Mediator Interview Topic - How did you identify leaders?

How did you identify leaders?

Ernest Jones

[Full Interview] [Topic Top]

The assessment that I did took place over probably 5 or 6 months. We made sure that we had all the points of contact that were necessary. What separates this from a regular case is that instead of going into Birmingham, AL and dealing with the mayor of Birmingham or the police in Birmingham, here you've got the Olympics coming to the city of Atlanta and you've got literally every level of law enforcement involved, every level of governmental entity. So there was a massive group of people we needed to touch base with to be able to move around to be able to get things done. Part of the assessment required an extensive amount of identifying who the key leaders were in different areas and then making contact with them. That way they would know who I was and vice versa. In the Olympics you've got all these people coming from all over the world. You've got an extremely diverse cultural atmosphere and because of that you've got the potential for all kinds of conflict particularly between law enforcement and people. The police aren't running the show, but they are making sure that it flowed smoothly. The tension for conflict between police, the majority of who would be white, and people from all kinds of parts of the world was exceptionally high and so we were trying to identify how that would work and where we would plug into this. The assessment and that leads me up to, the key factor in the assessment process was to make sure that we knew where we fit and where we could best provide the kind of service that we were supposed to.

Question:
How did you know who to contact, who would be the key players that you needed to bring into this process?

Answer:
Well a lot of it was common sense and experience. Because you've done it before, you go into a situation where there are certain people that you have to touch base with. There was a bureaucracy created and an Olympic Committee and they are kind of running the show. That's like the CEO's office. So you know you've got to go to them, you know that you've got to go to the key law enforcement agencies that are going to be responding to this, not just security within the Olympics. A lot of it was going to take place with the periphery and so you had to make sure that you touched base with the city police, the county police, the state police, and the federal police. And again that's kind of common sense. You just know that because that's what the job entails. And you know based on the assessment you can get a sort of sense where you think the problems are going to be so you invite other people that you might need to touch base with. Social service agencies for example, you might touch base with them. So identifying the key leadership, or who the people are that you need to get in touch with, you look first for the position. You find out who the chief of police is and you talk to him. Being here in Atlanta we had some advantage in that we knew some of the players already and so you talk to one and you find out you also need to talk to a couple more and it just kind of grows out. Over a period of several months, and not full time, I was dealing with other cases and everything else. We had a luxury of time because we had a long advance period prior to our involvement. I did the assessment and that gave me an idea of what we were going to do and it kind of created a picture of here's what needs to be done and here's what we plug into this whole process. Then I had to figure out how we were going to do that and how many people it would take and how you organize that and make it run smoothly.

Efrain Martinez

[Full Interview] [Topic Top]

How do we know who to talk to? We have an idea since every town has a mayor. We don't know any names, so we just call the operator and say, "Hey, give me City Hall and the chief of police." Hispanic minorities in Texas are associated mostly with the Catholic church. But you cannot ask the operator to give you the number for the Catholic church. You have to ask for a specific name. But there's always a First Baptist Church. You can call that preacher and ask him for the name of the Catholic church in that town and where the minorities go to church? I would also ask about African American churches and their pastors, and how I could reach them. Before we show up, we know a lot about the town because the people tell us. Once I arrive, I look around to see who's got the biggest business, who's got the biggest house, are they racially mixed. Usually, I ask for the top three business people and I ask those people who the top politician is. I also ask the mayor who are the top business people, the top educators, the top community organizations, the top law enforcement.

Question:
Are you doing this after you get there?

Answer:
Usually, we try to do as much as we can on the phone, but if it's an emergency we have to be there quickly. Once I get there, I ask them several things from their point of view. What do they think is going on? Also, these people will tell me a lot of things about each other. Sometimes people have things they don't want you to know. So we just ask a lot of questions. Who's the leadership, who's the top educator, who's the top businessman, who speaks out front, who's in the back? Who calls the shots? They tell us. Then we make sure we talk to those five key individuals. Then we can pretty much be effective. The whole point of being effective is to create some kind of change or to help them progress, to solve their own problems.

Efrain Martinez

[Full Interview] [Topic Top]

What I'm looking for is consistent names. If four of these people tell me I ought to talk to John Doe, I'll make sure I talk to John Doe. Now once I get to see them, what do I see them for? Essentially, I want to know what they know about the situation.

Efrain Martinez

[Full Interview] [Topic Top]

Do you usually go to the city or county or whatever official first, like the mayor?

