Interview with Ira Grupper, August 9, 2000

Tracy K'Meyer: This is an interview with Ira Grupper conducted by Tracy K'Meyer on May 9, 2000, in Mr. Grupper's home at 1644 Bonnycastle Drive.

Ira Grupper: . . . That's why I'm very anxious to assist with these things.

TK: Okay, well, thanks. What I usually do is ask some, and again like I say, basic stuff. When and where were you born?

IG: I was born in New York City, January 4, 1944. I'm fifty-six years old.

TK: I'm going to eventually ask about how you got to Louisville, but before I do that, there's a couple of questions I like to ask everybody. Born in 1944 so just before the baby boom, just a couple of years before. One of the things I like to ask everyone is how and when did you first become aware that there was such a thing as racial prejudice?

IG: I was probably around nine or ten years old and I lived in Brooklyn, New York, one of the boroughs of New York City. And we lived in a pretty rough neighborhood and there was a lot of tension between African-Americans and whites, also between Jews and Italians and Irish and Puerto Ricans and some Dominicans although not very many Dominicans. So it was, I'd say, eight or nine years old that I became conscious of it in a personal way, although I probably had seen it before but I was not really cognizant openly about it.

TK: And what did you learn at home or other places about how to respond to it or what to think of it?

IG: That's very hard to . . . I don't know how I conceptualized it at that point. I remember there was an African-American kid who took my brother's cowboy hat and I got it back. It was a fist fight that we had and he was a better 2:00fighter, better with fisticuffs than I but my father always said, "You never back down and you hit as hard as you can." And I got the cowboy hat back, even though he got better than me and we both went around different corners and I started to cry like a baby. I'm sure he did the same thing, but that was a first recollection. I don't know if I attributed that to race as much as just children being mean-spirited.

TK: Do you remember, as you were growing up your first awareness of any kind of civil rights activity?

IG: Yes. The first activity that I was involved in, I was around fourteen years 3:00old. I had become radicalized. I came from an orthodox Jewish family, although my father was politicized by the Great Depression of the 1930s and was becoming secular, but when I was fourteen I became radicalized and by the time I was sixteen I knew everything. My father was not an activist at all but he was a progressive man. On February 2, 1960, I still remember it, I think it was the first or the second, maybe it was the first of the February, four African-American college students sat-in at the Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. The following day my father asked me if I wanted to join a picket line. They were going to picket in solidarity at our local Woolworth's and I was very happy to do that, except I had one reservation, although I didn't tell him that, I was afraid that some students who I went to school with would see me. So that was an embarrassment like kids are embarrassed about pimples. I didn't want to be different from anybody else. But I still 4:00remember picketing with my father and these were mostly working class people and nobody went into the store. Very few people went into the store. So that was my first activity, 1960, but I had been involved for a couple of years before that to an extent.

TK: You said you had been radicalized how did that happen?

IG: I went five years to what they call [unintelligible], which is a Hebrew school after regular school and this was the orthodox, the Holy Rollers, and it served two functions; one, I was bar mitzvahed and two, I vowed never to set foot in a synagogue again. I just began reading and New York City being such a melting pot, it really was then, there were all kinds of rallies and different things that people could go to. And I began to read and I went, one rally I 5:00remember for the veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which were the veterans that fought in Spain, and that was actually the first intellectual pursuit that I that made me radical because obviously I was not born when that happened, but it really turned me on and I read everything I could get my hands on, on the Washington Battalion and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade that got us into the [unintelligible], the international brigades in general in old Spanish. So that was the first thing that I recall.

My father would bring home things every once in a while, like I say, he was not a dogmatic person, but he would bring left literature home and I would read, and I'd see there would be a rally here or a demonstration there and I began to participate and I became full-fledged leftist at that time.

TK: You said your father was interested in this stuff but he wasn't an activist. Was this his first picket line then?

IG: No, I'm sure he had been involved before, but he was not a really a joiner. He was a person, who was a decent man and he hated oppression because of the Holocaust and I think that was his motivation.

TK: Between then and coming to Louisville, were you involved in any other civil rights activity?

IG: [Laughter] Was I.

TK: Tell me a little bit about the background there, then.

