Background information on a case

Bob Ensley

Bob Ensley

Bob Ensley

Answer:
No, they came in with the idea that they were going to develop this land that they call East of Egypt and that it was going to be like a theme park. There would also be residences for people to live in, as well as a teaching facility and a place for worship services. Many people want to call it a cult or a group but it's not, and it's not a compound. I'd refer to it as a village, and the commune wants to term it and describe it as something that's going to result in another Waco or Ruby Ridge. These people are highly intelligent and I've spent an awful lot of time there and I've learned so much about some of the things they do. Dr. Urich, Moaki Urich has a great deal of vision and they have money from their bookstores. Also, they have what they call they're Zedfest, which runs from June 24th to July 4th and it's a period of eating and festivals and praying and so forth. One rainy Sunday they had 6,000 people come. They had 300 from England. They could charter a plane. They had them from all over the world -- Hong Kong, Japan, all around. They had over 35,000 people there during the days of the Zedfest. So here's what the city did. This shows you how calculating and how hypocritical some of these officials are. They went out to the compound, as they called it, and closed every one of their food centers, where they would sell food. They said they didn't meet sanitary codes and this and that. Everything. You want to know why? They want them all to buy food from the local white establishments in Eatonton, Ingalls Department Store. Ingalls is a food chain here in rural Georgia. That parking lot stayed full. That delicatessen counter would sell out everyday. All of that and it was done simply to increase the sales of the local establishment.

Edward Howden

Answer:
Now here let me switch to the other case which involved the neighboring small town that had a different kind of a water problem with the tribe. That problem had to do again with the absence of formal historical legal documents. About a two-mile stretch of pipeline that served this neighboring community from a spring many miles to the north went across part of this reservation, and it was an old six-inch cast iron pipe that everybody knew had been leaking. The town had a need to replace that pipe with a non-leaking pipe, so they needed the tribe's permission to do this. They knew there was an easement across the tribe's land, but the records were lost. The tribe had a small community at the west end of the reservation, a tiny community that had only about three households in it, and they didn't have any piped water. So the tribe, knowing the town wanted a new easement, said, "Ok, we want water." The only water they'd been getting for this tiny community was trucked in from about a mile away. There had been an understanding that they had a cattle watering tank that came out of the town's water. It was understood on both sides that the tribe was supposed to get some water, but this was the only water they were getting for many years. The tribe was concerned, so I contacted the head of the town's water council, who was very much interested in mediation. There were lot of tangles and problems due partly to the great distances between the town and its attorney who lived at least a four or five hour drive away. On one occasion the tribe was a little short of funds and we had a delay of some months because the attorney's fee was not forthcoming. There was a standstill for quite a few months on that. I kept sort of nursing it along, keeping folks interested and pushing toward the objectives, and of course there were on-site visits and discussions of the water line. There were gaps of understanding and serious differences over what could be done and what could not be done. Eventually, after having been in and out of the scene for something like three years, eventually we began to shape up the draft of a possible agreement that went through several drafts and discussions. The final result was almost fours years before we got it nailed down.

Dick Salem

Answer:
At first the culture groups worked fine. Then the white inmates, seeing the esprit, cohesiveness and sense of community enjoyed by racial minorities, decided that they needed some organizations. So all of a sudden there was a German culture group, and then there was an Italian culture group, and they were granted culture group status by the administration. The German American group was actually a block of inmates devoted to racist activity and they provoked fights with the black inmates. Rioting broke out on several occasions and some of that found its way into the Minneapolis newspapers where I learned about it.

Dick Salem

Dick Salem

Dick Salem

Answer:
Yes or some other critical reason. For example, we had a call from rural Ferris State College in Michigan, where they had been recruiting black students for the first time. The black students were being intimidated by white students who kept their hunting rifles in their rooms. There was some serious intimidation, and it was apparent to call that this was a serious matter. The alert came from the state NAACP, I believe. The handful of black students on campus were being intimidated, their parents were on campus and the college president had refused to meet with them. C.J. Walker, in our Detroit office, phoned the President and told him he was coming in. We stayed close to C.J. on the phone then, because he was new on the job. He just went in there to get the parties talking, to get something happening. There was no time to fool around there. We had the resources, we had the person, he was nearby, he got in there, and he got on the job. That’s the way we would operate when there was high tension or a crisis. What he did there, incidentally, was to get the parties talking. He got the president to meet with the parents.

