lawyer. And their own lawyer, referred to it as the Bonanza Snake Pit. [Laughing] And what was involved there, was that they discharged this woman because she was pregnant. Okay? And again, she wouldn’t, for whatever reason--oh, I know. At her previous job, she had made more money than what she made at this snake pit, so she wouldn’t have gotten any money. You know in the analogy I set up earlier, she wouldn’t have gotten anything if she couldn’t get damages for embarrassment and humiliation. Well, we discovered that this thing we had erected so carefully, carefully only in a loose sense. We erected it, it just had a lot more application in employment. And other people have taken this thing up nationally and built on it in employment cases. And of course, we’d built on it ourselves. While I’m rattling on here, I don’t mean to take all your time.

BRINSON: So let me try and summarize a piece of that, you’re saying that what was developed here in that respect, was precedential for use in other parts of the country?

MARTIN: Yes, yes, especially in employment, but also in housing, especially in housing. Again, I’m not trying to tell you what to do or anything, but if you want background on this, you can call the woman who was really the prime editor of this, her name is Sarah Pratt. And she, until very recently, she worked, you know, with us at the Commission; and then she went on to work, I would say ten or twelve or what have you, years--that’s Sarah Pratt there--with HUD. Again directing their enforcement program. She finally gave up in utter total desperation and quit, here a few months ago. She works now for another private group.

BRINSON: Let me go back to the nineteen sixty-eight housing statute. Talk about that. Was that difficult to get through the Legislature? Or were people generally supportive of it? Who introduced it?

MARTIN: Powers. She introduced everything.

BRINSON: Senator Powers, okay.

MARTIN: Everything we did for her whole twenty-one years, she lead the pack. And she introduced it. She got it out of the Senate real quick. And then it got fuzzied around in the House, but we ultimately got it passed in the House. It’s just, you know, these things, I can’t tell you that they were hard. They just weren’t that hard. We got a climate going. We got, mainly out of what happened in the sixties. And there were so many leaders down there, not everybody. Some of those people didn’t like us, and some of them never liked Civil Rights and so on. But the climate, the overall leadership and most obviously the climate under Combs was the world’s best; and almost as good under Breathitt, or maybe in some ways better under Breathitt. And then it sort of trickled down, I would say, until it lessened. It was not that bad, I told you earlier, it was not that bad under Louie, but it kind of trickled down. I don’t think it had much standing under Wilkerson or some of those, or John Y. Brown, he couldn’t....He was never going to do anything obviously open bad about Civil Rights, but he was never going to be very good.

BRINSON: But nineteen sixty-eight was a pretty pivotal year with riots across the country.

MARTIN: Oh absolutely, including Louisville.

BRINSON: And riots in Louisville.

MARTIN: Yes, pictured in the...

BRINSON: And sort of, you know, the whole Black Nationalist Movement, kind of coming more out front. And did those, the riots and Black Power, did that play a role in any way in terms of influencing legislators’ values or...? What was it like?

MARTIN: You know again, I just don’t know--a lot of things I remember real, real well. That’s the guy whose speech I was telling you about that they attributed to Pritchard.

BRINSON: Well, just your sense of that whole Black Nationalistic Movement. For example, did you have staff, who became more out front in terms of Black power? Was that an issue for you internally? The way it was, for example, in the CORE chapter, you know. Where CORE, which had been a mixed racially group for a while, you know, long about sixty-seven, sixty-eight, a lot of those CORE Chapters told the whites, thank you we don’t want your help anymore. What about your staff in all of that?

MARTIN: I’m trying to....Okay. Hughes McGill, see Georgia had power, not only in her name.

BRINSON: Right.