IG: My intention originally was to get a bachelor's, a master's, and a Ph.D. in seventeenth century English literature. I used to get my jollies off of seventeenth century English literature. And the civil rights movement came along and I said, "Fuck that!" Forgive my tape-recorded language. I'm sure you never heard that word before. [Laughter] And I got involved first in New York City. I was a rent strike organizer and there was a school boycott because of the terrible difference between education of African-Americans and whites, also Latinos, but in this case it was focused upon African-Americans. That was the first time I was ever arrested was in New York City. I was busted at home; I don't mean in my house. And I should also say that I grew up in the Coney Island 7:00section of Brooklyn and when I was fourteen, fifteen, I guess it was, no, fourteen, about fourteen, the year after I was bar mitzvahed, we moved to a New York City housing project. The housing projects were pretty rough, although my mother would call it a middle class housing project, that was the way she rationalized it, and it was one step up the economic scale from where we had been, so it was good. And there was a lot of activity in the projects in the civil rights and I got involved there. In fact, when I was in college and I'm digressing . . .

TK: That's okay.

IG: And I decided to drop out. I was involved first in New York City as I said for a couple of years, but the real action was in the South. And I was a radical. I was not a liberal. I was not a person who thought that there was just a problem in the South and not the North and I should go there and cure 8:00everything and there would be the be-all and the end-all. But I was a seasoned veteran, if I may say that, without sounding immodest or arrogant by that time and I first went South with SNCC, the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, in Georgia. And why I mention this, the people in the housing project, as well as people in other areas nearby, they formed a group to support me, it was a friends of SNCC group. And they sent me fifteen dollars a week for a long time and then ten dollars a week after that. It was wonderful! And I sent newsletters back to them. I wish I still had them; I don't know where they are. I've gone through divorces and other things and I don't know where things are. But it was wonderful and so I was first in Georgia. Is this helpful?

TK: Yeah, actually the background, because it helps to explain how you get to Louisville, right?

IG: Now I don't remember years very well, I remember incidents. I first was in Georgia and was there for about six months.

TK: Do you know where in Georgia?

IG: Atlanta.

TK: Okay.

IG: And I worked in the office of SNCC, the Student Non-violent Coordinating 9:00Committee, which I suppose if I had to use an analogy, it's like the Marines of the civil rights movement. We went where nobody else would go! [Laughter] There were other groups that did also very courageous things, CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality and others, but SNCC was in my mind certainly the pre-eminent or one of the pre-eminent groups. I was there maybe six to eight months, I don't remember, and from there I went to Mississippi. I was first in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, H-A-T-T-I-E-S-B-U-R-G, in the southern part of the state. So you want these details, okay, I'll give you.

TK: Was that for Freedom Summer?

IG: No, it was a little bit after that, just after that. I was in Georgia before I went to Mississippi and the white students had gone back to keep their what was called [unintelligible] deferments. The boys did anyhow and the girls for other reasons, they didn't want to be drafted to fight in Vietnam, so they 10:00stayed in school. And I was there and I was in Hattiesburg and from there I moved to . . . I met a guy in Hattiesburg who was living in Columbia, Mississippi, about thirty-six miles to the west in Marion County, and he asked me to come to Columbia to work with him. His name was Curtis Stiles, a wonderful person; he's no longer living. And I agreed but I said I had to finish work that I was doing in Hattiesburg because I was very involved in Hattiesburg. I was with COFO, the Council of Federated Organizations, which was a coalition of all these civil rights groups in Mississippi at the time. SNCC, as I mentioned, CORE, Congress of Racial Equality, Delta Ministry of the National Council of Churches, and the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored 11:00People]. Then that set a [unintelligible] to become the MFDP, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party which was one of the most important independent political action thrusts in U.S. history. I don't know if we have time to go into that now but it was a very very interesting phenomenon. So I was very much involved in Hattiesburg for a long time. Hattiesburg was a very dangerous place. What I should say is there was a difference between the southern part of Mississippi and the northern part. And the northern part of Mississippi you had a plantation system, black people worked on cotton plantations and there was total control. So you really didn't need a Klan. There was a Klan, [Ku] Klux Klan and a White Citizens Council, which is like the businessman's Klan, at times there was no differentiation. It was a system of control unto itself; endemic and intrinsic in this system was a form of control.

