Oral History Interview with John Rosenberg Part III

John Rosenberg Interview Part III

INTERVIEWED BY

ARWEN DONAHUE

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

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

JOHN ROSENBERG: I was just saying that the constitutional amendment was passed in nineteen eighty-eight, so it was introduced in nineteen, I guess the nineteen eighty-eight legislative session. And it was passed by ninety-two percent of the voters. It was a great publicity campaign by KFTC, a lot of letters to the editor, sort of put them on the map. We had started KFTC with a small group in Hazard, Kentucky. A group of citizens came together to talk about fair taxation of minerals, initially. Because the coal under the ground, not only did the land owner not have the opportunity to object to whether they could be surface mining or not, but they were paying virtually all the taxes on the property. They were not….And the Kentucky constitution said that all properties, cashed, is taxed in fair cash value. But the minerals weren’t being taxed. The group looked at that and decided that they would try to start an organization called the Kentucky Fair Tax Coalition. I’m even been credited with giving, we were sitting around the room trying to decide what should this thing be called? People were throwing up names. [LAUGHING] Somebody said, I think it was, whatever the various combinations people had been throwing out, was that I suggested it be called Kentuckians Fair Tax Coalition. But the other issue it took on was the Broad Form Deed. And the group started very small, it was just kind of a get together really. One of the members who, one of the folks who was there was a young man named Joe Zakus, who had come from Pennsylvania and was interested in working with local citizens groups. And he had come, was living in David, I think and had gotten involved in some issues over in Martin County. It didn’t have anything to do with the Broad Form Deed. It was really a proposal to move a low income community out of a flood prone area. And they were going to fill it in and put in new housing or industrial. The only thing was they forgot to discuss it with the people who were living there. And he organized an effort there to, which ultimately stopped that. They backed off on that project. But in the process began a group called the Martin County Concerned Citizens, who then were involved with a number of environmental and social, social active….Got involved in issues of social concern. We represented them one year in a case challenging the application of….Kentucky Power wanted to build another power generating plant. And the reason they wanted to build it was to sell more power to other companies, but it would have raised the rates of everyone, including the Martin County citizens, and people who lived in that area. And we had a lawyer in Legal Services in Lexington, Tony Martin, who focused on energy work, and basically demonstrated that there was no need for the power plant. But all it was going to do was increase everybody’s power bill. They had plenty of generating power, they were just trying to expand themselves. And the stockholders might benefit, but the Martin County citizen group was the named party. And so that was just to say that, even though a group that was called Kentuckians for Fair Tax Coalition and decided later to rename itself, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, because local chapters were working on different issues of local concern. Didn’t necessarily involve minerals and that sort of thing. But they really put themselves on the map with the campaign to get the constitutional amendment passed. So that amendment was on the ballot in nineteen eighty-eight, along with the lottery. And the lottery barely passed. It passed by, I think, fifty-one or two percent of the vote. Ninety-two percent of the vote, people voted for the Broad Form Deed amendment, which showed that people knew what they were doing. In fact, I remember when, early when we had been here not too many years, The Courier Journal, I think did an informal poll. And something like ninety-three percent of the people thought they shouldn’t allow anybody to strip mine your land without your consent. But I was then, one of my, the coal industry decided they wanted to challenge the constitutionality of that constitutional amendment as violating the federal constitution. Because they claimed that mineral ownership rights had been established by these series of Kentucky cases in the Supreme Court over the years and that people when they bought mineral rights expected to be able to legally surface mine. And we argued….I was representing an older couple in Johnson County, Garnet and Eugene Ward, who lived on a small farm. They really weren’t farming. It was in a holler that had not been mined. It was a mining application by a company. And at the trial court, one of the attorneys who was here then was handling, handled that case and it was on appeal when it came to me. And I took the case over. And we ended up arguing the constitutionality of the amendment in the Supreme Court. The attorney general argued in our support and the court then agreed with our theory that they never had the right in the first place to grant the right to strip mine. It took a lot of years, but finally the right was….If you come out today, surface mine anybody’s land without their consent….

DONAHUE: When did that final decision come down?

ROSENBERG: Nineteen ninety. Supreme Court decision was stated in nineteen ninety. Ward versus, Ward versus [INAUDIBLE] I forgot the last name completely. I can talk about that case for a long time, but that’s sort of a summary. Garnet, now both of the Wards. Eugene died while we were in the Supreme Court. And Garnet died a couple of years back. She was a very feisty woman. She claimed….No one else had ever paid any taxes on this property. And they didn’t know that anybody else had any claim to it. She thought they owned the place. When we were in circuit court we asserted that. There was some basis for her claim, because when the minerals were sold, about nineteen ten, really interesting, by, the local owner, the owner was in Johnson County and he sold the mineral rights to a company in New York, that wanted to develop these minerals. And he sold….And they promised to pay him with….They gave him shares of stock and said they would buy those shares back once their company was in operation. And a year went by and nothing happened, so he sued them to get his money. And actually in that suit someone, a deposition of him was taken. And when he sold that property he said, I will give you the minerals and you may mine that property, but I want you to leave all the walnut, chestnut, hemlock trees over ten inches, which made it impossible to strip mine. And so we actually argued initially it was not a Broad Form Deed, that this deed specifically was limited to deep mining because it was impossible to strip mine, because he had said that. And on deposition, which was….the deposition from his testimony was still in the courthouse. And in the deposition he reasserted that, that he wanted those trees left alone. You could use the smaller timbers as people did in deep mines. Timbers under ten inches were used for shorings in the deep mine workings. So that made good sense. He was saying you can have the saplings, but I want those good trees left. So our local judge agreed with that and said you can’t mine. They appealed to the Court of Appeals and they won. The Court of Appeals, the intermediate appellate court said, well that’s just what these deed provisions say, but the mineral owner still has the paramount right to mine through our decisions. So then we took that case to the Supreme Court and in a discretionary review. We asked them to review that. They took the case and so the amendment was argued, we argued the amendment on that. So Garnet, they never, they did not….Anyway, when these minerals were sold, he did some, there was very careful, plattes were laid out and surveyed. And it was not, and when they filed this mining permit and claimed they owned the minerals were Garnet and Eugene lived, they didn’t do that very well. Where they claimed their boundaries looked like went….She could, we could make a colorful assertion that that didn’t coincide with those original plattes. Because they didn’t prove that, clearly she should have had the right to those minerals, but we lost on that claim. It’s just an aside, but I think she probably didn’t own the minerals. It couldn’t clearly be shown that she owned the minerals. But we won the case, so that’s the law. So that was a nice effort to have been involved in and one of the many achievements that we made along with many other cases. [INAUDIBLE]

DONAHUE: When you first came to Prestonsburg, you and Jean, were you planning on really settling here, really staying for the long haul?

ROSENBERG: I doubt it. I mean I think we probably thought we might be here two or three years. It was a real big transition for her, because she was, had never lived in a rural area or a town the size of Gastonia, which was twenty-five thousand or thirty thousand. She was from Philadelphia and then lived in Washington. I mean she had been in Southern communities before. So when I looked for a house, she wanted a sidewalk that she could roll the baby carriage on and be near a shopping area, David for example.

DONAHUE: Is that what happened?

ROSENBERG: Well, I found a house in town that was kind of in a residential area. It’s not where we live now. We moved after ten years, out a little ways, near a school when Michael was in elementary school. The kids went to, both of them went to a day care center in David. In David, the development of the David community was another really major part of what we did in terms of economic development in a small community. We were able to purchase for a local community development group. Help the development in that town.

DONAHUE: Do you want to talk about David and your involvement?

ROSENBERG: David is about nine miles from Prestonsburg and in the nineteen thirties, especially, it was a booming coal town. It was what they called a model community, sort of like Wheelwright. Many of these coal, you know most of the Floyd county and this area had a number of coal camps. They were basically company towns, because the company owned the homes where the people lived and the company paid them with scrip. And they owed their soul to the company store, as it were. But some of the homes were quite nice. I mean, I think they were very nice communities and very close communities. There were some employers that were better than others. And there were the mine wars in Harlan County, all of the difficult history involving unionization. Where it was successful, and where it wasn’t. But David, the mine there was the Princess Coal Company. And David was mentioned, was named for a fellow named David Frances, who when I came here, lived in Huntington. He still, that family owned the minerals. The only swimming pool in this area, in this end of town was at David and people used to go out there and go swimming. They had a train and a little airport. They have a school. It was a very vibrant mining community and when the mine closed in the forties, it kind of went down hill. And it was purchased by, the buildings, not the minerals, but the town of David and the ridge around it and the homes that were there was purchased by a small group of businessmen here in Prestonsburg. People paid rent to them. A group of Catholic priests from St. Vincent’s mission came to David in the late sixties and seventies and started teaching bible school and some literacy training. Apparently they were approached by the businessmen to see if the mission was interested in buying the town. I think they viewed themselves as absentee landlords and all they did was collect the rent. They saw the water system going downhill. They didn’t really, weren’t interested in developing the community. The homes were in pretty bad shape. They weren’t really slum lords, they just weren’t doing anything to keep it up. It was a private water system. So, the Father Matthew at the time, one day came to see me, told us about the offer to buy the town. They weren’t interested in doing it, but they wondered whether we could, whether the community might be able to buy it in some way, if they could figure out, help them figure out how to do that. So, I asked a law student to do some research and we got a little help from the National Economic Development Law Center. And we decided, we put together an economic development, a corporation, a Kentucky corporation. And we started having some community meetings in David. And there was a company….The town wasn’t working, but Island Creek Coal Company still had a store that they owned. The old company store. There was a fellow named Tiller, who ran the store and who also – he read the Wall Street Journal. And he was a very smart guy. He was an interesting man. So, they elected him as chair of this group. And he became the first chair of our little community development corporation. We didn’t own anything yet, but they started planning. We started looking into the possibility of financing the purchasing of the town and how it might work. The problem was there was no water, the water system was unreliable. They had a pump that was literally held together by chicken wire. They were afraid to take the gamble unless they had water. We were sort of diverted for a couple of years until we were able to figure out with our local area development district how to, ultimately we were able to, got a grant, which helped one of the existing water districts bring water to a number of their new customers in the rural part. The Beaver-Elkhorn water district supplied water to a lot of the homes on Right and Left Beaver Creek. By getting them additional, those lines, they agreed they would run a line over to David, an extension. And we established a David Water District and went to the Public Service Commission to get approval to bring water to David through the water district, which would buy its water from this Beaver-Elkhorn Water District that had agreed to extend its lines. When we got that done, by that time Mr. Tiller had been transferred to somewhere, Western Kentucky. People were afraid the corporation was going to go in, go down, because he was really sort of a driving force. But there was a old coal miner, retired, who had black lung, named Ashland Howard, whose nickname was “Hawk”. And he had the energy and the spirit and the – even though he might not have had the formal education, to push this group along. And he took over, became the chair of that group. And we then, once we got the water district in, we put together a financing package, where we had a first mortgage from the local bank here in Prestonsburg and a second mortgage from the group in Washington, called the Housing Assistance Council. And the idea was that if the corporation could buy the property, all of David, then the renters could buy their homes in turn and the local bank would make those mortgages. So the bank would turn its money over quickly and get its mortgage paid back as people bought their houses. And the Housing Assistance Council in Washington helped, encourages developments of this sort. They were, I think we paid them back twice as fast. So, we were able to purchase the town. We had another lawyer, by that time I had another lawyer named Kate, who works over in Virginia now as a private practitioner. And she helped sort of put the deal together. And then after the town - We did all, this was a large amount of legal work. Public service commission [INAUDIBLE] We were also able to get the corporation to realize they needed to get some staff people. So we helped them to write a VISTA grant to get the VISTA down here. At the same time a young man named Danny Green had come to David and started a, at home, he had taken in some foster care kids. He came down as a volunteer with the mission. And he started the David school, which over the years has attained some national recognition for helping high school dropouts. He realized there was no real alternative school here. Kids would drop out, that was the end of it. The schools really just wiped their hands of them. He bought the old store building. We bought most of the town, ridge to ridge. And he bought several others and was able to get some financing for the old store, which became the school. There’s now a brand new building, which is very beautiful, that has been built in the meantime. Started the school. I’ve been on their Board and we’ve done a lot of things together. Afterwards the corporation built and developed about twenty-five new homes, Farmer’s Home Loan. Put up new houses where the old ones were, had deteriorated in one of the hollers. It’s a very nice, attractive town now. It’s sort of the Appalachian – we had this big battle over a strip mining permit at one point. There was a large block of coal left underground. I said strip mining. There were some strip mining attempts that we were able to fend off. But there was also a large amount of coal that had not been mined because they hit water in the mine. There was an attempt to re-open that, to start, to get a permit to mine that block of coal. And Danny and the community got very upset about that. And so we opposed that permit and there was a lot of community pressure, a lot of help. And thankfully that was, we were able to fend that off. But we’ve been very much, you’ve had deep mining and strip mining and coal truck traffic, all the problems that you see all over, in one little spot here in David. You have the craft co-operative as a new, which has become fairly successful. It’s a nice community. There were actually, we had plans to develop other parts of David, to expand it, but basically the community sort of decided it didn’t want to get any bigger. It’s a very interesting place. And we learned a great deal and I think had a lot to be proud of in terms of what the community did and the role that we were able to play, because they could never afford it, that sort of legal work, help.

