Oral History Interview with John Rosenberg Part II

Interview with John Rosenberg Part II

INTERVIEWED BY

ARWEN DONAHUE

BEGINNING OF TAPE 20.U.5d, JOHN ROSENBERG, SIDE A

ARWEN DONAHUE: This is tape number four, side A of an interview with John Rosenberg.

JOHN ROSENBERG: I think I always had a very strong allegiance towards American patriotism. I mean that goes back to my parents coming here. You know, I think as you get older, when events like Viet Nam happens, you question it the way any other, the value of that action or any other action that the country takes as a nation. Intervening in other wars or as a world leader and the limits to which you would want to go, that people go in the name of….That actions that we take as Americans against other countries, whatever we do in our official nature. As an American, I mean, as a responsible citizen should do, but I have certainly never gave it any thought. I mean, I think as I said, when we were on alert for a week and didn’t know whose side we were on, that’s not a way I want to spend my life. I think if it were a little clearer than that I might have stayed in the military just because of the very close associations that I had with the people that I was in the service with. We were just very, very good friends. We would do things together and rely on each other in situations I suppose that are somewhat dangerous. And you become very close. It doesn’t have to be just on the battlefield. Even when you are doing training exercises that are, that involve some danger, but you act as a team. And then you spend a lot of off time together or you’re on a base, like a small base out in nowhere in , you become part of a family in some way. And so there was, I would have considered that, I just was not….I decided that I don’t know that I’m ready to push the button on for example and start….If we had come in on the other side against , I would have been in a terrible predicament. I didn’t want to find myself in that predicament. And after I married a Quaker, I left my tennis shoes at the Pentagon Athletic Club and never went back to get them. I probably have a much more in some ways a different outlook about the value of violence and the value of military actions to some extent. It’s certainly been moderated. I wouldn’t call myself a pacifist. But that’s, I certainly think I would certainly consider myself a very, very much an American citizen.

DONAHUE: And when you say you wouldn’t call yourself a pacifist, what does that mean? That you….Well we’ll just leave it at that. What does that mean?

: Well, I think, you know, philosophically you obviously, Quakers, if you take that position, take a strong pacifist position, you are in a sense ready to die when someone points a weapon at someone you love and ready to pull a trigger. And they’re not going to deal with the situation. Or you feel that there is never any justification for violent action. I don’t think I would do that. I think there probably are situations where you would find yourself willing to react violently or to take up arms against somebody else under certain situations, under those situations. Like war. And we use a war to end a war. [LAUGHING] I think that’s probably still in my, I think it’s the last resort. Not one that I would promote, but I don’t think I could easily stand by. Of course, I joined the, I was in the Air Force voluntarily, no one drafted me.

DONAHUE: Were you aware of criticisms of Jews during the Holocaust, that they had not resisted enough? And that they had been too pacifistic and just been passive toward the violence directed toward them?

: You mean in the concentration camps or where or when?

DONAHUE: In general in the whole….There were some criticisms that were voiced initially just following the war by Bruno [INAUDIBLE] and others that Jews had gone like sheep to the slaughter. That they had not resisted enough. This was a problem with the Jewish people, that they were not ready enough to take up arms to defend themselves. And I’m wondering if you, if you shared that point of view or if you were aware that people thought that [INAUDIBLE]?

: I don’t, I am not familiar with….I mean I think it’s impossible. I don’t see how anybody could take that position because the Germans were so, they were armed. They were so superior. There were those courageous, there were some of those acts, you know, in several concentration camps where the Jews broke out or had plotted to leave and some did escape. I don’t know the name of those camps. And there were individual acts of resistance. I don’t think, I don’t see how anybody could have said that. I mean I’ve read an awful lot about and heard a lot about Jews who were made to sort of cooperate and throw the bodies away. How much were you willing to do to stay alive? Because the camps also, the camps themselves were operated in a large by slave labor, which was pretty horrible, some of the work that they had to do was pretty horrible. And they were doing it partly to stay alive or they could have gotten shot under the circumstances. I’m sure people right down to the last second feel like, as some would say, I was trying to stay alive and hope everybody would, that people understand it. Whether you are the person who’s going down the list and saying let’s have some decision making about who’s going to die and who’s going to live or whether you’re out there and, or you’re effectively making those decisions, hoping to keep yourself off the list. Or whether you’re actually throwing bodies in a pit or doing some other kind of maintenance work, you’re under the gun. I don’t think you can ever, I don’t see how any, I mean I do see, but I would never want to be critical of anybody who is doing that when they’re essentially forced to do it. The people who would say go and shoot me and let somebody shoot them are heroes of a different sort, I suppose. Heroines of a different sort, when you do those sorts of things on principle. And I guess that’s how principles are established over time. But it’s expecting a lot from someone. And I think there is an element of forgiveness, generally in our tradition and in other traditions. You may have to take extreme measures to save yourself. You can’t expect people to….I don’t see how anyone could accuse the Jews of being – if that means going like lambs to the slaughter. I mean they didn’t have, most of those, most families weren’t armed. My father never allowed us to have any weapon. He almost bought me a BB gun once and then somebody had gotten a window shot out in the neighborhood and I never got my BB gun. We never had a gun in the house. Papa wouldn’t let us have one. That was one of the no-no’s.

DONAHUE: Were you aware of, by the time that you were in the Air Force, were you very interested in American politics, political issues?

: I think that’s hard to answer. I don’t know, because when I was, I think I was, you know, pretty young. And you come out of high school and you’re out of a background where I had, was really fortunate. I was president of the senior class and had been working and went to Duke and it seemed like a good thing to do. And my father, we went to the bank and borrowed two or three hundred dollars, sent me twenty-five bucks a month. They were straining to get me and I was working to get through. I don’t think the politics that was going on was, I think my, ideally we were so grateful to be here that generally everything seemed like it was very positive to be in this country. I was the first person of my generation to go to college. My parents were very proud of that. So, I suspect in many ways, , this country was very supportive of . So, I just think probably in our eyes, it might be a stretch to say the country could do no wrong, but pretty close to it. And that we were ready pretty much to accept the way things were going and felt pretty good about it. I think we felt, I’m sure my parents felt, my dad, we had come a long way. He was working hard, his son was going to college, younger brother was doing well in school. I don’t think politics….My father read the paper religiously. He was a very educated person and he had very strong views of his own about, he was very much of an anti-communist. He always preached that communism wouldn’t work, couldn’t expect it to and that he thought it was a very repressive system, not only for religion. But for human beings he thought communism was terrible. And he didn’t get out on street corners….He wasn’t himself involved in any politics at home. He voted, had very strong views, but as I say, he was very much of a private person. I think the way in many small, southern towns, politics isn’t top of the agenda normally. They lead a pretty insulated, very provincial sort of life. Unless you are….Especially if you are in a working class family. I don’t think I was very politically astute. And as I say, I didn’t have the first thought about any problem with joining the ROTC. I guess I might have thought it was a good thing to do, as far as, trying to serve the country, get tuition, be able to contribute a little bit.

DONAHUE: Did you have, so you joined the Air Force in ?

: Let’s see, I graduated from Duke in fifty-three, so I was in the ROTC the last two years, I think. Fifty-one, , fifty-one. There were several of my fraternity brothers, who were in as well. It was also a way to be an officer and not to be drafted, not to be an enlisted person. We had a summer camp in Tindel Air Force Base in , I guess, or fifty-one. So we graduated in fifty-three.

DONAHUE: The reason I’m asking is I’m interested in your awareness of the civil rights movement developing and whether you were aware or particularly interested in what went on with Brown versus the Board of Education.

: Well, it was , which is when I….Nineteen fifty-four, I was in navigation school in and I think clearly I must have known about it. I mean it was a big event in . But you know, it wasn’t anything that touched me over night. I think was still pretty much a segregated town. I think over the years that I was in the Air Force, from fifty-four to fifty-seven, and I told you about the incident with Abe Jenkins. That was really early, actually when you think about it. That incident on the train was . And I think the Interstate Commerce Commission eliminated that practice, stopped segregation in the train, at least gave direction, sometime in the next two or three years. And things were just starting really to bubble. Because I joined the Civil Rights Division in nineteen sixty-two. The Montgomery Freedom Riots, the bus, those things had just taken, they were in nineteen sixty, I think, and sixty-one, maybe even the beginning of fifty-nine. But when I went, let’s see, I went to law school and my law school years were fifty-nine to sixty-two. I came out of the service in fifty-seven, then I went to work for the Roman-Haus Company in as a technical representative for a year and a half. I traveled Pennsylvania, New York and Northeastern states, selling, basically selling chemicals and doing technical sales work, which involves developing, having some knowledge of chemistry, developing some product and then call on pharmaceutical companies. Among others, water softening, the chemicals in water softener. Roman-Haus manufactured something called Amber light resonance, which when you’re in very microscopic size, filter water and make hard water soft. Cold water, salt water, hard water, get the calcium off. And those same resonances make a film and when you, when you put them in water and let the water dry up you’ve got clear floor polishes. And if you let the chemical polymers get thicker you get all the way, you all of a sudden you have plexi-glass. But I worked with Roman-Haus during and took the law school test. I entered law school in . And we had, one of my classmates is now, who’s now the Chancellor of North Carolina Central, was an African-American named Julius Chambers, who became a very prominent civil rights lawyer. Really brilliant young man, who was actually first in our class. Was the editor-in-chief of [INAUDIBLE] And we were good friends, so the years we were in law school, fifty-nine to sixty-two, were the first….I think we had three or four African-Americans in our class. [INAUDIBLE] the first in , that barrier had been broken to some extent. But it was going on, and the Freedom rides were happening and I think we were all conscious of what was going on. Julius was just an exemplary young man, did a wonderful….Was a great model. Worked terribly hard. We were, there were a few of us who were good friends. We were friends with him. I don’t know that it was open hostility, because he was such a quiet guy, who was always first in his class. I don’t think there was a lot of hostility directed towards him, as such, except the racial. Student body from, law school students are pretty conservative anyway, but the students from Eastern North Carolina, who were from the segregated, the black belt of North Carolina, were certainly still not, I think, as a group, sympathetic to having the law school desegregated. We never had any particularly violent, any incidents while I was there. But anyway, I think that period, it wasn’t so much when I was selling chemicals, when I was, I really had, I think I was just….Law school might have been in the back of my mind, but in the Northeast, things were not as clear. And I was focused on my work and being single and living in and having a good time when I wasn’t working. And it was not a major kind of issue for me. It was nothing I spent my time on before I went to law school. I think law school made you aware of that, especially in the context of my experience in the military. We had to do, things would have to change in the South. They ought to change in the South. Because if you were from places like , where I grew up or you liked your hometown, liked being a Southerner and saw the good things that the South had to offer, then this racial situation had to change. It might have to be forced to make those changes. I began to think about trying to do something, use, having the law, using the law to help do that. I don’t know that it was all very clear when I first started in law school. Because I really wasn’t sure….I decided to go to law school only….That probably, that may have been in the back of my mind, but I think once I had been selling chemicals for a year, it just wasn’t terribly fulfilling. Or if you’re a good salesperson if you like to sell and you like people and can sell anytime. You can always sell one product or another. I still had the G.I Bill available and just decided that it might be a good opportunity to use what I had before my brain shrank. And so it was all those sort of things together. I think that Julius and the….I think that being in law school and remembering my experiences in the service probably had a lot to do, it just sort of came together as a way of having me ultimately decide that….I mean when I first went to law school I didn’t even know if I could get through law school because it was such a big change.

DONAHUE: Why did you choose law school?