Whereas in the southern part of the state, you had independent African-American farmers, for example, and laborers who would grow okra and butter beans and corn and tomatoes and cabbage and they had some cattle. They had a modicum of independence and there was a need for fierce control and so that's why the Klan, 12:00in my opinion, was so strong in this part. And so I was in Hattiesburg and then I told Curt that I would go to Columbia but I had to finish my work, but then I got sidetracked. I went to Jackson, Mississippi, and I was arrested in one of the largest demonstrations in the civil rights history. I guess Birmingham arrests two years before and the beatings were much more on a larger scale, but we were protesting the illegal convening of the Mississippi state legislature and I was arrested. I was beaten by the Mississippi State Highway Patrol. When I got out of jail about two weeks later, there's a wonderful group called the Medical Committee for Human Rights, nurses and doctors. Are you familiar?

TK: Yeah, a friend of mine is writing a book about them.

IG: Really?

TK: Yeah.

IG: Yeah, I'd like to meet that person because I know a little. They arranged for me to go to New York City to be treated for my injuries and thank goodness, it was nothing permanent, but I had to heal. And then from there. . . . Again this is okay, this is what you want to hear?

TK: Yeah.

IG: Okay. From there I made my way back South. Well, I visited my parents, of course, and they were very upset. My mother was upset with me going back. She was upset with me going in the first place. She was a very conservative person. She was not a right-winger. She didn't want black people being bitten by police dogs in Birmingham, Alabama, but she didn't want her son, such a smart boy and scholarship potential and all this stuff, quitting and going [unintelligible], which means all this hell, in the South. My father was very supportive. He also was worried about me, but his worry was simply a concern of a parent worrying 14:00about a child as opposed to an ideological concern. He was ideologically in solidarity with me. I made my way south. I stopped first in Washington, D.C., and I was there for about six or eight weeks. I worked in the legislative office of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. I really learned how the system worked. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party had arranged for people to lobby the legislature. That's the mailman.

TK: Oh, okay. You got a lot of mail.

IG: Mostly crap. Looks like all bills. But they, for example, the EEOC, the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, which was a concession, a limited 15:00concession by the ruling class to the power of the civil rights movement, had just been formed. And we brought people from Mississippi to meet with EEOC officials and talk about the nature of discrimination and all and that stood me in good stead because later on I was a commissioner and vice-chairman of the Louisville and Jefferson County Human Relations Commission.

TK: Oh, okay.

IG: From 1980 to 1986, but I'll get to that later.

TK: Okay.

IG: I said chairman advisedly, because I try to use the word chairperson and they didn't want me to use it at that time.

TK: Anyway.

IG: Anyway, and in addition as working for a legislative person for the MFPD, I worked for an attorney, again volunteer, I didn't get paid for this. I was getting my fifteen dollars a week from the SNCC group, which later was ten dollars a week and then it was zero. Oh, I'm sorry.

TK: We need that. [Static]

IG: It was fifteen dollars a week first, then ten dollars a week and then zero and even then ten dollars, it was nothing, and I split it with people.

TK: You were working with a lawyer, you said?

IG: Yeah, his name was William Higgs. I don't know that he's living. I heard that he's not but I don't know for sure. He was a wonderful man. He was a white guy who was from the delta, from Greenville, Mississippi. He was a scion of a very wealthy newspaper family and he joined the Freedom Movement and he was run out of the state. They brought up him on bar charges and I think he may have lost his bar license but he set up a shingle in Washington, D.C., and was working full-time for the Freedom Movement and I had the opportunity to meet him and to work with him. So I worked with both of them. Then I made my way back to Hattiesburg and I spent maybe a couple of months there. Again, I can't give you the exact date. I could probably look it up if I racked my brain or if you put a gun to me but I'm just giving the general. And then I moved to Columbia and for the next year, year and a half, I was in Marion County. I'll tell you how that story. . . . Do you want to know a little bit about the history of that or. . . . ?

TK: Well, I think if you just give me the highlights of your career so that we 17:00can sort of know your story on how you ended up coming to Louisville.

