In its continuing efforts to keep the public informed about the ongoing admissions litigation, the University of Michigan makes these transcripts of the trial proceedings in Grutter v Bollinger, et al., Civil Action No. 97-75928 (E.D. Mich.), available to the University community and general public. As is often the case with transcription, some words or phrases may be misspelled or simply incorrect. The University makes no representation as to the accuracy of the transcripts.
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE EASTERN DISTRICT OF MICHIGAN
SOUTHERN DIVISION
BARBARA GRUTTER, for herself
and all others similarly
situated,
Plaintiff,
Civil Action
-vs-
No. 97-CV-75928
LEE BOLLINGER, JEFFREY LEHMAN,
DENNIS SHIELDS, and REGENTS OF
THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN,
Defendants,
and
KIMBERLY JAMES, ET AL.,
Intervening Defendants.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _/ VOLUME 7
BENCH TRIAL
BEFORE THE HONORABLE BERNARD A. FRIEDMAN
United States District Judge
238 U.S. Courthouse & Federal Building
231 Lafayette Boulevard West
Detroit, Michigan
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 24, 2001
APPEARANCES:
FOR PLAINTIFF: Kirk O. Kolbo, Esq.
R. Lawrence Purdy, Esq.
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
2
1
APPEARANCES (CONTINUING)
2
3
FOR DEFENDANTS: John Payton, Esq.
4 Craig Goldblatt, Esq.
On behalf of Defendants
5 Bollinger, et al.
6 George B. Washington, Esq.
Miranda K.S. Massie, Esq.
7 On behalf of Intervening
Defendants
8
9 COURT REPORTER: Joan L. Morgan, CSR
Official Court Reporter
10
11
12 Proceedings recorded by mechanical stenography.
Transcript produced by computer-assisted
13 transcript.
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
3
1
2
I N D E X
_ _ _ _ _
3
4
WITNESS PAGE
_______ ____
5
6 WITNESSES PRESENTED ON BEHALF OF INTERVENING DEFENDANTS
7 JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN
8 Direct Examination by Ms. Massie 5
Cross-Examination by Mr. Payton 126
9 Cross-Examination by Mr. Purdy 130
Redirect Examination by Ms. Massie 149
10 Recross-Examination by Mr. Payton 153
Recross-Examination by Mr. Purdy 153
11 Redirect Examination by Ms. Massie 155
12 JAY ROSNER
13 Direct Examination by Mr. Washington 156
14
15
E X H I B I T
_ _ _ _ _ _ _
16
17 MARKED RECEIVED
______ ________
Exhibit Number 97 112
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
4
1 Detroit, Michigan
2 Wednesday, January 24, 2001
3 9:00 a.m.
4 _ _ _
5 THE COURT: Okay, next witness.
6 MS. MASSIE: Intervening Defendants
7 call Professor John Hope Franklin.
8 MR. PURDY: Your Honor, we don't
9 intend to have any interruptions today, but may it
10 still be understood that we have a continuing
11 objection for the reasons as we set forth before.
12 THE COURT: Continuing objection.
13 MR. PURDY: Thank you.
14 THE COURT: Mr. Franklin, how are you
15 this morning?
16 THE WITNESS: How are you?
17 JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN,
18 was thereupon called as a witness herein and, after
19 having been first duly sworn to tell the truth, the
20 whole truth and nothing but the truth, was examined
21 and testified as follows:
22 MS. MASSIE: Judge, I don't think
23 that Professor John Hope Franklin needs too much of
24 an introduction.
25 THE COURT: I don't think so either.
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
5
1 But you may put it just for the record.
2 MS. MASSIE: Just working on this
3 case has definitely been the greatest honor of my
4 life, and one of the biggest intellectual challenges
5 as far as the stimulation of my life and the
6 opportunity to work with Professor Franklin. There
7 hasn't been any greater thing in either category.
8 THE COURT: I am privileged to have
9 him in my courtroom, so it's nice to have you.
10 DIRECT EXAMINATION
11 BY MS. MASSIE:
12 Q. Could you spell your name for the record, please?
13 A. John Hope Franklin.
14 Q. And that's F-r-a-n-k-l-i-n?
15 A. Right.
16 Q. When and where were you born, sir?
17 A. I was born in Rentiesville, Oklahoma on the 2nd of
18 January, 1915.
19 Q. And where is that town?
20 A. Rentiesville, Oklahoma is 17 miles south of
21 Muskogee, Oklahoma. Muskogee, Oklahoma is 50 miles
22 south of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
23 Q. Is there anything north of Tulsa.
24 A. If it is, it's unknown.
25 Q. Tell us about your education, if you would, sir?
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
6
1 A. Well, I began my education in Rentiesville, Oklahoma
2 where I, first of all, was sitting in the back of my
3 mother's school room, she was teaching, that's when
4 I was three years old. And I learned to read and
5 write that year to her great surprise. She was
6 teaching others, but I was also learning.
7 I was in the room, but I kept quiet,
8 there were no day care centers or anything like
9 that. She was babysitting me while she was
10 teaching. I went through the first five or six
11 grades in Rentiesville, and then we moved to Tulsa,
12 Oklahoma.
13 There had been a riot in Tulsa which
14 delayed our moving there. And we went to Tulsa,
15 Oklahoma the tenth of December 1925. I was ten
16 years old. And I went to high school there.
17 I graduated from high school there in
18 1931. Then I went to Fisk University in Nashville,
19 Tennessee, from which I graduated magnum cum laude
20 in May of 1935.
21 And then the fall of 1935 I went to
22 Harvard University as a graduate student in history,
23 and I got my master's degree that year. And four
24 years later I received my Ph.D degree in 1941.
25 And I was already teaching, I taught
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
7
1 three years by that time. And I would say that my
2 career was lodged probably after I got my doctorate
3 in 1941. But it was interrupted, of course, by the
4 war to some extent, and I had various other trials
5 and tribulations along the way.
6 But I began to publish in 1943, and
7 my first book was published that year. My second
8 book two years later, and my third book in 1947.
9 And a number of books later.
10 Q. I know there's a couple of graduate students who
11 took the day off to come in and hear your testimony.
12 I'm sure they're now considering giving up academe.
13 A. Thank you.
14 Q. Tell us about the school where your mother taught?
15 A. Well, it was a one-room school. She was an
16 elementary school teacher, and she was teaching
17 reading, writing to the first grade. I was given a
18 paper and pencil and in the back row with a desk,
19 and she would come back there periodically to see
20 what I was doing.
21 And to her great astonishment when
22 she didn't hear me making any noise she came back to
23 see what I was doing and I was writing what she was
24 writing on the board. And that was the beginning of
25 my education.
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
8
1 From that point on, I was on my own
2 and I studied diligently I suppose, I tried to. But
3 both my mother and father were very important
4 intellectual powers or forces in my life.
5 My father was a lawyer practicing
6 first in Ardmore, Oklahoma where he received his law
7 license in 1907. The year of the statehood of
8 Oklahoma.
9 And from that point on he practiced
10 law successfully in Ardmore, Rentiesville, Tulsa.
11 In fact, he practiced law in Tulsa from 1921 to 1960
12 the year in which he died.
13 By that time I was already chair of
14 the Department of History of Brooklyn College, the
15 city of Richmond, New York. And I had already
16 taught by that time at Harvard University, and a
17 number of other institutions as visiting professor.
18 I have been a visiting professor at
19 Harvard University, Cornell University, and the
20 University of Hawaii and various other places along
21 the way.
22 Q. How many children were there in your mother's class?
23 A. I can't remember. I know the room was crowded, 35
24 or 40.
25 Q. And all of those children were black?
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
9
1 A. Yes, yes. All the children in the town were black,
2 all the people in the town were black. It was an
3 all black town in Rentiesville, Oklahoma when I was
4 there. I was born there in 1915, there were no
5 whites in the town at all.
6 It was primitive life such as you
7 can't possibly imagine. No electricity whatever, no
8 central heating, no heating of any kind which wasn't
9 made from wood or coal. No running water, no
10 library except in my parent's home, the only library
11 to which I was exposed.
12 No facilities of any kind that I can
13 think of. No amenities, no amusement, no public
14 amusement. Just a few churches, that's about all
15 that was in Rentiesville.
16 And when I left from Rentiesville in
17 1925 to go to Tulsa, I thought that was a new world,
18 entirely new world opened up. Which it would be
19 difficult to describe, because it was so vastly
20 different in every conceivable way.
21 Traffic, street cars, schools, little
22 library, not much larger for African Americans than
23 this witness stand, but it was there. And it was
24 an expression of the desire on the part of the
25 African American community to have a facility like
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
10
1 that.
2 It was not publicly supported, it was
3 privately subscribed to. And the first time I ever
4 had the opportunity to use books not in my parent's
5 home, was to go to that little library. And it was
6 once more, opened up a new world, entirely new world
7 to anyone who had not experienced that before. It
8 was an amazing experience.
9 School in Tulsa was a different kind
10 of institution from which I had been accustomed. It
11 was orderly, fairly large, although the African
12 Americans population in Tulsa was only about a tenth
13 of the population of the city.