DONAHUE: Okay, we were just talking a little bit, off tape, about how many things we’d, I’d still like to cover about your time in Prestonsburg and working for, with Appal Red. And we probably don’t have the time to get into it all today. So, I was thinking about, when we were just talking a little bit, off tape, about your time here in Prestonsburg, and maybe you can reflect on your work here and a little bit on just the, what you’ve, it turns out you’ve devoted your life to. I mean you had the opportunity of becoming a chemical salesman and you decided that wasn’t what you wanted to do. And you’ve gone along more in the direction of service. Any reflections or words on that?

ROSENBERG: Well, I think what I’m doing now has been in many ways has been the most fulfilling over the last thirty years. Working with the Civil Rights Division was a great opportunity to learn to practice law and to do something very worthwhile. The big difference is that in the Civil Rights Division, we didn’t live in those communities and that we came and went. Whereas, and I have great admiration for the people who stayed there and their courage and how difficult their lives were. The life we’ve had for the last thirty years in Prestonsburg has been here. And I wouldn’t at all compare myself to the African-Americans who lived in those communities and the life they had and how difficult that was, simply because we are white. And we live in an area where there are very few African-Americans. And I think their life has been difficult at times although it’s gotten much better. There is also a fair amount of blatant racism in this particular area, and some of it is direct racism. But over the years I’ve been able to, at least the only practicing attorney in Eastern Kentucky right now, is a woman who has her office in Jackson. She’s been there a number of years. And we’ve tried unsuccessfully to recruit some others, because they don’t…

DONAHUE: You’re talking about African-Americans?

ROSENBERG: Yeah, African-American lawyers, paralegals. You have to have a support system as a minority person to live, I think, wherever you are. It’s difficult to be alone. And in Hazard we have a church to which Cynthia from Jackson belongs. And there are some black communities that are concentrated in our areas. So the few people who have looked, that have really taken a little look at it, I think were, very cautious about, were not convinced they could feel comfortable living here. We do have a black secretary in Barbourville and one in Harlan and we have a paralegal in Richmond, Richmond having a fairly much larger African-American community. But the population is about ninety-eight percent white in our thirty-seven counties. But I think the point I wanted to make was that we do, Legal Services offices are in the communities where our clients are and so you are much more associated and you are a part of that community. I think we’re a lot closer to our clients and you get to know your clients. And you get to see the problems and live with the problems from day to day. Not to say that all of us are poor, but I think after your kids, especially when your children get into the schools you begin to feel that you have much more of a stake in trying to develop, do something about that community. You find other parents who really want the very best thing for their children, even though it may be what we’re doing in court is not always popular. Maybe our value systems are not on the same track as the other lawyers who for a large part are driven by the money they are going to make in private practice. They do some good things in private practice along the way, but generally in the social structure people are driven by money. So, I feel that the work we do, we represent about seven thousand clients a year and much of the work we do, whether for each of those clients, the case we help them on is the most important thing in the world, whether you’ve got to talk about an abused spouse or someone who’s about to be evicted from her apartment or someone you’re helping with social security benefits or something small or whether we’re involved in some major issue involving the Broad Form Deed or safety discrimination, the cases that tend to get the headlines. Working on Black Lung, working on trying to help make Black Lung regulations more responsive, more liberal, more than five percent of the claims are approved. Or something like David. Each of those are real, I think, positive contributions to helping people lead better lives and making the society a just one. So, I think it’s, you asked me a while ago did I think we were going to be here thirty years when I came and I said I thought we’d be here maybe two or three years. I think the work has been so challenging and the opportunity to do this work has been a real privilege, that I always say we’re fortunate at least to be paid for doing something we want to do. And the government, state and federal governments are willing to provide funds to do it. I think the newer, our younger lawyers give up a great deal to work for us, because they are working at very low salaries and many of them have large loan re-payments. They start at twenty-five thousand dollars a year and some of them have really huge debts of eighty, ninety thousand dollars to their law schools. We have a small loan re-payment program now that helps them, up to two thousand dollars a year. But they’re the ones in a way who are, I think, making a substantial sacrifice to work. We hope that the government, we can do better than that. That eventually we can work out, develop more programs that would encourage people to spend their lives in this sort of work. I think it’s been so, in part satisfying and challenging and all those adjectives that I’ve enjoyed it. I probably, there may have been times that Jean might have wondered whether we wouldn’t be better off going for a better educational system for our kids. Michael was academically very gifted and sort of ahead of the pack. We had our difficult times, early times with one of the teachers asked him to explain Hanukkah, the Jewish holiday one day. The kids were, some of the kids teased him while he was doing that, made it a little difficult. When he was first learning to…

DONAHUE: Teased him in terms of…?

ROSENBERG: Presenting this Jewish ceremony. I don’t remember all the details, but it hurt him because he was doing it at their request. And I think it was strange. It was a time when they were still…..

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

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

JOHN ROSENBERG: …threatened him because he couldn’t keep the crayons within the lines, which is still a problem for some children. I mean she was more concerned about his drawing, keeping the crayons in the lines. And what, how that would, then realizing how, what a negative reaction this could have on a child, who was basically an academically gifted young boy. But you know, those were….The teacher eventually left. And we, I think we were fortunate that we had some teachers who saw how bright he was and that he began, that he was able to get the best, was able to do quite well. And we had a principal who wanted, he was very interested in the best, in providing good education for mountain kids, and who encouraged Jean to help start a Gifted and Talented program in the school. And he never, there wasn’t a single swing on the yard when we first came there. And so we put together a little committee and gradually got a coal company to do some grading and developed a wonderful playground with the PTA, on the school grounds. And that he just, his name was John Pitts. He couldn’t figure out where he wanted to put the swings, so he hadn’t put them anywhere. But he just needed some help. And you know, I think as people realize that what you want is the same thing they want. That what you’re trying to do is really not a turnover, turn everything upside down, that we’re filing law suits every time….What we were trying to do is help the community and be good citizens. Then you begin to feel that people are on your side, even if the few lawyers aren’t, and that we have a lot of support in this community. I remember in our PTA when the movement first started to put the ten commandments up on the walls of classrooms, which is something that’s come back today again. If you’ve seen the paper, the Harlan County Board of Education voted to put the ten commandments on the walls, even though it’s against the law and the Supreme Court has said you cannot do that. We had a discussion in our PTA, a very thoughtful discussion. We had, there was, we had at least one family of Indians, not Native Americans, but from India. A surgeon, whose daughter was in Michael’s class. And, you know, there were people, initially the reaction is what’s wrong with the ten commandments? They’re perfectly good commandments. And I could say well, they’re the foundation of our faith as Jews, but they may not be the foundation of our Indian friends and religions differ. And I would be the last person to say there’s anything wrong with the ten commandments, but they don’t belong on the wall of the school right now. And the attorneys at the time, they were waiting for the attorney general to come out for an opinion. So, the resolution at that meeting was to wait until the attorney general came out with an opinion. And people were quite comfortable with that. I’m sure that if we hadn’t been there, and I mean the point was….That was let’s see, twenty years ago, that people accepted what we had to say and were respectful of what we had to say and were willing to wait. And that wouldn’t be always the case, I think, where you have folks who are very strong in their….And I’m sure some of those people are, were members of fairly doctrinaire, Baptist and churches, but they were willing to say, we’ll wait. And I think those things always give me some hope, give you pause for feeling good about, of being proud of the people you are with. I mean I’m not always proud of everything everybody does. I think as we, both Jean and I, got involved in a lot of educational advocacy work, that we sort of, knew we were here. Then when our daughter, Annie, did not do well academically as she got into high school and had a lot more….She is a very social person and was friends with people who were very, very poor and friends with people who were quite rich. And she had a lot of kids who were friends with the fringy group. And she was in high school and was not doing well. So anyway, she went to the David School, which didn’t have many girls at the time and they were able to take her. She hadn’t dropped out. She did really well there and thought the David School was a wonderful place because of the one on one. And she had a very good math teacher and we helped her with her math. We got her back on the right track, academically. But it was very hard for me to take her….I had felt, really wanted to stick with the public school, public education. But they were losing her and she was a good example of a student, who should have stayed, who had, at least then, average academic skills, but was just an example of someone that fell between the cracks because the teachers weren’t paying attention. Which is something, I think, we’ve changed. And I think that we’ve always continued to be involved in these kind of efforts to try to help out our schools and make this region a better place. And I think that education has a lot to do with that. And I think we see in my work here in the office, we do a lot of work, we represent parents of kids who have special needs and schools tend to, they don’t want to bother with them so often, unless you have a very committed teacher, who’s going to work with students like that. It’s much easier to move them out of the way. When we, I think a lot of the cases we’ve done, like consumer cases, all the cases have in reference to Black Lung work, where it’s hard for, the organization wouldn’t have anyone to assist them in these very technical fields without spending a great deal of money. Helping them to write regulations that will benefit them. All these things have been really a great place for me to work and for the lawyers who worked in this program. I think people who work in Legal Services across the country devote their lives or their careers to serving the poor. It’s a wonderful group, I have a lot of admiration for them. So it’s always nice for me to come to work every day, because it’s such a good place to be.

DONAHUE: I wondered, you mentioned that there is some racism in the area and you also talked a little earlier about how you had a difficult time when you first arrived, because people were thinking of you all as communists or something like that. And you had trouble renting an office and so forth. Did you experience any anti-Semitism? People know that you were Jewish? Has that been a problem at all?