MARTIN: The Commission had power in the statute. Clearly there were demonstrations, obviously, huh, huh, here’s the whole time table. Well our outlets of course were more, in those days, in terms of getting these fair housing acts adopted in other cities. That’s what a lot of our effort went into, now that I’m reminded of it. See, for instance, the funny thing was that we got Georgia’s Bill added housing, but it also for the state--but it also authorized local human rights agencies to adopt their own housing ordinances; and so that swept the state. And one of these jurisdictions adopted it before they had the power. I think that may have been Bardstown in Nelson County. I’m pretty sure. We sent out a model ordinance and they up and adopted it, even though it wasn’t really due to go into effect until July. They adopted it prior to that. But clearly then we got them adopted in Covington and Kenton and Fayette, the Louisville Board of Aldermen, after much machinations. No wait a minute, I’ve got my cart a little bit before the horse here. Yeah, I’m citing some stuff that happened in sixty-seven. Yeah, it was in March of sixty-eight...

BRINSON: That’s prior to the passage in sixty-eight of the open housing.

MARTIN: Yeah.

BRINSON: But your recollection is that it went through in a fairly orderly manner. There was not public opposition to it.

MARTIN: Well, that’s my recollection, yeah. Nearly everything was going our way in this period.

BRINSON: Do you remember the Louisville riots?

MARTIN: Yeah, yeah.

BRINSON: What can you tell me?

MARTIN: Well, the funniest thing that happened, one of the weird things was that, Herb Seavers and I, he was our Community Services Director and he was black. He and I were in a State car, and we went out here to, I don’t know what street it was, maybe Twenty-Eighth and Dumesnil or somewhere out there.

BRINSON: Dumesnil, what was that?

MARTIN: D U M E S N I L, Dumesnil, I think is the way you pronounce it, I’m pretty sure. And he--we were--we parked and got out of our car, or something. But we talked with this one black guy who was out there on the street. I don’t know, I think he was just around. I was not aware that he was doing anything particularly. And then later on we, Herb and I drove down to the City Police Department and walked by the jail to see who was being arrested, and bingo, here was this guy, he had gotten himself arrested. [Laughing] But you know, the thing was, it was just like in a lot of other cities, it was just out of hand, people were breaking out windows and setting fires and so on. It was just a bad, bad time.

BRINSON: Is it, how did the police handle it here in Louisville?

MARTIN: Well, I think that they did not let it get horribly out of hand. I think that they were, they were doing more or less what you would expect them to do. I don’t know. Of course in sixty-seven, I think we had the office down here in the building where we talked about May Street Kidd being. I think, yeah we had that office at that time. I’m pretty sure we had it in sixty-seven. But our main office was in Frankfort at that point. But we were up here and we, you know …

BRINSON: Okay.

MARTIN: I don’t want to imply that I was involved or what have you, that directly. Basically, by and large, our employees were not that deeply meshed into the demonstrations. Some of them were, some weren’t.

BRINSON: Can you recall the names of any who were involved in the demonstrations?

MARTIN: Not really.

BRINSON: I want to ask you about two employees, specifically, Ann Beard Grundy and Chester Grundy.

MARTIN: Yes, yes.

BRINSON: Now they met here.

MARTIN: Yes.

BRINSON: And eventually married.

MARTIN: Yes.

BRINSON: What can you remember about them when they were here as employees?

MARTIN: Well, the most striking thing of course, is in the morning paper, again, and that is that Ann, Ann was involved in the church where the young girls were killed.

BRINSON: Birmingham church.

MARTIN: She went to Berea College like I did.

BRINSON: Right, uh huh.

MARTIN: You know they were good people. Ann was--you know--she was--I think it’s fair to say--was a disgruntled employee, not necessarily all the time, but at times. I remember one time, she met me out on the street--we were not--it was not a street far removed from the office, and as I went by, she kind of muttered out, Honky. [Laughter]

BRINSON: This was over in Frankfort or were you here in Louisville at that point?

MARTIN: No, it was here in Louisville, it was here in Louisville. I don’t think she ever worked with us in Frankfort. I think that she and Chester were up here. We were on the, we were in the Mammoth Life Building at that point. We had gotten a lot more money.