Dick Salem

Dick Salem

Answer:
The guys who responded were on the street, I wasn’t doing that. Primarily this was, with one exception, a black staff; three people from Chicago and one sent in from Washington. What they did, I suspect, was confront police and alert them to the problem. I don’t know whether they asked them or told them or what they actually said. We were also on the street observing the horrendous police behaviors. I can’t say what everybody did, because I wasn’t there, and I know they weren’t telling me, nor were they telling Deputy Attorney General Warren Christopher when we reported to him at his suite atop of the Hilton. What I do know, is when it was all over, five or six of us were sitting in the office when the phone rang and it was Roger Wilkins, the director of CRS. I’d only been out there about four months; they’d just opened the office. I was the regional director. They did not consult Mayor Daley on my appointment, which federal agencies usually did when they appointed regional directors. Often Mayor Daley would make the appointments himself. But we did not control the flow of federal funds and he had no use for us, we were like flies on the wall. Roger said on the phone, "Dick put me on the speaker.” So I pushed the speaker phone button, "I want you guys to know that whatever happens, you acquitted yourself very well.” It turned out that police had complained to the FBI and the FBI complained to the white House that we were running around telling police what to do in Chicago. That's how Roger started the conversation, "Dick, did any of your people tell the police what they should be doing?” And I said, "Guys?” "No.” So who knows what happened in the heat of things? That’s the report that came back to the mayor and they wanted us out of there. It wasn’t important enough for them to pursue and the issue died. But at that moment, it sounded like we were all going to be working somewhere else. So yes, there are times the public officials let it be known they don’t want us around. Very often, if someone would complain to Washington, the letter would go to my boss and it would go to the Attorney General, as it did in Richmond, CA. It would come back down to my boss for the AG’s signature, he’d send it to me, so that I would draft the response to the complaint against me, send it back to him, back to the attorney general, back to the complainer with the AG’s signature.