14 The schools was like I couldn't
15 imagine, it was a large number of schools. An
16 institution run by blacks. But, of course, it was a
17 public school. But it was a public--they called it,
18 I don't know, this was a different kind of
19 segregation.
20 They didn't use the term segregation,
21 they used separate, The Tulsa Separate Schools.
22 E.W. Woods was principal of Booker T. Washington
23 High School, of the Tulsa Separate Schools. And it
24 took me a while to understand what that meant.
25 It meant that only people of my color
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
11
1 could go there. And it meant that if you were not
2 of that color, you didn't go there. It meant also
3 that you didn't have the opportunities that you had
4 at Central High School. Vast complex building on
5 the other side of town where they taught modern
6 foreign languages, we had none. They taught French,
7 Spanish, German in centralized schools, but nothing
8 like that.
9 So, I went to college without ever
10 having had a modern foreign language. And I had to
11 take--and I knew that by the time I was a sophomore
12 in college and I was going to major in history.
13 And my major professor who was a
14 young white man, the chairman of the History
15 Department at Fisk University which was all black,
16 of course, it had a mix, it was white and black
17 faculty.
18 He almost immediately decided that he
19 wanted me to go to Harvard. And we sort of--as an
20 undergraduate I was doing everything that he wanted
21 me to do to be certain that I was eligible to go to
22 Harvard, including the Harvard requirement of two
23 modern foreign languages in order to qualify with
24 any advanced degree.
25 So, there I was as a sophomore and
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
12
1 junior at Fisk University taking elementary courses
2 in French and German, so that I could be eligible to
3 qualify at Harvard.
4 And I took them and I did qualify at
5 Harvard in both languages, and was prepared in a
6 very careful way by him to be able to do the work at
7 Harvard.
8 When I went to Harvard, I had no
9 problem. As a matter of fact it was, if I can say
10 so, it was a push over if that, because of his
11 careful preparation. It was no other explanation
12 for it.
13 Q. Were there many Fisk students at that point who
14 ended up at the Harvard graduate school?
15 A. No, there were not many Fisk students at Harvard
16 graduate school. Indeed, there were almost no
17 students, other than white students at Harvard. I
18 had no black students, fellow students in any of my
19 classes at Harvard.
20 There were a few at the university,
21 maybe one in English and two in law school and two
22 in the Biology Department, and maybe one or two
23 more. Two or three other graduates.
24 I would say that there might have
25 been as many as--this is a liberal figure, as many
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
13
1 as a dozen students that were African Americans at
2 Harvard in 1936 when I went there. In 1935 when I
3 went there.
4 Q. Of thousands?
5 A. What's that?
6 Q. Of thousands?
7 A. Yes, there were 10,000 or more students at Harvard.
8 And I went to Harvard, of course, it was the pit of
9 the Depression. My father had to become what we
10 describe generously as became bankrupt. We lost our
11 home simply because of the extraordinary bite of the
12 Depression. The poverty was unspeakable.
13 So, that I went to Harvard, I could
14 not have gone to the University of Oklahoma as you
15 certainly know. And the University of Oklahoma not
16 only did not admit any blacks, no blacks could be in
17 the town after dark.
18 And they gave me a scholarship, out
19 of state scholarship it was called, and that was for
20 a hundred dollars if, if I passed my courses. That
21 is, I did not have the freedom to fail as they did
22 at normal Oklahoma. You were admitted and then you
23 might or you might not pass.
24 But I didn't have that privilege, I
25 had to pass in order to get that hundred dollars
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
14
1 from the state of Oklahoma against--paid toward my
2 tuition. And that remained the practice down to the
3 time that they admitted blacks to Oklahoma in the
4 1950s.
5 Now, the matter of trying to do the
6 kind of work that I undertook to do in graduate
7 school and after, it would project my life work.
8 Brought me into contact with the kind of life that I
9 hadn't imagined.
10 When I took my general examinations
11 at Harvard in the spring of 1939, I decided to do a
12 dissertation on North Carolina. So, I went to
13 North Carolina and there I went in to see the
14 director of the state archives.
15 And I told him I wanted to do
16 research on free negroes in North Carolina from 1798
17 to 60. And he said, well, I suppose I will have to
18 do something about that. He said, I see no reason
19 why you wouldn't be able to work here, he said, but
20 when we built this building we didn't anticipate
21 that anyone of your color would work here. And so
22 we don't have any place for you to work.
23 He said, but if you will give me a
24 week I'll try to arrange something. And I remained
25 silent and I looked at him and I had my mental
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
15
1 adding machine, I was going to have to pay the rent,
2 board, room and all of that for a week while I
3 twiddled my thumbs.
4 And I just looked at him and he said,
5 well, what about a half week. I said, I'll be back
6 Thursday, this was Monday. I went back Thursday and
7 they prepared a place for me.
8 They cleared out one of the exhibit
9 rooms, the smallest exhibit room there was for the
10 archives or display of archives of materials. And
11 they put a desk and a chair and a waste basket in
12 there.
13 And he gave me a key, he said, I'll
14 give you a key to the stacks because I don't think
15 we can request the white pages to deliver materials
16 to you. So you'll have to get your materials
17 yourself.
18 I said, all right. He gave me his
19 key. He said, you go through the search room that's
20 where all the whites were sitting and doing their
21 research. You go through the search room to the
22 stacks, and you get what you want and bring it over
23 to your room and you can work there.
24 And I did that and it turned out to
25 be the most satisfactory arrangement, because I
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
16
1 could sort of window shop in the stacks, pull down
2 what I wanted, things that I thought I might want.
3 And I would come through the main
4 reading room with my dolly and my library card,
5 laden with materials. And the white researchers
6 looked at me with some disdain as well as jealousy.
7 And two weeks later the director of
8 the archives told me and said, I have to take your
9 key. And I searched my conduct and wondered what I
10 had done that was offensive.
11 I said what's the matter, he said
12 well, the white searchers who see you coming through
13 the room with all of your materials which you have
14 selected yourself, says that this is a
15 discrimination against them and they want keys
16 themselves.
17 He said, well, I can't give everyone
18 keys and I therefore will have to take your key.
19 And you will have to abide by the regular rules
20 which, of course, would involve your bringing one
21 request in, depositing it, then going back to your
22 room and waiting for that to be delivered to you.
23 And I said, well, if that's what you
24 think it should be, all right. Now, it was at that
25 point that I realized the inconsistency and the
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
17
1 remarkable ingenuity, if I may put it, of racial
2 discrimination of those who practiced it.
3 I had to work in three libraries.
4 And within a radius of three blocks of each other,
5 literally within three blocks of each other. One of
6 them was the archives where I described that I had
7 used a separate room.
8 The other was the state library on
9 the other side of the square. And there I could go
10 into the main reading room and work, but there was a
11 regular place in the stacks for African Americans to
12 sit.
13 And we were not supposed to go take
14 the books off the shelf or take the newspapers in
15 there. But actually we were to make that request,
16 but we could sit there in the stacks and use the
17 materials.
18 Then on the other side of the square
19 was the Supreme Court library. And there were no
20 restrictions at all. We sat and did our work at the
21 same table that white people were sitting.
22 I said this is rather strange. In
23 the radius of two or three blocks, we had three
24 practices, three practices of racial distinction or
25 discrimination or segregation.
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
18
1 And that gave me to understand that
2 the practice of racial segregation was sort of
3 improvisational. That is they made it up as they
4 went along.
5 They have did this on one side of the
6 block, they did another on the other side of the
7 block, and another on the other side of the block.
8 Whatever seemed to pass their minds, as long as
9 there was distinction.
10 As long as there was a mark of, as
11 old people say, a mark of distinction, a mark of
12 oppression of some kind. The differentiation was
13 there.
14 Or another way, not only was this
15 practice at the highest levels, what I think of
16 libraries would be fairly high. It was practiced at
17 the other extreme, that I couldn't say which was
18 more praiseworthy or meritorious.
19 Outside the city, just outside the
20 city there were two barbecue joints or places where
21 you could go. I didn't go, but some other people
22 did. I went once and that was enough for me. I
23 didn't have to have a barbecue, I had to have those
24 papers and things like that in the libraries. But I
25 didn't have to have a barbecue.
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
19
1 But this struck me as rather
2 remarkable, and it was not unlike what they were
3 doing downtown in the capital square. You go out to
4 one of these places, barbecue places.
5 One if you went in to one of them and
6 you wanted to be served, you sat in your car and
7 young white girls would come out and bring anything
8 you wanted, serve you with great applaud.
9 Across the road was another, and you
10 could go and sit in your car all day and they would
11 look out there, and you would be in your car and
12 they wouldn't come out.
13 But you go in the place and you were
14 welcomed heartedly, warmly. I said, what's going on
15 here? On the one side they say we don't serve
16 blacks in cars. On the other side they say we do.
17 On the one side they say you're
18 welcome to come in and eat. On the other side they
19 said you can't even come in the door. You need a
20 road map, or you need an encyclopedia and a number
21 of other aides to help you navigate your way through
22 these racial minds as it were.