BRINSON: Was she still working with you when she called Honky?

MARTIN: Yes, yeah. But you know, some things in life you’ve just got to know [Laughing] in your own person that you are doing what you have to do, and just go on. We never talked about it later or anything.

BRINSON: Well, Ann and Chester both, became very influenced by that whole Black Cultural Arts Movement that came out of Black Nationalism, and getting back in touch with your roots in Africa. And I believe they helped to start a festival here, I don’t remember the name of it and whatnot. And that, it goes back to what I was asking you earlier about, when Black Power and all the ramifications of that came in, did you notice any of that in terms of staff relations, community relations here in Louisville? I wonder if Ann calling you Honky might have been, you know, a good example of that?

MARTIN: Well I’m not sure what you mean--did I notice--in other words, we were a state agency. We were charged with enforcing the law. And we did the very best we could to get state employees who would enforce that law. We were not into paying people to do anything except enforce the law.

BRINSON: Right, right. And of course, their interest in the Black Cultural Arts came, I think, after they had left the agency. That was another activity for them on the outside.

MARTIN: Well, a lot of employees I’ve kept up with over the years, after their departure, many, many hundreds. But I just have not had that much contact. I have definitely followed their career and I’m glad for all their accomplishments, and glad that they found a niche at U.K., where they apparently fit....Chester. I don’t know that Ann ever had any connection with the U.K. connection. But I have followed his work from afar. I’ve never had any occasion to talk with him that I can recall over these years. But the Commission had a mission to enforce the law. And we had no particular mission to--it was not for us to, to pass on Black Power. Georgia had power and the other legislators had power. Oberst exercised power as he presided over the hearings. The courts had power. That’s not the same as Black Power. But what--you know--I, I don’t know what you’re thinking, that maybe we should have been doing to relate to Black Power or...

BRINSON: Well, I’m not suggesting that you should have been doing anything. I’m just wondering if you observed sort of the ramifications of that in any way, in Louisville or...

MARTIN: Well, I couldn’t for the life of me remember when this happened, but we sponsored these annual conferences for colleges. Okay? And we held them at various places. We obviously held them at the University of Kentucky. We held them, I think maybe at Berea. I can’t really remember, I’ve been in so many conferences, they all run together. [Laughing] And clearly that was one of the ramifications that I can remember. Okay? We must have done this, I don’t know, five, six, what have you years, and I can’t remember if it was coming down when Ann and Chester were there. I cannot fix the period. I don’t know when it was. But I would think into the seventies that.....

END OF TAPE ONE SIDE TWO

BEGIN TAPE TWO SIDE ONE

MARTIN: ...the discussion turned to whether or not, whites should be excluded. Okay? And so most of the people who were there voted to exclude whites. So I left. You know, I think that is a pile of crap. And here we are, this is the government, government money that’s paying for a government sponsored conference. Okay? I am not for allowing any citizens to be excluded on the basis of their race from anything that is government sponsored. So I think that was wrong. I remember particularly, you know it was out at Camp Otter Creek, at the Otter Creek Park. I remember fairly clearly coming back and getting my lunch at the Kingfish Restaurant out there on Dixie Highway. [Laughing] Well, what the heck.

BRINSON: And who was sponsoring this meeting?

MARTIN: The Kentucky Commission on Human Rights was sponsoring the meeting.

BRINSON: So it was your meeting, it was your meeting, and yet. Hmm.

MARTIN: And I’m not implying anything, it wasn’t like they put me out as the head of the staff, as compared with other people who were white. I think the essence of the action was to put out all whites.

BRINSON: Did other whites leave with you?

MARTIN: Yeah, again, I didn’t document this. I don’t have any idea as to what, who was there or who wasn’t there. But I think that one of our staff members was probably instrumental in that action, putting us out. Well, I think that is wrong.

BRINSON: I assume you had some conversation with the staff about that?

MARTIN: No, I don’t recall having any conversation with the staff about that.

BRINSON: No?