: I think I wanted to, well, I wanted to use my head in a more intellectual capacity. I thought that, and I liked….I don’t know if I took a bunch of interest tests. I wasn’t so sure. I was doing fine in this sales work. And I was about to be moved to New York City to take up where, a big area, Long Island, New York, where another representative was getting ready to retire. You know, I wish I could say, well I wanted to go to law school so I could help, so I could go to work for the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. But I don’t think that was quite the way it was. I think I wanted to go to law school because it seemed like a good way, it would be a good skill to have. It would be a challenge to become a lawyer. I think I knew enough to know, I knew enough that the legal system was a logical way of thinking. A lot of people who are mathematicians or who have scientific backgrounds seem to like that. I had some interest. And I say at one point I thought about even being a Rabbi. And in terms of interests it just seemed to fit with my general outlook on a good way to use the G.I. Bill and to go back to and go to school. It does sound kind of….I was making, I think when I first went to, it was a period of time when a lot of veterans were back in school. And there was in fact sitting, this nice educational package to do something with, for a few years if you had something in your mind. If you could afford it. If you could use it. It didn’t pay for everything. So it seemed to me, I was single. It was kind of like, why did my sister decide to go to law school after twenty years as an architect? I think it was something like that. It might be nice to change, do something different. I could always sell chemicals. I don’t think it had anything necessarily to do with my Jewishness or the Holocaust. Just was, I think I decided, sales people spend their time going from, if you’re traveling, whether it’s chemicals or something else, going from one large corporation to another, sitting in somebody’s waiting room until they’re ready to see you, having, maybe going, having a big lunch, but having an hour or two discuss talking about your product and their product and how they might use it and why they aren’t buying as much as they ought to or whether, all the things about your product that are better than the competition’s. And then you go on to someplace else. You might stay in nice hotels and eat nice big, eat lots of steaks, looking back on it. It isn’t particularly challenging and it’s not, and you also do not become, you don’t have a community. I think that was one of the things that bothered me too, in when I was thinking back about it. I remembered it bothered me back then to some extent, although I wasn’t as conscious of that as I am now. And that is, the people who I worked with, the executives, worked in , but they all lived in suburbia and suburban communities. And so they were not at all concerned about the inner city of . It was not their community. And so I, which I think, and many of our urban areas gave really rise to the decay, to having those communities go downhill, until you found some rebirth in those communities. That’s what’s nice, of course, about small towns, which I prefer anyway. And so I think I was not particularly happy with that way of life, living down and in my sales job. I think I was looking for something else to do and hadn’t really, I had not, there didn’t seem to be anything I had a real burning desire to do. And going back to school, it seemed like something I wanted to do, but I wasn’t sure, probably. I didn’t want to get a Master’s in Chemistry. I didn’t think I wanted to spend my life….I spent three months in a research lab. That particular organization that I worked for was a, you know, they were an excellent company. They were thorough. Before you even became a sales representative, you were in the labs for three months, working on products with their own laboratory people. So, you got a sense of what that life is like and what they can do and the sort of support they can give, so if you’re throwing out theories about what might be possible with your product, somebody there could, would be available and that sort of thing. I think all of that just sort of moved, it just seemed like a good decision. And after all, since when I went to, if it didn’t work out after a year or it didn’t work out, I could always do something else. I didn’t have a family attached to me. But I know, I’m sure, I think that I remember the first couple of months here in law school I wondered what am I doing here. I was not making any money anymore. [LAUGHING] And just to have the G.I. Bill and a little savings. Actually I was in the Air Force Reserve. I was in the Air Force Reserve when I was working for Roman-Haus in . I went down there on weekends once a month. And I suppose that’s a comment on….I think, I’m trying to remember whether, I think I had essentially met my obligation. There was a little money there, but I was interested in maintaining that proficiency. I was not sort of kissing the military good bye. And I belonged to an Air Force Reserve organization in . And kept on flying for a year or two. And then when I came back to law school, when I came to law school I continued and in part it was an income. At that point it was really partly income and I was a dormitory daddy when I was in law school, keeping….Related to a lot of stuff. But I was the dormitory daddy I call it, for all the football players at the . There are a lot of them and they had a dorm full of players. And some of them were veterans as well, who were going back to school. At least of those years. So, I think all of that sort of combined to see how it would to go. And then I …

END OF TAPE 20.U.5d, JOHN ROSENBERG, SIDE A

BEGINNING OF TAPE 20.U.5d, JOHN ROSENBERG, SIDE B

ARWEN DONAHUE: Tape number four, side B.

JOHN ROSENBERG: Law school, when you start your very first class, they often assume you’ve already had several, all the other classes. Law is basically so interrelated and the principles that you apply in one course often come from or are related to something in another course. So in a sense it doesn’t all come together until you are finished. And then you, as I told my sister when she started studying for the Bar, as much as I did not like taking the Bar and studying for the Bar, the Bar Review for the first time sort of brings all that stuff together. They don’t have a comprehensive. I don’t know why. Law school easily could have a comprehensive exam like PhD exams, and then you’re a lawyer. Get a lot of debate about that, but it never has come about. So, I’m sure I, like many other students, felt pretty lost the first couple of months. And say why did I leave a nice paying job in and come back down here and go to law school. But I stuck it out and I actually got to, as I think other law students do, towards, I got to, I got to, enjoy may be the wrong word. But by my last year when we were doing seminars and researching or writing stuff, I enjoyed my being there. And started to see, I think, how I could, it would be very challenging to be involved in the Civil Rights struggle through the legal, using the law. I wasn’t so sure yet. I still interviewed some firms. It was out here. You see the doing these things. There were firms in the South that were doing some civil rights litigation. And actually when I interviewed with the Honors program for the Department of Justice. I don’t know how this….As I said, I first went to the Anti-Trust Division. I can’t, don’t know that I chose the Anti-Trust Division or chose the Civil Rights Division. When I got to Washington and they put me in the Anti-Trust Division I asked to go to the Civil Rights Division. And tried to get an interview with the Civil Rights Division, which was almost impossible to get into, because there were only….They only had about eight lawyers that were doing civil rights work. One of them was John Doar. He was the assistant attorney general and you couldn’t get a job there unless he saw you and he decided he was going to hire you. And he was in the South most of the time. It was very hard to get in the door. And it was not a really favored section in the department. It was so small because Congress didn’t appropriate a lot of money into it. Senator Eastland’s Congress was not yet really committed to putting the full force of the government behind civil rights litigation. So, that’s sort of how it came together. It was logical in some ways and it made a lot of sense to me. I just don’t think I realized as I was going through law school, as I say, I went to and interviewed with a couple of firms, with some firms, one of which did a lot of civil rights work. It was a small firm and then I came back and I interviewed with the Department of Justice. And then my room mate and I, one of the fellows from , who I had gone through law school with, he had interviewed with the Federal Trade Commission and we ended up going to together and renting an apartment. He was still a bachelor. And that’s how I got my job, initially. I was with the Anti-Trust Division probably, maybe a month or two and then I went to work with the Civil Rights Division. I was very, very pleased to be able to go there.

DONAHUE: At what point did you realize that you wanted to do civil rights work?

: Well, I think really….I don’t know that in when I graduated, I mean nineteen sixty-two. That whole mess was going on. And Julius Chambers went to . We had some very serious discussions about civil rights work. And it was in the papers. And I think I really did, while I was on the campus of UNC. I mean, by that time it was a foremost issue in the country. School desegregation.…with Brown. People were still not complying with Brown. It was the Ross Barnett, Ole Miss. It was the summer of Meredith trying to get in. So, and North wasn’t on the forefront of desegregation efforts either. I don’t think any of the states were. I think by the time that I got to . I thought that I would really want to be in the Division if I could get there. I think in my mind I was going to come back to the South to practice law. Or that I would come home at some point to where my family was living. That I felt what the government was doing was right. It would be a great opportunity to be a part of that as a Southerner. You kind of feel like you’re helping to improve the place that you live in from a position where you could do some good. I think I was pretty convinced that this was not going to happen entirely voluntarily. It would take that kind of activity to do it. Even those were very, very small steps. The Division was very small and was really, there was Meredith. Most of the work the Division was involved in involved voting rights at the time. There were very few Federal areas where the government had the authority to intervene, besides voting. There was no legislation yet until nineteen sixty-four where anything could be done about public accommodations or employment. Housing. All of those things were yet to come. John Doar had accepted his position at the end of the Eisenhower Administration. And he had only been there a couple of years. He was a lawyer from , a [INAUDIBLE] lawyer, who was willing to undertake this job. When the Kennedys came in he was in the South, in working. Normally they might have appointed, Doar was a Republican. I think Bobby Kennedy read one of his affidavits he had filed or was looking at one of the cases that he was involved in and they were so impressed, he interviewed him and asked him if he would stay on as first assistant, when Burt Marshall became the assistant attorney general. And he said he would, so he was the boss, that I interviewed with. I think he was also somewhat attracted to the fact that I was from the South. I was also a little older and was a veteran and had done well, so he took a chance.

DONAHUE: Was it hard to get an interview with him?

: Yeah, it was. I mean you just had to bang on his, you had to keep coming down. But he was traveling so much and I don’t know whether it was part of his system. I mean it was a very small….And some people would say a little bit of an elite group of people. There were several people who had worked in the Division for a long time, who had been in the Department of Justice and the civil rights area, the government had not been very active. We also had authority in police brutality cases already, but I think generally it was not an area, it was an area where the United States Attorneys who were in the various states, pretty well controlled. It was seen as something that the government was not doing much about. Mistreatment of Blacks in the South by police officers. The U.S. Attorneys were in charge of that and many of them were from those areas and they were just not going to do very much about it. I mean the discrimination and segregation was very blatant. And in the Southern counties….Governor Barnett and Wallace just defied the government, said we’re not going to let blacks in these universities. And that was the way the voting thing was all over the South at the time. Blacks couldn’t vote. If they went to try and register they lost their jobs or their lives. So, it’s very, there were very few resources that were being devoted to doing anything about it, until the Kennedy Administration. And I suppose the President was still, in retrospect, was somewhat criticized. When Bobby Kennedy came in and there were only, this was a very small, still a very small division. It started growing, very small, in small numbers budgetarily. But John Doar’s idea and Thurgood Marshall’s was to do one step at a time. And we were in Southern courtrooms with Southern judges and even Federal judges were oftentimes from a background, from segregated communities and were not willing to step out and enforce the law. So, when we first started we lost many of those cases, until they were appealed….our job was to….And generally the FBI in many of those communities was not sympathetic. The FBI wanted to, they wanted to go out and solve bank robberies. What we wanted them to do was to come with us to a courthouse and stand there all day with a microfilm machine and photograph voting records, which we would then take back to , and we would spend days and nights analyzing those records. We would, because the FBI was also, most of those people from that area, they weren’t very good about interviewing in the black community. Probably were not sympathetic to having those people register to vote. So, we, John developed the notion, which sounds very sensible, but had not happened. Basically going into these communities and identifying the black leaders either through the NAACP or the funeral home or they’d make a complaint. Or one or two people to get this person, who else….We would meet with those people and find out that yes, Arwen Donahue tried to register to vote ten years ago or somebody went up to the courthouse and did try to register to vote a couple of years back. Her name or his name, and every once in a while you’d find out that they might have let one or two people register to vote. The guy who worked in the funeral home or somebody who was well known in the community, that the white business community was aware of and that the registrar was aware of. They would either not let them vote or register at all, because they would lose their jobs. This job that John Doar, this case John was working on….Kennedy had read, involved a fellow named Atlas in , who was a farmer, who raised cotton himself. He had a small farm. He went up to register to vote and they found out that they wouldn’t let him. But beyond that the local ginners refused to gin his cotton. He went to a number of places, they simply, they refused, they just would not gin his cotton. So, he went to Federal court to try to order them to stop interfering with his right to vote. And that was how that began. Then John, I think, was up in Haywood and some of the counties, wherever people started writing from and we would get some complaints. And so we would go to the communities and find out who tried to register and get those names. And especially if they were able to fill out a form. What these Southern counties, what was going on was they were administering a literacy test. And basically using a literacy test to deny black applicants. Teachers, people who wrote very articulate constitutional sections and they would give blacks very difficult sections to interpret, which you and I might not be able to interpret at all. Or if they gave them an easier section they would turn them down. And at the same time they were registering whites who were illiterate, essentially illiterate and who wrote, and or who wrote very incomprehensible answers that didn’t make any sense. It didn’t matter what they wrote basically. I’ve got notebooks that I have. We would then go back, find the records of those persons, go to court and ask the black register applicant to testify, who could prove their literacy. I’ve been a teacher for ten or fifteen years. I have a Master’s from [INAUDIBLE] college. And then we would also have found the registration forms of those whites, who either looked as though they couldn’t write or maybe even in some cases there were even x’s. And ask that person, have the FBI to go out and see the white persons and show them their form and ask them to read. They couldn’t, so we would subpoena them to court to show that they couldn’t read or that they were just given help. They could testify yes I came up and I registered. I wrote my name. What about a constitutional section? Well, he told me to copy this and write it down. That kind of thing. And so we gradually were able to get the courts to adopt the theory that if you, that you have to register blacks on the same basis they registered the least qualified white person. In those early cases, it wasn’t to register illiterate, because the courts didn’t want to register people who were just illiterate. If you could write, they were accepting someone who could only write their name or who could understand the very basic sentence, that would be applied across the board. But that took several years, because the courts were unwilling. They would find some excuses. Or they would say we’ll register the five, we’ve got to register those five people who testified. I believe that’s true of them, but you don’t have any others. Who else do you have? We might not….There weren’t any others because they were afraid to go, even though there might have been more blacks living in the county than whites. But all the whites were registered and very few blacks. And that goes back to Reconstruction and the development of the literacy test and the poll test, tax. So, we spent our first, spent the first few years in those kinds of cases. And as we got more lawyers, as we did those cases….That was also the period of time when there was more, there was more action by SNCC and CORE. In nineteen sixty-four you had the killing of the three civil rights workers around that very thing. They were holding voting rights meetings in .