23 And that gave me to understand that
24 race distinctions were not very significant, except
25 to make a difference to. And it must have done
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
20
1 something to the people, it must have given them
2 some sense of superiority, or it must have given
3 them a sense of satisfaction if they could be a few
4 notches above or away from others.
5 And I decided that that was a kind of
6 a sickness, a kind of searching for something that
7 would give them a sense of security and superiority
8 and advantage.
9 And that to me--see, I found it in
10 other ways too. I've described what doing research
11 at North Carolina meant. If doing research in North
12 Carolina was that bad, when I went to Alabama to do
13 research with the confederate flag flying over the
14 Archives Building, I didn't know whether I even
15 wanted to attempt to do research there.
16 And the first morning I went in to do
17 research, I told the woman in the search room that I
18 wanted these materials, and she said, yes, I will
19 get them for you. And she brought them and handed
20 them to me.
21 And I waited for her to tell me what
22 to do with these materials, with this background of
23 having waited three days for someone to arrange a
24 room in North Carolina, I thought that I might have
25 to wait a week in Alabama or a month.
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
21
1 And she gave me the materials and she
2 stood there and looked at me. And I stood there in
3 a quandary, I didn't know what to do with them, I
4 didn't know where to go, where to sit.
5 I'm in the reading room, but I assume
6 that that reading room was where I could not sit.
7 But since she had not indicated to me that there was
8 a room separate for me in the basement or somewhere
9 else, I then did what I would do in Detroit at a
10 library, I went to look for a quiet corner.
11 And so I went toward that corner, she
12 said you can't sit there. I was like, why don't you
13 tell me where to sit, I said to myself. I said,
14 well, where should I sit, she said, you sit over
15 here with the others. She said that's the coolest
16 part of the room where they're sitting, and they
17 need to meet you anyway.
18 And so she said, you sits there.
19 Then she made all of them stop doing what they were
20 doing, and she introduced them to me. And she said,
21 now you sit there with the others, so I did.
22 But this is all confusing, you see.
23 You can't be certain what to do, you see. That's
24 what I meant by improvisation, you don't know, you
25 don't know where you stand. And I work there off
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
22
1 and on for weeks.
2 And at one point I wanted to look at
3 a set of papers, Governor Winston papers. And I
4 said to the person in the search room, I want to see
5 the Winston papers, they said we can't show them to
6 you, they're in preparation.
7 The only way you can see them is to
8 get permission from the director of the archives.
9 Who at that time was Ms. Marie Bankhead-Owens. And
10 I said, well, when does she come in. They said,
11 well, she comes in, she will be in Thursday
12 afternoon. This is Wednesday morning.
13 She will be in Thursday afternoon. I
14 said, well, how will I know that she is here. She
15 says, well, you will know. Everyone knows when
16 Ms. Owens arrives.
17 So I waited. And the next afternoon,
18 indeed, the whole building took on a different
19 atmosphere. I said Ms. Owens must be here.
20 And I went up to her office and I
21 told her secretary, I want to have a word with
22 Ms. Owens. And she said, well, she's in there, go
23 in.
24 And I went in, and as I went in I got
25 another lesson. The secretary did not close the
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
23
1 door behind me, and when I got in to speak to
2 Ms. Owens she did not ask me to sit down. I said
3 this is another mine field I'm in.
4 And she said, what can I do for you,
5 I told her I wanted to see Governor Winston's
6 papers. And she said certainly you can see the
7 Winston papers and anything else that you want.
8 You're free to see them, just let me know and I'll
9 be glad to facilitate your efforts.
10 I said, well, I do appreciate that
11 very much, I'm still standing. And she said, they
12 tell me that there's a Harvard nigger in the
13 building, have you seen him.
14 And the secretary whose door was open
15 and she was listening to the conversation, she said,
16 that's him, Ms. Owens, that's him. She said, are
17 you the Harvard nigger?
18 She said, I had no idea. She said,
19 you got right nice manners, why don't you sit down.
20 My first invitation to have a seat.
21 She said, where were you born and
22 raised, I said Oklahoma. She said, no, no, that's
23 not where you got those nice manners. I wanted to
24 tell her that my mother taught me, I was discreet
25 enough to let her explore the matter.
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
24
1 She said, where did you go to school,
2 I said, Rentiesville, Oklahoma, Tulsa, Oklahoma.
3 She said, no, no, I don't mean that. Where did you
4 go to school out of the state. And I said I went to
5 school at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee.
6 She said that's it, that's where you
7 learned those manners. Nice good old confederate
8 state. And I let that pass. And she then went on
9 to tell me about the south and about manners and so
10 forth.
11 And she didn't undertake to tell me
12 why she treated me like that, except that when she
13 told me of an incident where she had a relationship
14 with a black woman, wife of the president of
15 Tuskegee.
16 She said, I called her Ms. Moten.
17 She said, but I wouldn't call you--it would be
18 beyond the realm of possibility for me to refer to
19 you as mister, do you understand that? I'm not
20 going to ever call you mister, I don't call black
21 men mister.
22 I'll call you doctor, reverend,
23 professor, whatever comes to mind, except for
24 mister. You don't deserve that much respect. I
25 said, well, as you will.
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
25
1 And the problem with her after that
2 was that she wanted to talk so much that she took up
3 so much of my time and I was busy. And she wanted
4 to talk to me about the race thing.
5 And I began then to think about what
6 race really meant to her and to people like her.
7 And I could not escape the conclusion that the only
8 thing that race meant to her was, well, the only
9 thing that race meant to these other people that I
10 talked about.
11 Is that they wanted to be certain
12 that there was maintained a distant, not laterally
13 but vertically. A distance where they were
14 somewhere above a cut above, that's very essential,
15 very, very essential.
16 And whether it's in a library or
17 whether it's in a hotel or rather it's in school or
18 wherever, this distance, this vertical distance must
19 be maintained this superior position. The position
20 of advantage must be maintained.
21 And I came to the conclusion that the
22 maintenance of this was so important that they
23 didn't mind being inconsistent. They didn't mind
24 being improvisational, as long as that gave them
25 this vertical advantage where they were somewhere
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
26
1 above and somewhere beyond.
2 And that to me was a revelation just
3 to come to that conclusion and to reach the view
4 that these people were groping for a way to live and
5 to co-exist with other people.
6 And the only way they could do it
7 comfortably was to have this distance. To have this
8 sense of self importance and of superiority, if you
9 will.
10 And I have always had difficulty in
11 squaring that with the so-called American way of
12 living, practicing, doing things. And not only was
13 this improvisation was inconsistent and incongruous
14 too, with what we are taught to be the American way
15 of the practice of equality on the one hand, and
16 human relations on the other as well.
17 This came to me another way when I
18 was quite young and just starting my career, when
19 during the time of the war. And the war came and I
20 was teaching in Raleigh, North Carolina.
21 And, of course, the incident at
22 Pearl Harbor what happened there was on the Navy
23 vessels, put the Navy in a very desperate position.
24 And the men who were in their offices on land, were
25 rushed out to pick up the pieces as they were to
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
27
1 serve in active duty in the Navy.
2 And this left great vacancies on land
3 among which was the need for large numbers of petty
4 officers, people to man the office and whatnot. And
5 they sent out a desperate call for volunteers to
6 come and serve in the Navy.
7 So, I decided to volunteer, this is
8 January 1943, I decided to volunteer. And I went
9 down to the Naval Recruiting Station and offered my
10 services.
11 He said, what can you do, the
12 recruiting officer, what can you do. I said, you
13 need people to run offices, he said yes, yes. I
14 said, well, I can do that.
15 I said I ran the office, I ran the
16 library at Fisk University for four years, that's
17 the way I worked my way through college. He said,
18 well, what did that mean. It meant that I could
19 type and do shorthand and stuff like that.
20 I said I have three gold medals in
21 typing. And he said, you do? I said, yes, and I do
22 135 words a minute at shorthand. I said I can
23 operate various kinds of simple machines, business
24 machines. And I have a Ph.D from Harvard.
25 He said, you have everything but
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
28
1 color. I said, oh, he said, yes. I said, well, I
2 thought there was an emergency, I apologize for
3 taking up your time. And I bid him good day.
4 And I left with a solemn resolve if I
5 may say that, that I wasn't going to the army under
6 any conditions, there was no emergency. That they
7 were looking around for people of certain color, not
8 of people of certain ability. And I wasn't going to
9 fight on their terms.
10 The terms that my brother experienced
11 as a graduate of Fisk and principal of a high school
12 in Oklahoma. The sergeant told him when he was
13 drafted and went in to the Army, that I will spend
14 my life being certain that you don't do anything
15 more edifying than peeling potatoes.