MARTIN: I don’t remember that. I just, you know, whenever you can, you march on and go on to your next objective.

BRINSON: Well that does sound like a pretty good example of what I was asking.

MARTIN: And you know, there was for some years, the underlying notion of why do we have a white guy, who heads this staff? You know, that’s life. And of course, I don’t know if you were asking me that the other day or not. But see the key thing is, when I started in this field, they were, everybody was ecstatic to get whites, and mostly preachers. We got entirely too many preachers, who didn’t have the, you know they had good intentions and their heart as the saying goes, was always in the right place. But I think they weren’t enough steeped in social action, necessarily. It doesn’t come--it is not a part of the ministerial training. So I think, that’s just the way things got started. Of course, the whole field has shifted now. I understand that and I don’t, I’ve not resisted that. I don’t think I really resisted it individually, and I certainly don’t resist it professionally. You go to the meetings--.you know, I was head of both the national groups, both the National Association of Human Rights Workers, I’ve just been back from that meeting. And the same thing is true in the other one, it’s so called International. It’s not really International, it’s us and Canada, International Association of Official Human Rights Agencies. Well, I headed both those over the years, and they have changed dramatically. You know, they are overwhelming white, overwhelming black. And that’s all right, you know, it’s because the staffs are overwhelming black now. At the Commission we really did a wonderful job of having a balanced black and white staff. And we had problems, I had complaints filed against me. The thing, it got all jerked around. But in the nature of working in this field, if you don’t get some complaints filed against you and you’ve got a staff that is half black and half white, [Laughing] there is something wrong. And so again, none of those ever stuck, they were never proven and so on. I just—you know, that’s stuff you had to live with; and there are those who think I should have gotten out sooner. Maybe I made a mistake to stay almost twenty-nine years, I don’t know. But I thought it was my life’s work and that I was doing good work till the end. And a lot of these things that we were doing, they ain’t getting done anymore.

BRINSON: Okay.

MARTIN: And that’s all right too. But in terms of the statistical reports, the emphasis on school desegregation and of course, there’s a lot more representation of the separatists on the Board, appointed by the Governor. We didn’t have that. We didn’t have that. There were no separatists appointed to that Board. The other thing I wanted to mention to you, and I put it in my notes here. I can’t remember if I told you this or not, but clearly we never employed anybody for political reasons. Did I say that before?

BRINSON: No.

MARTIN: Okay. We never, never, never employed--once in a while, I would get calls, you know, the way it works in Frankfort. I’m sure you know that.

BRINSON: Well, I’ve heard this from other people.

MARTIN: Well, believe me, it’s been a problem. And I think it is getting worse. Again, I am not an expert on that, I don’t know.

BRINSON: These legislators...

MARTIN: In terms of political appointees. No...

BRINSON: Governors?

MARTIN: These are people around the Governor’s office.

BRINSON: Wanting you to hire their family or their friends? Or someone they supported.

MARTIN: Well, or someone for political purposes; and I never argued with them. I just ignored them. [Whispering] And I’m serious, of the hundreds of people that we employed, we never employed the first one for political purposes. And of course, part of the problem is, I knew if we got, as they referred to these people as drones, you know down there; if we started hiring drones, we weren’t going to have anybody to do the work. And so I just knew we had too much work cut out for us. And so I managed to, I managed, I succeeded in doing it. We never...

BRINSON: I want to ask you...

MARTIN: ...discriminated on the basis of race. We just, we were into constant efforts to recruit blacks, and it is hard. It is very difficult.

BRINSON: I want to ask you about some of the early Commission members. Phillip Ardery, A R D E R Y was your Chair in nineteen sixty-one. Do you remember that?

MARTIN: No, no.

BRINSON: Now, he’s the lawyer. He’s the...

MARTIN: This is the advisory committee to the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights.

BRINSON: Oh, okay.