IG: Fine. Well I was involved in voter registration drives, desegregation of public accommodations. We helped set up a freedom school to teach black history. We did some work with whites. There were some whites in the area who were supportive of the civil rights movement. One boy, he was fourteen years old, and his parents had him declared insane and he was admitted to the mental institution in Whitfield because of his civil rights activity.

TK: Wow!

IG: Yeah, it was horrible. So I was there for a long long time and I was in jail there, too. Came back to New York around, I don't know, '67, had no money and got various jobs. I worked as a, if you have the ability to communicate the gift of gab, if you will, which I like to think that I may have, you can be a salesman, which I was for a while. I was a professional salesman, just door to door, I made a lot of money. Sometimes I didn't make a lot of money because 18:00whenever I made a sale, I would spend the rest of the day, not in the dirty movie houses, but working for some progressive group.

And then I worked as a union organizer for a while, two different unions. And I received a call from Carl and Anne Braden in 1969. I had known them and they asked me if I wanted to come to Louisville to work for their organization, which was called the Southern Conference Educational Fund, SCEF. SCEF, as you must know, is part of a larger organization called the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. It was busted during the McCarthy period and that was the vestige that had remained. And I was living with a woman and we were going to get married, so I was hired as a printer. I got a big raise, I was making a hundred twenty dollars a month, well, a hundred and ten dollars a month. We came down here and we had our first child and I think Carl and Anne gave me a ten-dollar raise.

TK: They hired you to work for SCEF?

IG: To work for SCEF, yes, here as a printer and also I was active in, we had a labor project and all. And after about a year, they were not able to afford to sustain the number of staff people they had and I was also very interested in the labor movement because I had been involved before, so I went to work for Local 1199, Drug and Hospital Workers Union. We tried to organize several hospitals here unsuccessfully because nurses and semi-professionals like EKG technicians and all thought that they were professionals and not workers; that their first duty was to their patients, which in a sense I suppose it is, but you can't treat people if you're underpaid and you're fucked over! And I've been here ever since. I've been here thirty years.

TK: Now how did you know Carl and Anne?

IG: I had met them in, I don't know, Alabama, I think it was at a meeting in Alabama when I met them and Mississippi. And then when I was in New York, as I said I had jobs where I had time during the day and SCEF had a fundraising 20:00office, 799 Broadway, I think it was, and I used to go in there to stuff mailings and just volunteered for that, and I got to know Carl and Anne pretty well. That's how they invited me to come here.

TK: Could you tell me a little bit about SCEF and how it was organized locally and what it did, things like that?

IG: They had several projects. I don't know if you've interviewed others?

TK: No, SCEF people yet, no.

IG: SCEF was a civil rights and civil liberties organization. It was formed in 1938; Southern Conference for Human Welfare was organized by a man named Joe Gelders from Birmingham, Alabama, a white guy. And among the people who were participating in the very beginning were Eleanor Roosevelt actually. But it was a radical organization. It was the vehicle through which the CIO [Congress of Industrial Organizations], not the CIA, the CIO would organize in the 1940s, and as I said earlier in the 1950s was attacked. The then executive director, I 21:00don't remember the year much later than that, James Dumbrowski in New Orleans went to jail and brought his case to the U.S. Supreme Court and won a major victory. It was a very important victory, which you should get the information from Anne, she would have a better recollection than I.

TK: I haven't interviewed her yet, yeah.

IG: It was organized in various projects. There was a project in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky and Eastern Kentucky headed by Al and Margaret McCurley.

TK: I've heard those names.

IG: They were both arrested actually. Their house was dynamited, they had a little baby in the house and it was dynamited and they were arrested for sedition to try and overthrow the government of Kentucky. The case went to the Supreme Court and they won. It was a major victory in the McCurly case. Al now lives in North Carolina, he's remarried, and Margaret, his then wife, lives in Maryland somewhere near Washington, D.C.

