Overview

The Civil Rights Mediation Oral History Project documented the work of Community Relations Service Conciliators from 1964, when the agency was founded as part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to 2025, until the agency was disbanded during the second Donald Trump administration. The project had two phases. The first phase took place between 1999 and 2001. At that time we did extensive (6 hour) interviews with 19 current and former CRS conciliators and regional directors, talking to them about what kinds of conflicts they dealt with, how they dealt with them, and what the outcomes were. The second phase took place between 2021 - 2025 (and it may continue beyond that.) In phase II, we interviewed 10 additional conciliators and regional directors, as well as Grande Lum, who was the full agency Director from 2012-2016. In this second phase we asked similar questions, although we updated them some to include questions about, for instance, the impact of social media on conflicts, which didn't exist in the early 2000s. We also talked with Grande Lum in Phase 2. Grande served as the full agency Director from 2012-2016. (Grande is also co-PI on this project and conducted one of the interviews himself.)

More information about the Community Relations Service can be found in Resolving Racial Conflict: The Community Relations Service and Civil Rights, 1964-1989 (Volume 1) by Bertram Levine. March 4, 2005. A second edition, with new material added by Grande Lum came out in 2020, entitled: America's Peacemakers: The Community Relations Service and Civil Rights.