MARTIN: Phil is a prince, again, he is a very high type guy. Did you—you may--it’s not criticism or anything, but have you by any chance read the latest book on Pritchard?

BRINSON: I have.

MARTIN: Well, that’s the Phil, that’s Phil.

BRINSON: I know it is.

MARTIN: They’re both very good men, very good men.

BRINSON: I misread that and I thought he must have been—so he was--I see--this was not clear to me. I thought that these were people who were signing off on this report to the Commission. But he was on the State Advisory Committee...

MARTIN: To the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights.

BRINSON: And your agency--did you have anything to do with that committee?

MARTIN: Our ships hardly passed in the night.

BRINSON: Okay.

MARTIN: No, well we fed things in. We would attend their meetings. We would present materials to them and so on. I shouldn’t have said what I said. Clearly these were sister groups. But see, that U. S. Commission was headed by Arthur Fleming, he’s the long-term head of it. Again a dear friend and a longtime supporter. And I knew the staff, a lot of the staff people who headed that. Bill Taylor is one of the most illustrious people and he is an advisor to us in the school desegregation suit. These were, you know, they were co-operative groups. And I see Phil at Actor’s Theater from time to time. And he came--when I had a meeting for my campaign, why Phil came to the first meeting to try to advise me as to how to run against Jim Bunting, and so on. He’s a good man, as is his wife. I like them both very much.

BRINSON: I took this document, actually out of the collection from your Commission in the State Library. So somehow, somebody has gotten them intertwined in the record collection there. But thank you for setting me straight...

MARTIN: It’s very proper, it’s very proper that, that be there.

BRINSON: ...on that. Well are there other areas that you really wanted to cover in particular, since you were good enough to make some notes?

MARTIN: Well, let me go ahead and give you one illustration here, back to the Bonanza Snake pit case. Again, the hearings were conducted by the lay members of the Commission. Mrs. Weatherford, the wife of the President of Berea College, was a superb presiding officer for hearings. She presided over the hearing [Laughing] in the snake pit case. And she was, I think, the daughter of a Commander of a carrier or something, a Navy Commander type. And she--I don’t know that for a fact: I shouldn’t cite that. But she was an outstanding member; and she had this finesse about her, that she could bang that gavel, in which the lawyers never thought to ask, is that lady a lawyer? Which she wasn’t. And once we had a hearing down at Cumberland Falls. It was cold. The guy from Corbin, who was supposed to be there, tried to call and get the hearing postponed because of the weather. Mrs. Weatherford was there ready to conduct the hearing, and she had come through Corbin, so he didn’t get very far. Now admittedly, she had a four wheel vehicle, but that was the kind of dedication we had from her, and Oberst and the other members of this Commission.

BRINSON: How did you get to be a hearing officer?

MARTIN: Well, people just sort of volunteered. I mean, not everybody tried.

BRINSON: So the Commission selected people for the position?

MARTIN: Yeah. Mostly it was our lawyers, nearly all the people who conducted hearings were lawyers. Paul and David Welch and Schwemm and Jim Crumblin, who’s black, from here in Louisville. He conducted a lot of hearings. And a lot of others. I don’t mean to name all the people.

BRINSON: Was that a volunteer task or did they get financially remunerated in some way?

MARTIN: [Laughing] To the tune of fifty dollars a day. But it took us the longest time to get that set up. See, what we got established under one of the governors, probably after Breathitt, maybe under Breathitt, but later on I think, we got it established that the Commission members could get fifty dollars a day. Big deal, if you’re a lawyer, [Laughing] you get fifty, you know.

BRINSON: Plus the travel?