16 Well, I wasn't going to peel
17 potatoes, I wasn't going into the Army on the terms
18 of that sergeant or anyone else and I didn't. And I
19 stand before you not ashamed of the fact that I did
20 not serve my country on my country's terms in
21 World War II or any war.
22 Q. How did that experience affect your brother?
23 A. How is that?
24 Q. How did that experience affect your brother?
25 A. It destroyed him, and he died right after the war.
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
29
1 Never recovered from the inhuman treatment that he
2 received, not only at the hands of that sergeant,
3 but at the hands of various others. He was a broken
4 man and died in Veteran's Hospital Brooklyn,
5 Virginia in 1947.
6 Q. Professor Franklin, how did there come to be an all
7 black town in the middle of Oklahoma?
8 A. Well, there were not an all black town, not one all
9 black town, but 28 black towns in Oklahoma and
10 Kansas in the period--in the 19th century and period
11 before World War 1. Twenty-eight of these towns
12 established.
13 They were, for the most part, the
14 result of the migration of blacks out of so-called
15 cotton kingdom, that is out of areas extending from
16 Georgia over to Louisiana.
17 They migrated there with the hope of
18 escaping the rigors of the deep south, and the
19 treatment which they received at the hands of the
20 leaders in the cotton kingdom.
21 And they went to these communities,
22 or they founded these communities with hope that
23 they could somehow break the ties that caused them
24 so much distress and humiliation when they
25 associated with whites. They wanted to be
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
30
1 independent, they wanted to be self respecting and
2 so forth.
3 An example is when my father decided
4 that he had to leave Ardmore, where he was a young
5 lawyer and practicing there and move to an all black
6 town. He had gone to Shreveport, Louisiana to
7 represent a client in a matter.
8 And he went over there with his
9 client, and when they called the case my father
10 stood. The judge said, what are you standing up
11 for, and he said I'm representing my client in this
12 case. And the judge shook his head and said, oh no,
13 you don't represent anyone in my court. And he
14 called him the "N" word, and he said, now you get
15 out.
16 And so that's why he not only came
17 back to Ardmore, but said, you know, I can't stand
18 this, I'm going to go where at least I'll enjoy some
19 self respect. I'm going to find a place where I
20 don't have to rub up against this everyday.
21 And that's why he and my mother went
22 to Rentiesville. But Rentiesville was so small, it
23 was not really viable as a community, as a community
24 to support a man who was a lawyer in a small town
25 where it was not much litigation anyway. And what
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
31
1 there was, it was not for profit, shall we say.
2 Q. I'm familiar with that phenomenon actually.
3 A. Yes. I think that might be why I decided not to
4 pursue law as I intended when I went to college, I
5 wanted to go into history. It's no defamation of
6 the legal profession intended.
7 Q. How is it, in fact, that your mother came to be a
8 teacher and your father came to be a lawyer?
9 A. Well, my mother was born in West Tennessee in the
10 village of Gayid, not far from Brownsville,
11 Tennessee. The daughter of a very enterprising
12 farmer who elected to send his daughter and later
13 some other daughters to college.
14 So that they could come back and
15 train the young people. There was a scarcity, this
16 was in the late 19th century, there was a scarcity
17 to train leaders and teachers and so forth in the
18 black community.
19 So, she was sent away to Roger
20 Williams University in Nashville, Tennessee to study
21 and to teach training and come back to Gayid and
22 teach, and that's what she did.
23 But, of course, in Nashville she had
24 met my father who had come out there from Oklahoma
25 and they fell in love with each other. And that led
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
32
1 to their marriage and going to Oklahoma to live both
2 of them. My father and my mother.
3 Q. Where did your father go to law school?
4 A. He did not go to law school. My father read law and
5 studied by correspondence and took the course, took
6 the examination in 1907 and passed it. He was
7 always somewhat distressed that he was only number
8 two in the bar examination. The first being a
9 graduate of the University of Michigan Law School.
10 And he practiced law from 1907 to 1960.
11 Q. Tell us what it was like to be at Fisk and at
12 Harvard when you were there?
13 A. Well, Fisk was like you say, in the old south, the
14 old confederate south and that's where I learned it
15 very early it was the confederate south. I had
16 grown up in a very interesting racial climate in
17 Oklahoma.
18 There had been the riot, which the
19 white people of Tulsa were in absolute complete
20 denial up until 1996, this riot was in 1921. But in
21 that period between 1921, the time of the riot and
22 1931 when I graduated from high school, there was a
23 very interesting racial relationship, especially
24 after the riot.
25 Where we were free to do as we
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
33
1 pleased, more or less. No one wanted to start, no
2 one wanted to have another riot. And the white
3 people wouldn't even admit that there had been a
4 riot.
5 Large number of whites including the
6 present mayor of Tulsa, and she told me just last
7 year that she did not know about a riot until just
8 very recently.
9 Meanwhile we enjoyed life and with
10 absence of this stress, we enjoyed our inferior
11 position without any intimidation. We went to these
12 inferior schools and nobody said much about them.
13 We got what we lost, in subject
14 matter we gained in terms of self respect and that
15 sort of things. It was pounded into us by our
16 teachers.
17 When I got to Fisk in the old south,
18 this is Ms. Owens' confederate south. I found that
19 the atmosphere was much more oppressive. And I was
20 told that almost immediately.
21 I went downtown, when I say downtown,
22 I mean in the business part of Nashville, the white
23 part of Nashville downtown when I was a freshman,
24 indeed, within the months.
25 I was 16 years old and I was far from
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
34
1 home. Oklahoma to Tennessee in those days was very
2 far. And I went downtown to do some shopping, just
3 to look around more than anything else with some
4 other classmates.
5 And we started back and I went into
6 the place where you bought a ticket to get on the
7 streetcar. And I had only a $20 bill, that was
8 almost the last $20 bill I had in college.
9 But I presented it to the man with
10 some apologies, I said, I'm sorry this is all I
11 have. The streetcar fare was 15 cents, this is all
12 I have and I am very sorry and you can give me the
13 change in one dollar bills or whatever you wanted
14 to.
15 And he rose out of his seat, I
16 thought he was going to jump through the booth. And
17 he said, you don't know little nigger can tell me
18 how to make change. I didn't know, I thought I was
19 being very accommodating, very courteous.
20 And then he took the time to count
21 out the change to me in nickels and dimes and
22 quarters. Nineteen dollars and 85 cents in nickels
23 and dimes.
24 And he was right, I wouldn't try to
25 teach him or anyone else after that how to make
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
35
1 change, if that's what he thought I was doing. I
2 thought I was calling myself being accommodating.
3 And that tend to blight my whole college life.
4 I never went downtown Nashville many
5 times after that. But I never went without
6 remembering that problem, I was absolutely
7 terrified, if you can imagine. I was 16, I was
8 terrified by this man.
9 And it's a big contrast to the kind
10 of atmosphere which I grew up where everyone was
11 holding back and trying to be congenial and not talk
12 about the riot, which they came and bombed us and
13 burned us down and everything, and caused me to be
14 four years tardy in getting to Tulsa in the first
15 place.
16 That was all on the board now and I
17 was confronted with this strange kind of treatment
18 that I had never had before. And that really
19 clouded my whole college life.
20 That was at one end of my college
21 life. At the other end, my senior year when I was
22 applying for Harvard Graduate School, 19 years old.
23 And I had to take the scholastic aptitude test.
24 This is before the graduate records exam. The
25 scholastic aptitude test is one which I had to take.
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
36
1 And I went out to Vanderbilt
2 University, that's where you had to go to take it.
3 And I walked in that room and the man who came in,
4 the professor who came in, looked at me and said
5 what do you want. I said this is the room I have to
6 come to to take the scholastic aptitude test.
7 And he threw the test at me, I had to
8 catch it. That was not the best atmosphere in which
9 to try to perform on a test.
10 And I don't know what he did with the
11 test, but I didn't have much competence in his
12 sending it to where it was supposed to go. I don't
13 know what happened to it, perhaps he did send it in,
14 I don't know. But I was admitted to Harvard anyway.
15 I don't know what my score, I think
16 my score might have been zilch, it might have been
17 zero after that experience.
18 And as I walked away from that room
19 on the Vanderbilt campus, a black janitor he said,
20 were you sitting in that room, I said, yes. He
21 said, I have never seen a negro sitting down in any
22 rooms here.
23 He thought it was very strange. He
24 said, what were you doing, I said I was trying to
25 take this examination. And he was amazed and full
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
37
1 of wonder that that had happened. And I was full of
2 wonder too, and I was very relieved to get off of
3 that campus.
4 So, at the beginning, at the end of
5 my Nashville experience, I had these two very
6 unsavory experiences which affected my whole
7 attitude towards Nashville.
8 I was later, much later, the chairman
9 of the board, a trustee of Fisk University and been
10 going back regularly both as alumnus and as a board
11 member. But I have never felt comfortable there
12 because of that experience when I was there in my
13 teens.
14 But we had a marvelous time at Fisk,
15 because Fisk was whereas that all the students were
16 African Americans, the faculty was racially mixed.
17 And we learned there in that rather strange and, I
18 think, some ways unrealistic climate.
19 We learned there that white people
20 were just plain people, just ordinary white people,
21 no mystery about them. And the man who sent me to
22 Harvard turned out to be my best friend outside of
23 my family. The best person I ever had any
24 relationship with.