Dick Salem

Answer:
Well that’s another tangent we’re going into. I wrote a case study about the Skokie-Nazi conflict for Mediation Journal in about 1983. This was a group of neo-Nazis who were demonstrating regularly in the Marquette Park in Chicago and they were vile and intemperate in their language. It was a white neighborhood in an area where there was black housing. The whites viewed it as encroachment on their neighborhood. These were largely Eastern European families whose homes were their lives, and their savings. They would make their weekly mortgage payments at the local S&L, building their equity in their homes. Now they saw all this being threatened as blacks moved in block by block. So while these homeowners would not accept the values being espoused by the neo-Nazis in Marquette Park, as soon as their homes were threatened, they felt really threatened and they were sort of glad about that storefront neo Nazi office in their neighborhood. Every so often, the neo-Nazi group would step out of their area and go into a Chicago area which was black and there would be some violence. Then every so often, a black leader seeking some recognition, not the main line leaders, but some young mavericks, would want to march into Marquette Park area and then there would be some violence. There was police action, nothing heavy, but enough to cause major publicity and stone throwing type incidents. But after one of those incidents, the city passed an ordinance. The Chicago Park District refused to permit any group to demonstrate in Marquette Park with 75 or more people unless it had a permit. The neo-Nazis never had a membership of 75, but their leafletting drew large crowds so they were told to get a permit. The neo-Nazis refused to apply for permits and ultimately were banned from Marquette Park. They then wrote letters to about 75 suburbs in the region threatening to come to the suburbs. Most of suburban officials discard letters, but Skokie, which has a large Jewish population, including many concentration camps survivors, warned the neo-Nazis to stay out and that started an engagement. Skokie passed some ordinances, which later were stricken down, banning Nazis from demonstrating there. It became a cause for neo-Nazis throughout the nation. The ACLU accepted them as a client and it hurt the ACLU considerably. There were fine legal scholars at Northwestern and elsewhere who supported the ban. Then there was state legislation introduced, banning neo-Nazi marches anywhere. The neo-Nazis were really a rag-a-tag band of Keystone cop-type guys when they came out in their uniforms and wooden shields. Their vile language and hate messages inflamed the Jewish community and many others as well. It appeared there would be a demonstration in Skokie so Werner Petterson went into that case to advise Skokie officials on matters related to policing and handling demonstration crowds. If you had a handful of Nazis saying they were coming to Skokie, you were going to have tens of thousands of people from all over the country planning to come to Skokie to counter-demonstrate. So on the one hand, we worked with city officials and the police. I joined them in some of these meetings on techniques for minimizing the likelihood of violence, as the Skokie police had no experience in this. We got Commander Jim Reardon from the Chicago Police Department to help us. He had worked the Democratic Convention years earlier. He talked to them about crowd control. We visited with the state police and discussed what support they were giving and how. We met with the leadership of the Jewish community to talk about ways to minimize confrontations by planning their counter-demonstration at least a mile away from the neo-Nazi site to discourage people from interacting. Then, maybe a small delegation would walk over there with their candles or something in silent protest. All of this sounded good, but there was going to be thousands of angry people. The momentum was building. Conditions were inflamed by newspaper headlines about the determined neo-Nazis. A newspaper reporter told me that a travel agent in his home town of Los Angeles had booked 2000 charter seats to Skokie. President Carter had a political rally at a Skokie high school prior to his election some years earlier and tied up traffic in the village for hours one evening, so you can imagine what would happen. Then you had the Burlington, Vermont veterans of foreign wars saying they would pitch tents in Skokie. You had people from Europe who said they’d be there and then you had the controversial Jewish Defense League saying, "There will be blood in the streets of Skokie,” and putting ads in the Jewish Forward media saying, "Send us $50, Send a Jew to Skokie.” It was obviously going to be a catastrophe and everybody saw this and nobody wanted it. And there we were, the only ones meeting with all of the parties. So it was just natural to turn it to mediation. We were under constraints from the ACLU attorneys. They understood who we were, but they didn’t have much respect for anyone who did not declare their position. But they needed us. We met Frank Colin, the Neo-Nazi head, just to talk to him, and we worked with Eugene Dubow who headed the Chicago office of American Jewish Committee and was coordinating counter-demonstration work greater Chicago area. He was very supportive of what we were doing. We tried to get Chicago Park District to consider opening up its park to prevent serious problems in Skokie, but they wouldn’t talk to us.

Dick Salem

Answer:
It was a village. There were American Indian families there and some white ranchers as well. Pine Ridge reservation was a desolate place. There were some jobs there, but at least 70% unemployment. It was February. They stopped there and took over that village. They didn’t hurt anybody; people were free to leave. For the record, -- Russell Means doesn’t tell it this way in his book, he says AIM communicated directly with the FBI Chief Trimbach the stories I heard was that Terronez and Martinez, both Mexican Americans who could be confused for Native Americans, and Sarver came out of Wounded Knee to the FBI officials up the road with AIM’s list of demands. The FBI chief immediately placed them under house arrest, notwithstanding their Justice Department credentials, the same as the FBI carries. It took a day until John could get through to Washington and get released. But they brought up the list of demands and thus started a saga, 73 days at Wounded Knee. CRS sent a team in to try to serve in the mediational and intermediary role. The FBI was there, Bureau of Indian Police, customs officials, they needed all the police types they could get there. There were rifles and firing and a few killings. CRS responded with a cadre of field representatives - - conciliators and mediators -- who were housed in a church in the town of Pine Ridge, five to ten miles out of Wounded Knee. There were blockades along the road. The first road block was maintained by the tribal chief, Wilson’s people. Then the FBI had a road block and the third road block was the American Indians right outside of Wounded Knee. We established our base in a church. There were beds and phones and a few rooms and we had anywhere up to a dozen people there at a time, doing a variety of activities. We would transport people in and out in conjunction with the other Feds. They knew we were there, but they didn’t accept us or like us. You had a situation where you had FBI agents who are really trained to work behind desks or in urban settings, and there they were out there in the plains and the cold. You had BIA police, and customs police, perhaps, and Marshals and none of them were very happy there. Many of them weren’t getting overtime and their families were back home. There were bunkers that the AIM members had built. There were armed people in them with gunshots going off at night sometimes. There were shots fired into the place. That was the setting.