MARTIN: Yes, the travel was separate from that, that was in addition to their--so if you presided here, you got your fifty bucks. The important thing is, these people gave, they gave, they gave, they gave. And they were reliable and they were first rate people at conducting the hearings; and see, furthermore what’s so important about that case is, the case was before one of the worst judges for women, the circuit judge, who was Chenault, Robert Chenault, whatever Chenault was. He’s since deceased. He was the judge at Richmond. And he said, in the hearing, in the hearing before Mrs.--no, no, no, when the case came on before him--he said, “Well it was news to him that you couldn’t fire a woman for getting pregnant.” I mean, he was a Neanderthal. And of course, he decided the case, he overturned Mrs. Weatherford in her hearing. But again, these guys on the Court of Appeals, they took care of that. And the involvement of these people, you know this is not lost on a Judge Lambert. Who’s now on the Court--who’s from London.

BRINSON: Give me the date again that you started doing the hearings.

MARTIN: Well, the hearings kind of grew, like Topsy. I don’t know when the first was held, but it had to have started, if we didn’t get started in sixty-six, we got started in sixty-seven.

BRINSON: Okay.

MARTIN: This thing is set out somewhat chronologically.

BRINSON: And did you have, how many, how many, were many hearings, rulings appealed?

MARTIN: In the early period, yes. We had as many as twelve or what have you, on appeal at certain times. I mean, that is a God awful lot of cases for a little outfit like ours. And you know, we were holding, at certain times, not all the way, but certain times, we were holding better than an average of a hearing a month. I see that the first one of these is the Whispering Hills Country Club, where they got caught, because they were excluding blacks from dances at the country club. Okay? They excluded this one Lieutenant, and he had, had some legal training. And he filed a complaint, and that was in seventy-two. So again it wasn’t, well we undoubtedly held hearings, but there were none of them that got appealed or that we had to appeal.

BRINSON: When we talked the other day, you asked me to remind you to tell me about Governor Combs’ Accommodation Order.

MARTIN: Yes, okay, now that was cited in the Pritchard book. Okay. And Combs--he knew--he understood the law and he understood leadership; and I just--up to this day--I just think what he did was fabulous. It was a way in which the law should have been developed, it should have gotten developed. But he got shot down. He said that the state was licensing all of these places of public accommodations, and therefore the state, as a part of their licensing requirement could require them to serve all citizens of the Commonwealth. He issued an Executive Order to that effect. He was absolutely on solid ground. I cannot honestly claim to you that we went to him and urged him to do that. He did that on his own, to some extent, obviously he had to have consulted with Pritchard. He did not really consult with us, but he did it. And it should have survived, you know. It was, as far as the law and what the law ought to be doing in this country, it was a magnificent stroke, but he got beat down politically. Because the election came along and Louie Nunn ran, Louie ran on the Executive Order. He ran as against that. And it just, it kind of got into the campaign so quickly, that we really couldn’t ever get it implemented. But it’s just another illustration of the kind of leadership that the country needed and that Kentucky provided. Admittedly, we got beat back on it. But I just think that it was--and Combs--he just--he was marvelous. [Laughing] At our lawyer’s meeting for a school case on Friday, this guy quoted, he quoted Combs on behalf of KERA. He said, that Combs--maybe you’ve heard this one. Combs was so good on these wags, I just love to hear another I hadn’t heard. He said that Combs said, “We sued under KERA to get a thimble and they gave us a bucket.” [Laughing] That is so true.

BRINSON: That’s right, because he actually was the lawyer for the lawsuit that resulted in KERA.

MARTIN: Yeah, yeah, that’s Combs, that’s Combs to a “T”.

BRINSON: Galen you have used the word, the wag a number of times, now. Tell me the origin of that word. What does that mean to you? Is it an expression you grew up with? What does it mean?

MARTIN: Well, I just consider all those expressions like that, at which Combs was very good. Some of them were little puns, Combs was deep into little puns.

BRINSON: You used the wag.

MARTIN: A wag is just a turned phrase I think. I don’t know what it means.

BRINSON: A wag, okay.

MARTIN: It’s just his little way of saying things.

BRINSON: But you also use it, you’ve used it as we’ve talked the last few days.

MARTIN: Well, I don’t doubt it. It has no, I don’t know.

BRINSON: It’s not a Kentucky expression that you know, or an idiom?