DONAHUE: How did that work? If there were eight civil rights lawyers in the department and then you had John Doar, who was going down into the center of things and networking with the leaders? Would you go along with Doar on selected cases and other lawyers on other cases? What did you do?

: Well, we basically, we were essentially split up geographically. We had a section and an section and a section. And I think when I came there were like four lawyers in each of those states, might have been a few more. I shared an office with a fellow named Gerald Stern, who was from and there were actually….for a while. And then there were three or four of us and Gerry eventually went to a large law firm. Anyway, he, we would be, we four would basically be assigned two or three counties and we would go down ourselves. It was John, it was, the first few cases he tried when he was the lawyer in the courtroom, and supervised the preparation of the cases, and did much of the courtroom work. As time went on, it was a real learning time, we did all of the spade work. And we had a team of us. John would have one lawyer inside the courtroom with him and one or two of us would be outside. And we would do the interviews of the witnesses. And we did all this document preparation, there would be several, had a footlocker full of voting rights records. Very much like you do on an anti-trust case. It was all of their records and our witnesses together proved this case of discrimination. But like, I was assigned to , to . So, I spent a great deal….And John couldn’t learn everybody, all over the South. I spent a lot of time in . Met all of the leaders in the community. And there were a lot of voting marches in nineteen sixty-three. They arrested a lot of, there were a lot of arrests. Went into the jails and interviewed a lot of the people who had been arrested. And then we filed a suit to get them out of jail. They were a lot of discussions between the lawyers of Lafleur and and me and some with…. John would call in at one point. Then the longer we were there the more responsibility we had. Then as time went on the number of lawyers went from eight to sixteen to thirty. And obviously he couldn’t take all the cases, so at that point I started, we were the lead trial lawyers ourselves. But I, and at one point I had four of those cases going at once in . A case involving, there were voting rights cases. And then in nineteen sixty-four, that summer they, when the Public Accommodations Act came in, there were two theaters in , the and the Lafleur. The Lafleur was part of a chain out of . There was a fellow named Marchand, who was the manager. And the chain decided they would comply with the civil rights laws and they were going to let blacks go to the movies, because they had always been upstairs. And the said no, they weren’t going to let them in, they were going to challenge the law. So, when the Lafleur said they would then some blacks went into the movie. They were beaten and were ejected essentially. The police stood by. So, we filed a case in federal court to require the police to start giving them protection and to stop this interfering and to sort of guarantee the safety of the blacks who would go to the movies. And then also at the same time we filed a case to stop the from refusing to admit blacks. Then we had, then there was another case. is where Brian [INAUDIBLE], he’s the one who killed, shot Medgar Evers. The lawyer who was in one of these cases represented [INAUDIBLE] There was an earlier case involving a voting rights march. There was a little community outside of named, called . It is a very small farming community that’s all the delta, cotton country. The black section of that town was called Balance Due, sort of the story of their lives. And they had a voting rights, they were all at a meeting in a church one night. They were at a rally, a voting rights rally. And there was singing…in nineteen sixty-four. Someone threw a smoke bomb into the church.

DONAHUE: Was this before…[INAUDIBLE]

: [INAUDIBLE] was from , . We were involved in that case. Jean worked on that case. I have a painting, if you come by the house we got off of, we bought at a restaurant in . But we worked, I worked on Dimer some. I would work on the three civil rights workers case quite a time. Anyway this voting rights thing. They arrested, so they decided to march up to the deputy sheriff’s house to complain about this interference. There are about sixty or seventy of these folks. It was night time. And the next thing you know, they arrested them all, took them all to jail, from like fifteen year olds to seventy year olds. There were a couple of very old people, several old people. And the next morning they tried them in groups of four for disturbing the peace. And I sat through those trials. He sent them all, he convicted them in groups. They didn’t have any lawyers and so he convicted them all in groups for disturbing the peace. And they sent them to the state penitentiary. So, we filed a court action to try to get them out. It’s called the against . And I worked on, I went to that penitentiary every day for a couple of weeks to interview people. It was a very long delayed proceeding. And actually the federal judge said we should have, that he would not interfere with this arrest because it was a state law matter, this disturbing the peace. So, we eventually got the National Council of Churches to put up enough bond to get most of them….They did let some of the older people out in a few days. It was a horrendous thing. I’ve forgotten the name of this Justice of the Peace. It will come if I can remember it. But I remember going to the penitentiary every day. The guy’s name was Adderberry, the warden. He had this huge Great Dane that I did not like at all. But it was sort of the climate, you know, here they are, they arrest all these….They really weren’t doing anything. They were complaining about the smoke bomb. So we brought this action complaining about their interfering with their right to vote. It was not really the most successful thing we had ever done. I think we should have won the case, but we didn’t. We did eventually get them out of jail with the help of the Kentucky Council of Churches, I mean the National Council of Churches. That was probably sixty-three, I guess. The Lafleur theater cases, which we eventually won. This man, Marchand, had worked for this theater chain all his life. And as the result of his doing what his bosses told him to do, they just ostracized that man in the community. You would have thought it was like he was responsible for everything, for having done this. He should have quit the job or said we’re not doing it here. Whites are going to quit going to the theater. He was this nice man, who had lived there all of his life. His whole life was the movie theater and people coming to the movies. Everybody knew him and liked him. But his life was decimated over that incident. was a very, you know there was a lot of civil rights activity all summer long there.

DONAHUE: Can you name some of the leaders who you worked with?

: Well that was, you know the SNCC headquarters was there and Stokely Carmichael and Bob Moses, who’s now up in , I understand. I’ve been meaning to try to contact him because he’s developed a system for teaching math to inner city kids and Algebra, apparently, that is very successful. That’s, it totally changed, in changing his life. I spent some time with Medgar Evers, not much. He was in, he wasn’t in , but I had met him. And after he was killed….I had actually been to his house not too long before that. There was a recent issue in a magazine of The Washington Post, which the writer had sent to me. And there was a fellow named Willie McGee, who was either on the cover or on the inside section of that….I mean I guess there was a young woman named June Johnson. Fannie Lou Hamer was in . I don’t know if you ever saw that, but there is a one woman play about the life of Fannie Lou Hamer. She’s the woman who grew up on a farm and became a real strong voting rights activist. And one of the first cases I ever worked on involved the situation where Fannie Lou Hamer and June Johnson and a beautiful woman named Ella Ponder. June was then about fifteen or sixteen, I think. And there was another young man. They had been to a voting rights workshop in and they were coming home to, well they were coming home. And Ella was coming back with them, because she lived in , but Ms. Hamer was over in and June Johnson was in . And the bus stopped in which had a bus station. Wynnona is in . Anyway it was on the main road south and they got off the bus and wanted to get a coke. And went into the restaurant, which….The restaurant owners called the police and the local police came and arrested them off the bus. Came and arrested them and took them to jail and beat them in the jail. Couple of officers beat them. They then, eventually they let them go.

END OF TAPE 20.U.5d, JOHN ROSENBERG, SIDE B

BEGINNING OF TAPE 20.U.5e, JOHN ROSENBERG, SIDE A

ARWEN DONAHUE: This is tape number five, side A of an interview with John Rosenberg. You brought a police brutality case?

JOHN ROSENBERG: Yeah, against those police officers. And one of the, it was difficult to prove who did the beating, or that there was, other than from the blacks having said they were beaten. They beat, actually Mrs. Hamer had a hip injury. She worked in the cotton fields for some reason they even, she was on a bunk and they hit her. But the FBI had not found any witnesses and we knew there was a trustee in the jail, who was actually, a black man, who played a guitar and who was sort of in and out of that jail because he drank. But we knew he was there a lot. And they said they could not locate him, as was the case often. And I remember that I found him, finally through talking to members in the black community, I learned where he lived. And I eventually went out to see him and it happened to be on the day that President Kennedy was killed in nineteen sixty-three. It was raining like cats and dogs and I was still in the local hotel. And I went out to find and I found the trustee, this trustee. And he identified the officers from the pictures I had. And then he told me that he had, that after they had beaten these young black, well they were really quite men and women, that Mrs. Hamer, I guess, was on a cot then. That after they were through and put them back in their cells, they told him to mop the blood off the floor, which he did. And he testified to that, to his everlasting credit. But the jury was an all white jury and they acquitted them on a Friday afternoon in a very short period of time. The jury went out, the fellow who put the case on was named St. John Barrett, who was the second assistant of the Civil Rights Division, who is a good friend of mine. And it was, we did have the attorney, H.M. Ray, at the table, which was something new. He was at least there. He was a presence. But the government had not yet begun a policy of challenging juries there, so there was an acquittal. And I then had to….I drove over to to see Mrs. Hamer afterwards, I think. I don’t know if they were still there during the acquittal. I always feel badly and I think St. John Barrett, whose nickname is “Slim” and who is still practicing law, never really forget that acquittal of that really horrible action. It was just very blatant and such a commentary on the way things still were in nineteen sixty-three. You couldn’t get a white jury, even in a federal court, to convict on that set of facts. But we had brought the case and that was only a year, well it was a few years later, of course, that the civil rights worker trial went off. And that was an all white jury, too.

DONAHUE: Do you remember, before you go on to that, how Mrs. Hamer was afterwards when you visited her?

: Well, she was a very remarkable woman, I thought. And I read an autobiography about her not too long ago. She grew up on a farm and was not a very well educated person, but she was a very, became a very fiery person, and spoke at the Democratic National Convention. I mean I think she was very disappointed. I think there was a lot of criticism by the activist blacks at the time, not just in this case, about why the government wasn’t doing more. I think she sort of took this loss as one of many losses along the way. There was a voting rights case in ….You know we were lawyers who spent a lot of time in the community, but we would go back to . And one of the demands that was never met and probably rightly so, the blacks wanted more protections. They wanted federal marshals when they went to register. They wanted more lawyers and Congress wasn’t going to do that. There was still the question of how much, what do the states do and what the federal government does involving law. I think SNCC, we, oftentimes those of us who were there in our coats and ties and with our federal ID badges, some of the more activist people thought we were just sort of window dressing. And you know, it was not the same as direct action and eventually I think Martin Luther King certainly demonstrated that marching and non-violence was the key to success. That mobilizing blacks themselves, the march in . I mean I think all of these things that were going on were part of the big picture. I think the division had a very prominent role, a very pronounced role that isn’t always recognized. Not just because I was there, because I think we demonstrated that the court, that using the court system was extremely slow and wasn’t going to answer this….That we could win one little case at a time, but, and that was doing some good. And we were starting to, that, that was helping. And it also gave blacks some confidence to win. But for the broader picture to change….We also helped write the Voting Rights Act of nineteen sixty-five. You had to do more than that. And I think the civil rights, I think in a lot of these struggles, things like whether it’s the Wall coming down or whatever it is. Someone, it always seems to take an incident like the civil rights workers’ death to wake people up, unfortunately. It’s their mining disasters that cause the mine safety laws to come in. The publicity in , in with the water hoses. It all, I think, helped mobilize the country to change things. We started, I mean I think the conviction of the civil rights workers in nineteen sixty-four, which took a great deal of help by this all white jury in Mississippi and by, where you had a presiding federal judge, who was clearly a segregationist. Senator Eastland’s room mate, Judge Cox. I think he said this is enough and he’s going to have a fair trial. And that was a little step along the way. It took a great deal of work.