Nancy Ferrell

Answer:
This would probably have been '90, '91 somewhere around there. So, that was what hit the paper, that the Klan was distributing flyers supporting the fraternity. The students obviously demonstrated against what had happened at the fraternity and sorority. The minority groups wanted the fraternity banished immediately. Since this was a traditional event that occurred, that had not caused any reaction for a hundred of years, the university was saying, so, what happened? What's the deal? Why did somebody get upset this year? Why didn't they get upset last year? It was an event where a minority had the courage to say, "I'm upset. This is not right. There's something wrong." So that raised the awareness and the consciousness. So the entry was the media being aware of that. I made contact with student groups and with university officials. The Vice President for Student Affairs and the Vice President for Academic Affairs were both very open to our intervention. They wanted to do whatever they could to make a change. They didn't have any resistance as far as them trying to say it wasn't egregious or that they didn't need to do something about it. It was very positive. Part of our approach was that you go to the highest level for entry and so I needed to talk to the President to find out if he was open to us going in.

Nancy Ferrell

Answer:
There were allegations of the housing authority not responding to tenants, and Tulsa became one of the prime targets of the housing authority investigation. The housing authority was siphoning money and spending it on other stuff, so the housing was falling apart. The minority groups living in the communities had complained to us because by then some of the players knew me and asked if I would come in.

Silke Hansen

Silke Hansen

Answer:
Not at me, specifically, at this point, as I was inside. Most of the white students were outside and eventually even the white staff were outside too. But they ended up getting all of the black students and staff into the auditorium which was inside without any windows because they were throwing things at the windows. Then the police came, including equestrian units, to try and move the crowds away, but they'd just come back. They'd move away, and then come back again from another direction.

Silke Hansen

Answer:
Yes. And what the procedures would be for making that happen. A lot of it was even just how you get access to some of the leadership of some of those agencies if you know there's a particular issue in your community that isn't being responded to. And in some cases, the time line was a problem, because when people apply for a loan they'll get an answer within a month. But these folks were looking for an answer next week. So how do you handle some of those emergency situations? In some cases, it was just a matter of really clarifying what the procedures are and what has to be done to have to go through that.

Renaldo Rivera

Answer:
Well, it's mostly the city and New Jersey because the primary investigation was focused right here and in Patterson and Jersey City, NJ, where some of the terrorist activity from 1993 was known to have taken place and to be harbored. So there was a larger premium by the investigative efforts on the Arab-Muslim, and South-Asian communities here than elsewhere in the country initially. It continues to today. The impact on the affected communities is larger here. Our effort is to work with and talk directly to the Arab-Muslim community as well as the South-Asian and the Sikh communities, to assure them that the focus of the investigation -- the new Anti-terrorism Act -- is designed to go after the terrorist effort and not the community at large. There is some concern around balancing civil liberties and the primary investigation, but the focus is really on anti-terrorism. Also, to work with the question of immigration status issues which are raised as the investigation proceeds. As people are detained and interviewed, their immigration status may come into question. We are working with the INS and local leadership around those kinds of questions so that the communities are assured that it is not the INS involved in a wide sweep again and that raids aren't taking place in communities.We've had good success in developing relationships with institutional partners so that we can do two things, reduce the level of community tension, preventing its escalation, and maintain community stability. The other part is that we have the issues of the primary investigation, which creates different impacts here since it is larger and more intensified; adverse impacts on the communities. We have to work with that.

Renaldo Rivera

Answer:
The point at which I decided to stay with it came when they permitted me to go to the organizing meeting for the next demonstration. We were going to just do self marshalling techniques and introduce those kinds of skills for them to have. Some of the individuals started talking about violence against people and property. It was clear right then that it was something we had to pay attention to at CRS. If some people are going to advocate property damage and personal violence, then your end is the growing mistrust for public officials and law enforcement in that community and you're moving towards the two-step trigger process for civil disorder or civil unrest. At least you have a contingent that's willing to move in that direction so now you have to try to diffuse that, or at least see if there's enough to do the two-step process.