ROSENBERG: I don’t think so, many people in this area don’t know, really have had no experience with Jews at all or Quakers for that matter, I think. And so in the more recent years, I don’t spend a lot of time at it, but I’ve been to church groups and talked about Judaism. Maybe the Klan, the few members of the Klan, when they get together at their constitution talks about the white, Aryan race, and Jews, money-making Jews, that kind of thing. I’ve never been conscious, really of anti-Semitism here in any major way. I know that those, I know that people who are strong Christians, do feel that if you’re not saved, you’re going to hell. And so they have a real concern about us, whom they may like and they don’t want us to go to hell. And they would like us, I’m sure, to be saved.

DONAHUE: Have they tried to convert you?

ROSENBERG: No, I think – Annie probably went to more church, was, went to church more, because she spent more weekends with friends who went to church, some of whom are more evangelical than others. We have been invited to many churches. And we have gone more to the Presbyterian church than others because, probably the Catholics and the Presbyterians have run more programs for poor people. And in this area over time, St. Vincent’s Mission came in here. Or maybe not the Catholic church as such, but the ministry. They brought more, while they are also attempting to increase the number of Catholics in their ranks, I think their message of being socially concerned has been stronger than that of the other faiths, even though they are a minority. The Presbyterian church was always very active with its Christian Service ministry. And it’s not as fundamental as the Baptist church and some of their beliefs with respect to Jesus. So when Jean, as I said from the beginning was working with the Meals on Wheels program and a number of their related programs in this Christian Service ministry, we’ve gone there many times. But there’s never been any real, we’ve known all of their ministers. In recent years there’s been a much more sharing between rabbis and ministers. Now here, the Ministerial Association, they had a Catholic priest that was here when we first came, named Father….Gosh what’s his name? He retired. Young Catholic priest was here. It will come to me in a moment. And they wouldn’t let him in, wouldn’t let him in the Ministerial Association. He’d tend to wear moccasins around and wear blue jeans and was always a little bit out front on some of the social issues, working with welfare folks. Asking people if this was the way Jesus would have it. He finally, I think, five or six years later, put a Christmas card in the paper, wishing all of his ministers well at Christmas, hoping they would have a nice Christmas. A guilt trip. They finally let him in. But there was that kind of….There’s never really been, I don’t know, people have always been very nice to us maybe because we’re more about who we are than what the religion is. I’m sure any of the churches would welcome our, many of the churches would welcome our conversions. Or the fundamental religion, especially. We’ve been to many funerals, I mean, when you get to these, especially when you go to a funeral where they preach over, about salvation and you’re doomed if you’re not saved. And they’re looking at you. [LAUGHING] But they mean well. That’s what it is, they feel like we’re going to be lost if this doesn’t happen.

DONAHUE: Would you just talk a little bit about your and Jean’s practice as far as faith, religion? You go to synagogue once a month? You go to Quaker meetings once a month?

ROSENBERG: Yeah, well we, while the kids were, we sort of maintain the Jewish tradition, Friday nights, Saturday, not every Friday night, but especially when everybody is together. And we go to services now more regularly since we go to Williams, West Virginia for the Jewish services. They are on Sunday night, as I mentioned. It’s a rabbi comes down from Huntington, so he has a Friday night service and a Sunday night. The Quakers meet monthly in somebody’s home. Of course you can have a Quaker meeting whether you have three people or three thousand, because they are silent meetings for worship. People get up and say something during the silence, if they are led to say something. And it may go on for half an hour, it may go the whole hour and nobody says anything. Or it maybe that someone has a comment that is on their mind and many people speak. In the more organized communities in the East, you have this group of overseers. I mean the meeting has to have an administration with dues and Sunday school and all of that. But this is a very informal group. There is an annual meeting of Quakers in Kentucky which we haven’t been to in a while. But the participants here are generally a couple in Hazard and a woman who teaches at the Pine Mountain Settlement School and a woman who is a doctor in Hyden, who is in her seventies and has been there for maybe twenty-five or thirty years, I guess, who was a teacher. But he was a doctor and she’s a Quaker, very interesting person, who lives up a holler in Hyden in a small house with a….All these hundreds of goldfinches that are usually there. A very nice location. And then there have been some Mennonite volunteers, who have come to Quaker meeting during their volunteer period. So the group is a little bit fluid, although there is this permanent group, if you will. The couple in Hazard work for the rural health system and they’ve been there for several years. So they meet once a month and they were in Prestonsburg a few weeks ago. The next time will be in Hazard or at the Pine Mountain Settlement School. That woman is in her seventies, also.

DONAHUE: And do you always go to the Quaker meetings, too?

ROSENBERG: I always go. I’m a very big fan of Quakers. Not to convert. It is a very tolerant religion, built on faith, a light that shines on everyone. I don’t know that there’s a great enormous amount of difference, except that it’s built on the teachings of Jesus, essentially. But they don’t dwell on salvation and the other parts of it. I think they really dwell on living your life out in a full life and serving others, and the principles of humanity that I share and that I feel good about. So I think it’s been pretty easy for us to adapt to each other. I’ve probably spent more time now with the Quaker part of it. I really haven’t studied Quakerism that carefully. I’ve read a lot of books and probably will some time, as I should read about Judaism. And I haven’t done as much of that also, a little here and a little there. But I’d like to that a little bit more. I’ve got plenty of other things I also want to read. Right? Like you do.

DONAHUE: And how did you raise your kids? Were they involved in both religions?

ROSENBERG: They were involved in both, although as I said, Michael, we didn’t have Quaker meetings back then. We had some of the state gatherings. This group is a relatively recent phenomenon of the last three or four years. It was really sparked by the people in Hazard. We didn’t go initially. We were when Michael, I guess in our earlier years, we pretty much went to services in Ashland and took Michael when he was little and Annie. They were the only children their age at that time. And we would go fairly regularly, but we always went during the Jewish holidays. And the Quaker tradition doesn’t have a lot of formal ceremony with it as Judaism does around these holidays. So we would celebrate those and we would go to Passover. We had Passover, Seders at our house, which Jean and maybe the others, she did the cooking and became fairly well versed in what’s involved. Did some reading and embarrassingly probably knows more about some of those traditions now than I do. But that’s the way the kids were raised. And Michael, as I told you, I spent more time with Michael probably talking about, doing sort of a light Sunday school lesson every Sunday for several years. That was part of our tradition at home. I didn’t do that with Ann Louise for, I’m not sure exactly why. Who knows why? But I didn’t. More recently she has become much more interested in both. She was, as Jean was relating to you, very concerned about the Nazis, the history, the danger that it posed and still is worried about some goofy Klans person coming to the house and doing something.

DONAHUE: To you in particular?

ROSENBERG: Yeah. She has become, both of the kids will be home for the Jewish holidays, I think. I don’t know about Annie, for sure, because she works on Saturdays. Neither of them….And Michael will be home. Roshashona falls on a weekend. I don’t know if he will come on Yom Kippur. As some would say, how can you work on Yom Kippur. And he might or might not. Those are their lines to draw. I mean it would have been unthinkable for anybody to work on Roshashona or Yom Kippur when I was growing up. And so they still have to find their own, figure out, I guess, what they want to do in terms of their religious – or how religious they’re going to be. Either way, either way, I think though Annie’s now becoming a little more interested. Although she hasn’t been going to the synagogue in Louisville. She and I went to a Unitarian service together in Lexington a couple of years ago. We feel okay about it.

DONAHUE: Do you want to say something in closing now?

ROSENBERG: Prayer? [LAUGHING]

DONAHUE: Would you lead us in a prayer.

: No, I can’t imagine anybody listening to all these tapes. I was saying to Jean, maybe. She said, can I listen to them? And I said, well you wouldn’t want to listen to all this. Maybe somebody wants to listen to this history years from now or maybe the kids would want to look in some archive, right? No, it was nice of you to be interested to do it, to listen to it. And I’m sure we still haven’t covered a lot of ground. But it would be true if I did one of you, even though you probably wouldn’t think so, but we all could spend a lot of time. I’ve just been fortunate, probably to have had such an interesting career in these two legal jobs, with the Division and with Legal Services. And now that I’m also interested in the and other community activities that we’ve been involved in. Just have a lot of interests that I’d like to pursue, that happen to be, I think, in areas that can affect other people and help them in a positive way, besides me. And I like to do it, so I think that’s been a real reward. And you can come back in thirty years, and maybe when I hit a hundred, I’ll reflect on the last forty.

DONAHUE: Yeah, that’s a good idea. Well, thank you.

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

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

ARWEN DONAHUE: Okay, it’s May 27th, two thousand and we’re several months later, picking up on our interview with John Rosenberg and so this is actually tape eight, side A.

JOHN ROSENBERG: Tape eight?

DONAHUE: Yeah. So, going back, we were just talking a little bit off tape about some of your, about some of your speaking experiences and things that you’ve brought up or drawn upon when you’ve gone to commencement addresses and so forth. And one of the things that you mentioned was the last case that you had before you left the Justice Department which had to do with the Kent State University violence. Can you talk about your role in that and your point of view about what happened?

ROSENBERG: Well, I mean my role was, at the time was as Chief of the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division. Because this involved the National Guard and potentially other police officials, state officials, the Justice Department is called in to investigate. Potentially there is a federal crime when police officials act illegally or summarily and what we call summary punishment by not arresting, for example, students who do something wrong, but rather they over react and shoot or punish or beat whoever the victim might be. So, when this happened, this incident happened and was called to our attention, my job was to write a request to the Federal Bureau of Investigation to investigate, to see whether a violation of federal law had occurred. That being May of, how many years ago? Nineteen seventy. Thirty years ago. I drafted that request, which then was sent out under the name of the Assistant Attorney General of the Civil Rights Division, who I believe at the time was Jerry Leonard. And I’m sure I’d have to go dig it out or I don’t even know if I have a copy of it. It would be fairly thorough about where they would be interviewing any witnesses who were there and whether they, the police officials in fact were threatened or there was any reason that would justify they’re having used force in shooting those students who were killed. There was a long grand jury convened after I left. As I recall it was actually inconclusive. I think there was no federal trial. I think there were civil trials later which I’m not sure, it seemed to me they may have recovered some damages for the families of the children, of the students who had been killed. It was just a very tragic event. There were others at the time. I recall, I think when we were speaking, I had seen an article recently before I gave the commencement address here at Prestonsburg Community College, which happened to have been written by the President of Kent State University. It was sort of a memorial column or just recalling those tragic events and the fact that they were in the memory of the President and people who were at Kent State now. And that the school, itself had made great progress in the intervening years and that this awful event was a milestone, obviously, in the history of the school, which sort of marred its reputation, along with, or which they felt marred its reputation. It was not forgotten, but that since then the school had progressed and had moved into the age of technology and that she was very proud of their progress. And I happened to be particularly moved by the way that she ended the column, which was that in this age of technology, it was important not to lose our humanity. And so I was, used her, some of her quotations in concluding this address that I gave to the local students. And it reminded me that it was also sort of one of the last things we did, that I did at the Justice Department, before we left on our vacation, but really left. And then were headed for Appalachia.

DONAHUE: So you just filed the case, but you didn’t investigate it?