DONAHUE: I’ve got a couple of questions. When you were talking about the case that you worked on in which Fannie Lou Hamer and June Johnson and the others were beaten in jail. Your exact role in that was, were you the only lawyer working on that?

: I was the, really the investigating lawyer. I hadn’t been in the division that long and so I was, I guess you would call, that’s what you would call it. I spent the time in the field and interviewed these folks and got the case pretty much ready for trial. And St. John Barrett was the trial lawyer and I assisted him with putting it on and was in the courtroom. I didn’t, I don’t think I examined any of the witnesses in that case. But being in I sort of would have written the request for investigation by the FBI with John. And I went down and was the contact. Interviewed all these people who were eventually to testify and others in the community. And sort of put the case together. That was the way we normally did all those cases. Over time that’s also how we learned who the people were in the black community. I mean we did have very good contacts all over the state, in all these counties where we were. And I think that was very helpful.

DONAHUE: Did you spend time with them socially?

: Oh, I probably had, I had quite a few meals in various, you know, they were like country people everywhere. We did not go out together. I went to a lot of church, meetings in churches. Did a lot of observing also, I mean sometimes when there were marches….I’ve got some photos I can show you that I still have like from . I spent a summer in Bugaloosa, where the Klan had been taking a lot of action, was upset because, initially because a relatively moderate congressman had been invited to come to speak. Brooks Hayes. And the Klan rallied. And they threatened to boycott stores that were going to sell to blacks. And there were a number of civil rights marches during the summer, that summer with James Farmer and others. And I was, spent the summer there, basically observing marches, interviewing people and getting the facts together for an action that we were, eventually filed against the Klan in federal court to get an injunction against them from doing, interfering any further. Again it was tied to voting and to public accommodations and employment. In many of these cases in those earlier years I had a, my immediate boss was a fellow named Bob Owen, who was from and who passed away a few years ago. He was involved in some of those trials. He was in charge of . There was somebody in charge of , somebody in charge of and somebody….Bob had gone to the University of Texas Law School. He had gone to . He grew up on a farm also, in . Wonderful man. So, essentially in those early years, the FBI had not been very effective. Things really changed after the civil rights worker incident. After that, they moved a lot of agents from other parts of the country to and and began to use agents who did not live and grow up in those areas to investigate civil rights matters. Is that? I can’t remember what the question was. I’ve become a little punchy, it’s in the morning.

DONAHUE: [LAUGHS] I was asking you about your role in the, in that particular trial. Not sure if I asked you a question after that or not.

: Oh, you asked me about, yeah, about the June Johnson, the case in Wynonna. That was the way we generally did our….And the bigger cases like this three civil rights workers case, there were many of us who…

DONAHUE: The case.

: The case, there were a number of us, who did investigative work, both in the black community….We had a lot of FBI agents. And initially the Bureau reports turned up a lot of other examples of police brutality. And when we convened the first grand jury, there were some indictments about other cases, not involving the three civil rights workers, because there was not yet any clear confession to who had done that or what had happened. The grand jury, that one or the second one….I was in, it was sitting in Oxford and I was interviewing people and putting them on a plane from Jackson to Oxford to the grand, where they were testifying. We did a lot of, but our, we as lawyers did a lot if investigative work, especially in the black community, because the level of trust was a lot bigger. Because the whites in the Bureau in those earlier days was not, made it pretty plain, I think, that they were not sympathetic to the civil rights struggle, or some of them did. Others were, the one in Meridian, the FBI agent in Meridian, Mississippi was actually a very fine man, who was very much involved in that investigation from the beginning. Well, I don’t remember his name right now. It’s in my notes somewhere. And there was a television movie made about it, which was pretty accurate, which put him in the correct light. The Mississippi Burning, which so many people have seen, which was sort of a fictionalized account and I always said it didn’t attempt to be accurate. When I have given these talks from time to time and they always say what happened? Is this the way it was? And it wasn’t. I don’t think that was really the way the FBI normally acted. I thought that the picture depicted the hostility of whites quite well at the time. My role in that, besides investigating, I spent about a month trying to put together, putting together a notebook on the background of the jurors. The jury list was like sixty or seventy people we knew from which the eleven jurors would be chosen.

DONAHUE: Are you talking about the Neshoba County?

ROSENBERG: Yeah, in fact Jean and I had just gotten married and we came back from our honeymoon. And it was right before the trial of this case and so I, I said I really want to go. [INAUDIBLE] And that’s what I spent the month doing before the trial, interviewing. Today they have all these very fancy jury experts. You practice trials in front of a jury to see how a practice jury would do things, especially in the civil cases, not so much the criminal cases. And then I spent a lot of, so I did that.

DONAHUE: I’m curious about, when you talk about interviewing the jurors. How did you, what did you do? Did you take notes? What was your method?

ROSENBERG: Well, you wouldn’t go see the juror. You’d go see people you trusted who might know the jurors. Do you know? Who is this person? Who are they related to? How long have they lived here? How would you expect them to, would you expect them to be fair? Have you, are they a member of the citizens council? Who do they employ? Many of those forms, I mean today if you go, if you’re going to be selected for jury duty, you fill out a form which gives out a fair amount of very basic information that everybody has access to. And where you work, that kind of thing. This is a way of trying to put together a picture about a juror without contacting the juror directly and trying to be somewhat respectful of the juror and also not to infringe on anybody’s rights. But simply trying to learn as much as you can. Some things are public information. I mean back then those were, systems were just being developed and we had a jury that had some blacks on them. And there were some members of the….Say you have to identify in Neshoba County in those communities, which was fairly large. The federal jury was from a larger geographical area. And you make some decisions about paring down these numbers, about which jurors, somebody from Jackson may be from a large metropolitan area and president of this company or that company, that you may not spend as much time on. But I assembled a notebook for John, who was going to try the case, so when he got ready to challenge jurors….You have so many preemptory jurors. I mean suppose, it may not be initially apparent, but from talking to people and identifying folks, you might find that a particular juror is distantly related to somebody, one of the defendants. Or that his daughter is married to somebody’s son, who works for….And when the judge says, asks the jury, are you related to anyone who is being defended? Normally if you are, you’re not going to be on that jury. Well, if you’re not being forthright, if you have some information that gives the lawyer, like John, the opportunity to ask a question about it. And then layers have their own hunches about….Every trial lawyer has their own….John always said he wouldn’t like, didn’t want jurors that wore white socks. I don’t know. I’m wearing white socks today. It was a thing, might have come from his accident cases. I don’t know if he even lived, if that was something he really, always….I’m sure that he used my notebook, primarily. I did some other work, I mean, other investigative work in the case, but I interviewed a lot of other people. But that was something I’ve always been proud of, because we got a conviction. We did get a jury that convicted a number of these people.

DONAHUE: That was in nineteen sixty-seven. Is that right?

ROSENBERG: Yeah, the case had happened in nineteen sixty-four, but the delay, the defendants challenged the legality of the indictment under federal law. So, the case actually went to the United States Supreme Court on the legal question. This was not a murder conviction. They were charged with conspiring to deprive the defendants of their civil rights. It’s a federal conspiracy charge. There was an issue of whether that was a crime, because it involved private individuals as well as some law enforcement. And the Supreme Court in that case said, yes it was a crime. All that took time, so it wasn’t until nineteen sixty-seven that the trial actually took place. And when I left, one of the last things that I did in nineteen seventy when we left, was to write a brief. They were about to be, they were still trying to prevent them from their arrest. They were still raising legal questions. And we were successful in resisting the objections and they finally then took the people who had been convicted – they weren’t all convicted – to jail, where they served their time. And I understand that they are today, finally, what is this? Nineteen ninety-nine? Thirty-two years later they are thinking about charging them with murder, convening a state grand jury finally. As they did in the Beckwith case.

DONAHUE: Why didn’t they do that [INAUDIBLE]?

ROSENBERG: Well, they didn’t do it because the state of Mississippi is not going to take any, I think, serious action in racial cases. There was too much, the officials were unwilling to risk their political lives. People in Mississippi, I think there were substantial numbers who thought these were outsiders who had come in to tell them what to do. They were not sympathetic to registering blacks. They should have stayed home. They had it coming to them. All that kind of thing. Such terrible ideas, but that was….They called it Freedom Summer. They had these workshops, students from all over the country in nineteen sixty-four were there. And that was why I was in Mississippi when it happened. Some of us happened to be there. I was in Greenwood, I believe when this went on in Neshoba County.

DONAHUE: You were in Greenwood right at the time of the murder and disappearance?

ROSENBERG: Right. My friend Frank, who is now a judge in the D.C. circuit was the lawyer, I think, who was actually in Neshoba County, called John, these sort of things were happening. I don’t know. I don’t think that I went over there right away. Because the FBI was out and they were trying to find the bodies. I was involved in some matters in Lafleur County, Mississippi. All of us were there during the summer in one way or another.

DONAHUE: Were you ever personally threatened or did you feel personally threatened ?

ROSENBERG: I’ve been asked that a lot. I really didn’t, I think we, because we were Justice Department people and generally people knew who we were. After that I never felt really any danger, particularly after the Neshoba killings, we started always driving together – in Neshoba County, at least, in pairs, being together with another person who was working. Before that we were always, generally, by ourselves.

DONAHUE: Were you armed?

: I never carried a weapon. I was in a, in a registrar’s office once in . I was with a team of FBI agents, photographing voting records. And the registrar’s name was Foote Campbell. While they were photographing records, I went in his office and we were talking about a variety of things and he related to me that he had witnessed some lynchings. And I wasn’t going to try that case, I was just there with the FBI. And he got started talking and he said, John, let me show you something. And he pulled this gun out of his drawer and he shot his pistol into the floor in front of me. And I said, why did you do that? And he said, well I just wanted to show you the gun worked. It was very odd. He shot a big hole in his floor. I think he was a little demented anyway. But it was the only time I know that….And he wasn’t aiming at me. And all these agents came in. Everybody heard this terrible noise in this old courthouse and came running in to see what had happened. And he said, well I just wanted to show John that this gun worked. But I never really was in fear, at least I don’t recall. I think we all knew that we were in such a different situation from the people who we were working with. I mean the blacks, who were so vulnerable, who were by themselves, who had to really display such courage just to go register to vote. We met so many wonderful people, these farmers, local citizens, who simply wanted to go register, to exercise their right to vote. I think you were mentioning what we were talking about the other day, how apathetic people are about voting today. When you think about it, I mean I think that always. We just couldn’t help but be impressed by these folks, who were, many of them were just hard working people, who wanted to have the same opportunities or just to have the same right as everyone else. I mean it seems so very simple. I will always remember a fellow named Eskridge. There was a farmer named William Eskridge in Carroll County, Mississippi, who was really a very bright, articulate man, who lived in a farm, worked a farm that he owned, way out, by himself, out in a very isolated part of the county. And they wanted their son to go to, to get a decent education and were willing to enroll him in a white school, previously all white school. And we went to court to desegregate the school. One of the earliest cases that the government filed. There had been other school desegregation cases, but the United States didn’t have the authority prior to nineteen sixty-four to initiate school desegregation cases. We could only do voting cases. And we were able to, whenever I went to see him, which was many, many times, I just always marveled how isolated they were and his willingness and his drive, just and his very simple desire to see the son go. We had an expert come in and the black school was horrible. It was the same picture as it was with the voting thing. They were in this old, rundown building and a pot bellied stove. I don’t remember if there was running water or not. But it was just an incredible contrast. And actually he, I think he might have been registered. Everybody knew him. Everybody knew him. He had a very good reputation in the white community and maybe that was why he was not so afraid. I mean he had a very nice personality and he was obviously pretty bright….

END OF TAPE 20.U.5e, JOHN ROSENBERG, SIDE A

BEGINNING OF TAPE 20.U.5e, JOHN ROSENBERG, SIDE B

ARWEN DONAHUE: This is tape number five, side B.