And the other project that they had, Tracy, was in the Deep South called GROW, Grass Roots Organizing Workers, was based in New Orleans. And these projects both worked with working class whites and tried to build alliances between African-American and white people. Later on, I guess, there were also alliances with Latinos and other people, but it was mainly a black/white coalition and not done on the basis of paternalism or maternalism but on the basis of mutual self-interest and class solidarity and there were very effective. And then we had a small Louisville labor project, which I was involved with here. So that's SCEF.

TK: Louisville labor project, what was that all about?

IG: We tried to organize several unions here. When I was working with 1199, I also was working with SCEF, Drug and Hospital Workers. We tried to help, I think it was, the Teamsters, to organize LG & E, Louisville Gas and Electric, in the 23:00early seventies. That's when I first met people in the Black Workers' Coalition. I don't remember the year but I had a good relationship with them for a long time; they were wonderful people.

TK: Could you tell me a little bit about them? So you weren't actually a member of Black Workers' Coalition, right?

IG: Well, I'm white. I guess if white people can join the NAACP, you can join the Black Workers' Coalition. We were very supportive; SCEF was of the work that the Black Workers' Coalition did. I'm trying to remember the years of the Black Workers' Coalition and that fail me, but Anne will tell you exactly; she remembers every niche. She knows all the particularities. They were a reformist group; they simply wanted justice. They wanted justice in the Louisville Gas and Electric in particular. There are a couple of people who are still around that you should talk to. I'll think of their names and get you phone numbers if you would like.

TK: Yeah, okay.

IG: And there was a lot of solidarity and there was a lot of solidarity work 24:00going on. The Black Panthers were here in town. I mean there were a lot of other organizations here. But again, I don't remember the overlap; you know which came first and all that. I'm sorry to tell you that I just don't remember. I was going to try to prepare for this interview by trying to write a little outline, but I just unfortunately did not have time.

TK: You got other stuff to do.

IG: I just came back from Jerusalem.

TK: And everything is not even unpacked. Well, one question, because this doesn't really require sort of specifics to answer, it's more of an impression, is when you showed up in Louisville in 1969, how would you describe sort of race relations in the city and what was going on when you got here? What was your impression of the place?

IG: I think that Louisville was a segregated city. This is a Southern city; it's a Southern city with a Northern industrial mix, but if you went out to Shively or Okolona, you'd see that it was a racist, very segregated place. But my 25:00impression was that because the ruling class here was, they weren't liberal but they were enlightened, and so prior to my coming here when there were demonstrations to desegregate public facilities in the Deep South, Louisville didn't have to be pushed terribly hard to desegregate public facilities. That doesn't mean that it was easy! Stewart's Department Store, which is now nothing, it took many different forms. Downtown was the main department store and they were segregated. And there were open housing demonstrations in the late 1960s, so it's not like it was a perfect place or even near a perfect place. But the harsh demarcations, shall we say, that were extent in the Deep South in Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia, and Florida and Tennessee were not here. And the 26:00Bingham family, which was the controlling family of the CBS station WHAS, well, they went from one station to another, but they owned that and they owned the Courier-Journal. These were multi-millionaires. I think when they sold the Courier they sold it for like 360 million dollars, a little more than I earned here. You and I earned here.

TK: Put together!

IG: And they didn't want trouble. They wanted there to be peace. They wanted to be able to exploit workers in a rational way without having this tension of racial discrimination. And so it wasn't quite so hard. That was my impression that there was a benign element to discrimination. Isn't that awful to say? Any discrimination is horrible but it was not raised or edged like it was elsewhere, that was my impression.

TK: So, by the time you're here, the riot has already passed and the Black Six 27:00trial was going on. Did you have any. . . .?

IG: Yeah, I was the printer for SCEF and so I was very involved in; I knew about all these activities. For example, the first day that I arrived here in '69, it was amazing. I got here around midnight. I still remember it was on New Year's Day, no, New Year's Eve, and Anne and Carl were home and who is sitting in the kitchen but Jimmy Braden, Anne and Carl's son, was arguing with Steve Gilbert. Jimmy was taking the position of the objectionist newspeople, Ayn Rand and those people. It just blew me away, their son arguing Ayn Rand that right-wing shit. And Steve Gilbert was a lieutenant in the U.S. Army at Fort Knox by day and by night he was the editor of the underground anti-Vietnam War newsletter called 28:00FTA. And I knew about this thing because I was the printer, later on was the printer. FTA it said on the thing, Fun, Travel and Adventure, but that's not what it really meant. It meant fuck the army, so they couldn't say that, they had to say FTA. [Laughter] Fun, Travel, and Adventure; it was very funny.