MARTIN: I would think that it is. I don’t know where I’ve heard it from Berea College or West Virginia or not. I don’t know, maybe it’s not proper. I’m not--I’ll go look in the dictionary when we get through.

BRINSON: I’m sure it is. Okay, okay. Is there anything else that you want to add to our talk?

MARTIN: One other thing that we did that was of significance--at least--was we held these seminars for black elected officials. And we, I think, unquestionably succeeded in increasing the numbers of black elected officials in our time. These were really very good conferences. One of the stars of them was of course, Leska Twimen, from Glasgow, who had been a principal, who had been a mayor, who had--Louie Nunn tried to jerk him around in terms of local political stuff down there.

BRINSON: He was a Republican, as I recall, too.

MARTIN: Yeah, yeah. This is not relevant to what I’m talking about, but the sad tragedy is that of the seventy-two districts that have no black teachers now, Glasgow is one of them. We’ve gone a long way down. But Leska came to those, we had the people out of Hopkinsville, who came to those. It was primarily, the black elected officials from Louisville were sort of above. I don’t mean that in a put down way, but I mean--they wouldn’t—they, I think deep down, they were busier in some ways and they were not as isolated as the other black elected officials from around the state were. But see, what we did was, everything that we did by way of statistical reporting, I know I’ve said this before, had a specific action outlet. And we got the outlet from that. The reports that we did had a very emphatic result in terms of cities that noticed when we called it to their attention that they didn’t have any black elected officials. And when a vacancy occurred a lot of them would go looking for a black, and then they would appoint the black to the city council and then the guy or gal would get re-elected. And that happened a lot of times.

BRINSON: How, what period did you begin these conferences? Are we talking about the sixties, the seventies?

MARTIN: Well, again, it’s just hard for me to remember.

BRINSON: The eighties?

MARTIN: Uh, my guess is that we really got swinging on them in the seventies, and that they carried well up into the eighties. But I don’t, I can’t say for certain.

BRINSON: That’s okay, that just places it a little bit.

MARTIN: But I know that they were influential. And you know, we got up the overall numbers, clearly as a result of the reports, we got the numbers up. That reminds me of another area, okay, with reference to public housing. Okay. Now we, you don’t have to believe this, but when Kennedy became elected president, he promised that he would ( ) public housing with the stroke of a pen. He did, he said that. Dick ( ) spoke to a ( ) conference a full year later ( ) Washington. And Dick said he couldn’t understand how a man, who could read so fast, could write so slow, because Kennedy had never signed the letter. [Laughing] And soon after ( ) signed the letter, we went to work on....

[Technical difficulties]

MARTIN: Again, one of the beauties of everything that we did was, we got such fabulous press, because of the leadership of the Binghams and the followship of reporters all over the state. And one of the things that we did in those reports, and we did twelve to fifteen annual reports on public housing segregation and desegregation. One of the things we did was, we put out a list of the most segregated districts. That got great press. That got the most press of anything we ever did. The reason was, because we tailored that thing for every one of these newspapers. And we would point them to exactly where their city was cited on what page. Okay? And they went right for that. And so they got it, they came out with headlines that said, “Hopkinsville Fifth Most Segregated Public Housing in Kentucky”. And we got that all around the state. And one of the funniest things that ever happened was, we put out our report on the ten worst. Well, naturally an enterprising reporter, this guy happened to be in Danville, he got our figures down, and Danville was there, it’s just we didn’t raise them up to the level of the ten. He didn’t hesitate a bit, he reported Danville fifteen most segregated public housing. And see that was the kind of thing we had going for us. And it was just, you know, marvelous, the kind of impact that, that had. And not only that, but one of the cases in here, is the case against the Middlesboro Housing Authority. See, we initiated, you kind of asked this question somewhat before, did we wait? No. In housing, we initiated roughly five or six complaints against public housing authorities that we found were segregated. We went after them. We--see our commissioners could, they not only heard the cases, but they could, not in the same case, but they could also in separate cases, initiate a complaint. They could sign that to the best of their knowledge and belief, such and such and such and such were a fact. Well then somebody else worked on that case, obviously the staff people worked on it and some other commissioner would preside if that went to hearing. Well, we initiated those against Richmond and several others, Covington I think. But anyway, Middlesboro was the one that we went after particularly. And that’s the one that is the number two of these cases, and that was in seventy, seventy-seven. And that case went again to the Court of Appeals, you know, we went through the local courts and the circuit courts down there and so on. And obviously we held a hearing and so on. But anyway, in that case, our Circuit Court of Appeals folks, strike circuit our Court of Appeals folk, they hadn’t heard all this semantics stuff out of the court cases out of Washington, you know the semantics that arose between the people who were always very careful to say goals instead of quotas, you know, quotas were bad, goals were good.