JOHN ROSENBERG: Well, I just think it’s something that we saw repeatedly. It’s been probably eight or nine years. A fellow, one of the people who worked on that case, another lawyer who became a judge, Bill Flannery, worked on that case with me. One of our friends went by to see him eight or nine years ago. He’s died now. Jean and I went to one of those counties, no, two or three years back and we went out to see him. He’s probably in his eighties now.

DONAHUE: This is the father of the child who…?

ROSENBERG: Right. He had afterwards gotten involved in some Mississippi politics for a while and the Freedom Democratic Party. I don’t think he ever ran for office. I always thought he should. But there’s not much more to that other than we won. The judge ordered them to allow his child to go, Judge Clayton, to enter that grade. We sort of stayed in touch with each other for some time afterwards both in connection with that case, whenever I would drive…..Whenever I would drive, whenever I went to Mississippi after a while you get to know some of these people and if you wanted to learn about what was going on in the community or whether there were some other incidents we ought to be aware of, those were the sort of people who called you.

DONAHUE: Did you say his name?

ROSENBERG: It was William Eskridge. I don’t know about the son. Did we meet the son or he was in school….Actually I have some pictures at home. It was not maybe three years ago. The reason I said he died, I think somebody told me. One of the school classes in Holmes County, which is nearby. One of the high schools did a little project, they put a booklet together on sort of oral histories about black leaders in their area a few years ago. And it made it’s way to one of the legal services people who was living there. And they sent it to me and there was an interview with Mr. Eskridge, who recalled the case we did. I guess that’s really about it, on this thing….We just saw those situations repeated over and over. Every county went to wherever the government was involved. And today in legal services whenever you have a movement or you have an issue like this, someone is going to, or some group is going to try, is going to stand out initially to see, try to help people get justice. To see that the right result comes about. So, you have leaders like, you may never hear about Mr. Eskridge in Carroll County. You might hear about some of the more prominent, you probably hear about Mrs., some of the people, who went to the national scene, like Aaron Henry in Clarksdale, Mississippi, who was President of the NAACP, also. Who’s a very prominent figure and who continued to be a prominent figure after these, in later days when the Voting Rights Act was passed and blacks did get the right to vote. Then if you go to Mississippi today, you see the number of black legislators, who are in the Mississippi legislature. And you had some part in to see how far it’s come. There are a lot of unsung heroes, I think, like Mr. Eskridge in all these cases.

DONAHUE: I wanted to ask you kind of a general question. I’m going to try and phrase it clearly, but you may not….take a little while. You mentioned something earlier about living in the South and how you wanted to live in the South and in a way you were proud of being a Southerner and you were aware of the things that were good and were motivated to be there because of that – to change some of the things that were not as good. I have kind of the idea that so many Northerners and maybe particularly Jews, who lived in the North, felt that the South was backwards and controlled by the Klan and there would be too much anti-Semitism and too much maybe lack of culture or something, putting it crudely or maybe over exaggerating. But I’m wondering what it was that you saw about living in the South that was so positive, that made yourself identify as a Southerner and motivated you in this whole endeavor?

ROSENBERG: I think it’s the same to some extent what you see in small towns. I think – or the rural areas – you get this, I mean in a simplistic way, the idea that people accept you for who you are. As a salesman I always used to say in the South if you have a customer, they’re going to initially assume you are telling the truth and will take you, at face value, what you say and will welcome you in. And will be happy to spend the time of day. And if you are fair with them, you can have a long lasting relationship as you would with anyone else. Whereas, if you were in the urban areas of the North, and then again this is very simplistic and probably not true in the sense that you can generalize, but I’m sure it indicates some of the way that I think and others think. In the Northern, when I was selling chemicals, I think in the North people say this guy is a salesman, he’s out to get us and he’s going to be a con man or con woman of one sort or another. They have a much harsher attitude. And maybe because these towns are, these cities are so big, are not interested normally in forming another relationship and welcoming someone from another place that has nothing to do with where they live. I think the camaraderie of communities, the fact that people are, whether it is a slower pace. People do have an interest in where they live and in making it, and in the sense of place where they are. I think that’s maybe true of smaller communities across the board. I’m sure it’s true in New Hampshire and Vermont and in smaller places up North, but it was true of the South. Much has been written about the South, I’m sure you’re familiar with literature of the South. And I think there is some of that commonality. It’s like when I was in the Civil Rights Division, being a Southerner, itself, was probably helpful; it was helpful, I’m sure in many ways, especially in dealing with white officials. I mean not that you would necessarily be their buddy, but they sure could….There’s something about being able to say, oh you’re from way up there in New York or you’re from….You don’t belong here. The South, I’m not proud of the Confederacy, but it’s part of its history. And to that extent, I think that’s why….I like the tradition and the atmosphere and the welcoming of those communities, they were….with my family. We were strangers in this county, in Spartanburg and in Gastonia. It became our home. And I think that it made a great deal of difference. And I suppose, I don’t know, I haven’t read as much about that, but we had many associations and many more friends, who were not Jewish than the ones who were, probably because of our, because of the economics of the situation in a sense. You have a sort of a class system, keeping up with the Joneses. There were people, who were well off and they were friends in the synagogue and were always very nice, but we weren’t able to go to Florida. Or they would travel, do things that my family, my parents didn’t do, because we couldn’t afford it, because we weren’t interested in it. So, I think that’s the way it is. I mean, it’s the same way I feel about being here in some ways. Been here almost thirty years and it’s become home. And I think the people here share that same kind of feeling about their place and their community. Appalachia, it’s different than North Carolina, but it’s the same sort of environment.

DONAHUE: Did your work change a lot after the Civil Rights Act passed?

ROSENBERG: In the Division? Well, we had more work in more areas. And after I worked in the Deep South, I became a Chief of what was called the Western Section. I started doing some cases in Texas. I litigated a case against the electrical workers union in Las Vegas, believe it or not. They didn’t want to let blacks, who were electricians, into the union. Steel workers in Los Angeles. In my section in Texas, I didn’t have any, well, I did, spent the last two years or three years in a case against the Houston school system. A big desegregation case involving the Houston school system. We moved to Houston for several months to hear this case tried. But it had been an ongoing case in Houston. And then I was also, I guess I became the Chief of what is known as the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division. That is the section that has the responsibility for the police brutality cases, these conspiracy cases like the civil rights workers. I didn’t, I was in charge of that and had a group of lawyers working with me and for me and the FBI. The last thing I did was direct an investigation into the Kent State case. That’s about the time I left, so I didn’t really get involved in very many more trials. The Houston case took a couple of years, off and on. I think I was actually the Chief of the Western Section, maybe part of it was still going on when I was Chief of the Criminal Section. In all these, by that time the Division had gotten a lot bigger and it was sort of a re-organization and I had eight or ten lawyers working under me. And we were doing cases around the United States. After the Civil Rights Act and then the Voting Rights Act was nineteen sixty-five, then I was in what we called the Southeastern section, that was Alabama and Louisiana. I did spend some time in Louisiana working on the, when they first brought in federal observers to watch elections, because under the Voting Rights Act people could register automatically by signing their names. And those southern states were covered by that. Then in nineteen sixty-four, the case that Jean is talking about, we had a case in Selma, Alabama, which was the first….I’m sorry it was nineteen sixty-five. It was the first case under the Voting Rights Act in Selma, where they were still using paper ballots. It was the first election in which black officials, where blacks had been appointed to be election officials. And it was very interesting. Jim Clark, who was the Sheriff of Selma and had been such an impressive force in Selma, was running for re-election. There was a moderate named Wilson Baker. The election officials who were black had never done that and they were counting all these ballots and they wanted to be sure and they were trying to be careful. And it was taking them a very long time to finish counting the ballots at the end of the day. And all the boxes had to come back in from the white precincts. And so the executive committee met, which was an all white, democratic, executive committee and they decided they would impound all of the….There must be something wrong. These people are taking too long. There must be some sort of fraud going on. So they went out and impounded all those ballots. The next day decided that they would, the fair thing to do is not to count the ballots from those boxes at all, just leave them out as a group, which had the effect of not counting probably ninety five percent of the black ballots that had been cast. So we filed an action under the Voting Rights Act to require them to count those ballots. We went to federal court and we got a judge named, whose name was Thomas, who had refused to desegregate the Mobile County, Louisiana schools. Each year he’d do just a little tiny bit and we’d, the government would appeal. The next year the Court of Appeals would tell him to do something more and he would only do a little tiny bit. So, he effectively kept them from being desegregated. When we put this case on and I tried this case and John, for a change, John told me the day before the trial, he said, why don’t you try this case, John? We had been putting it together. He was my assistant, if you will. [LAUGHS] The objections, some objections, I put the case on and he did the opening and he also did the closing. Did a very nice job. And Judge Thomas said that, he required them to count them. He said, you should not deprive a voter of his right to vote based on what might be a technical mistake by an election official. And we showed that all the ballots were in the boxes. There was no fraud. The number of people who signed in to vote equaled the number of ballots. There might have been one or two slight differences, but basically we proved that all the ballots were there and what they were doing was perfectly good. There was no reason not to count them. He ordered them to be counted and the result was that Jim Clark was out. We didn’t file the action to get Jim Clark declared ineligible or anything. We filed the suit under the Voting Rights Act, in order to have those votes counted as they ought to be counted, so that their right to vote was protected and their vote would be counted. But it was the end of Jim Clark as an elected official in that county. So, I was always pleased with participating in that case.

DONAHUE: What year?

ROSENBERG: That was nineteen sixty, probably nineteen sixty-six. I’d say sixty-five, I think the decision was in sixty-six. Because the Voting Rights Act was passed in nineteen sixty-five, which really changed everything. I mean, across the South there were black sheriffs, in these counties that had more blacks than whites or heavy black counties. It was really probably the most important legislation in many ways passed anywhere. Because it really gave blacks the right to vote and changed the political process.

DONAHUE: Did you have anything to do with writing that legislation, the Voting Rights Act?

ROSENBERG: I, it wasn’t me personally, the Division, the lawyers in the Division, John and our appellate section, Burt Marshall, who was at that time not the Assistant Attorney General, but he was still very….Became a professor at Yale. But the lawyers in the Division and in the hierarchy of the Department of Justice….Some of that language, some of that Act was based on the court cases that we had fought. It said if a certain percentage of voters had not voted and if they used a test or device, like a literacy test, if these various criteria were met then it triggered the application of the Voting Rights Act. And if that was triggered, the registration process then involved, meant that they had to allow everyone to register by very simple procedure. And if they weren’t going to do that at the courthouse, they could do it where the federal observers were. Or that they did it in the courthouse with federal observers looking on. It is a forced process that covered virtually the entire South. There was a challenge to the legality of that, that went to the United States Supreme Court, which was upheld. I think United States versus Louisiana. Well, it wasn’t Louisiana. Then there was also, I was involved with the poll tax. The Southern states used poll taxes to prevent blacks from voting for many years. Filed an action in Mississippi and then I helped the Assistant Attorney General and put together the case against poll tax in Alabama. That was a fair amount of my time. [INAUDIBLE] The poll tax was probably the Voting Rights Act of sixty-seven, after Selma. In sixty-eight, I think we did that case in Montgomery.

DONAHUE: I wanted to ask you about the Civil Rights Movement in general and your perceptions of its various goals and conflicts within the movement. You mentioned SNCC being, and I thought maybe I should mention for the tape that, that’s the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee. Right? I was thinking about that and the idea of non-violence that came in people who worked in that spirit. People who worked with SNCC and people who worked in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, versus Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, who were later on. How did you perceive that? I mean you were talking a little bit earlier about how you don’t, about non-violence and how you don’t feel that if you were in a situation that you would just turn the other cheek if someone gunned down you or somebody dear to you. Whereas King was very committed to non-violence and his followers were as well. What were your perceptions of that and of Malcolm X’s agenda?