ROSENBERG: I didn’t no. My job basically, if had I stayed the office, the lawyers who worked with me and for me as Chief of the Criminal Section….After, the way those things would work is that when the FBI goes through its investigation and prepares a report, those are usually turned over to the United States attorney for prosecution or for determination of whether a crime has been committed. And generally then if there is some conflict, in other words when the officers say, it looked like the student had a gun and that we had to shoot the student or we would have been killed, those factual disputes, someone has to resolve them by generally going to a grand jury, which is what happened. And then either the U.S. attorney co-operatively with lawyers from the Civil Rights Division would make that presentation, but we left. That was at the point after I had authored and drafted this report, this request, was when we left. And so the investigation really went on and I believe one of my colleagues, Jim Turner, who was sort of one notch up in the hierarchy as a Deputy Attorney General, was sent out there and that he spent several months, along with reviewing the reports and working with the grand jury and then determining whether someone should be indicted or not. I want to think that there was never, that there were no federal indictments, but I may be wrong. It seems to me that was one of the sad things, that this was one of those, one of those sort of inconclusive….On the face of it you would think that there was no reason to shoot students, because they certainly were not armed. And that they got caught in the, were victims of what happened. But I’m not sure that anyone was actually ever accused of having, criminally of having done this. That there was some evidence that in the heat of the moment that these folks felt threatened, their lives were threatened. And while they may have been negligent or they may have, whatever they did, there was enough justification to make them question, that they made a bad decision, but it wasn’t, certainly wasn’t intentional on their part. And that it may have been enough to warrant civil proceedings. But that’s the way those things always went. And so in other circumstances, like when I was in the Houston case, we also asked the FBI to investigate and to assist us in determining, looking at records and other areas. And then the lawyer who is responsible for the case, as I was in the Houston case with other lawyers working with me and were working under my direction, then I would present the case to the judge. That’s how those things work. We’re done. I didn’t do any more in Kent State. I mean that was, most of that then happened after I left. So it was a memory and this article that I happened to see in the newspaper sort of jogged my mind back. It’s sort of the punctuation mark. It’s the point at which we left.

DONAHUE: I wonder also if you had, at the time if you felt, you had mentioned in the earlier sessions of this interview how much you idealized this country and its constitution and the principles on which it was founded, and that you really had high expectations of it. During the Viet Nam War did you feel disillusioned with this country and its government? Did that change you perspective at all?

ROSENBERG: Well, I mean, I think there are lots of times when you wish political decisions were made, were different. I mean I think that everyone, that a lot of people are sad about our involvement in the Viet Nam War. I was in the war, served during the time of Korea. And as I probably said before, there were lots of reasons I enjoyed the time I spent in the service. We made a lot of very close friends, who I continue to see and hear from, get together with periodically. And I think you feel that you are doing something worthwhile when you’re in the service. And helping this country in a small way. But I also noted that when, during the Suez Canal Crisis, when we were on alert for a week and no one was quite certain which side we were on. And that because the United States hadn’t made up its mind which side we were on and Israel was one of the partners, was one of the main parties involved in that dispute. The thought that we would be in a conflict with Israel was not very appealing to me, but that it just let me know how much of a, that this was not what I wanted to do, [LAUGHING] to be regimented in that way. So that staying in the service was not anything that I wanted to do. On the other hand, I always, I think that it’s a very dangerous occupation. And I feel those people who are in the Military for a career, who really believe that this is an important thing to do – often that we owe a lot to people who have been, who have served in our Military, and who have either given their lives or come back wounded or who are veterans. And I’m sure now we much, recognize much more the people in Viet Nam, who may not have won a war, were nevertheless were there because they were doing what they were told to do. And of course a lot of people were willing, were conscientious objectors and didn’t go. My personal feeling is if someone’s a conscientious objector they ought not to go. And we ought to let them not go. There are plenty of people who want to go or who were willing to go or there were and there were things that could be done. So, I don’t know that I, I’m not disillusioned. I’m still very much a, feel very strongly that, I guess maybe it’s a little rhetoric, but I feel that this is still the best country in many, many ways in the world. There are a lot of imperfections with it and some of the issues that we have to resolve are very difficult issues. When we see in this area the economy being as poor as it is. We’ve lost a lot of jobs here. Trying to catch up. What I spoke about at PCC, of course, is that, that the Kent State thing related to, I asked, I emphasized to the students how much they should be grateful for being in this free country. It was also the, the week of, the graduation was also the week of Law Day, in which we celebrate our freedom and the constitution under which we live. And it was also the anniversary of Holocaust Remembrance Day. And it was the anniversary, the thirty year anniversary of Kent State. And I think all of those are messages that we need to remember and reflect upon. I think we do have a legal system that really is the basis for the freedom that we have. And a lot of those freedoms are at times tenuous. You worry when the Klan, you wish that we did not have the Klan around, but the fact that we allow them to exist in a restricted way still is part of the freedom that we can enjoy. And I think all of those kinds of issues sort of tumble around together. And yet we, we have to be, we’re always balancing those things. And I think the political system that we’re under, where we flip back and forth between a Democratic party in control and the Republican party in control at the State and National government, kind of keeps everybody off balance, at the state level and the federal level. But it seems to make us sort of come out in the middle and even though lots of things go on that we don’t like. I mean I wish we had greater funding for Legal Services at the state and federal level. And sometimes Congress, the legislation we have on, that affects welfare moms seems very punitive, at times. And I know we could do better with that. We clearly need a better health care system, lots of places where we can improve, where we ought to improve, being as rich as this country is. We seem not to regard people, the problems poor people have as seriously as we ought to. Well, that’s a rambling answer. I can’t even remember, it seemed to me that we started with Kent State and we kind of got into what I was talking about, but it all kind of goes together.

DONAHUE: Yeah. Kind of related to what you were saying, can you talk more, you had mentioned that sometimes, you mentioned off tape and I’d like to get this on tape, that you mentioned when you go to speak at various places within the community, people are interested in, partially interested in hearing you speak because of your Holocaust related experiences. And maybe you can talk about your, your invitation to speak at the hundred year anniversary of one of the Black churches here and also talk about why you think it is that people want to hear about that particular aspect.

ROSENBERG: Well, I think that the Black church, the name right now escapes me, probably shouldn’t. The hundredth anniversary was an event they’d worked on, was quite a significant event for the church. There are two churches in Wheelwright, Kentucky and this is one of them. And they had been planning this anniversary for some time and have had a series of ministers over the years and it’s a very cohesive community. And I think, probably, one of the reasons they asked me to speak was because they related, they knew that I was Jewish and that I had been involved as a Legal Services lawyer and perhaps as a Justice Department lawyer in some civil rights issues over time. But also that I was a, that my family had escaped from the Holocaust and they knew some of that history. And I think they analogized it in their own way to the discrimination that they had felt and that they wanted me maybe to reflect upon the f act that there were people who were white and who were discriminated against because they were Jewish or for reasons other than race. But that someone, a family lived in this community that had shared some of that history that their own families and ancestors had experienced over their lifetime. I know that, I think in the schools, I think that the schools now have made the Holocaust a very much a part of their curriculum. When I go, I’ve spoken to middle school students and elementary school and high school students. And when I ask how many of them know who Ann Frank was or whether they have done a unit on Ann Frank, almost every hand goes up in the room. I think that unit is probably done in the fifth and sixth grade and then the seventh grade. And that, but the fact, teachers tell me, the fact that they see someone who is alive and who can come into their class and say this is what happened to my family. I was eight years old when they arrested my father and took him to the concentration camp. Or I was standing in the courtyard when they were dynamiting the synagogue. That is always more, it makes a stronger point than having heard it from a third person. And if it’s someone in their own community that I suppose has been identified as having some credibility, that doesn’t just make these stories up. I think when you, you always tend to put some faith and trust in people that have lived with you a long time, who are part of the community. It’s kind of like any other, listening to older, someone described the history of the May house or the May family or their own family history. When they’ve grown up here it means more. At least I think that’s, whenever you find someone, whether it’s the war, my neighbor used to, my neighbor must have been on every beach. He died a few years ago, but he was one of those Appalachian soldiers who was drafted and lived through every beach assault in the Pacific. And even if he tells it in a low key sort of conversational way, it’s very powerful to talk to someone who lived it.

DONAHUE: It’s interesting, considering your significant experience, you spent a lot of time working on civil rights and a lot of time here in Appalachia working on helping the poor with legal services. And it’s interesting the thing that people would pick out when they want to hear something from you, is this thing that really happened in your distant past and really has to do with your roots, which hasn’t been so much the focus of your very significant work and interesting work. Do you think, I’m trying to….There’s kind of a question in there somewhere, but I think, you know, there’s some key maybe to your roots which came up in the earlier interviews, too. You mentioned that where you come from and your escape from the Nazis has been a very important part of the work that you have subsequently done. It’s something that you’ve kept in mind, but we didn’t really go into very much detail about that. It is something that you really think about a lot, about the Holocaust era and about your family and about….Maybe can you just talk more about that?

: I don’t know that it’s with me every day. I think that and I think I’ve spoken about this before. Well, before I forget it, I think in my earlier, when I talked about commencement talks or just generally about Legal Services, I really did not speak, talk much about the Holocaust unless I was, unless….Some of the church groups when we first came Jean was….We were involved with the Presbyterian church a good bit because they did a lot of social, were more involved in local social projects. They started Meals on Wheels and Christian Service Ministry that she was involved with. And so the ministers who knew that we were involved, had Passovers and that I was Jewish and some of that developed into, people, by word of mouth realized that I wasn’t born in this country and that I did have this experience. But it wasn’t, I guess in more recent years, I’ve had more, probably as people learned and as I spoke more about the Holocaust and about being Jewish, that there have been more, there’s been a bit more of an awareness about the Holocaust. I think partly because of the Holocaust Memorial and there’s been more publicity generally about the importance of this whole era and trying to make people remember it and not let it be forgotten. That all is probably, is part of the reason why this has come up. And I think that tying it into Law Day is something that has gotten around among the teachers, that’s something I’m willing to speak about or can speak about on Law Day, that may be more meaningful to students than just talking about the Constitution or how the legal system works, which is the other thing that we generally do when we go to the schools. I don’t have any doubt that the history, that our fleeing from Germany and coming to this country and being grateful for the opportunity to be free here, has sort of moved me into public service work. I think that’s pretty clear. When I was in the military, I think it probably in a way helped move me to go to the service as well. I don’t know that I went into the ROTC, which helped partly also with tuition. Back then it was one of the ways of making Duke affordable, which is an expensive school. But I mean, whether it’s just the rationalization or the reason, I think I certainly felt that being in the service was one way of trying to help fulfill my, help me give something back. You can stay out of the service. I’m sure I didn’t have to do that. That was during a time that people also were being drafted. And that if you didn’t want to be an enlisted man and wanted to do more with your career in the service….I guess my bigger decision was that I was, I did have the option after coming out of Duke as a chemistry major, of going to work in the Military as being in something that was more science related back then, using my chemistry degree. And I decided really not to do….I decided I was either going to fly and ultimately became a navigator. Because the pilot training didn’t really work out. But I, so I’m sure that was probably, sort of an adventuresome kind of thing to do. It would be more interesting than being in a lab. I knew that I probably might want to sell chemicals some day. I really hadn’t decided my long term career goals. But I flirted around when I came out of the service and went back to Roman-Haus as a technical representative for a chemical company. I don’t know whether we….Did we talk about that?

DONAHUE: Yeah.