Answer:
It depends on who I make connect with first. I try to reach the NAACP, I try to reach the ministers, the church, and I try to reach the mayor. It was the mayor who called me back first. But within the first few hours you try to reach all parties and I let them know who I'm meeting with, or ask them if they could identify somebody from the community. If I'm talking to an official, I ask who do they think I should be meeting with? Who's the one that's been active? Who do I need to see? They'll tell me. Then I call them up.

Manuel Salinas

[Full Interview] [Topic Top]

Question:
How often is the vocal person the real leader? How often does it turn out that there's somebody quiet that's a real leader?

Answer:
Well it's hard to say. Most of the time the vocal person had been around long enough and in the community long enough--probably born there--and is respected for that. So I would say yes, that the vocal person is the person that is best to deal with. Most of the time it's legitimate.

Question:
How do you know when it is not?

Answer:
If during a meeting, it begins to break down or something, or an agency person may tell you that he's not the right person, really. "Maybe we ought to talk to someone else," or something like that. You learn through the grapevine. You can't pass judgment, you're too new.

Nancy Ferrell

[Full Interview] [Topic Top]

Question:
Initially there are 20 people who are sitting at the table, developing these trusting relationships, developing a mutual understanding. But the goal is to eventually get the whole community to develop a more trusting relationship. How do you transfer what's learned at the table to the rest of the community?

Answer:
I think the critical element is who you have at the table. Most people follow values of particular leaders. One of my techniques is to try to identify not only position leaders, but also personal leaders in groups. There were always people who had personal power over and above position power. If some of them won't sit at the table, you can still keep them in the loop if you know who they are. As long as you can keep them involved in the process, it will spread because most people are looking for someone to give them direction. In one instance, I went to a housing authority meeting every month for four months before one woman finally stood up and said, "You're not going to go away, are you?" I said, "No, not as long as I think I can be helpful." And that's when they started working with me. So if I earn the trust for myself, then they can easily transfer it into the community. We saw it over and over again. In Tulsa, we began to establish trust groups. The police department had so much trouble and once the community began to relate to the police department, the housing people began helping police rather than avoiding them and/or not being helpful. It became safer for the police and it became safer for the community. Once somebody who is a personal leader says, "We can trust the police," then the group begins to cooperate. But when that person says, "They're not trustworthy," there's nothing the police department, or me, or anybody else can do to convince that group. So the key is finding those people. Who are the personal leaders? Position leaders are essential for institutional change, but to get change in community, you've got to find the personal leaders, the people who are really respected and honored.

Renaldo Rivera

[Full Interview] [Topic Top]

Question:
How did you identify the other groups that didn't contact that committee?

Answer:
We had a long-term relationship with one of the inspectors in that police department. He was aware of what was happening, because it was in the local papers on a daily basis. We said, "Look what are we going to do? How can you help us because you've got your men tied up with all the demonstrations that are taking place and they're not going to go away. It's one town, and this is an opportunity for us to see what we can do together. You can have better relations because you'll need to have better relations in this community." I just asked.

Question:
So other people helped you identify the leaders?

Answer:
All you do is ask the question from a responsive source, which is what CRS used to do in the old days in the South. They'd go into a community cold and have to find who the people of influence were. So you start asking the people closest by. You ask the clergy who has influence. You ask the NAACP, to see if you were able to identify some of those people of influence even if they weren't highly visible in the public providence. Then we went and talked with them and expressed the concern and told them what was going on. They were also able to influence the publisher of the paper because the United Way has this little corporate committee round circle. They were able to talk to the publisher of the paper and that also influenced the nature of the direction that they took with the case. So in identifying the people, you need to talk to a large number of people and what begins to happen is that a smaller subset -- that's the other part of the underlying question -- you need to talk with a wide range of people in the community. You ask, "Who is it that can get things done. Who do you go to get things done in this community? Who else do you go to when those people don't work?" What happens is that you talk to community members, church members, members of municipal departments. And you talk with the private giving community. What begins to emerge is a small cluster of individuals and those are the ones you want to talk with or have other people talk to. That technique and that strategy goes way back to the beginning of CRS. They may not always be lawyers and doctors. They may be in some places where people have coffee, in the homes. Those people of influence exist in each place. A lot of them are unheralded and unsung, but they're there in each community and getting your way to them is through the process I just described.

Martin Walsh

[Full Interview] [Topic Top]

Did the African-American students have an organization?