ROSENBERG: Well, I think that, I mean I might tolerate somebody throwing an egg in my face, especially when you are together with other people, you know. I have a great respect for the non-violent movement and Gandhi and his teachings. I think Martin Luther King and his idea of using non-violence as the way to demonstrate love for your fellow man and woman. And that you have to, that, that was the way that would be most effective. And that armed, an armed response wasn’t going to work. It wasn’t going to work anyway because a number of people were going to be killed. People were killed along the way. I mean, I’m convinced really that you do, that the courts are only an adjunct to any movement of that sort. I mean the courts can help to insure that the rights of individuals and groups are protected within a very, within a particular sphere or frame of reference. But as I said, the Voting Rights Act, I don’t think, would have been passed. Certainly it wouldn’t have been passed as quickly and I’m not sure it would have been passed at all without the Selma march and the demonstrations and Martin Luther King’s conviction that gradually the country would recognize how wrong segregation was and that you were simply trying to provide all citizens of this country the rights to [INAUDIBLE] secure. I’m not, as far as Malcolm X and the Black Power Movement, I’m not a, I don’t, I haven’t studied all of Black history anymore than many other subjects I haven’t studied. I think that there is an awful, that it’s important for these, for African-Americans to recognize their history and their culture. There’s a lot to be gained from that, just as it is in Appalachia. People ought to be, can be proud of their culture. And that you can do that in this country, within the confines of the law and that there is room for us to have an integrated social system, where groups that are Native Americans, African-Americans, and various cultural, ethnic citizens who are coming to this country can still retain and recognize some of their own history and preserve it. And I think that’s really what he was, in part, talking about. I suppose, whether Malcolm X would like to have separated this country into one that was white and black or not. I’m not that familiar with really everything that he wrote. But that’s the way I feel about that. I don’t know that it means how I would react in a particular situation. We don’t have any guns in our home or in our cars. [LAUGHING] And I don’t intend to carry any weapons or have one. And many, and in this area and the South, you know, you have a lot of hunters, which I am not. You have a lot of people who feel strongly about their right to bear arms in this area here, where we live. And they can do that. I would be happy for us to get rid of all the weapons in this country, hand guns. I don’t need them. But that doesn’t mean that I, to me that if push came to shove, I might not feel it was the right thing to do. Or that I would not be a conscientious objector if I were called back into the military. I think that’s where those lines are. I don’t think it’s an absolute line. For me, even though I would think, I do believe that non-violence has its place and that we can achieve the ends that we seek. And mass marches, whether it’s for Viet Nam or to break down barriers of segregation, then that’s what should be done.

DONAHUE: What did your parents think of your civil rights work?

ROSENBERG: They, I think, well, I think they were quite proud of what I was doing. They were quite proud of what I was doing. I don’t know that my mom, I mean my father and mother more, I don’t know that my father was totally convinced. I think he was in same ways, he was a little bit of an elitist intellectual. As I said earlier, he was not, he was a very private person. He really had a difficult time making conversations with people, who he didn’t feel had a great deal of education or that were on his level intellectually. And in that way he was a little bit of a snob, I think. And so I don’t know that he was in total agreement with the use of the nation’s resources to desegregate. I don’t know that he was, I think my Dad wasn’t a racist. I don’t think in that way, I don’t know that we….

END OF TAPE 20.U.5e, JOHN ROSENBERG, SIDE B

BEGINNING OF TAPE 20.U.5f, JOHN ROSENBERG, SIDE A

ARWEN DONAHUE: This is tape number six, side A of an interview with John Rosenberg. So he wasn’t sympathetic to demonstrations?

JOHN ROSENBERG: Well, I mean I think it’s complicated and hard to really articulate what my dad’s feelings were. I think they were very proud of the fact, after the fact….I don’t think they were necessarily understanding about why I went to law school, when they thought I had already found a career. And had a good job. Within the Jewish community for example, try to explain to somebody why a man who is, let’s see how old was I? In fifty-nine I was twenty-eight. Why anybody would want to go back to school. I think they had the same reaction when my sister went back to school. You can’t tell them anymore that he’s a successful salesperson going, selling chemicals. You always want to tell somebody your kids are doing something that’s fine and they’re well and they’re taking care of themselves, whether it’s a chemical salesman. Doing great things, making a lot of money, which is what the Jewish community wants to hear, that people are making a lot of money, which is their symbol of success. Maybe my mother more than my father. So when I went to law school. But they were very, I think they were very impressed by and large with the lawyers and associates that I met in the Civil Rights Division. And certainly having the Division and John and the people who, we didn’t have the Kennedys come to our wedding, but everybody, a lot of the people from the Justice Department and the Civil Rights Division and our associates. So, I think they were really, in the general matter, very pleased with what I was doing as a lawyer and the work I did there. And the work I did here. I think they would never, there was always the question of why I didn’t just not go into a law firm and make a whole lot of money? [LAUGHING] Why spend your time doing this public service work? Which people still don’t understand, not only about me, but about a lot of other people who work here and work in other programs. The work that many people, and Social Services do and maybe that people do as writers or artists, where they’re trying to live out their life in a way they are comfortable with and like, which may not be financially, very rewarding. But that, that’s not the test for them and probably it ought not to be the test in my mind. So, it’s hard….I think they were very, you know, when I received some awards later on for my work here and that sort of thing. Parents are always going to be happy with something like that. But I think my dad was kind of a complicated man when it came to the racial thing, because he worked on a daily basis in his factory and I think saw….Was not as ready to believe that you give everybody a chance, that poverty is like a vicious circle. When you live in a very poor environment you are going to have illiteracy, you’re going to have drugs, you’re going to have alcohol abuse and substance abuse. And if you don’t look, if you aren’t willing to deal with the causes, then you aren’t willing to try to deal with the elimination of poverty at that level. It’s easy to say, these folks are always drinking, they could be….They drop out of school, and it’s all their fault. The next thing you know and they’re certainly true of….There are more poor white people in this country than there are blacks. But it you look at it as a Southern phenomenon or where you lived. I think that someone like my father, who had a history in the Jewish community, we’re too often too quick to say we were able to take care of ourselves despite all this repression. We came out of Germany, with only the clothes on our backs and nothing in our pocket and look what we did. Why can’t they do the same thing, the same thing. People say look at Asians, Japanese have come to this country and whose kids achieve, who are motivated to achieve.

DONAHUE: What’s your response to that kind of ….?

ROSENBERG: Well, I mean, I think it’s the same sort of driving force, in a way, that says they are, historically have valued education, and have seen that if you get an education, you are motivated to succeed and you can be someone. And I think African-Americans see that, too. But I think, I think, as I say, part of it is a vicious circle, part of it is, that is what Jean does, sometimes it’s one at a time, that people who are born into these poor economic circumstances. We have a whole generation, we have several generations of welfaring in Eastern Kentucky and in the South. It’s hard to break that cycle in a variety of situations, people and we….I don’t know that welfare reform isn’t all bad. It can be done, in my mind and I think Jean’s, in a more humane way. People have to have some support systems, if you come out from, if you have a series of generations where education isn’t valued, for example in Eastern Kentucky. Get a very good job mining coal, you didn’t need an education for years and years and generations, all you had to do – it was hard work. Dangerous work in some ways. But it was the kind of work that people knew. It was all manual labor. As that ends, people don’t have those jobs, and they don’t have the options, they find themselves in those situations where there is disparity, they have to leave. And I think the black, in the South, you have the history of segregation for a couple of hundred years, where you don’t have equal opportunity. Where you have terrible schools, where you’re expected to be a share cropper, really don’t have an equal opportunity. Then you can’t have, those children can’t have the expectations of being successful. Now people debate that nationally. Black leaders debate that, you hear it all the time. We can be successful. We should not have Affirmative Action. I think Affirmative Action has been a very successful tool. But now the pendulum has swung. Now they find, Justice Thomas, and you find black leaders who say Affirmative Action is unfair. It’s unfair to whites. It’s unfair in that it gives, we don’t need an unfair advantage. To label it as an unfair advantage. To some extent it’s subjective. Those are my own feelings about….I think you do have to make additional opportunities available to people who have been historically discriminated against. We have had, had it and to try to isolate that advantage to those very few situations where you can actually prove that this company discriminated in this bad way and so they’re supposed to overcome that. But I don’t, and I don’t think that my dad, anymore than anybody else….I certainly wish he had been more broadminded about that. I’m just saying he’s no perfect, none of us are perfect and he had his imperfections and that was one of them. As far as, philosophically he didn’t go around making speeches about it. But I think he was still proud of what I was doing. I think it was easy, he would be the first, among others, he would say well they should be, certainly not prevent people, think it was wrong to try to enforce the right to vote or even the right to go to public facilities or to have the same legal rights as everyone else.

DONAHUE: Do you think your awareness of and to some extent you direct experience of persecution of the Jews during World War II, affected your, influenced your interest in working for civil rights for blacks?

ROSENBERG: Oh, I’m sure it did. I’m sure of it. The history of persecution that Jews had, what we went through as a family and as Jews had a lot to do with my wanting to participate in the Civil Rights Movement. It’s the same thing. I mean it is essentially the same thing. Mistreatment of blacks, maybe it isn’t genocide, but there were certainly the lynching periods when many blacks were killed. Not in the scale that was true in the Holocaust. But I think it was the same thing that motivates, helped to motivate me to work there. And in the services to essentially trying to do something similar there on an individual basis. To provide those opportunities so that people are at least even in courts and that they can find lawyers to advocate their positions, which they, in the courts, which they otherwise wouldn’t be able to do. And I’ve said many times, I think it’s a mark, a good mark, one of the things that this country ought to be proud, is the fact that it does fund programs like ours, so that people, and provide lawyers to low income people. It even makes it possible to sue the government if necessary, that biting the hand that feeds you, if you have to. You don’t have to do that as much as we did. We don’t get the funds that we ought to have, that’s regrettable. Just as regrettable as it was that it took so long to get to the days of the civil rights, it took….Brown against the Board of Education is nineteen fifty-four and we aren’t fully at the end of it yet with regard to higher education. It takes thirty and forty years. Court processes are slow. But I think it all has to do with human rights, treating people, giving everyone the same opportunity, whether they are young or old, white or black.

DONAHUE: Would you tell how you met Jean?

ROSENBERG: My wife, Jean?

DONAHUE: Get a chance to fill in the record. Your wife, Jean.

ROSENBERG: I met Jean in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. She was, I was the Deputy of the Southeastern Section, which handled Alabama, Mississippi. No Alabama and not Mississippi. My section chief was Frank Dunbar and Jean came to the section as a research analyst, which she mentioned to you. They are now called paralegals. We call them also administrative representatives here. They do a little different work in my organization. But John Doar was invited to speak at Earlum College in Jean’s senior year, or maybe her junior year. Her roommate, Dorothy, now Landsburg, was named Shelton, was in charge of the speaking program for some reason. And she had heard about John Doar’s work and asked him to come to Earlum to speak. And he came there and then he, I believe first hired Dorothy for the summer to work for him and he also met Jean. Or she came to, or she came to Washington. I don’t know whether he hired her then. They were about, they were the two, I think, the first research analysts. Dorothy later on after I….And so, Jean came to this section and we began working together. I was second in charge of the section and she was working on cases, so I think we once….A group of us went on a skiing trip and that was the first time we had any opportunity to be together socially. That’s when I guess we were still drawing some lines where we were at work. She was just a new employee and working under, not directly under me, but with some other lawyers in preparing cases. What they would do is analyze the documents, like the voting records we brought back. We similarly starting doing the same thing with schools. Normally in a school desegregation case, someone like Jean might go into the Superintendent’s office under a court order or voluntarily and start analyzing where the white students and the black students in the county lived and why they were not being assigned….Say, it was pretty apparent in the segregated school systems that you have, especially where there was bussing, that black children would need to pass a white school to be assigned to their black school. And to put those patterns together and to analyze how the school system assigned students deliberately, so that white students would be together and black students would continue to be together. Or route buses in a way that made it sure that schools remained segregated. So they were really analyzing those records, which they would then present to the lawyers. And the same thing in employment cases, where, you know, in a large factory, where you looked at the number of applicants for jobs and determined that a black was passed over, even though, let’s say that he had made an application to get to a particular job and the company said well you weren’t qualified in another area. By looking at several of those situations you could look, you’d only know from the records whether the person was actually put in, had the qualifications or not, or whether they passed over someone who was black. Or they didn’t, the black who had applied was obviously qualified or less qualified than the person they hired. That kind of analysis, which was then given to the lawyers. That’s what Jean was hired to do. We, later on when we were, she worked there about a year, well, let’s see. It might not have even been a year. When we went to Alabama on this voting rights case, the Jim Clark case, Jean was there with me. She was involved in some records analysis. And I almost, we were not yet married and I almost had to put her on the stand, but I didn’t. And there were a couple of other situations where she ended up in a place where, in a case that I was working on, where we began to suspect that John Doar was deliberately sending her to cases that I was working on, since we had started dating or people knew that we had sort of started dating. So, after we worked on this case involving Jim Clark, we went over to, it was sort of a night and day affair. She was telling you that we had this unfortunate situation where Lois Baker, who was our secretary. We hired the first probably, black secretary. We had an office in Selma, Alabama. There was a lawyer from the Civil Rights Division, named Chad [INAUDIBLE], who was the first lawyer that we had in a field office. He and his family moved to Selma and were there. And Chad hired Lois Baker as a secretary and she was an African-American. She was the one who had these epileptic seizures. She was just very young. I think she was only about nineteen. I went back to Selma for the thirtieth anniversary of the Selma, of the Voting Rights Act in nineteen ninety-five. They had a big get together. It happened that I was going to Birmingham for a Legal Services meeting and one of the lawyers who works in my program, Larry York, and I went over to Selma for a couple of days. There was a….They have a small voting rights museum there. There were some people around who we visited and I visited Lois, who had since gotten married and had two, several children. And thinking back….She’s the head of the computer section at Montgomery Air Force Base or something at this point in time. But after that Jean and I went over to Montgomery and helped work on another, on a school case for several days. It was the statewide school desegregation case against Macon County. They needed some help. They were just going to trial and they needed some help in getting the thing going. And Brian, my roommate, I was living at the time with a lawyer named Brian Landsburg, who then subsequently married Jean’s roommate, Dorothy Landsburg, who was the one that John had invited to come out. And Brian was my roommate. We lived together in a small house in Washington that we had bought, that we had rented from a former lawyer with the Division. Anyway after that was over, Jean went back to Philadelphia. You asked me how I met her. That’s how I met her, after the skiing trip we started dating. Then after working together so much, I think we just decided, I just asked her to see if she thought we ought to get married.