25 And this was a little oasis there,
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
38
1 where we didn't have any differences, no racial
2 differences of any kind. And where I remember so
3 well when President Roosevelt came to visit the
4 campus in 1934, I was a senior.
5 A student had been lynched, not a
6 student, I'm sorry. A young person living on the
7 Fisk property, the edge of the campus, had been
8 taken out and lynched the spring of 1934. And we
9 were, of course, very much exercised by that
10 experience.
11 And when we learned that the
12 president was coming to Fisk, the president of the
13 United States, students decided to bring him in on
14 the protest. To petition him to make a statement
15 about it.
16 Well, the president of Fisk was very
17 distressed about that and persuaded us not to do it.
18 And I was president of the student government at the
19 time, and he persuaded me not to do it.
20 But this was an experience too, which
21 I should have mentioned this coloring, my old
22 feeling about the town and so forth.
23 And we were called off from doing
24 that, that's another story of the president. The
25 president of Fisk said he would get us an
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
39
1 appointment with the president of the United States,
2 if we would just not badger him when he was on
3 campus.
4 One of the things that we did though
5 that spring, was to not only to entertain the
6 president of the United States, the Fisk class
7 singing and that sort of thing. But we welcomed the
8 whole community.
9 The president said he was only going
10 to stop at Andrew Jackson birth place, and Fisk
11 University. Well, white people in Nashville
12 couldn't imagine the president of the United States
13 would come to Nashville and go to a black school,
14 and that's all he would do in Nashville. They
15 couldn't believe it.
16 And we therefore, arranged bleachers
17 and so forth for everyone who wanted to come and see
18 the president of the United States. And as
19 president of the student government, I was sort of
20 officiating around and people doing what I told
21 them, so to speak.
22 And one white man came up to me and
23 said, where are the white people sitting, I said
24 anywhere. He said, anywhere, and I said yes. And
25 he was very, I don't want to convey that he was
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
40
1 hostile, he was not.
2 He said, you know, this is very
3 strange. He said, I voted democratic ticket every
4 time in my life. He said, but if Franklin Roosevelt
5 doesn't think anymore of my vote than to come out
6 here to a place where I have to sit with black
7 people, he said I'll never vote the democratic
8 ticket again.
9 And he wasn't hostile, he was
10 bringing me in on the resolution that he had taken.
11 He just couldn't do that. Democrats were going to
12 do that, then he had to turn his back on them.
13 And that put another cast on my view
14 of this whole thing. I was utterly and completely
15 confused by these different attitudes that I saw.
16 That I continued to see and I continue to see even
17 in my later years.
18 I sometimes think that if I'm going
19 to understand this, I need to be awarded another
20 degree. It's a conundrum, it's difficult to
21 understand.
22 Well, all of these experiences
23 happened since I--I won't belabor, I won't burden
24 you with anything since then. But the experiences
25 that I've had since I've been 80 years old, and that
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
41
1 wasn't yesterday you see.
2 But I've learned not to be too
3 surprised, there have been lessons to me and I have
4 learned more lessons.
5 I remember the night before I was to
6 receive the medal, the Presidential Medal of
7 Freedom, I gave a dinner party to celebrate that in
8 Washington at the club which I belonged there.
9 And I invited some friends to come in
10 to have dinner with me that evening, and some of
11 them had not been to the club before and it was a
12 very wealthy place, and I was taking them on a tour
13 of the club.
14 And we got up in the library, we were
15 in the library and I remembered I had two more
16 guests that hadn't arrived. So, I would go down the
17 grand staircase to the lobby, to see if the guests
18 were there.
19 And as I came into the lobby, a white
20 woman walked up to me and said, listen, go and get
21 my coat. She gave me her coat check, she offered me
22 her coat check.
23 I said, madam, if you will present
24 that coat check to the uniformed attendant at the
25 club, and all of the attendants here are uniformed,
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
42
1 perhaps you will get your coat. And I walked away,
2 I don't know whether she got her coat. I didn't
3 wait to see whether she did.
4 I thought that she might meditate on
5 that for a while and perhaps come to some conclusion
6 that she had reached out to a person who, in her
7 view, was there to serve her. Why otherwise should
8 I have been there if I wasn't there to serve her.
9 She could have looked on the wall and
10 seen my pictures the Man Of The Year the previous
11 year, but she didn't. I guess she didn't. But
12 maybe she thought that the Man Of The Year was also
13 a porter, I don't know.
14 Q. What was Harvard like when you were there?
15 A. What's that?
16 Q. What was Harvard like when you were there?
17 A. Well, it was the great university that it is, and I
18 didn't run into many racial incidents at Harvard. I
19 know that it was--there was so few of us there, so
20 few blacks there that I think we were inconspicuous
21 to the point of being almost invisible.
22 I remember that when I was taking a
23 course in economics, in this world economic history,
24 one of the very distinguished people in world
25 economic history, counsels, advisors, presidents of
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
43
1 that sort of thing.
2 He told a so-called Negro joke in
3 class and I'm sitting there, but he was oblivious to
4 the fact that I might have been offended or that I
5 was even there. It just weren't enough of us there
6 to make any difference, no critical mass or
7 anything. He didn't see me.
8 You got one person and 35 or 40
9 people, I guess, you can't be seen I don't care how
10 dark you are. Your consciousness is not extended to
11 that point.
12 I think that the thing that I
13 experienced at Harvard, most searing experience, it
14 was not the anti--not the race, not racism but
15 anti-Semitism. And that was really a remarkable
16 revelation to me.
17 I didn't know what anti-Semitism was,
18 I had been so busy trying to wear my way through my
19 problems, life problems that I had before me, that I
20 did not know that other people had problems.
21 So, when I was a member of the
22 Henry Adams Club, which is a club of American
23 history students at Harvard. The time came for us
24 to have officers, to nominate officers for the
25 following year, we had a nominating committee.
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
44
1 And I'm so naive that I did not
2 realize that when was I proposed for the nominating
3 committee, number one person on the nominating
4 committee, the first person proposed.
5 I didn't know that I was to be
6 certain that I wasn't nominated for anything. So,
7 when the nominating committee met and the chair, I
8 was not the chair, the chair said, well, for whom
9 should we have for president.
10 And I named the person who I thought
11 that should have the president. I said, he's an
12 outstanding student, best student in our group. And
13 I think he should be in. He's faithful, active in
14 the club, he should be the president of the club.
15 Dead silence all the way around,
16 absolute silence. I don't know what's going on,
17 what's the matter. And then one of the students
18 spoke up and said, well, he doesn't have all of the
19 attributes of a Jew. But he's still a Jew.
20 I'm so speechless, I don't even know
21 what they're talking about. And I finally was able
22 to indicate to him, I don't know what these
23 attributes are that the students have, what are
24 they.
25 Well, you know, but I did not know.
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
45
1 And I was speaking honestly, I did not know. I
2 never heard that before. And so I really will have
3 to go back--it struck me as so untoward, so un
4 everything, so unAmerican that I don't even remember
5 what happened.
6 I can only say that that person when
7 all of these others fell by the way side, most of
8 them didn't even get their degrees, this person
9 became the most distinguished fellow in the history
10 of Harvard University.
11 He thought there were a few things,
12 and I was proud that we remained friends for 60
13 years.
14 But the other thing about Harvard was
15 that the climate was such that I was able to
16 understand immediately what there was about it that
17 caused so many young people to become full of
18 themselves and take themselves more seriously than I
19 thought they should.
20 As I said, I didn't have any
21 problems, I didn't have any difficulty with academic
22 problems at all. I had some financial problems, but
23 those were solved after the first year with
24 fellowships and so forth.
25 And when I finished my exams and I
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
46
1 was asked by my major professor if I wanted any
2 further fellowships, and I said no, I just want to
3 leave, I want to get out of here. The atmosphere
4 was so stifling to me and I wanted to leave and
5 become myself again.
6 The pretensions were so great, and
7 the effort to be like professors was so great that I
8 thought it was no place for me, so I left. And I
9 was glad to get a job and write my dissertation when
10 I was working. I was writing on their money, on
11 their fellowship money.
12 I was happier and got more
13 experience, and learned more and was out of that
14 climate that--you see I began to realize that it was
15 something wrong with that climate, it was
16 anti-Semitic. So, probably I didn't see it because
17 it was anti-black too, much more than I really could
18 feel or experience.
19 It gave me, it put me on notice that
20 if Jews were special I must be very special. In an
21 unsavory and unattractive way.
22 Q. You said something earlier, Professor Franklin, that
23 I didn't understand when we first talked about the
24 riots in Tulsa delayed your arrival in that city by
25 four years?
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
47
1 A. Well, my father had gone to Tulsa the year before to
2 start a new life, to make a living. And he did
3 well, he was prospering and everything. So much so
4 that he said that we could come up at the end of the
5 school year, he would come and get us and everything
6 at the end of the school year and we'll be together
7 again.