Answer:
Yes, there was a Black Student Union and there was the umbrella organization ALANA (African Americans, Latinos, Asians and Native Americans). While there was the umbrella organization, the leadership really came from the Black Student Union. They were the ones who carried the protest. They had organized the protests and they were the ones directly affected by the recent incident. The other groups joined in supporting them. We didn't say anything at that meeting. When it was over, Larry and I went up and identified ourselves to some of the student leaders and indicated that we would like to sit down and talk about these problems and determine whether we could be of help to them.

Martin Walsh

[Full Interview] [Topic Top]

The first thing in meeting with the community was to assure myself that they were the leaders dealing with the shooting issue. After checking out the matter in a few phone calls, those identified in the media agreed to bring several of the leaders together who were meeting about this issue. It seemed that they were some of the people who were moving this matter.

Stephen Thom

[Full Interview] [Topic Top]

Through a list of people that Larry had provided we went down that list and worked with those families who likely had relationships to the remains. Later, we met with leaders of those families, and eventually brought the leaders of those families to one large gathering of the tribe.

Question:
Over what period of time?

Answer:
I would say that it took at least a two and one half months. We had at least 10 meetings. You always have a lot of hits-and-misses - people don't show up for meetings, so you have to go back... we were driving all the way out to these rural areas and meeting with people, only to find that the right leaders weren't there. So we'd have to come back and meet again.

Silke Hansen

[Full Interview] [Topic Top]

One of my favorite people on that council was a guy named Jim. Again, he wasn't really an activist, but he wasn't shy either. He had some involvement in his local church and he became one of the key leaders of that council. When Vice President Rockefeller sent somebody to Boston to get a feel for what was happening in the community, we wanted to make sure that he got some feedback from the white community that was trying to comply with the court order, not just from the "Louise Hicks" [uncooperative] types. So Jim invited them over to his house, and had a number of his white friends including all of those who were on the biracial parent council and he started to talk to them. The council had been in effect for a while now, and he explained that some of his newest, but best friends couldn't be there, because, he couldn't assure their safety if they came to his house. He explained that there were black parents who were serving on the council, but if they walked down the street they probably would get killed. He said, "You know, I've heard so much about violent blacks and rioting blacks, and how destructive they are, and how you can't trust them. Well, I'm going to tell you something," he said, "I remember watching the march in Washington and thousands of people standing in the rain quietly praying. If those had been a bunch of Irishmen who had been treated the way black people have been treated in this country," he said, "they would've taken that damn Washington Monument and wrapped it around the Capitol! So don't ever, ever come to me talking about violent blacks, because that's a mistaken notion and I'm not going put up with it!" I was really impressed. This was not the speech that Rockefeller's envoy had expected to hear in South Boston. But people like that are the ones who sort of make this job worth it. He became a real leader in that community.

Angel Alderete

[Full Interview] [Topic Top]

No, we had them select their spokespeople. It's a mistake to assume that the guy you're talking to is the leader. So we said, "Hey, go out there and choose someone yourself." Had we chosen the spokespeople, the inmates would have just laughed at us. So they brought in some people that they chose. You know, in an institution, you can know who the top leaders are, but it's a lot harder to know who the lieutenants are.

Angel Alderete

[Full Interview] [Topic Top]

So, the people that I contacted were the agencies that serviced that area, which were very few, but they were Native American and African American. Latinos didn't have any group that they could call upon to serve them, and the Asian community had a religious group that served them, but they didn't get the sort of help from that group that the African Americans and the Native Americans got from their groups. It was mostly internal, and they usually took care of problems that arose within that Asian community and in effect, they took care of themselves.

Bob Ensley

[Full Interview] [Topic Top]

But you just can't go in and assume that a given person is the leader. You have to find out who the real leader is. It may not be the one up there talking, the one who has the microphone. Sometimes it's the person standing there with a pair of coveralls on and his hands up into the bib area. So you have to do an accurate assessment to find out who the leader is. Then you begin to talk with those persons. And then the most important thing is, don't you try to take credit. When I did this, you always say, "Well, thank you." You give them the credit for what they're doing, and you will find out that the result is very rewarding and productive.

Efrain Martinez

[Full Interview] [Topic Top]

I asked the mayor five or six times throughout the weeks and he just wouldn't do it, finally he says, "Let's do it." We went to his house and he called all these people and I said, "Give me the fifteen people that run this town." So he had fifteen or twenty people and we discussed what they thought of this.

Efrain Martinez

[Full Interview] [Topic Top]

Okay. Once you do the assessment then you decide who gets to be the representatives?

Answer:
No, the parties decide who their representatives and leaders are. I ask them who are the players, and they'll tell me we need to have this person, we need to have that person.