DONAHUE: Now will you tell the story of how you did that…[INAUDIBLE]?

ROSENBERG: Well, I was with, actually John Doar, I think partially to see that I got home. But to assign me, Jean went back to Philadelphia after the Montgomery trip. And John asked me to go to Charlotte. My classmate from law school, Julius Chambers, who as I mentioned was my African-American classmate, had gone, was practicing in Charlotte, had become a very well known lawyer, who was eventually, in later years argued the Charlotte desegregation case in the Supreme Court. But he had started a law firm and was involved in a lot of civil rights activities, and there had been an attempt to bomb his house. I think the mail – he hadn’t gotten hurt, didn’t do a lot of damage. But the mailbox, there had been some exterior damage. And we had started an FBI investigation and it looked like it was fairly, clearly to do with the Klan. And so John asked me to go up there and look into that and maybe talk with the U.S. Attorney’s office. And my friend, Nick Flannery, who had done the Carroll County case with me. A wonderful lawyer, who, when he left the Division went to work for, in Boston with the Center for Law and Education, which was the Legal Services support center for education cases. He was the chief trial lawyer in the Boston school desegregation case, if you remember then. But Nick went with me to Charlotte and we started doing some investigation. And we went out to eat, we were in line going out to eat and I said to Nick, I asked him to hold my place in line, that I would be back in a few minutes and I wanted to make a phone call. And I called Jean at her house. Now whether I thought well maybe she would come down. It was just, see Charlotte is only twenty miles from Gastonia. In fact I don’t think, I was staying with Nick and Charlotte and I had not, I’m not sure I had even been home yet. I don’t know why, whether John sent me there so I’d have a chance to see my folks. I think he thought, literally being from North Carolina and he knew that I knew Julius, I would have some interest in this case, being from home. So, I called her on the phone and said, will you marry me or don’t you think we should get married, since we’ve been together all this time and seem to get along pretty well. We’d actually had been, I mean we had been dating pretty steadily by that time. Had even taken a trip or two with Dorothy and Brian. But we had not really talked about taking the plunge, I think. Jean would, reminds me that I told her, when I first started going out with her, when we started going out, that I really would not consider marrying somebody who was not Jewish. I had announced that early on in our dating. Must have let that one go by the board.

DONAHUE: You don’t remember saying that?

ROSENBERG: Oh, I don’t know whether, I’m sure I did. I’m sure I did. I’m sure it came up early. Or once we started seeing each other and it became a consideration, I’m sure my influence and my history was still pretty strong. And I did not think I would ever marry somebody who was not Jewish. But I did.

DONAHUE: Was that premeditated, that phone call? It sounds like it was just all of sudden you’re waiting in line for food and you just feel like, I gotta go propose marriage. [LAUGHING]

ROSENBERG: I think it was clear, I put Jean on the plane and I suppose I knew that I was pretty much in love with her and we ought to do that. Why I did it at that particular moment, who knows? Maybe it was the first free moment. We were working on this Klan case and I just had a desire to do it. And I knew we would go back to work on the Klan case, probably and that there would be an opportunity for her to come down. That I would be at home. And then she said, her dad suggested it. I think I got on the phone with them. I don’t know whether I suggested they come down with Jean or her father was never one to sit around and wait. So, then I was able to tell Nick when I got back in line, there’s a wedding in the offing. We were engaged for, I think from November, maybe that was the engagement call. We got married in February nineteen sixty-seven. So, that was probably like October, November of nineteen sixty-six.

DONAHUE: And when did you meet her?

ROSENBERG: Probably, let’s see the Selma case was earlier in sixty-six, so she came to work in sixty-five. So, she came to work right, probably right about the time of the Voting Rights Act. She graduated from Earlum in sixty-five. Because we just got a post card, she will be having her thirty-fifth reunion next year. Sent an e-mail out to Dorothy Landsburg. They got married, we were the first of about four or five, actually. She was living, at the time Jean was living in an apartment with Dorothy and another woman named Mary Lee, then Campbell. And all three of them married Civil Rights Division lawyers within a year of each other. And Mary Lee has spent most of her life working for the Children’s Defense Fund. She’s very up in the hierarchy with Mary Ann Eddlemann. She does a lot of foster care issues, a lot of lobbying. She’s a terrific person. And then Dorothy went back to law school. When they, Brian became the Chief of the Appeals Section of the Civil Rights Division, which he held for a number of years. He worked in our Alabama Section, under me. We were living together, but he was in my section for a long, and he then became a section chief, I think. And became Chief of the Appeals Section and stayed there until, probably ten years ago, when he joined the faculty at McGeorge Law School in California. And then Dorothy went back to law school and she’s a lawyer with a very large, not a very large, but with a fairly prominent law firm in Sacramento. They live in Sacramento. And she’s been recently for the last year been doing a big case with John Doar in his private law firm practice. So most of these connections have sort of stayed together. It’s a little bit like the Civil Rights Division, fairly small, family. The Assistant Attorney General who replaced him, Steve Pollack, Jean and I….They had three kids and they never had taken a vacation since he came out of the Navy. They were all small. So, one of first volunteer actions was to move in and they took a two week vacation, and we moved in with their kids and did child care for a while. All of them are now married or getting married or having children and it was quite an experience for us. I think even one of the gerbils died during our sitting. So, that’s how that happened.

END OF TAPE 20.U.5f, JOHN ROSENBERG, SIDE A

BEGINNING OF TAPE 20.U.5f, JOHN ROSENBERG, SIDE B

ARWEN DONAHUE: You were just talking about proposing to Jean and the immediate aftermath of that. Had Jean met your parents by then, by the time that you proposed to her?

JOHN ROSENBERG: I think she’d been there once, I’d have to ask her. But I think she had been down once and that was probably a clue that [INAUDIBLE] Pretty certain that she had been to the house once before. So, they knew of her and they knew….I’m not sure how I managed to do that. Whether it was on a vacation or whether we had been working on a case. I just don’t remember, but I think they knew that we were pretty serious.

DONAHUE: And that first meeting between her parents and your parents and you….Would you like to describe that scene?