Martin Walsh

Answer:
Yes, and I think it was fostered by a number of the African-American teachers and professors.

Stephen Thom

Answer:
I was working this alone for CRS and the Native American Heritage Commission -- they do mediation particularly in this arena, but asked me to work with them because of my relationship with the Ohlone People. There were at least six different divisions among this particular tribe that we had to bring together. Very strong feelings. Some of them had their own burial grounds and wanted to have the remains given to them so they could have them put into a mission burial ground. Others felt they'd like to have these things hidden away because they didn't want anybody to disturb or desecrate the remains, and they all wanted them to naturally go back into the Earth. That's the spiritual way that most Native Americans believe that remains need to be returned naturally back into the Earth, so that their spirits can rest in peace.

Stephen Thom

Nancy Ferrell

Answer:
He's inside the compound with the guy with the guns. I don't see anybody inside the building. He takes me down the hallway. It's very dark, and I'm beginning to think, "Alright, what's he going to do?" I could sense people on both sides of the hallway, I could sense there were people there. It was dark and I was following this guy. I turned to the left, down the hall, and went to a room where the chief and another person were. I started doing the interview and asking questions about what their issues were. What occurred to cause them to take these extreme measures? What was it going to take to resolve the situation? I'm taking notes, I'm getting everything down. They're telling me, "We should've talked to you a week ago. This wouldn't have happened. We're so glad you're here." Retrospectively, I realized that every now and then one of the two people would leave. But somebody else would come in. So I would start a whole new discussion with them. What do you think is causing this? What got us to this point? How do we now move ahead without the violence?" I was taking lots of notes because they would leave and somebody else would come in. This happened for probably an hour, back and forth. Within two hours, I'm still interviewing people as they jockey in and out of the room. They're just so pleased I'm there and they think it's going to make all of the difference in the world. "We're just so glad you could come." So all of a sudden, after a couple of hours, I realized nobody had come back. One person had left, I'm talking to one, and then this person leaves. I sat there for about five minutes and nobody came back.

Silke Hansen

Answer:
Ok, this was a case of a national company that had a history of not being trusted by segments of some minority communities. In fact, there had been boycotts specifically organized against this company. There was an occasion where an official from that company made some statements at a public event which were seen as particularly outrageous by the community. That sort of renewed the need for something to happen in terms of the relationship between that company and the minority community. There were some discussions taking place locally and on a national basis, and our agency was able to coordinate, or facilitate, a collaboration among a number of minority organizations that were interested. They all had an interest in trying to approach this particular company, and the company was willing to at least explore the possibility of meeting with this national level coalition to address some of the issues and concerns that had been raised. Some of our national staff helped to make some of the national contacts, but we in this region were the ones that actually worked it. I co-mediated that with Leo Cardenas who was a regional director. We were the ones who went on with the logistics of actually pulling together this coalition of minority organizations, arranging the first meeting with the company, and doing pre-mediation work.

Silke Hansen

Martin Walsh

Stephen Thom

Answer:
I had worked with her on some other cases, and she had alerted me that she was in touch with the institution, and that she was going to see what she could do to get those remains returned. So I knew of the issue, but I had not initially opened a case. At the same time, the institution had contacted the Native American Heritage Commission and requested its assistance. And in our discussions, we had learned that the two parties had contacted different people.

Stephen Thom

Answer:
We knew there were tensions here because we had been involved in a lot of pre-riot conflicts between the Korean and African Americans and issues of police excessive use of force that was taking place. We were down in LA all the time just putting out swap meet and African-American community conflicts. Stores and demonstrations. The precursor to all the civil unrest was at least a year of spotted conflicts between Koreans and African Americans throughout. We knew there was this backdrop of police and community tensions all along because there had been shootings of the Muslims and other altercations that we had to respond to, all in the prior years. We've had gang leaders come to us and say, "we're going to declare war on the Los Angeles Police, this is it. We're tired of this because we feel like we are being hunted." So there is just a great deal of tension prior to the civil unrest.

Stephen Thom

Answer:
The mayor set a limit. They tried to raise the limit. They cleared the floor. I think this was a little bit of a compromise. We got a few more people in, and they made their selection and they went in. Then it was a matter of, "Let's go over the agenda. What are you going to talk about? We've got to get some framework to this. It was amazing to me.