: So, I flirted around for a little bit about going to Rabbinical school and decided not to do that. But I’m sure that what, that going into the civil rights work and being, and wanting to do public service work has been to some extent influenced by and maybe a large extent, probably a lot of it is subconscious, the fact that I want to feel that the contribution I can make in helping other people in this country, who are not as well off, is just a way of helping to give back. I don’t know that is any sort of sacrifice. I just feel like there are lots of ways to spend your life. And if some people want to spend it practicing law in one way or another, that’s their choice. But it’s a much more, this is part of it, but I don’t feel that I had any obligation to do this. I just, I’m sure that having that history in our family in a major way influenced us. I mean, my father and mom, my father worked in the textile plant. He was a teacher. My brother is in public service, worked for the government all of his life. My sister was an architect working for the state on issues affecting handicapped people, an architectural barriers person. So and just recently finished law school and thinking how to use the law degree in a helpful, probably together….I don’t know that she will be going into Legal Services. I mean I don’t know that my motivations are really, I think all of the lawyers and people who do public service work, whether our daughter, who is social serv, working on a social work degree, and working with developmentally disabled people now in Louisville. Or our son who works with students who have academic difficulties. Or your or whoever the other people, who are in public service life, who choose to make that their life and feel that service is a way to live out your life in a meaningful….

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

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

ARWEN DONAHUE: ….B. And uh, related to your work or to your experiences with speaking to groups, you had mentioned a little bit earlier that you have on Law Day talked about the Holocaust. And what do you talk about when you talk about the Holocaust on Law Day?

JOHN ROSENBERG: Well, I talk about the contrast between a society that we have in this country, where we have a government and a nation, which is governed by the rule of law and what happened in Fascist Germany where the legal system was basically put aside for a dictatorship. And that the kinds of things that were able to happen in the Holocaust, which was a result of Hitler’s fanaticism. And what did happen in that dictatorship, and how again grateful we need to be and how they, students can reflect on or ought to reflect, and their teachers and all of this ought to reflect on the system we have in this country, which would not, hopefully, permit anything like that to happen. That the checks and balances in the legislative, executive and judicial systems would keep that from happening. And that we have, that free speech is important and that all of the guarantees that we have under the Constitution and under the Bill of Rights are very meaningful and that it’s important to talk about them. I use, I guess the family’s personal experiences and I talk a little bit about the history of how all this came about in the nineteen thirties from Hitler’s rise to power. How during the war, I mean even afterwards how people would like to pretend in Germany that no one knew about it and this all sort of just happened and people are looking the other way. At least were looking the other way and most, I suspect, did know about what was going on in the Death camps. That’s what I try to focus on and I think the teachers seem to appreciate that and seem to feel that it’s a good way to have their students appreciate Law Day.

DONAHUE: Why don’t you just talk about….You had mentioned in the first sessions that we did, something about the relationship between Judaism and justice, and it was something that you said that you had thought about. Would you elaborate on that some?

: Well, I don’t remember what I said at the time, but the important tenet, I guess, of Judaism is the emphasis on justice, study and justice. That the ten commandments and having a society where being just to each other and where you have a governing, legal codes that govern Judaism, which are principles of living really. The major ones. I might have said that those principles probably helped to influence me and the work that I do. I remember when we just talking about Law Day. Usually when I begin a talk, I talk a little bit about the fact that we’ve been, who we are and who I am, that I’m here in Prestonsburg. We’ve lived in all these years. And talk a little about our Legal Services agency and try to describe that we do have a system in this country that provides lawyers for people who can’t afford lawyers, on the criminal and on the civil side. What this program, what Apple Red and other civil Legal Services programs do and how difficult it is. Many times it is basically impossible to navigate through the legal system without having a lawyer to help you, so that poor people, who are often on the short end of business transactions and many other people lose rights. They lose benefits to which they are entitled. And the kind of work that defenses in eviction cases, consumer cases, all the work that we have done. The Broad form, environmental work. So I try to also mention that. So, going back to what you were asking me, I don’t know that it’s any easier….I think all religions, whether it’s Christianity with Jesus’ sort of different, somewhat different little spin on the loving aspect of God, that it’s not as much of the retribution and thunder that you read about in the old testament. But that any, I know there are a lot of people in Legal Services and folks have written about, who, even who have had backgrounds in Divinity School, who feel that by helping, by using their legal talents to help people who are oppressed or who are poor or have been discriminated in one way or another, that that is a good way for them to live out their life and their principles and their values. And providing legal services for low income people, that that’s….I don’t think there’s anything particularly unique about being Jewish in that way. I just, probably anyone who feels that their, that religion and a belief in God is part of their personality or their person, would feel the same way about that, I think. I mean, we have people in Legal Services who are very religious. They’re Catholic, Protestant, Jewish. And we have many people who are not religious, just as, I’m sure, other professions do.

DONAHUE: The question that had come to my mind before that had slipped out was kind of related to something that when I’ve interviewed other Holocaust survivors that gets brought up a lot and I don’t know whether you’ll have anything to say to it or not. But often I hear people say that they feel, hear people state an opinion about whether a Holocaust could happen again. And many people say I think this is going to happen again. That there is going to be some kind of mass persecution of the Jewish people. And some people feel like that’s not going to happen, but a lot of….It just comes up and I’m wondering whether you feel like – you were talking a little bit earlier about the legal system in this country. Do you feel like that system is really stable enough so that there is not potential for that kind of disruption or do you feel like it is possible for something like that to happen in this country?

: In this country? I would like to think that it could not happen in this country in our lifetime or in anybody else’s lifetime. I think that when you read about any sort of fanatical behavior, when you read about….It’s only been a hundred years or a little more, well a hundred fifty years since lynchings were pretty commonplace in the South. And we had a “legal system”, that was not as….We didn’t have transportation systems and we lacked a lot of the modern conveniences so that, I think our life was a lot more rural. But it seems to me that communities were pretty heartless about….I mean that there was, in the South more so than any where else, but on a large scale, African-Americans were property. I mean they were property. And anyone, people seem to accept that in a fairly major way. I don’t know that it would happen just to Jews. And obviously the Klan had put Jews and Catholics into a group, Blacks. But you know, we see things, we see the American Indian in this country and for years having, and not the very distant past, being treated as a second class citizen. But in the next fifty years probably the white population as it is or “Caucasian” population will probably be a minority in this country. So I don’t know. I do think that people can be fairly heartless. I mean we’ve had this, even with the go around with the ten commandments we’ve had in this state recently. We have educators and superintendents, who don’t seem to get it and don’t understand or can’t understand why anyone would object to putting those ten commandments on the walls of the school or a public building. That’s always pretty scary to me and they wield a lot of influence. And they could be leading, they could decide that they’re going to march on any one of us. Any lawyer who lived in our local community, that promoted, who was representing the other side. I don’t know that you would see anything like what happened in , on that massive a scale, where you’re filling boxcars with thousands of people on a schedule that end up being cremated and killed and gassed. But I think people, there are leaders that appeal to emotions and just the same as the abortion clinics….You have folks who would like to defend the fact that they can kill somebody because their view is different than their own. So I think it is possible and I think it is probable they’ll continue to happen as long as you have open gun, as long as gun laws are the way they are. And as long as you have people who believe in these fairly fundamentalist religions. Wars are fought. All the things that we’ve seen in the last few years. And maybe this country is a little different because of its tendency to become more homogeneous, certainly both culturally and racially. But you think of all the Tutsis and the Hindus and you think of Kosovo and you see all of these people and you see massive….As far as they’re concerned it is a Holocaust. Right? I mean they are being killed in massive numbers. We just aren’t there. I don’t know and you feel pretty helpless over here trying to do anything about it. I don’t know we can always rationalize it by saying those aren’t very civilized countries. But all of these things seem to be done….I mean look at and the Arab countries. Both sides, certainly the Arabs, think that all of this is for Allah, and most of these massive killings are religious wars. And they are done in the name of God for one side or the other. Or the ethnic issues up there in . I mean tanks….So, who’s to say that can’t happen here? I would like to think that it wouldn’t happen here because of all the different pressures that keep the country going. For one thing, we’re so materialistic, people want to keep making money and they want to keep a society and keep the economy going. And wars and internal fighting and disputes on a large scale, they ruin countries. I think if it’s nothing more than that sort of selfish self-interest and political interest, that people know they’re not going to allow anything of that scale to happen without calling out the National Guard or something. At the same time you see on the television, you see all those things that you think somebody was just writing a fiction plot a few years ago, they can happen. Whether it’s biological warfare or some goofy, this computer virus stuff. We see that everything is possible with technology. But I don’t know that anyone, these days, in this country, I’m not sure we would have to fear a Holocaust. I do think that minorities who live in fairly isolated situations, I think are always somewhat vulnerable. Here in now it’s a nice thing, we now have a mosque here in , which is, I think, a real milestone. And we do have more and more African Americans and people of other cultures, who have, are finding a home and generally acceptance, at least in some economic, to some economic extent. But I don’t know that they are not always somewhat vulnerable. To some extent there are people who are here because the area has needed more physicians and for economic reasons and they are excellent citizens. Whether over time, like the osteopathy school or if the economy gets worse, people, they will have become enough of this community where they would stay and would speak their mind. I thought they were, they were totally silent during the ten commandment debate. I had encouraged some of them to speak out, because they were the most affected. So, you, you know, it’s the same way with the Jewish communities during, the Jewish families that moved south in the earlier days. They stood by, they were in their communities, they were merchants in these towns and they could not join country clubs and they were being discriminated against. They had African American maids at home. And they were certainly willing to live in a segregated society, because it was economically favorable to them. I think I may have said that earlier. I think those things are, those are difficult ethical and philosophical issues. But it has to create a certain level of discomfiture for people who are doing that.

DONAHUE: Why don’t we go back and we were talking a little earlier about how we might get some more detail about your work on the case. So, go back to there and then work forward again. [LAUGHING] Last time we talked about it, you mentioned a little bit about how you had been working on that case, but what were the details of what you were doing exactly on that case? The murder of the three civil rights workers.

: Well, I worked on the case twice. The first time was in the grand jury when I was talking to you earlier this morning about the fact that after the FBI has investigated a case, then we get the witnesses together. And after the incident had happened in the summer of sixty-four, we had a grand jury in , a federal grand jury. But that was before there were any confessions. And so we went to and the FBI had uncovered a number of other police brutality cases that were local officials, the sheriff and local police had acted illegally when beating some Blacks, primarily. And we only knew the circumstantial evidence of the killings of these workers. We did not have a confession and so there was not any clear evidence. We did not have an indictment of that. Then there was subsequently a confession. When Jean and I came back from….Then the indictments went to the Supreme Court, when there was an issue about, after the confession, when there was an indictment, there was a legal issue about whether these indictments stated a claim under federal law, because they also involved private conspirators along with some police officers. That question went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. It was decided in nineteen sixty-six, I think, and Jean and I got married in nineteen sixty-seven. When we came back from our honeymoon, we, John Doar called me….At the time was I still working in the Southeastern section? Asked me to come down and work on the case if I felt like my honeymoon was over. And we were in at that point. We’d been down to in the . I said to Jean that I just thought probably with this I was ready to go back to work to try and finish this case.

DONAHUE: How long had it been since you had gotten married?

: We were, we were still on our honeymoon. We got married in February, nineteen sixty-seven and this was February, nineteen sixty-seven.

DONAHUE: Okay.

: We flew back, back. We were out of the country probably ten days and we were going to spend another five, four or five days in seeing some plays or something. But we were back in this country and this case was ready to go or we were ready to get in and get ready for trial. So I kissed her good-bye and I went to . And I spent, specifically actually, I primarily did two things. I spent almost a month interviewing people who were perspective jurors in the case. Because nowadays they have psychologist, psychological, they have these jury experts that are sitting, that sit with the lawyers and who’ve done big sophisticated background checks and maybe even sometimes try cases to juries to try them out. They’ll have a mock trial and have a mock verdict. But by learning through the Black community, who the members of the white community were that might be trustworthy and who were supportive and who thought this was a dreadful thing, this killing of the three workers and who were upstanding citizens and who would know people, basically. I created a notebook of information about the jurors. We didn’t know who the twelve would be. You get a list of about forty or fifty. And so I collected information on these people by word of mouth primarily. I met a lot of people and then put this notebook together for John Doar, who was my boss and for the attorney for trial, at which they used for selecting the jury.