: Well as Jean told you, she was there without me with the both of them facing each other for a little while, so I guess they were a little bit new to each other. But her father is a pretty extroverted person, who has a lot of interests and was then much younger, quite young. Was very interested in spiritual things and I think my dad was able to talk to him. And they got along very well. Jean’s mother and my mother hit it off really well. I think Jean’s mother had been a secretary and was always doing transcription work of one sort or another. And in fact, in the last fifteen years or so she would not, well after we were married, Jean’s mother wouldn’t take a full time job, she worked for Manpower, so they could come down and see Michael or be with the grandson and then the grandchildren. We were both, in the sense that her father’s background was German and was the son of a tailor immigrant family. His mother was very strong. He grew up in New York City at a time when much of downtown New York was still farm, farming country. There are some old letters in her family that I was reading when I was home, where they were describing the winter and it was cold and they’d have to go outside to the outhouse to relieve themselves. And they were literally living in a farming area where the United Nations Building is now. But the point was that they were sort of both from old European generation backgrounds, where the fathers were working and were sort of a dominant and they were making the money and the mothers were at home. And the household was sort of run the way the fathers said it was run. In that way, I think, there was some commonality, even if the religions weren’t the same and the families got off to a pretty good start. They didn’t stay very long on that occasion and I don’t remember, I mean they saw, saw each other periodically and from time to time. Jean’s parents used to, as she said, came to visit us a lot more. They came down here a lot. They really took a major interest in their grandchildren. My parents had moved to Florida and did not really come up….They made a trip up after we moved here from North Carolina, when they were still living in Gastonia. As I said my father, sixty-five, let’s say in nineteen sixty-six….We got married in sixty-seven. He retired about that time and moved to Florida shortly thereafter. So that we would go see them usually at Christmas. But they didn’t make many trips up. Right after we moved to Prestonsburg they made a, they drove over, got as far as Pikeville and the four lane was just being developed, was being blasted open between Pikeville and Prestonsburg. So they got within thirty miles of home and then had to take a thirty mile detour around the back hollows from Wheelwright and I don’t think, I think that sort of, was enough for them. Although they moved to Florida, they never really made another big driving excursion up this way. I don’t know that I have many more, it’s one of those things I don’t have a lot of….Jean probably recalls better than I do. We went back for….After we got married and worked in the Civil Rights Division, when Jean then, when Michael was born in nineteen seventy in April, we had decided then to leave the Division. That was when the Nixon Administration had come in and even though I was Chief of the Criminal Section, they were not, pretty much still let me have a free hand. The Houston school case was one of the last cases that they filed in which the government, which I had written the pleadings in which we asked for bussing as a relief. And they were generally to eliminate segregation, to start bussing black kids to, across to white schools and whites to black schools. We didn’t get all of that in the relief. We had to pair up some schools and we made some other major improvements. But they were, in my view, certainly and others, were retreating on school desegregation. The climate was not what it had been and I, we decided then, I think, that we had been there long enough. Besides I had been there, was in a very senior position and at that point you’re almost starting to price yourself out of the market if you want to make a career change. You might stay with the government and decide to go, to keep, to go up another notch or two or maybe make more money. Or if you’re going to a law firm, in order to get a reasonable salary, too, it was at the point where it was a good time for me to do that. So we, and Michael had just been born, it was a nice time to take off for the summer. And we decided then to go on a large camping trip. We got our little car and the baby carriage. We bought a Peugeot for eight hundred dollars that looked like it had a lot of miles left on it. And we headed North and we went North along the American and Canadian coast. We went to the Canadian – American National Parks, Fundy and all the way along, Cape Briton, out to Cape Briton and Prince Edward Island. Came back to Quebec and basically got away from it all. I think I had one call from a firm and decided to leave it, not to bother with it. We weren’t really sure, where, we knew we wanted to do something useful, where I felt I was using my legal talents to somebody’s benefit. I had talked to some firms and that didn’t really excite me at the time, but I think I was just more, we were really more into making the decision to leave, which was a big thing, because we didn’t have a job. We wanted to get away for a while and we had some money saved up, so we, while I was on that trip one of the….When we came back….Someone left a message for us. One of my former colleagues from the Division, Terry Lensner was the head of Legal Services for the Office of Economic Opportunity. And he was the one who suggested while we were on this camping trip that we might want to drive through Charleston, West, to come through West Virginia and into Kentucky. This is by way of answering you about my parents, because they had moved to Florida. And we were sort of on our way to being, to spend the Jewish holidays with my parents in Florida, which is about this time of year, in September. So we were off, I think we returned from, we were, went over to Cape Briton and we went back to Quebec. It was really cold and we bought a tent heater. And then we went from there down to Boston and all of a sudden it was ninety-six and we were staying with former colleagues of the Civil Rights Division, who were in graduate school. Harvard, I think. And they had this small apartment without an air conditioner. We were burning up. Well anyway, we started back down and Terry Lensner got in touch with us and we went through Charleston. And the program in Kentucky was then associated with this group in West Virginia, called Appalachian Research and Defense Fund, which had been founded by three lawyers, four lawyers, who wanted to start a public interest law firm. And they had begun some environmental work, but were having a tough time economically. And they had gotten in touch with Terry Lensner at OEO and he wanted to, was willing to do some, to fund an organization to do, under the auspices of Legal Services, to look at some of the symptomatic issues around poverty in the Central Appalachian area. Out of state mineral interests, Black Lung disease, environmental damages related to coal mining, deep mining and surface mining. And Paul Kaufmann, who was one of the four lawyers. There were four attorneys, Kaufmann was a former gubernatorial candidate and was real active in Democratic politics, had been a private attorney. And John Bittner, fellow named Ratliffe and a woman named Naomi Cohen. And then there was a small group here in Eastern Kentucky of lawyers, who had worked as a group called Mountain People’s Rights. And there was a fellow named Howard Thorkelson, who was from Pennsylvania. And he had gotten a couple of other lawyers to come down here, although they were not yet licensed and they were having financial difficulties. So the two of them were sort of interested in working together and getting this federal money through the West Virginia organization. West Virginia then had a Republican governor, Arch Moore. He was hostile to the Legal Services, as was the Republican governor in Kentucky, Louie Nunn. So there was a, the West Virginia Technical Institute, was an educational institution, so Terry concocted a scheme whereby he would fund West Virginia Tech, because educational grants were not subject to gubernatorial veto as the other OEO grants were and then they would in turn fund Appal Red. But anyway, I guess I’m getting a little ahead of myself. I was just, we were on this camping trip and so we came to Charleston and talked to the people there. Paul said why don’t you go down and talk to the Kentucky people, because Howard Thorkelson is going to leave and they need someone to replace him and we’re going to be funding them. If you’re interested we would seriously consider asking you to take over this group in Kentucky. So, we came down here and we came here to Prestonsburg. On an August or a September evening and pitched out tent out there at Jenny Wiley. Back then, oh actually the campground was at the other end up here near Auxier, that entrance. Jean wanted to go out and make sure there weren’t any bears or foxes. There wasn’t anybody there but us. It was really after the camping season. But we met the people who were here and everybody seemed very friendly and we decided to go down and….I had already gotten some names of people, Harry Caudill, who you know wrote “Night Comes to the Cumberland”, was on the Appal Red Board in West Virginia. He was a friend of Paul Kaufmann’s, I think, and had been very, Kaufmann had put some people from Kentucky on his Board. He wanted this thing to be more of a regional program because there was so many of the issues were common to the Central Appalachia. State lines really didn’t mean anything. The strip mining problems of Kentucky and West Virginia were the same. Unregulated strip mining, land owners having their land torn up without their consent, that sort of thing. So, I went down and talked to Harry Caudill. There was a woman, here in Mud Creek they were doing a lot of, they were having a lot of problems around health issues. Hospitals weren’t taking people who couldn’t pay. Roberta Hall was her name, she is a good friend, who still works at the, founded the Mud Creek Clinic here in our area. [INAUDIBLE] Kentucky. Fellow named Joe Bagley, who was running a country store, who was very strong against strip mining. His wife, Bagley, she got her Master’s in Education from the University of Chicago. She was a wonderful person. They….And Joe was born here in Floyd County and was part Indian. We talked a lot about their history and the problems that he saw, people were getting run over by strip miners. Because Kentucky’s courts allowed mining without, strip mining without land owner approval. These out of state mineral owners had come here in the late eighteen nineties and bought out all the minerals. We’re talking about country people and the acceptance of outsiders. Have you ever read Harry Caudill’s book, “Night Comes to the Cumberland”? Well you know, he describes this situation so well where these land agents for the Northern philanthropists, Rockefeller and large oil holding and mineral holding companies sent their agents down here. They would visit these farmers who lived in very remote hollers, where they were farming, out in the hills. They would come in and tell their stories, spend the night, talk about all the good things that were going on in the world and how nice this place was. And then they would suggest to them that they should go ahead and sell over their mineral rights because it wasn’t really any benefit to them that they could see. They didn’t really know what mining was. There wasn’t any huge deep mine there. The only use they made of their coal was to cut into the hillside enough to get the coal to use for heating up their cabins and their homes, which is what most of them did. You can see an outcrop of the coal and they would run a scraper along the mountain and take out a little bit of coal. But no one, certainly was aware as they were in other countries of deep mining. And I’m sure these agents didn’t talk a great deal about the possibility of a huge, deep mine. This was in the eighteen nineties, nineteen hundreds, before the time of the railroads. And subsequently the railroads came in and all these minerals had been bought up. They literally bought up all of the mineral ownership in Eastern Kentucky. Under the common law, the mineral estate is severed from the surface, so what you have left is the land on top. And they gave them, the deeds they signed as you know, were known as broad form deeds because they were so broad in their language. They literally gave the owner of the minerals the right to take the minerals and all steps reasonably necessary to build roads and railroads and tram roads. Whatever might be necessary that was incidental to taking out the coal. And they would sign those minerals away. Kentucky courts held those deeds were so broad they gave the mineral owner paramount right to the surface as long as the mineral owner didn’t arbitrarily misuse that right. As long as he mined by reasonable methods and took the coal out by an acceptable method, the surface owner could not object to that. So those Joe had one of those old deeds and told me what an awful instrument that was even though at the time when they executed the deeds, no one could have envisioned these current methods of mining. Bulldozer, mechanical and this huge, mechanized equipment that was in use seventy-five years later and that the courts would hold that to be allowable. In most contract law, the contract applies to those things that are within the reasonable contemplation of the parties, like deep mining. There was no doubt, if you were going to mine back then it would be deep mining to get the coal. You never challenged that. But the notion that they could use a method that was not at all in anybody’s contemplation was rejected in other states. Virtually. I mentioned West Virginia, I guess that wasn’t really right. The West Virginia courts had said you had to have the landowner’s consent. You could get a surface mining permit and you could pay for that. And that was what Pennsylvania, and Ohio, and many of these others, Illinois, all the other states, the courts had said, but not Kentucky. So Joe, we talked for a long time, was pointing out, also how poor people couldn’t get lawyers to challenge those deeds. They couldn’t get lawyers to challenge a permit application if someone applied for one. But there were many situations where he thought it would be just a wonderful thing if we could have lawyers available to represent poor people. Because he saw these situations happen so often. We went on. We went on to Florida to visit my mom and dad and while on the way I think we kind of decided that this would be an interesting opportunity to try to come to Eastern Kentucky. It would be a worthwhile way to practice law and to provide that opportunity. There was interesting work to be done and useful and perhaps important work to do on behalf of [INAUDIBLE] compliance. And also to help start this Legal Services program, which was, had sort of a small beginning in helping people’s rights. So we decided to come and we came. We moved to Prestonsburg. At first I looked around in Barbourville. We had a little tough time getting off the ground, because the, we had some disagreements about how to do this the best way. Some people, some of the mountain people’s rights members thought that it was more important to organize, to organize work with low income groups like the Welfare Rights group, rather than doing lawyering work. So it wasn’t quite as smooth sailing getting started as I had hoped. But after a little while we got on our way and Joe Bagley’s son, J. T. Bagley, who had just gotten out of the Marines and gone back to law school, turned out to be the first lawyer that I hired. And I hired a fellow named Mort Stand, who is now in Australia, teaching. And we started off with, then a fellow named Paul Forwey, who is the Domestic Relations Commissioner in Franklin County, and we started in that little house that I pointed out to you on the way up here. So, that’s how it began. And as I was telling you, it wasn’t an easy beginning. I think the Bar Associations were very suspicious and I think they were threatened and thought really we were going to compete with lawyers for clients that would be able to pay. And then some, many lawyers, who were employed or retained by coal companies were not particularly sympathetic to the notion that lawyers might start to challenge some of these practices and give people representation in the courts. We were not the most popular people in town when we started. I had difficulty renting an office. Finally found an office in the place where Jean and I ended up living for a long time on the other side of town, in a week of each other. And we got started. It was also a difficult time because in the national level, President Nixon had an office of Economic Opportunity Director, who was opposed to Legal Services, bringing any of these sort of controversial cases against public officials, and challenging welfare rights practices and that sort of thing. And he, he decided to, he wanted to de-fund those programs. So I had only been here about a year when all of that began in nineteen seventy-three and it looked like we might lose our money. Half of the lawyers were on half salaries and the secretary, we had to hire, we got a lawyer in Washington, Steve Pollack, I mentioned to you, I used to work with, to represent us to threaten to sue OEO to get our funding. Some other programs, similarly went through a period of that sort. Governor Reagan at that time, who would become President, had sort of declared war on Legal Services in California, who had represented migrant farm workers and had also won some fairly major welfare decisions with regard to hearing rights. And it showed that the California Welfare System was violating the rights of Welfare recipients and applicants. And he was angry and tried to start, established an inquiry, tribunal out in California, that sort of thing. Actually the tribunal came out with a report, this included some judges, that was very favorable to CRLA. Then when Reagan became president, he decided to do it all over again.

DONAHUE: What it CRLA?

ROSENBERG: California Rural Legal Assistance Program, a rural program much like we are here. But fortunately we managed to weather those storms. We were able to, in nineteen, we were able to reach an accommodation with Legal Services actually, in that nineteen seventy-three when we were represented by Steve Pollack and we sort of severed our ties to West Virginia by establishing a separate corporation here. I mean it, they established, we added “of Kentucky” at the end of our name. We’re still very good friends with the people in West Virginia and some of the work we do is the same. But in West Virginia they ended up establishing a judicare program, which is a program where cases are sent to the private bar, instead of a staff attorney. And you have a small central office and the cases are then contracted with lawyers. It tends to be a lot more expensive. But Appal Red’s office did maintain intact in West Virginia, just with a fewer number of lawyers. Then we started our own program here. And in nineteen seventy-four, one of the last things that President Nixon did was to sign Legal Services Corporation Act, which he had vetoed once before. Then the corporations started getting larger amounts of money from year to year. And between nineteen seventy-five and nineteen seventy-eight we expanded from the single office here in Prestonsburg to ten offices that we opened and still have. And we went from probably three hundred thousand to about two millions dollars a year in our budget. We had eleven offices by nineteen eighty, including we had a research office in Prestonsburg, I mean in Lexington, which we still have. So we undertook some very important day-to-day litigation. We represented a lot of people in everyday problems with family law, consumer rights, housing problems. And we did some of the larger challenges involved in, with regard to the coal mines. We found out that the agencies that governed all of these programs were not really very responsive at times. Like State Mines Safety and Health Administration did not do a good job in protecting the rights of coal miners. So many miners were fired because they complained about unsafe conditions. I mean, that’s what would happen to them if they complained. And so we were able to start representing them to get their jobs back and to get damages for them. And then in the environmental area we represented numbers of people who were challenging surface mining permits because they posed dangers to their homes and their property. And we gradually, as we kept after this Broad Form deed, we challenged it in the courts unsuccessfully. And we eventually wrote legislation that corrected the problem, drafted a statute that said if kinds of mining methods were not described in the deed, that it would be assumed that it referred only to methods that were in existence at the time the deed was executed. And in Eastern Kentucky and in most places that would mean deep mining only. That was first introduced in nineteen ninety-four. There were some previous efforts, unsuccessful….There was an earlier statute that required surface owner consent and the courts struck that down. And then this legislation of ours was also struck down on a four – three opinion. The court said that the legislature could not tell the courts how to interpret deeds, which I thought was bad reasoning. After that a legislator from Pike County, Clayton Little, introduced at the urging of Kentuckians…

END OF TAPE 20.U.5f, JOHN ROSENBERG, SIDE B