Question:
But you need to have one person out of all the key players who's convening the meeting, or do you convene the meeting?

Answer:
I need to be in charge of the process, the participants provide the input. At the beginning I convene the meeting or we do a co-convening. It depends on what's going to work. If it's bad that I associate myself with somebody that has a lot of negatives already, then I don't associate myself with that person too much, although that person is critical. So I try to find the safest person at the table, or the one that has the most positives and work with that person to do what we need to do. But in this other community last year, I chaired a committee of leadership, only because there was no agreement on who else would do it. Toward the latter part of the meeting I said, "This is the last time I'm doing this. You'll have to select somebody you all can agree with. This is your town, not my town. This is your case, your issue. You should care enough about your town that you're going to work together under some leadership here. I'm taking the first stage out, I won't be around forever." I was going to say also, out of these five or six people who are obvious leaders, some may be in the background. In this other town, we had police problems. It was a big town in Texas. I met with people I thought would be relevant parties in the community. Then I went to a county commissioner who was not involved but who knows everybody. First of all I introduced myself and explained what I'm doing. "Here's what we need to do, and am I dealing with the right people here?" I mentioned about six or seven players, "Are these the relevant people I need to meet with?" He says, "Yep, I think you got them all." I went through the original process but then I double checked myself. I'm going to spend time with these players, I need to know there's going to be productive time. If they're not the ones calling the shots, what am I wasting my time for? Let me go to the ones that are really in charge.

Efrain Martinez

[Full Interview] [Topic Top]

Yes, I called him. Let's say in that situation, since there was a black victim involved, I wanted to see the concerns of the black community so besides calling the mayor I tried to reach the NAACP, and the ministers. I tried to reach the First Baptist church, also. As I left town I called the F.B.I. to see what had been happening. The F.B.I. district director special agent in charge talked to me and said they held a press conference at noon, and he was on his way back to Houston. He just filled me in a little bit on what happened. I had also tried to reach the mayor and the mayor finally called me back and arranged to meet with him. We arranged to meet about 7:00 or 8:00 that evening, so on the way up there about thirty minutes from Jasper, I called the mayor because I thought maybe I should meet with other people and he could notify them. He said sure, come on over we'll talk about that. He was going to see what he could do. Later I was up at his house and he had a whole lot of black men there all dressed up in suits and all that. I thought it was a monthly meeting of some group. I realized after a while that he had called them to meet with me. There must have been about fifteen, or twenty people, maybe more. They told me about what they felt about the current situation, what they had been doing already, and some historical issues involving race in the community. We agreed I would help them, and we'd look into the historical issues at a later date, but right now we would look at what's happening currently, what was expected, and who was doing what already. I found they had begun working very closely with the white ministers.

Ozell Sutton

[Full Interview] [Topic Top]

Question:
How did you identify which of the grassroots people to invite to the meeting?

Answer:
You just sought out the leadership. The leadership comes to the surface. It may not be of the same class as middle class blacks, but it shows itself.

Question:
Again, how did you know that? How did you find those resources?

Answer:
Well, I've been around for a thousand years. I used to be a community leader, myself. I was with Central High 9 when they entered Center High School; I was a young NAACP worker in those days. So I know it when I see it, because I used to be a part of that too. Some of the greatest things I ever dealt with was grassroots community leadership. I could persuade people. It's a culmination of a life of involvement in that. Every aspect you see, you've done it-"been there, done that." And I tell whites now, and I tell blacks, don't try to squash leadership, because it does not lead as you would lead as a middle-class black. Let it go, try to direct it, but be proud of that fire that sends them forth.

Ozell Sutton

[Full Interview] [Topic Top]

Answer:
Well it's no different from any other problem of that nature. When you have a problem and you come from a powerless group, you start to ask people in the powerful group to give leadership and status to it. So that was the NAACP and its leadership, the Urban League and its leadership, and then there was the Black Ministers Alliance.

Question:
So you went to the ministers first?

Answer:
I 'm not sure, but they all were done. It all depends on who's available to see me first. I made contact, because I already knew most of them. You can't go too many places in this region that I don't know somebody.

Question:
Did you let them know beforehand that you were coming?

[Full Interview] [Topic Top]

It would've been the time prior to that first meeting when I would've pointed out to the home owners, "There needs to be some kind of entity that the tribe can deal with, who do you want to be? Can we identify you as a particular group?" As I recall, the minister was chosen. They chose their own people, although I had probably been responsible for identifying those who were interested and urging.

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