Stephen Thom

Angel Alderete

Answer:
Law enforcement and corrections. But we would get involved in other kinds of situations, too, if we thought we'd be able to provide assistance. And of course, if they were willing to have us come in. But about 1972 or 1973, the axe fell and we lost a great number of staff people. Nationwide, I think we initially had roughly four hundred staff people, and we were cut down a lot. When we got chopped up, of course they went by the amount of time each person had with that agency, so I lost my position and stepped down to Conciliator. They brought my group in with the rest of the region, which, more than likely, should have been done long before. From then on, I began to get involved mostly in correctional and law enforcement kinds of problems, not only within my region but also within other regions. I sometimes would get a call from Seattle to come in and provide some kind of technical assistance to them with some of the things that they were doing. From then on, until about 1986, I feel that we did a good job in staying true to the purpose for which we were originally created. From 1986 on, as the agency became even smaller yet, my own feeling is that at that point, we got interested solely with numbers. If you, number one, just put out the numbers, and number two, your little face is out in the media, then you'll survive.

Angel Alderete

Angel Alderete

Angel Alderete

Angel Alderete

Angel Alderete

Leo Cardenas

Answer:
Why don't we concentrate on that particular area [media] now and then move forward. I still find it very interesting. At the time that I was initially contacted, CRS was going throughout the country and conducting media workshops with editors and assistant editors in both the print and the electronic media. I happened to be invited to one workshop that was conducted at the University of St. Mary's. The idea was that individuals -- minority community leaders and editors -- would sit down for a day, or a day and a half, to explore why minorities were not in the media. Also, CRS had a goal to improve the coverage of the minority community. That happened a year and a half before I was recruited. I was recruited to work out of the Dallas office and one of the areas that I covered was Denver, Colorado. Prior to my coming on board, Denver had had a similar meeting between minority organizations and the media. As a result of that meeting, the minority community organizations were able to come together and focus on the media. One of the areas the Denver community leaders focused on, or one of the targets, shall I say, was McGraw Hill. McGraw Hill, at the time, owned several television stations. I began working with the conciliators who were assigned to the Denver office, Wilbur Reed, and Manny Salinas, and with the community group and also with McGraw Hill. As a result of a series of meetings with the community group and with McGraw Hill, eventually they sat down at the table, and CRS mediated an agreement. At the time, we thought it was heaven on earth, because the total amount of money that was committed by McGraw Hill was one million dollars. Now this was 1971, and one million dollars then is a billion dollars today. McGraw Hill and the community group agreed on that amount to be spent over a five year period.

Leo Cardenas

Leo Cardenas

Answer:
With both sides. Yes.

Leo Cardenas

Bob Ensley

Bob Ensley

Edward Howden

Answer:
Okay. We received a phone call one day from a woman who was the tribal chairperson of a small tribe in a southwestern state. She had found the name of the Community Relations Service in the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance, a document at that time that listed all kinds of services available through federal agencies. She indicated that they had some problems with two neighboring non-Indian communities, mainly with respect to water. There were some other problems with neighborly relations too, but the main issue was water supply. I indicated that we'd probably be able to come down and talk with them and explore the possibility of getting some discussions going with each of these two neighboring communities. So they invited us to come do that. We did and they expressed great interest. I explained the mediation process at some length and exactly what was involved as we saw it if they chose to have us assist in a mediation effort. They liked this idea. Part of the explanation was that I would need to get in touch with the other parties and see how they felt about it, explain the process to them and see whether they were interested -- because, of course, it's a totally voluntary process. So I got the names of key people in each of the other communities and went looking for them.

Edward Howden

Edward Howden

Answer:
There were complaints brought by the black officers about the whole hiring process and the lack of adequate representation at various levels. It had been stalemated for a long time, without any progress being made. An earlier court decision had actually frozen hiring, so the city was hurting, it needed cops! Of whatever color. Our regional director down there in Atlanta, had tried several times to get the city to vote for a try at mediation. The mayor apparently did not want to bring it to mediation and let CRS try to help resolve it.

Bob Hughes