TK: Was he a local person or was he just here because Fort Knox?

IG: No, he was here because Fort Knox was here.

TK: When you came to work for SCEF how many, you said they had other staff members as well, how many people worked for SCEF at that time?

IG: In Louisville there were six or eight people. In eastern Kentucky, three or four people. In the Deep South, about five or six people I think.

TK: Do you remember who any of those other people in Louisville were?

IG: Nancy Griffin, now Nancy [unintelligible] Clayton. She came later than me 29:00but she worked for awhile. Joe Hoban, H-O-B-A-N. Suzanne Crowell, who is now in Washington, D.C. I haven't seen her in many, many years. She was a very good writer; she was a writer for them. Joe Malloy, who resisted the war in Vietnam, white guy from Louisville. Karen Malloy, his wife. [unintelligible] he was her husband.

TK: Were these people originally from Louisville or did they come here like you, having been recruited to work?

IG: Joe and Karen were from here, well, Joe was from here. I don't know where Karen was from, somewhere upstate New York, I think, Buffalo, Albany. I think Joe Hoban was from here. Charlene Washington, did she work for SCEF? No, she 30:00worked for Bill Allison later. Bill Allison was the attorney for SCEF.

TK: Oh, I didn't know that!

IG: He and I have been friends for thirty-one years.

TK: I think I need to try to interview him.

IG: Wait till after he gets elected.

TK: At least after May, then maybe in the lull of the summer or something.

IG: He's from Valley Station. He's a red neck. He uses double negatives. He don't know nothing about proper syntax or [unintelligible]. I don't either. [Laughter] He don't use [unintelligible] phraseology like you Ph.D. people do. [Laughter]

TK: Yikes.

END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A

START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B

IG: She's Eleanor Garber, she's a judge now in Louisville. They took on all kinds of cases. They defended the Louisville black police officers. They won six million dollars! They represented, or Eleanor represented the people at the 31:00airport that were trying to prevent tearing down hundreds of houses and they won. It was a [unintelligible] victory because when they [unintelligible] winning he moved all the houses. So Bill was in it and who else. There's a guy named Keith Stickford; I haven't seen him in thirty years, twenty-eight years. And there was a guy named Barry who was sort of . . . he came from the stratosphere and he sort of floated around and whatever homocegenic things that he could find, he would pick up and try to share with us. Of course I was never involved with that.

TK: Of course not. And so when you were working, did you all live down at the office as well?

IG: A couple of the people lived in the office, one or two. I think Barry lived in the office, but everybody else had their own apartments.

TK: How long did SCEF last here?

IG: I lived first with Carl and Anne. I lived with them for six months until I got. . . . How long did SCEF last here?

TK: Yeah.

IG: It closed its doors around 1975. There was several ideological splits in the organization, unfortunately; one around '72, '73 and it really rendered the organization asunder.

TK: What were the differences?

IG: There were political differences and I think if the truth be known, it may well be that the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] fermented some of that. Suffice it [to] say that people, who were very comradely and very friendly with one another, didn't speak with one another for a long time. It was very sad. I think that the problem at that time was not just with SCEF, it was with many organizations in the country; they could not establish a base in the proletariat in the working class, and so people started fighting amongst themselves. Maybe that's too simply, too simplistic a way to say it but I think that that's probably the truth. It was very, very difficult to build a movement at that time for a lot of reasons, so people started fighting amongst themselves.

TK: Why do you think it was so hard for these groups to reach the working class?