BRINSON: Right, right.

MARTIN: They hadn’t read that, so they said that the Commission could order a quota. [Laughter] And we got this situation through that case and the others that we initiated; we’d gotten eighteen public housing authorities in this state to sign affirmative action desegregation agreements with our Commission. Okay? And you know what that takes, to go from Kennedy’s stuff to get eighteen of those is painstaking. And then the U.S. Justice Department, this was under Carter, and the Attorney General Assistant Civil Rights guy was named Drew Days, he’s later been the solicitor under...

BRINSON: D A Y S?

MARTIN: D A Y E S

BRINSON: E S, okay.

MARTIN: He initiated a case, which they didn’t even ask us about. They just, they kept reading these reports, and we kept telling them how Owensboro was getting worse and worse. And they just up and filed a U.S. Federal Court suit against Owensboro. And that was at the time when Gordon and Hogan and I went to lunch one day over here. And Gordon said, and about that suit down there in Owensboro.

BRINSON: ( )

MARTIN: Oh yeah. Just elected a new mayor. Of course the guy was a political, political, political guy named J. R. Miller. Since been up to his ears in politics, well he’s always been up to his ears in politics. But anyway, Gordon said “We just got a new mayor and I think he’s going to get a new attorney for the city and they’re going to settle that suit.” And that’s what they did. But then under Reagan, they brought in Ed Meese, who’s a crook. And ( ) Mills, who’s a , well both of them are ( ). And then they wrote a letter and destroyed all these agreements. And of course they claimed we were overreaching, in that they had no termination point, and so on, but they trashed us. But that didn’t detract from what we did. We knew what we were doing and we went after it.

BRINSON: You’ve been involved in the organization I guess that is representative of your counterparts.....

[Technical difficulties]

[Tape Resumes]

MARTIN: Gary said that, “No other Commission”, and that might have been a factor in his mind, see, it may weigh more heavily in his mind, but he said, “No other Commission had ever gotten within ten miles of a school desegregation case.” But I think, you know, unquestionable in our time, I think we did one of the better jobs. We put out more publications, we were more pro-active, we took the initiative in leadership. We definitely got the National Conference of Commissions on Uniform State Laws, and hardly anybody ever got that. Well, they didn’t have Breathitt and his determination. But all across the board in the big issues, in the big issues of school desegregation, which is still, no matter what other people may say, some people think that is beside us, off there somewhere or another in a Never land. I don’t agree with that. The history of this country shows that, that is the most important issue, just as race is the most important issue. And people may be off chasing other issues. But what we need, of course is maintenance of effort, with regards to race, because we have never, never solved the race problem. We’ve just marched on.....

[Technical difficulties]

[Tape Resumes]

MARTIN: But I’ve, I think in each of these areas that I’ve highlighted, desegregation, schools and teachers and housing, and publications of the black heritage, black elected officials, all across the board.....

[Technical difficulties]

[Tape Resumes]

MARTIN: And they were not pro-active the way we were.

BRINSON: Okay, I’m going to stop there.

END OF INTERVIEW