8 And I so was very anxious because I
9 was six and going to be with my daddy again. And we
10 were packed and waiting for him to come. And he was
11 coming on the point of day the first of June. We
12 waited and he didn't come. The next day he didn't
13 come. The next day he didn't come.
14 There was no means of communication.
15 There was no telephone, there was not a telephone in
16 Rentiesville. There weren't many telephones
17 anywhere in those days.
18 Finally my mother read in the
19 newspaper that had been dropped off at Rentiesville
20 from Muskogee, down in Muskogee, the Muskogee Daily
21 News, that there had been a riot down in Tulsa. And
22 there were many casualties.
23 And then she didn't know whether her
24 husband, our father, was living or dead and didn't
25 know that for several more days. And finally we got
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
48
1 a note from him.
2 When the riot broke he stepped out of
3 his place, his office, to see what was going on and
4 he was seized, taken to a place of detention. Kept
5 for several days there.
6 When he got out everything that he
7 had had been destroyed. The house that he rented
8 for us had been burned to the ground. His office
9 had been destroyed, the building had been wrecked.
10 He couldn't find anything, any of his possessions
11 anywhere.
12 And that kept him really from writing
13 us or communicating with us for some days. And
14 because when he could get around, when he did get
15 around to communicating with us, he couldn't come
16 because by that time he had established his law
17 offices in a tent. There was no buildings in the
18 black community, no building at all.
19 He established his law office in a
20 tent, he stayed there at night. And he was busy
21 with his clients suing the insurance companies,
22 suing the city, suing the mayor, everyone in sight
23 for some compensation, reimbursement and so forth.
24 So he was so busy he couldn't come.
25 And he finally was able to--the city
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
49
1 had passed an ordinance saying that there could be
2 no reconstruction in that section of town unless it
3 was a fireproof construction.
4 Well, they didn't have any money to
5 build fireproof. My father advised his clients to
6 build with orange crates, if necessary, build with
7 anything. And they, of course, were arrested for
8 violating the city ordinance.
9 And he took that case to the state
10 supreme court and it was declared, the ordinance was
11 declared unconstitutional. So we had to wait four
12 more years and then we went out to Tulsa in 1925.
13 And that's when I found what Tulsa
14 was like, and what life was like there, how
15 different it was, how wonderful it was in so many
16 ways.
17 But this climate that I'm talking
18 about, which is kind of an artificial climate, but
19 one that was maintained and that gave us a sense of
20 freedom and of well-being that it was probably not
21 quite true.
22 But it was enough for us to feel that
23 we could go where we wanted to, and do what we
24 wanted to do and be what we wanted to and without
25 any serious consequences, or adverse consequences,
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
50
1 and we did.
2 But, of course, the town couldn't
3 have been more segregated or more Jim Crowe than it
4 was. And my parents, of course, would not and did
5 not ever demean themselves by accepting segregation
6 of any sort.
7 When I went to the courtroom with my
8 father, if the blacks were not segregated by law but
9 by custom they were, he never let me sit over there.
10 If it was a jury trial and the jury
11 was sitting, then he brought me to the bar and I sat
12 with him at the bar. If not, he said you can sit
13 you can sit over there where the jury is supposed to
14 sit.
15 When the Chicago Symphony Opera came
16 to town my mother was a musician she loved the
17 music, she wouldn't go to the opera because it was
18 segregated.
19 And she said, well, if you want--I
20 said, I want to see the opera. She said, well, it's
21 segregated we don't go to anything like that, but if
22 you want to demean yourself, if you want sell your
23 dignity that way, go ahead.
24 And I went with music teacher and so
25 forth, I went. I told this story in a PBS
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
51
1 documentary and the director of the Metropolitan
2 Opera in New York saw it and wrote to me, and said
3 I'm sorry you learned a little opera under those
4 conditions, but I'm glad you've learned to love it.
5 From now on you will never have to do
6 that again, you can be my guest in my box at the
7 Metropolitan whenever you want to. And Joseph--and
8 I have become very good friends because I go to the
9 opera as his guest.
10 But they wouldn't tolerate any kind
11 of segregation. So, I grew up in a household that
12 was hostile to the practices of racism. And I
13 learned, I learned what they were, although--I
14 learned what that was, although I didn't practice it
15 as a youngster.
16 I would have to wait and learn what
17 the adversities were before I would be able to
18 practice it. As I was able to practice it after I
19 went to college.
20 Q. You were able to practice?
21 A. To abstain from going into segregated places. As a
22 child I did not, as an adult I did. It was
23 something that I was forced to like during the
24 research and that's all.
25 Q. You went back to Fisk to teach, is that right?
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
52
1 A. Uh-huh. To Fisk?
2 Q. Yes.
3 A. Yes, I went back only for one year to teach. I
4 taught there in 1936, '37. Just an interim while I
5 was in graduate school, I went back to teaching at
6 my friend's place, the man who sent me to Harvard,
7 he was going away.
8 And by that time I had a master's
9 degree, and although I was a very, very junior
10 teacher at Fisk, they tolerated me for one year.
11 And I taught there and then I went back to graduate
12 school and finished my Ph.D.
13 But I stayed out of downtown
14 Nashville for the most part when I was back there
15 for that one year.
16 Q. What were your other teaching jobs, and how did race
17 become a factor?
18 A. Well, I taught at Fisk, St. Augustus college in
19 Raleigh. Then I taught at North Carolina College
20 for Negros in Durham.
21 It was when my luck ran out in
22 Raleigh with the draft board, and they were about to
23 draft me that I changed colleges.
24 And I called Dr. Sheperd, the founder
25 and the current president of North Carolina College
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
53
1 for Negros. And this is after I was not able to do
2 anything else in Raleigh, and after the president of
3 St. Augustus College told me he would not write a
4 letter to my draft board.
5 He said because he thought the Army
6 would be good for me. And it would teach me to hang
7 up my clothes, to be neat. And I told him my mother
8 had done that already. And I got up and left.
9 I called the president of North
10 Carolina College in Durham, North Carolina for
11 Negros in Durham. I said is that offer that you
12 made to me last year still standing, and he said, of
13 course.
14 I said I'll come to your college,
15 I'll come over and teach under one condition, he
16 said what's that. I said, you're on the Draft
17 Appeal Board, aren't you? He said, yes. I said
18 that you will keep me out of the Army.
19 He said, well, it would be a disaster
20 for the United States for you to go into the Army.
21 He said, I will be glad to keep you out, maybe we
22 can win the war then. So I said I'll come right
23 over. So I went over there and I spent four years
24 there.
25 Then I went to Howard University, at
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
54
1 that time I had published several books and I went
2 to Howard University as a full professor. I was 26
3 years--I'm sorry, 32 years old.
4 And then I stayed there nine years
5 and I went to Brooklyn College where I went as
6 chairman of the department and professor, it was
7 1956.
8 And it was there that I got some more
9 experiences in this life of what it means. I
10 learned a great deal about northern racism.
11 Brooklyn College is located in a
12 wonderful residential section of Brooklyn. And I
13 was living in an apartment, my wife and my son and I
14 were living in an apartment up on east--when I saw
15 all of these lovely houses there down there, and I
16 said, well, it must be wonderful to walk to work.
17 And so I began to look for a house.
18 And no real estate dealer in Brooklyn
19 would show me a house. I'd read in the New York
20 Times here is this house for sale, then I would go
21 and see the real estate dealer who advertised the
22 house, it wasn't available for me.
23 And I worked at that for several
24 months and I wasn't getting anywhere. I wasn't
25 seeing a house, I couldn't even see a house.
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
55
1 And then I concluded that I wasn't
2 going do see a house through the real estate
3 dealers, and I decided the next level of search
4 would be to find houses offered for sale by the
5 owners.
6 And I would confront the person who
7 was the sales person who would be the owner. And I
8 began to see some houses, but not many.
9 And as I went into the homes that
10 were for sale by the owner, I remember one instance
11 we came out of this house, he told us that it was
12 just about concluded the sale. But if that fell
13 through, he would be glad to call me and took my
14 telephone number. I didn't hear from him.
15 But I came out of that house,
16 apparently the word had got through that we were
17 looking for a house. This black couple was looking
18 for a house, and every white person in the block was
19 out in front of their house. All the way down the
20 block, to watch to see this black couple come out.
21 It was sort of sending a message, I assume.
22 I thought I could read the message,
23 it said that they didn't want me in that block.
24 Well, they couldn't get me anyway, because the man
25 didn't call.
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
56
1 We finally found one house though
2 that sounded interesting and we called, it was a
3 Saturday afternoon, we called this owner and this
4 owner said, what are you doing and I said, well,
5 we're not anything that we can stop doing--that we
6 can't stop doing.
7 He said, well, why don't you come
8 down here and see this house. And went down to this
9 house and we looked at it, and we were very
10 interested in the house as we approached it.
11 We parked and we rang the bell and
12 the man came to the door. He and someone else was
13 sitting in the kitchen, you could see it, this
14 living room, dining room, kitchen, you could see
15 that.
16 And he said just a minute, and he
17 went back and he took a drink. And he came back, he
18 said you want to see the house, you're the one who
19 called, and I said, yes.