IG: Well, I think Louisville was a microcosm of the United States and you had the 1960s, the civil rights movement was an impelling force. The civil rights movement, this is the only way I can answer you to say what the civil rights movement did and then how did that relate to the 1970s. The civil rights movement not only integrated public facilities, but it, in my estimation, nailed shut the coffin of McCarthyism more than anything else. Now there was the [unintelligible] McCarthy hearings in the 1950s. I don't think they did nearly so much to expose McCarthyist to the civil rights movement. This thrust, this tidal wave of activity nailed it shut. But also from the civil rights movement, 34:00many other things happened. There was a lot of sexism in the civil rights movement. There was a very famous statement, infamous statement by Stokely Carmichael when he was asked, "What do you think about women's position in the civil rights movement?" He says, "Prone." And so a lot of the African-American women said, "Fuck this! We're not going to stand for it!" And they helped formed women's organizations as did many white women. I don't know if the white women did it because of the civil rights movement, but these black women did. And the first real opponents of the war in Vietnam were not white students, although they received the publicity and I'm not trying to denigrate the importance or downgrade the importance of their commitment. But that were people like Walter Collins, an African-American, or Cleveland Sellers, who was my buddy and was a SNCC activist. He made a very famous statement, he said, "No Vietnamese ever called me nigger." And it was a very, very emotional time, so this is the sixties.

Then the seventies comes along and things begin to dissipate. The FBI had by 35:00then infiltrated a number of organizations and I don't remember what year the Black Panthers came along, but they helped destroy that. It was just very difficult to organize! The labor movement dealt mainly with wages, hours, and working conditions, but didn't deal with racism, with sexism, with ageism, with homophobia, with discrimination against the foreign born. I won't say it was an [unintelligible] with then, but it was just not within the context of their understanding. They were very narrow-minded people; they dealt with self-interest and not with class interest. I think these are some of the reasons. And people, you know, there was a lot of drugs that were going around. I really didn't participate in the drug culture at all as I was very single-minded. I was very assiduous, I guess is the word.

TK: Well, I always try to tell my students that they shouldn't make the . . . my students make the assumption, of course, that activist equal hippie equal drug, you know, they're all the same. And I keep trying to tell my students that it's not the same!

IG: It's not the same at all, you're absolutely right.

TK: You know and in some cases, they didn't necessarily like each other.

IG: This is not a small difference, it's a very large difference; it's almost a chasm.

TK: You had mentioned the Black Panthers a second ago and just curious, what different militant groups were there in Louisville at the time, it begins kind of late sixties, early seventies?

IG: Well, the Panthers. There was JOMO. I don't remember what the acronym stood for, JOMO.

TK: What were they about, though? I've heard the name but no one seems to remember what they were about.

IG: I think they were a black nationalist organization. Claude McCullen, who still lives in Louisville as far as I know, was involved with them. He's now a minister or [unintelligible], I forget what he is, but Anne would know how to reach him. So JOMO, Black Panther Party, then there were several groups in Louisville. You had the Black Workers' Coalition, which was quite different from the Black Workers' Congress nationally. This was a reformist group and I'm not 37:00saying that as a criticism but as an empiricist observation. Other groups I'm not sure; I don't remember. There were groups in Louisville. There was the West End Community Council, which they helped I think desegregate public facilities. No, they were involved in trying to prevent block busting when the West End was all white and then was becoming black.

TK: Was that still around by the time you were here?

IG: Yeah.

TK: What was it doing by the time you were . . .?

IG: They had a newsletter and they tried to build amicable race relations. They did a good job. It was a really good newsletter that they put out, I remember. I'm sure there must still be things . . .

TK: Actually Fred Hicks gave me a box of them, I just haven't opened it yet.

IG: I was going to say that his wife Judy, or his late wife Judy, they were both active but I think she more than he. I think she edited the newsletter for 38:00awhile, if I'm not mistaken. They were a very good group of people, yes.

TK: They sound like an interesting group, unfortunately, this is why I'm anxious to look at these newsletters because there's not a whole lot in writing about them. You know, I've heard that . . . you come across a name here and there but there's not a lot of records. So the Black Workers' Coalition was, I just want to ask is there anything else you remember about them, how big it was or who was in it or anything like that?

IG: They were involved at LG&E, Louisville Gas and Electric. They were involved at International Harvester, I think at GE [General Electric]. . . maybe I think a couple of the chemical plants also. They were very militant in opposing racism. People who were involved in there were Roosevelt Roberts, who I haven't seen in many years but was an international representative at International 39:00Harvester. He was what they call an UAW [United Auto Workers] committee man, like I used to be a shop steward, for many years in the factory and it's the same as a shop steward. A fellow named Moscoe Rapier, M-O-S-C-O-E R-A-P-I-E-R.