DONAHUE: How were the forty people selected in the first place?

: They’re chosen out of the jury we all, at that time in most states, they were chosen off the voter list, the voting lists. You put all the voters….It’s a federal court, so the district is much larger than just a county. So you’re more apt to get people that cover a much larger area. And I think the trial was in , in the Southern District of Mississippi with Judge Cox. And so these jurors were somewhat spread out. I mean it wasn’t all the way across the state, but it was in in several counties.

DONAHUE: And was there some kind of quota with the jurors, where there were supposed to be a certain amount white and a certain amount black?

: No, but there were blacks on the jury, but the blacks were, they were struck. I was in some earlier trials in the early, when I first came, we had a trial in involving SNCC workers, who were some voter registration workers, including several of whom were black. And then later with the trial of Fanny Lou Hamer and they were all white jurors. It was really at a time before, again it was something at the time that was not challenged as being unlawful, the system for selecting jurors and that resulted in no blacks being on the jury. Now this particular jury, now in the Southern District, you would think, probably, that half the people on the jury would have to be or close to half would have to be black, because the voting requirements have been so slackened. Because that was another part of this whole civil rights struggle, because they were using literacy tests at the time. I’m pretty sure….And that would make sense because the number of black voters back then was still very, very small, and so you had very few blacks. And they were not, probably every qualified, voting Black was probably in the jury b, pool. So, I don’t know if they were out of the, let’s say the twelve, that were called initially or fifteen, as they were being struck. There may have been several who were black, but they were struck, so that the jury was an all white jury. But I was, of course, felt pretty good, because we got a conviction. So I felt like that work was at last helpful. The other thing that I was, we had always, the way we did our trials in the Civil Rights Division – I may have talked about this before. We had two people inside the courtroom putting on the case and then the fellows outside the courtroom who were responsible for preparing witnesses and making sure, and having things go right. In the case, my other responsibility, well there were several others, but my one major responsibility was to firm up the identification of the workers. And at least three civil rights workers were killed. And that was done through their dental records. We went back and found who their dentists were and the dentists’ charts and compared them, in the event that that was in dispute. I don’t think we put the dentists on, maybe it was admitted, but we did that. And then there was clothing that had been retrieved from the workers and the whole issue of proving that they were who were claimed they were, that they had been the murdered workers. And then I did a lot of other, I did some inter, there were other parts of the case, where you’re trying to make sure that everything is together. And some of the witnesses were not heard. There were people who, a deputy sheriff at one point picked up a young woman, who was an Indian - there was a Choctaw reservation in that area - who was an Indian, and she overheard a conversation. And she didn’t speak English. So when we wanted to go talk with her, we had to find an interpreter to try to tell us what she had seen. I think actually she did testify, because she overheard them saying something that indicated they knew what was about to happen or that they were going to stop the workers when they let them out of jail that night.

DONAHUE: So, she understood English, but couldn’t speak it?

: Right, she just spoke a very broken English and she remembered some phrases that they had said when she was picked up. They gave her a ride. I don’t remembered how we tracked her down, but it was something that was helpful like that. The grand jury, I worked on the grand jury a while. One of my roles was nothing more than a logistician. I was in , getting people driving from , but the grand jury was sitting in . And we were moving, I was doing a little more than that, besides interviewing. I kept taking people to the airport and sending them from to . Keeping the witnesses going. That took, we had a lot of logistical issues in getting, finding these people way out in the country and brining them down – especially African-Americans, who had been mistreated, and getting them to the airport and getting them up there and back. But then the fact that there was a conviction in this case, John did a, really quite a remarkable, did a very, very good job in presenting the case. It was a big effort. It was a very sad thing to kind of work on that.

DONAHUE: Did you meet, you strike me as a person with a lot of energy and a lot of drive to go on, but did you ever just feel depressed and have trouble getting out of the bed in the morning? Or is that just not an issue for you? [LAUGHING]

: Back then or now or?

DONAHUE: Well, in any of these. I mean, I would, just picturing studying the dental records of these people who had been brutally murdered for working on a good cause. And then you’ve done other work since then that’s had to have been very depressing. I was just wondering….

: Oh I think you feel, it always has an impact on you. I think that just for this purpose, you never forget the smell of those clothes….

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

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

ARWEN DONAHUE: This is tape nine, side A. Will you, will just repeat what you had started to say?

JOHH : Well, I was just saying in that particular situation I always can picture, we had the clothing put away in boxes behind the door. But it was really – the stench of those clothing was so strong, that it was always there. And for some reason that always stuck with me more than the dental records. Well, you do, you feel very badly for the families, you feel kind of not very forgiving, I think, for the people who did this. And of course, there were some church burnings before that. The atmosphere around, in Mississippi and Neshoba County among the white community and among the Klan, that particular group of Klansmen, Sam Bowers, the mastermind of this one, who also was behind the fire bombing of another African-American, who was a voting rights leader in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Vernon Damer, who, they firebombed his house. These people were just pretty evil. They were violent. They were just bad people in that sense. I think you have a, if anything you’re probably driven. I don’t know that I ever felt depressed, I think most of us, and at the time this was a pretty highly motivated group of lawyers, who worked in the Civil Rights Division. It was a very relatively small group of lawyers in the early sixties. It was sort of a sidelight. I mean, Congress’s commitment to civil rights was not great either. The Division had very few lawyers working on civil rights cases when I started in nineteen sixty-two. And they had to beg for all the spending money. There were very few of us and we worked on these voting rights cases. And it took an enormous amount of time and it was hard to do more than two or three of them. We’d spend months looking at records and microfilm. And we worked extraordinary long hours. He couldn’t understand why people who were family men with children would want to go home at the end of the day and not come back and work at night or work on Saturdays or work on Sundays. Of course, there were some folks who got divorces over that hard work, just as they do in the service, I think. I don’t know, I think that lawyers get depressed when they lose cases. And we lost, we lost many cases in the early stages in the lower courts, voting rights cases and others, because the judges themselves were segregationists and were appointed and came out of that society. So we had to appeal their decisions before and they were reversed and all of that took time. So, when you work hard, it doesn’t matter what, if you work hard….When we knew we were going to lose, it’s – and then you did lose, you’re sort of prepared for it. And you really are trying to put the case together in the first level, so that’s it’s a compelling case to the next level. And that’s what happened, we over prepared and we generally won, eventually we would win. And then gradually the law started to change. It took a very long time and so I’ve said many times it was fortunate or maybe because of that slow pace and the limited role of the federal government, that somebody like Martin Luther King had to come along. Or that Blacks had to organize themselves and realize, as so often happens, that people have to organize and that movements get started and that direct action has a place. And it all sort of came together in this instance around the Voting Rights Act of nineteen sixty-five. That’s when Jean and I met. We were in , we were in this case, this voting rights case, this case. It was the first voting rights case under the nineteen sixty-five Voting Rights Act, that election. I think we may have talked about that before.

DONAHUE: Is there anything else you want to say about the case?

: I don’t, not really, I think. There was a very good, made for T.V. movie about that case. I’m often asked about Mississippi Burning, which is a popular movie that came out, which was not really accurate in many ways. But I thought it depicted the hatred of the atmosphere at the time fairly well, and some parts of it were there. Jean and I have a, at our house, the painting of the sailboat in our living room is from the restaurant called, it was from Meridian, called Wideman’s Restaurant, which was where we worked out of the Meridian office, which is close to Neshoba County. But I don’t think so. I mean, one of the other last things beside the thing that I did at the Civil Rights Division was to, you know after these folks were convicted, then they appealed their conviction and it went on. That took a few years. And I think one of the other last things that I did was to file a brief opposing their last motion not to be sent off to prison. I wrote the response to that and then they were picked up. Then they finally went to jail. So that was about nineteen seventy.

DONAHUE: Do people ask you to speak about your civil rights era experiences very often?

: Not, it only comes, it comes up, well, my friend, Pillersdorf, who is a practicing lawyer here, teaches a class on the court system, on I think, civil liberties and the law. And he generally has speakers come in, other judges and I usually come in for a night with him. And I’ve spoken a few other times, but really not very much. And I’m not sure that that many people are aware of what I did. I mean I don’t particularly publicize it. If I’m giving a speech and somebody’s writing some background about my legal history, they’ll generally mention that. But I don’t really do much speaking about it. Usually the schools have a unit on it. There’s a lot of, certainly a lot of written materials and most of those – Taylor Branch’s books quote my boss, there’s a lot in ’s book about John Doar. And usually when books are written like that, that’s who they are going to write about. I don’t know that I’m anybody necessarily. But locally if people ask, I will talk about the cases. I’ve spoken a few times, not recently about the legal developments of these, of how we put these cases together and the Voting Rights Act and the impact of the Voting Rights Act. But then I left in nineteen seventy and I’ve been doing this Legal Services work for thirty years. And unless those things come together somewhere, it’s become part of my, sort of distant past, except for reunions of Civil Rights Division lawyers and some of the ongoing contacts I’ve had with people. So I’m not really very much…

DONAHUE: I wondered if you want to say anything else about the desegregation work you were doing in ? You mentioned it in the last interview. One of the things that you mentioned in the last interview that I thought you might want to comment on now, is that you said it was the beginning of the Nixon administration and you were seeing that that there was kind of a move away from real advancement with civil rights. And that , working in , there was not a, you didn’t give much detail, but it seemed you weren’t very hopeful for things moving in a real positive direction there. Do you want to talk about that?

: Well, I think probably what I had reference to was after Richard Nixon was elected and William Mitchell became Attorney General, they did not want to continue to seek bussing of students as a remedy to undo segregation. And bussing, had accepted a bussing remedy and several other states, too. The problem is when you have a segregated community, so that white students, black students are, if you don’t use something like bussing, you can’t achieve very much integration, unless you pair up schools where the two housing districts happen to be close. Where they call that pairing of schools. You can pair schools that are in nearby neighborhoods. But the Nixon administration, so that the Nixon administration really backed, not only on bussing, but they generally felt, I think, that the position of the department in the past had been too strong towards, moving towards integrating classrooms. And they were more inclined towards free choice, which would essentially leave student, schools white and black with some very few exceptions. And the case was filed right after Nixon came in and we did ask for bussing as a remedy. And it was the last case that they allowed that to go through. In fact, the Assistant Attorney General, who was probably called on the carpet about it a little bit, because it had gone to him and he had approved it. And I don’t know that he was brand new, whether he really focused on it as much as he might have. But the Attorney General, I think, had to sign it as well. We went forward in that case. It was a very large case. was the third largest school district in the country. I can’t remember, a couple of hundred schools. They had, what they had done is spent millions and millions of dollars building new suburban schools outside, on the outer fringes of . At the same time they let the inner city schools decay, so it was really doubly bad. It wasn’t just, in some school districts they tried to upgrade black schools to prevent desegregation. In they didn’t care. They spent all their money on white schools and let the black schools get worse. So, but then at the same time they bussed white kids past black schools and blacks past white schools. So we asked for, I had an expert from , who was an expert in school desegregation matters. What a minute, maybe he was from . Mike Stowley. I guess he was from . One or the other. He testified as to the need to bus and that using bussing as a remedy would produce a, basically an integrated school system, with all the advantages that could come with that. There was much more to it in the case than that, but basically that was it. The other phenomenon at the time was that the Chicano community was just developing, so it was like we had three donuts. You had a core of inner city black schools, then you had a small, growing donut around it of Chicano communities and then you had all the whites on the outside. But racially, Chicanos were treated as whites at that time, and probably still are. There’s a designation for themselves, but we were trying to desegregate a school district that had traditionally been black and white. And so one of the things that the judge in the case did, was pair up some white schools with Chicano schools, which I wasn’t particularly happy about. I mean I don’t know that we had achieved very much, as we had hoped to do. There were some other things. We didn’t get a lot of bussing, but we got, the Board was required to spend massive amounts of money to get, to upgrade schools. And the other, probably the best thing that happened was they threw out the School Board. They voted in a new School Board that was much more moderate. And they got rid of the lawyer who had gotten rich representing the Board and keeping the system segregated. This case that I was working on had been filed many years before that and the NAACP had sort of reactivated it and sort of urged the government to enter the case, which we did. And we moved down there with four or five lawyers. Jean came with me. We had not been married too long and we rented an apartment. We lived there four or five months getting ready for this trial. When it was over, we took a big trip and nine months later our son, Michael was born. Actually we went to , to and – ever been up there? , Bamp. Wonderful country. , I still sort of scratch my head a little bit. I haven’t kept up with what. There was an appeal of that order. And I wrote part of the brief on appeal. Still have it with me. But I always felt a little badly about the limited result of the pairing of the schools, but I think it helped a great deal in the long run in different ways, to move that system from what it had been. They had just let the black schools deteriorate into such terrible condition. Then let’s see, Michael was born in nineteen seventy, I still had a hearing, a pre-trial, I think, not a pre-trial, but a conference right after he was born. We delayed it because I expected him to be born in April. So, that was April nineteen seventy. I think that’s about it. I don’t know if you’re thinking about something else in the case.