20 He said come in. He said, this is
21 the living room, I said I thought that was the
22 living room. I didn't know, but I thought that.
23 Then I attributed his change in
24 attitude to the drink that he had taken, that that
25 might be a misreading.
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
57
1 But by the time we got past the
2 living room and into the dining room, he began to
3 push his house. He began telling me how good it was
4 and that how much money he had put into it, and that
5 I might be very pleased with it.
6 And he said, how do you like this, I
7 said it is all right, I like it. He said, you know
8 how much money I put into this basement. And then
9 he took me upstairs, me and my wife and my son
10 upstairs.
11 And then he finished showing me the
12 house, he was pushing the house on me. So I told
13 him that I would let him know. He called me the
14 next week and said, what about the house, you want
15 it?
16 I said, I think so, but I've got to
17 go away to see my father, he's not well. He said,
18 when are you coming back, I said I'll be back by the
19 first of December, we'll be back soon.
20 He said, look, if you want this house
21 I'll take it off the market now, I'll wait for you.
22 I said, well, I think I want it, he said I'll take
23 it off, I want you to have it.
24 And so I came back and I told him I
25 thought I would take it. So, we signed the contact,
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
58
1 my lawyer was in on the deal, and my lawyer, my
2 Brooklyn lawyer.
3 And he said, well, how we going to
4 pay for this house, he said, well, we've got to find
5 the money. And he said, do you have an insurance, I
6 said yes, and I told him the insurance company.
7 He said, well, your problems are
8 over. He said, they had set aside several scores of
9 millions of dollars for their own customers, their
10 own policy holders.
11 He said, what's your policy, I got it
12 out for him. How much was it, $20,000. He said,
13 what's the name of your insurance agent, I told him.
14 So, the next day I got a call from my insurance
15 agent.
16 He said, now I don't want you to get
17 a misunderstanding, we have done a lot for you
18 people. I said, what are you talking about. He
19 said, well, you want to borrow money to buy a house,
20 I said yes. And you've got lots of money for your
21 policy holders.
22 He said, it was not really for
23 everybody. He said you want to buy a house on
24 New York Avenue, I said yes, 1885, he said that's
25 the wrong block.
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
59
1 He said, I can't lend you money to
2 buy a house that far down because you're leaping
3 over a white neighborhood going into this other
4 neighborhood, he said, that's too far. He said you
5 have to take it neighborhood by neighborhood.
6 I said, well, I want to live in that
7 neighborhood. He said, we can't lend money for
8 that. I said, well, what's this money for that
9 you've got.
10 He said it's for our customers, but
11 they have to conform to the pattern of living that
12 we want them to conform to. I said, so I can't buy
13 in that block, that area, because I'm black, he said
14 that right.
15 He said, but I'll get the money for
16 you, I said from where, he said another company I
17 can get them. I said well, then that's the company
18 that I should be insured by.
19 And I said and as of now, you can
20 consider me not your customer anymore. And I turned
21 him down. I turned his offer to get the insurance
22 company to get the money for me.
23 And there I was back where I started.
24 I went to my lawyer, Murray Gross, I said Murray, I
25 still don't have the money, this man won't let me
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
60
1 have money from this insurance company and I
2 cancelled my $20,000 insurance with him.
3 And we have to start over. He said,
4 well there's banks, we'll get it from the bank. And
5 he told me the full story of this when I was about
6 to leave Brooklyn for Chicago.
7 He pulled out the folder of requests
8 that he made to New York banks. Not one bank in
9 New York would let me have the money, not one. This
10 included the bank in Harlem, it was a front for a
11 downtown bank anyway.
12 So there I am with no bank to lend me
13 money. And then he told me then how his father was
14 on the board of the South Brooklyn & Savings Bank
15 and he got the money through his father. That's the
16 only way I got money to buy that home.
17 I was so determined to have it and I
18 was determined to have it by the time the insurance
19 company turned me down, that he then decided that he
20 would help me get the money, and he did from the
21 bank on which his father served as a board member.
22 That was quite an experience for me.
23 In the community where I had been the
24 favorite, my picture was on the front page of the
25 New York Times when I went to Brooklyn. It was a
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
61
1 spectacular historical appointment, an African
2 American the chair of the department at Brooklyn
3 College of the City University, that's a first.
4 But although I could teach their
5 children, I could not live among them. That's what
6 the message was. And I felt that perhaps I was like
7 the barber who could cut their hair, but could not
8 belong to their church. Or the maid who kept their
9 children, but could not sit down to eat at the table
10 with them.
11 I didn't know. This is a strange
12 kind of treatment of a person who do they entrusted
13 their young people to me. So that when I moved in I
14 felt that I was moving among enemies. And I was.
15 The man next door would not move his
16 car so that the moving van could come into the curb
17 by the house. It had to sit out in the middle of
18 the street and take our belongings out of the van.
19 It took hours, tied up traffic and
20 everything but he didn't care. I got anonymous
21 calls from people that I knew that they hated us,
22 they lived in the same block. Telling me things
23 about myself, telling me I thought I was more than I
24 was.
25 One time we went out, my son and I
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
62
1 went out to paint the picket fence in front of our
2 house, apparently the word got around in the
3 neighborhood up and down in the block that we were
4 there, not to destroy the neighborhood, but to
5 improve it I suppose they might have said. It was a
6 half gallon of paint to put on a picket fence.
7 But they all came and stood and
8 looked across the street. Just looked, didn't say a
9 word. The silent treatment they gave me.
10 And it was the end of my wife's
11 career because they began to taunt my son who was
12 six years old. These are adults. Frightening him
13 when he would ride on his bicycle.
14 Telling him, aren't you afraid to be
15 here and that sort of thing. And he would come home
16 and tell us what they said. And my wife said, I
17 must be here for him.
18 So, she gave up her librarian career
19 and remained home until he went off to college.
20 Never set without him, never being without him.
21 Never letting him become a latch key kid, she was
22 there whenever he came home from school.
23 So it was my northern exposure to
24 racism was not better than my southern exposure.
25 Q. Was that different when you went to Chicago
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
63
1 subsequently?
2 A. What's that?
3 Q. Was that different?
4 A. It was largely different when I went to Chicago. By
5 that time I had become accustomed to walking to
6 working to work, you see. And so in Chicago I
7 wanted to walk to work.
8 But there the University of Chicago
9 controlled all the real estate in that area and they
10 secured the home for me. They were the intervenors,
11 sort to speak.
12 They knew that a certain professor
13 was putting his house up for sale, because he was
14 going to Vassar, as president of Vassar. And so
15 they said, if you like this house we will arrange it
16 so that you can get it.
17 And I liked it and we purchased it,
18 and it was that. And the second day we were there,
19 or maybe the same day we moved in, the youngsters in
20 the neighborhood learned that there was a youngster
21 in the neighborhood in the house, so they wanted to
22 know if they could come in and visit with him and so
23 forth. And they welcomed him.
24 We only had one incident, and that
25 was when my son who by this time was becoming fluent
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
64
1 in French. Belonged to the French Club which was
2 made up of adults and students.
3 And he had gone across the street
4 from our house to the home of one of the wives of a
5 professor in the English Department.
6 And the University of Chicago
7 policeman saw him coming out of this house and he
8 stopped him. And he said, what are you doing in
9 this neighborhood, why are you coming out of this
10 house. He said, I live across the street. And they
11 wanted to know what I did.
12 And then my son came into the house
13 out of breath and he said, the police, University
14 Police stopped me and wanted to know what I was
15 doing in the neighborhood.
16 And I called Edward--the president of
17 University of Chicago that moment. And told him
18 that the person who was patrolling that neighborhood
19 had stopped my son.
20 I said he cannot grow up being
21 stopped by the University of Chicago Police, I want
22 this stopped now.
23 He called the policeman in and
24 reprimanded him and issued an order to the police
25 department of the University, that they were not to
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
65
1 do this, not to accost young blacks in the
2 neighborhood because it was a presumption, it was
3 early profiling you see.
4 It was a presumption that something
5 was wrong if he was coming out of one of those
6 houses. And I said you can't do this, my son cannot
7 like that, we cannot live in this situation. And
8 that was stopped immediately.
9 That was the only experience that we
10 had that I would say untoward or adverse. And he
11 lived happily ever after that at that school and
12 went on to Stanford after that.
13 Q. Chicago is your last appointment before Duke, is
14 that right?
15 A. Yes, I retired from the University of Chicago in
16 1980, driven out by the weather. And retired to
17 Durham where I wanted to live. I was a fellow of
18 the National Humanity Center, I was a senior fellow
19 at the National Humanity Center.
20 And I was there writing the life of
21 George Washington Williams, one of my subjects. And
22 the second year there I was invited to be the Duke
23 professor at Duke University.
24 So, I didn't go from Chicago to Duke,
25 I went from Chicago to Durham to the National
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
66
1 Humanity Center, then I became a professor of the
2 Duke. Called out of retirement, I had no intention
3 of teaching anymore.
4 But those were eight or nine years of
5 the most delightful times of my life of teaching at
6 Duke. Both first and the second year. And then in
7 the law school I taught in the law school for seven
8 years, teaching American constitution.
9 Q. What made you like Duke so much?
10 A. Well, it was a different kind of experience, and I
11 was invited to be the James B. Duke professor. I
12 had had two chairs, one in this country and one in
13 England. And I was accustomed to chairs.
14 But Duke had never had an African
15 American sitting in a chair, named chair, and I
16 thought that it would be a good experience for Duke.
17 And that was one of the main reasons that I
18 accepted. And I think it was good experience for
19 Duke. And I hastily say that it was for me too.
20 I said this was some crowning
21 experience of my career, and a very packard one. It
22 was no unhappy experiences about that at Duke at
23 all. And they have been very good to me and paid me
24 homage that I could be paid, I think.
25 I have an honorary degree from Duke.
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
67
1 There's the John Hope Franklin Center for Africans
2 and African Americans documentation at Duke. And on
3 the 8th of February, they will open the John Hope
4 Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and
5 International Studies, the whole building.
6 It will open on the 8th of February.
7 So I have no quarrel with Duke about what they do.
8 Q. I will say though that on the honorary degree
9 they're not really standing out a list of
10 institutions that you have degrees from, it's
11 probably easier to go through then the list of ones
12 that have?
13 A. I wouldn't say that. There are maybe a thousand
14 colleges and universities in that country, two or
15 three thousand, I have only 128 honorary degrees.
16 Q. Tell us about your scholarship, Dr. Franklin?
17 A. Well, you mean my public work, my writing?
18 Q. Yes.
19 A. I was very fortunate in picking a subject for my
20 doctorate dissertation, which at the end of the line
21 that is when I finished with it, my mentor at Howard
22 Professor Shaveying announced at my final
23 examination, said my dissertation was ready to be
24 published. He recommended that I publish it, that
25 it be published.
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
68
1 Mr. Crittenton the head of the
2 North Carolina Archives, the one who put me in a
3 separate room and so forth. Who was a Yale Ph.D in
4 history, by the way. And upon reading my
5 dissertation, asked if he could send it to the
6 University of North Carolina Press, he says it's
7 ready to be published. So he did and they published
8 it. They published it.
9 Its been published and republished
10 and reprinted. And the University of North Carolina
11 Press has even brought out a new edition on it the
12 last three or four years. That's at one end.
13 And then my second publication it was
14 off of one of my students. I was lecturing on the
15 Civil War at St. Augustus College and one my
16 students came up to me and said, you know, you're
17 talking about the Civil War and it reminds me that
18 we have a Civil War diary that's been in the family
19 since 19--he said since the end of the Civil War.
20 And would you like to see it and I said, yes.
21 And he brought it, he sent for it and
22 it came up, and I read it and it was so interesting.
23 It was a diary of a white man who at the age of 57
24 years old, wanted to go into the Army and he did.
25 He enlisted in the Union Army, but he was put in the
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
69
1 Infantry, you know, how long a 57 year old would
2 last in the Infantry.
3 And he was then transferred after
4 1864, he was transferred into the recruiting
5 section. And he was dispatched to recruit black
6 soldiers after the United States proclamation, to
7 recruit black soldiers.
8 And he kept an account of that. And
9 I then published that as a Civil War diary of
10 James T. Ayers. That's just been reprinted by the
11 Louisiana State University Press this year.
12 Then I began to work on the Militant
13 South. And I was in the middle of that when I was
14 asked if I would be interested in writing a history
15 about African Americans and I said no, I'm busy.
16 I'm busy doing this.
17 But the head of the college kept
18 nagging me and nagging me and finally I relented,
19 and agreed to write from Slavery To Freedom, The
20 History Of African Americans. That was 57 years
21 ago. 53 years ago, I'm sorry. 54 years ago.
22 And that, of course, has gone through
23 eight editions. And it's used widely. It's, I
24 guess, between three and four million copies are in
25 print.
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
70
1 And I then proceeded to do other
2 things, write out for other books. I wrote a book
3 at the University of Chicago on the subject of
4 Reconstruction After The Civil War.
5 The Militant South which I postponed
6 to write From Slavery To Freedom, the Harvard
7 University Press published it.
8 That's a very interesting angle. I'm
9 writing my autobiography now, and the only thing I'm
10 finding is the actual historians through that book
11 on the Militant South. Which is not about blacks at
12 all, it's about whites.
13 There was a feeling that maybe I was
14 not qualified to write about whites. And the reader
15 whom I know now who it was, reading it for the
16 Harvard University Press said that, I don't see why
17 you need a Negro view of the south.
18 But if you insist on having a Negro
19 view of the south, maybe Franklin is the best person
20 you can get to do it. That's in the review which he
21 submitted to the Harvard University Press, which I
22 later did receive.
23 And I said to the director of the
24 Press, I don't see no Negro view of the south, it's
25 a view of the south period. The director of the
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
71
1 Press said, we understand that, that's why we wanted
2 it and they published it.
3 Then I wrote a book on the
4 Emancipation of Proclamation from a textual study of
5 the Emancipation. Like Lincoln came to write it and
6 so forth.
7 And then I wrote a book, another book
8 on white southerners it's called Southern Odyssey
9 Travel of the Annabella North. Which I described
10 the addictions that southerners had to the north, it
11 was a real addiction.
12 So much so there were large numbers
13 of them in the north at the time of the Civil War.
14 And they ran home from the war, but the day the war
15 was over they began to come back. And that story is
16 a bit interesting in itself.
17 That book won some kind of prize from
18 the Southern History. And I don't know, you remind
19 me that I wrote that. I will be able to tell you
20 why I wrote it, but it goes on.
21 Q. Let me ask you about your experience recently as the
22 chair of the President's Initiative on Race?
23 A. Uh-huh.
24 Q. What was the initiative, or how did you become to be
25 involved in that?
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
72
1 A. Well, I can tell you what the initiative was. The
2 president decided very early in his administration
3 that we had to do something about the problem of
4 race in America. This is President Clinton.
5 He come to North Carolina when he was
6 running for president and asked if I would visit
7 with him and I said, yes.
8 And I met him and the vice president
9 candidate, the candidate for vice president and the
10 family all at the same time, they came to Durham.
11 And I met them all a week before the election in
12 1992.
13 And then shortly after he became
14 president, the next contact I had with the
15 administration was through the vice president who
16 said to me one day he said, you know, I want to know
17 something more about race too.
18 And I wonder if you would help me
19 understand it by providing the intellectual feed if
20 I will provide the other kind of feed.
21 He said, I propose to hold three
22 seminars at my house and then invite 25 or 30 people
23 to each one of those. And I would like for you to
24 meet these--these would be influential people. Some
25 would be members of the cabinet, some will be
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
73
1 members of Congress, some will be scholars and so
2 forth, and I did that for three consecutive weeks.
3 The vice president and Mrs. Gore.
4 And my next contact I think was with
5 the president, when he conferred on me the Medal of
6 Freedom. And he made a speech on me that day which
7 surprised me, I didn't know he knew that much about
8 me. This was 1995.
9 And he told stories about me, some of
10 which I shared with you, and I was really amazed.
11 But it was shortly after that, that he began to talk
12 to me about the Initiative of Race, which he had set
13 up in the White House already.
14 And it was through that initiative
15 that they began to develop programs of various parts
16 of the government for the immediate racial
17 situations in those departments and so forth.
18 And then finally, he decided he
19 wanted an advisory board to the Initiative, which
20 was staffed by people in the White House.
21 He wanted an advisory board that
22 would recommend to him, that would study the
23 situation and recommend to him some things that we
24 thought he ought to do.
25 And the board was created on the 13th
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
74
1 of June, 1997, announced, it was the day. And the
2 next day it was announced at the meeting--at the
3 commencement at the University of California
4 San Diego.
5 The president met with us the day
6 before, and he took us all out there in Air Force
7 One, and we were really part of the commencement
8 exercises back there at U of C San Diego.
9 And he made the announcement there,
10 had all of us to stand. Told what we were up to,
11 what he wanted us to be up to, and he met with us
12 and brought us back to Washington.
13 Then we were on our own after that.
14 We were organized as an advisory board, under the
15 public laws of the federal government, which meant
16 that we were a public agency, no private meetings at
17 all.
18 We were getting acquainted, we had to
19 get acquainted in public. It was awkward for me to
20 say, now, what's your name and put that down.
21 But we began to develop a plan of
22 work with staff of about 25 to 30 people who helped
23 us. And we decided to study various aspects of the
24 problems of race in this country.
25 To start a dialogue is what the
GRUTTER -vs- BOLLINGER, ET AL
75
1 president wanted us to do, is start a dialogue.
2 Some people felt that that was not terribly
3 necessary in view of the fact that we have been
4 talking about race for three or 400 years.
5 But we felt that it was desirable,
6 very necessary to look at the problem
7 systematically, and to bring to bear on the problem
8 the research and findings that scholars and
9 statesmen had brought to it.
10