DONAHUE: No, I just….

: Just a large, urban school case. Took a long time. of records, lots of lawyers working with us. And I was able to get Jean to come with me on that, to work on the case.

DONAHUE: You talked about how you had come to and the whole process of establishing yourselves in Prestonsburg and some of the challenges involved in that. I thought maybe you might want to say a little bit more about, one of the things that has struck me, just in reading a little bit about Appal Red and the early years and your talking about it last time that we talked here, is that when you talked about the difficulty of getting established, you said that it was difficult. But from what other people have said, they suggested that it was a lot more difficult than you let on the last time that we talked. I wondered if there’s – I mean you had mentioned that you had trouble renting a place and so forth. But what else was happening besides that, during that time? Did any of the difficulty make you feel like, okay if things don’t turn around soon, we’re out of here?

: I don’t, I don’t, no, I don’t think I had thought about being out of here. There were a couple of things probably, one was one of the earliest cases that we were involved with, involved the local health care establishment, for example. There was a federal program in here, that wanted to set up what is now a federally funded health care clinic, that Eulah Hall was associated with. But the governing agency was a Community Action agency, which had some public officials and local doctors, who were either on the Board or very close to the governing Board and they basically didn’t want this thing to do anything. They were going to use it primarily as a taxi service to....They had a trailer, which was fully equipped sitting out, for example, at Mud Creek, but all they used it for, people would go to the trailer and then they’d drive them into Prestonsburg to get their medical services from Prestonsburg physicians, that would get money. So, they were reimbursing them for services, but they wouldn’t allow anybody to be treated out there. Not even a nurse to give them shots. And then they employed a doctor. The local medical establishment threw a lot of roadblocks into his getting a license. And it was just a lot of trouble getting it. So the welfare rights groups came to me and we filed some administrative complaints and basically threatened to close the thing down. I mean their decision was if it wasn’t going to work and be responsive, let’s just not have it. Let’s not waste the money. Well, two things happened, one was, of course, Jean wasn’t sure who her doctor would be, since they were all mad at us. And so she wondered if she could get any child care, any medical care for her son, who was less than a year old, or just about a year old. And then the establishment, the doctors or the agency complained to Congressman Perkins about it and he asked for an audit by the General Accounting Office of what we were doing, not just in this case. At the same time a lot of hostility by local lawyers to having our get started. They thought basically we were going to take money out of their pockets. So the GAO sent an inspector here, which wasn’t too….But he was in our office for about a month. He looked at all, every piece of paper and then he issued….They ended up issuing a report which was really very favorable and complimentary. And when I called Congressman Perkins to ask him about this thing, about his request, he said not to worry about it. He was doing it to placate the local officials. He was sure it was going to work out okay. So there were things like that. And I had the local Bar was quite hostile. I went to them on one occasion and asked them, told them I wanted to set up a system to refer clients to lawyers who, if the clients weren’t eligible for our services, if they made too much money, that we wanted a fair system. So, would they want to give me a list of the lawyers in some order, the ones that would take certain cases and not take certain cases. So he appointed a committee to look into it. The President said he thought it was a good suggestion. Well, the committee met and their resolution was to suggest that we leave town, that we not practice law here without their permission. It was sort of an indication of the atmosphere. I mean there were a few, well I don’t know that we had any lawyers who were outside. There were a couple of lawyers, who had been here earlier, who had had a run in with me, but they were philosophically supportive of free legal services. Because I wasn’t the….When I first came, there were some lawyers, who had been working here with welfare rights folks. They started something called Mountain People’s Rights. They saw their role more as being organizers than as being lawyers. They had not gotten their licenses, so we had a serious difference of opinion about how this needed to be done. Cold air out here. Oh, that’s the air conditioning, that’s what that is. Is it too cold?

DONAHUE: No.

: So, there were those things. And I mean the medical….And the fact that I had hired, the first two lawyers I hired, J.T. Begley, Joe’s son, who had just come out of the Marines and gone to law school and Mort Stan, both of them were living in Lexington and were staying down during the week and then they would go back on a weekend to their families. It was not a, it took a while to, I really didn’t have any friends or that much of a support system, especially since I was also sort of fighting with the other lawyers who had been here. And Jean was a new mother and was just trying to get to know a few people who might share values, because the lawyers, the wives of the private practitioners, were really garden club types or people who were pretty much interested in money and materialism. But she then, she started, gradually started teaching childbirth classes. That was a big, sort of avocation of hers and got her to have an interest outside of being at home. I think the first, those early years, probably was much lonesomeness. I think it was [INAUDIBLE]. And we knew, at the time we were not so sure that we would be here that long. I think it was much more, as you said, they’re not going to run me out of town. We’re going to set this up. We’re going to get started. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done. Legally there were many more black and white, if you will, issues. The law was, I mean the law did not favor welfare claimants. A lot of things which we take for granted today, like the right to a hearing and the right to your medical records, if you’re involved in anything. Those things had not been established and they seem very basic. So there were a number of these, almost every time you looked at something involving a poor person against an official in one of these agencies, including the environmental stuff. There was so much to do and so much that needed to be done, that very few others were doing. The work was very, very interesting from the very beginning. It was very challenging. We were just sort of outsiders, who were not particularly welcome in the community.

DONAHUE: What about among the clientele? What kind of relationship did you have with most of the clients? Was it just strictly professional? And did you feel a good rapport?

ROSENBERG: Oh I think people who come to you as a lawyer for free service, especially who are just, who realize that lawyers are there, who want to help them and are interested in them and are treating them like people. And then when they see that in court they are meeting the other side with the same, if not even better, with more competent lawyers, they’re pretty proud of that. And I think the clients are always from the first day, even when I was in the Civil Rights Division when I represented the United States. I always admired them a great deal. Most of them had difficult lives and serious problems. They’re very, generally nice people. They don’t always have the advantages that the rest of us have. Sometimes in the domestic relations cases, there really aren’t any winners and the children are losers. And I don’t know….We have a lot of debates in Legal Services about the value of spending so much time on domestic cases. And back then probably the divorce rate was probably twenty-five percent, today it is over fifty. So, the demand for what we do in that area, because people fight over kids. And the legal system hasn’t adjusted. You have to have a lawyer in these things and there just aren’t enough lawyers to go around. In this area there aren’t enough people who can afford lawyers, so you either have people who go without representation, if they don’t they have to look to us. But on some of the larger issues, the consumer cases or even the evictions or the others, that generally oftentimes you have an opportunity, to help someone make a real difference in their lives. You can see in the case listings that we put together. Those are all very significant, very important. I think that’s so. But it was not an easy start. And now in retrospect, it doesn’t seem like it’s not such a huge amount of time. And I think, I’ve always said I don’t twist anybody’s arm to come to this program. You have to want to be happy in a small community and that has pluses and minuses. You can’t get lost in anonymity, which I think small towns have a lot going for them. But at the same time you can feel very isolated if you’re going uphill as we often are. And you’re stepping on toes a lot.

DONAHUE: Does that happen still?

ROSENBERG: Well, we still step on toes. I think now there are, we don’t, I don’t like to step on toes if we don’t have to do that. And we try to avoid it and we’ll try to negotiate cases before we file them. I think the program now, thirty years later, has a lot of support and so, public support, so people sort of expect to see that periodically. When they see a case that’s in the paper, where we’re taking on as somebody would say another cause or fighting, filing a case for someone who’s an underdog or who’s against the county or a hospital or against a coal company, they sort of take it for granted. I mean they understand that back then it was very unusual and the clients probably were, I’m sure, supported back then. I just think that people feel a little more empowered today. The economy has been bad and the I think the coal industry over time has done, it has not been very good, without being forced into making changes that are, to require, which requires safe mines and low dust levels and environmental measures that make, will restore the property after mining. All of those things have come…

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

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

ARWEN DONAHUE: This is tape nine, side B.

JOHN ROSENBERG: It seems that companies just won’t regulate themselves. They will not. We’ve seen that over and over again, whether it’s the chemical industry or the mining industry. Because where people are looking for profit, primarily, they don’t want to shut something, a mine down, long enough to fix what’s broken or to take real measures to keep dust levels down until somebody has made them do it. Because every time you do that, you have to slow production down a little bit and you won’t produce as much. So, the result is you have a high incidence of black lung disease and you have an unfriendly worker environment. Finally things started changing in the last few years. So now I think it’s much more accepted, if that’s the right word, I think people even can understand or they see it happening and they see that’s probably one of the roles that we play. And that we have done over the years, but I think at the same time they can see that what we do is responsible. That we have good lawyers. That we don’t make up law suits and that generally there’s a good reason for what we do. When we can do something in the community, like the housing project, where we’re working with public officials, who are now, who want to do something for people who let’s say live in substandard housing, out of their own sense of duty or their own feeling that everybody’s entitled to have a decent place to live in. If you’ve got that sort of county government, then those are people we can work with and not have to sue. I mean, I’d like nothing better than to have us, to be able to put ourselves out of business. [LAUGHING] But, I don’t know, I think that’s a long way off.

DONAHUE: You talked last time about your, about a few of the cases….Do you need a coffee break? [LAUGHING] Do you, okay, so last time you talked about the Broad Form Deed and how that case was dealt with and the victory that resulted from that. And you talked about the development of the community in David and I’m wondering….You also talked about the establishment of the Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, which was called Fair Tax Coalition and the work that that organization started. I think those were the main things that you talked about during this era that you have been in Prestonsburg. I’m wondering if you want to highlight anything else from those years? Go into detail about anything else?

ROSENBERG: Well, I think we’ve….There are some other sort of unique things that we’ve done. I think I’m very proud of the work that we’ve done on behalf of coal miners, who have refused to work in unsafe conditions. We established a mine safety project, where we represent those miners in seeking a re-instatement and damages for having been fired unjustly – excuse me – or discriminated against unjustly. I think that’s been real successful. And the lawyer who did that for a number of years, Tony Oppagard, who is now the Assistant to the Director of the Mine Health and Safety Administration, who was an Appal Red lawyer in West Virginia years ago. I think that’s been very significant. We’ve represented a lot of disabled coal miners in applications for Black Lung benefits, this federal program, where so many people, right now, ninety-five percent of the people are denied, because the governmental regulations are so severe it’s difficult to obtain the claims. But we still manage – and the private bar hardly does those cases at all. So we’ve worked with the Black Lung Association, Bill Worthington, for example, officers of the Black Lung Association, in trying to get Congress to be, relax those requirements and to have better regulations that are fairer, that we see a more reasonable number of people be approved for Black Lung benefits. We have won many of those claims, the ones that we’ve screened and where private attorneys finally gave up. Because it takes so long for private attorneys to get their fees and because they’re so complex and take so long, we’re going to get another lawyer to come in pretty soon, nearer in the next few months to do that. And the mine safety and Black Lung work sort of go hand in hand. The same thing is true of coal miner, of pension benefits. We had a case we went to the United States Supreme Court on involving pension benefits where we lost. But it really helped them, I think, in some ways to re-write their requirements. But Gracie Rob, it’s the Gracie Robinson case, a woman up here, a widow up in Oxford, whose husband had worked over thirty years in the coal mines, but had not stopped working and applied. And he died in the coal mines in an accident. And the requirements for obtaining a widow’s pension was that the miner should have applied for a pension and stopped working. And since he was killed in a mine accident and said he hadn’t applied for his pension, they wouldn’t give her her pension. We said that was arbitrary. If he’s worked thirty years and you only have to have twenty-five to get a pension. And he wanted to keep working. It was like punishment at that point. We won and then we lost in the District court and then we won in the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and then we lost in the United States Supreme Court. But they did actually re-write that provision in the bargaining contract. But I think the work we do for low, for disabled miners has been really important. In the last few years we’ve started a migrant farm worker program up in Richmond, where we got some money from the Legal Services Corporation to help migrant workers throughout the state. We have a very small grant. It’s only about thirty-five thousand dollars, so we’ve done that co-operatively with a program in Texas that represents these folks full time. And we’ve managed to file some of the first cases with respect to working conditions. I mean there are cases where the workers come up here and the grower breaches the contract or at least our workers claim the growers have breached their contract by not providing the working time that they claimed they would or the working conditions under which they would work. And the program, the Western Kentucky program had the grant a few of years ago and they just could not really find the workers and we were, by getting together with the people in Texas, the paralegal from Texas came up and who helped….Who helped to do this project, did the outreach work. And oh [YAWNS] And for example he would meet the bus, the Greyhound bus coming in at one o’clock in the morning at the station and give out his card to the workers and then they would know how to contact him. That kind of thing. And you have to be bilingual, obviously, but I think that’s been a very, even though we have very few migrant workers out here in Eastern Kentucky, there are a number of other areas in the state, especially where they have large tobacco farms in Western Kentucky, that’s where we’ve had so many of our cases. I think most recently the development of our housing coalition here, called LINKS, where we’re doing this huge home repair project. With all the groups that are coming in from out of state. And just bringing all these agencies together under one roof, so they can collaborate and work together, I think has been a real positive development. Showing people how they can, I mean we’ve pulled together a lot of different agencies and non-profits, who are all addressing housing issues, into one collaborative. And I think everybody’s been real pleased with that. I think we’ve been able to do that because we don’t have any axes to grind or turf. We just said we want to do this and we’re willing to do it if you all will cooperate and we can seek funding together, and do some cooperative work. And so now I actually am sharing a grant with the fiscal court, which would have, and for a worker here, who is a young woman, who came from Jean’s program. A participant, who is very, very bright and who has moved up very fast. Is a single parent. Could go to law school if she were willing. And that makes me feel good. We’ve had a number of people like that, who are single parents, who have been on welfare, who have worked with us in a training situation over a few months time and have really, really sort of progressed so quickly and come out of their shell and have moved on to good jobs. I think we have a pretty extraordinary group in most of the offices. It’s a good program to me, I mean if I go through the senior staff in this organization, I’m just really proud of who they are and what they do. Many of them have been with me a long time and each of them has different skills, but they’re all committed to what we, this representation of low income persons, who otherwise wouldn’t be able to have lawyers. Whether it’s for a mundane situation or something that is pretty exciting, that will really affect a lot of other people in the future. I think we’ve, I think we do very, very good legal work and I think we have real committed people.

DONAHUE: Do you want to say anything, you’ve been mentioning that it’s been kind of a turbulent time for Legal Services in general. Do you want to say something about your perspective on the state of Legal Services and what direction it might be taking?

ROSENBERG: Well it’s all conjecture. I think those of us who have been doing this a long time are sort of, have been disappointed the last few years, because we really have not been able to get appreciable new funding at the federal level. And this program was established at the federal level to provide free legal services to the poor and to be a non-political program. It was the last, one of the last things that President Nixon signed, was this Bill that created this corporation. And we expanded and got additional money from nineteen seventy-four to nineteen eighty. And we went from like forty million nationally or fifty, to three hundred and twenty-one. And when Governor Reagan came in as president he was ready to destroy, to get rid of Legal Services, because of his experiences. They had sued him in California. And I won’t go through all that history, but really since the Reagan and that first year, instead of getting rid of us they made a compromise and we lost twenty-five percent of our money, which is a lot. And we’ve never really recouped that money. We’re now still not at the level we were in nineteen eighty. So that most of us have half as many lawyers as we did in nineteen eighty-one. We were able to….But there have been many efforts in the meantime in Congress to just eliminate the program. And we’ve been able to forestall that, which says a lot. Because congressional support now is pretty strong. Unfortunately the sub-committee chair for Legal Services is from this District. It’s Hal Rogers from Somerset. Whereas he’s able to bring back lots of money for other local projects, he has never, either he’s not a fan of Legal Services, or he is trying to mollify the people above him and the others whom he works with, because his latest….For the last couple of years, that committee has passed out a recommended budget which is only about half the size of our funding level, 140 out of 300 million dollars. And that’s been real disappointing, but he likes to say that he is keeping it going and that there are budgetary shortages, and that the other people on his committee are not as strong as he is. And he would be supportive. And besides he knows that our supporters will be able to get the funding level up on the floor of the House, once it gets to the floor. And that’s what’s happened. But I’m disappointed in him. I wish he were a little more aggressive or could do more at his end, which he probably could if he wanted to. But….Excuse me just a moment. In the meantime we’ve been fortunate to get some money through the State Legislature and I think that’s been a real positive thing in the last few years, where our own legislators have recognized the importance of Legal Services. We did not get any more money this year, but we did get a repeat of last year and so about half of our funding is now state funding. I think it’s conjecture, as I was telling you there are lots of possibilities. I think our current corporation feels that it’s more efficient to have a single entity in the state, covering the state. Because the President of the corporation is a former private attorney from the state of Washington, however, where they have a very effective, single state program. Time will tell us what will happen there. I don’t know. And some other….Anybody else? I think I just lost my train of thought.

DONAHUE: Well, it sounded like you were basically finished with your train of thought, weren’t you?

ROSENBERG: I was talking about the state funding, right? That we didn’t get any more funding this time or that we were….How far did I get with state funding?

DONAHUE: Said that this year, you’re at the same level that you were at last year. You weren’t cut anymore.

ROSENBERG: We weren’t cut and we were very pleased that we were able to get additional money last time. We have two sources of state funding, one for the filing fee and one for a general appropriation. And this time, many programs did not get increases. There were a lot of one time expenditures, like the Science Center, got a little more money. But I think a lot of on-going projects, except for the new ones like the Child Care money that I think actually, some of it’s out of the Tobacco money. So, this is a year again, where we have no more new money, state or federal. And that makes it difficult because if you want to give people salary increases, you either have to lose positions or something else to free up additional funds. I don’t know whether….And so there is this tendency in our funding agency to pull programs together. There is the thought that state-wide programs are more efficient. I don’t think there is any real proof of that anywhere. I mean I don’t know that they have evidence of that. It may be more efficient to administer, because one person can make a decision instead of four. You might be able to be more homogeneous around the state. I would like to think that Legal Services is here to stay. I think for the most part it is. I think there are people in Congress, who think of, that it could be organized differently. When I was talking about a state-wide organization. Or whether….I know that one of my counterparts in Virginia would rather be part, consolidate with us, because our client population is so much the same. The Appalachian counties do have a lot in common. Whereas in Virginia you have only, all of the states is in West Virginia and Appalachia. And Virginia, a small part of the state is in Appalachia. So, whether they would allocate enough resources to that one or two programs in that corner is something that time will just have to tell.

DONAHUE: You want to take a break and stretch…?

ROSENBERG: I think I need…

ROSENBERG: The other thing that’s been so difficult with Legal Services has been the restrictions that Congress has placed on us in more recent years, which prevent us from filing Class Actions or challenging Welfare Reforms, accepting attorney fees, not being able to represent prisoners. Those things all seem to, one could view them as making us second class lawyers. There is no real, rational explanation for them when the preamble to the Legal Services Corporation Act states that you should not interfere with the professional responsibility to your client. And that clients have the right to have full representation from Legal Services lawyers. So there’s, it’s not a very favorable atmosphere to work under. It doesn’t mean we still can’t do ninety-five percent of the cases, because many of them still fit into, aren’t affected by those prohibitions. But it is something that needs to be changed. And it’s purely a political affair. And you have the national opponents of Legal Services, who are always looking for one more anecdote to pull out as being the kind of thing that goes on. I mean, no one’s perfect. So you find somebody’s statistics aren’t quite right and all of a sudden everybody in the country has to be on guard for an inspection, even though we….The way we are funded is by the number of poor people in our areas, not by the number of cases we do. So there’s always a level of, if not harassment, of paperwork that grows and grows and leaves less time for the real work that needs to be done. At that same time it’s good that we are able to get this money because you really can’t fund this kind of work with private fundraising. You do a limited amount of it, but not very much. We, I think we’re fortunate to be able to get good lawyers. We don’t pay equivalent salaries. And we have people coming to work with very large, outstanding loans from undergraduate and law school. We’ve instituted a small, re-payment program that is helpful. But we’ve just increased our starting salaries to twenty-seven thousand, which is a big step forward. It’s still behind many of the private firms and many of the state and federal agencies. And then we only go up about thirteen hundred a year for, first for nine months and then for a year. But all the same, I think we’re competitive and we have some good benefits. And we are able, have been fortunate to get people who are really committed. So I am very proud of the work we do. I am very proud of the people who are here and who do the work. We have wonderful relations, I also should mention with the spouse abuse shelters. That’s another project we’ve started in the last few years, is to have specialists who work, who represent abused spouses at domestic violence hearings. And we’ve gotten very involved in that area and I think the family court judges appreciate us and the shelters appreciate us. And it is a huge amount of our practice, more than we would like. But it’s one of those societal problems that we have to deal with, so we are very interested in the rights of children and the rights of these women. Of course, it’s wonderful to have people like my wife, Jean, out trying to help move them gain some independence and get back into education and develop their careers in a way that they can be productive and independent on their own. I’ve been real proud of the people that have come from her program into my office, both for representation and several who, at least one of whom is employed now as a full-time person here. It continues to be pretty exciting work. I never lack for anything to do. Close to the end?

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