TK: I have to look him up.

IG: And there was a guy at LG&E, Kiphart, James Kiphart.

TK: Oh, I interviewed him but he didn't mention, yeah, he did talk about Black Workers' Coalition.

IG: You interviewed James Kiphart?

TK: Yeah, yeah.

IG: How is he? I haven't seen him in God knows . . .

TK: He seemed fine and . . .

IG: Is he retired?

TK: I think so and he had prepared like a stack of stuff for me to look at because he had been involved with the Wets End Community Council, that's how I got his name, but he had had clippings and stuff about his case. He had sort of filed a suit at one point.

IG: Yeah, he filed a suit.

TK: So we just went through it, you know, I couldn't take any of it with me, so I just kind of looked through it quickly to see if there was anything I couldn't find elsewhere.

IG: You might need to go back over and I'll tell you what to do, but that may be an important piece for you.

TK: Yeah, because especially because again one of my questions that I have is, and I'll ask you this directly, is after open housing and after the riot and the Black Six stuff, so in the early seventies, what are the main issues you think the people were trying to do something about?

IG: Well, you ask me these hard questions. It's only thirty years, thirty-five years. Well, the city was a very segregated city. There was black and white. There were very few integrated areas. Old Louisville was an integrated area. Some area out around Preston Highway somewhere was an integrated area. The West 41:00End part was integrated in the Portland area particularly, near the Ohio River, but the rest it was very segregated and so there were many attempts to change our pattern housing, patterns [unintelligible], that was what it was like.

TK: You had mentioned, I just noticed a little note to myself to ask you, you had mentioned being on the Human Relations Commission. I know you were on it later so this may be skipping ahead, but I did just have questions about that organization, I mean what role did it play during this time period?

IG: Well, I'll have to give you the background of Human Relations Commission in general. Human Rights Commissions and Human Relations Commissions were a limited concession by the ruling class to the power and the strength of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. It was a way to generate dissatisfaction and into non-constructive busy work and they were a function of the United States Department of Justice, Community Relations Service. CRS set these things up and again it was a double-edged sword because on the one hand it was a victory to 42:00have these things set up to deal with discrimination as a vehicle through which you can file a complaint and get some justice. On the other hand, it took this dissatisfaction and that sort of dissipated some of it. I think that in the, well, I was not here in during the early sixties and middle sixties, I came in the late sixties, so I can't comment on it. I don't know exactly what year it formed. In the seventies, well, when was it, in 1975 the biggest thing was the desegregation of the public schools, which I was very involved in through a group called PIE, Progress in Education. And the Human Relations Commission went along with the Chamber of Commerce. Nobody wins when you lose your cool; they didn't deal with the substantive issues that black people had to face and which 43:00later would come back to haunt them and why desegregation is an abominable failure here and elsewhere in the United States. So, for example, I have four kids, two of them at that time were in school, the two older ones were, and we sent, there was a boycott by the white racists, and we sent them to school. And the view of the Chamber of Commerce and many of the business people here is "Let's just calm things down. We don't want any trouble." It was a very enlightened view, as it had this slogan "Nobody wins when you lose your cool." And the Human Relations Commission basically was part of this fabric of trying to smooth out the wrinkles. They didn't do such a good job; there were 10,000 National Guardsmen on the streets when the schools . . .

TK: Really!

IG: Yeah, 10,000, yeah.

TK: I didn't know that!

IG: Yeah, I was not here at the time, I was fundraising somewhere in the North, but they were stationed in the streets, yeah.

TK: I mean I had heard that there was, you know . . .

IG: And in fact, I'm sorry go ahead.

TK: Disruption, you know.

IG: I would say that it was more dangerous here, because I was very involved with PIE. It was a potentially a more dangerous situation here than in Boston, which turned out to be in fact the most dangerous. Why? Because here, as opposed to Boston, it was the unions that were organizing the opposition to busing, mostly skilled crafts, which were all-white unions, you know, it wasn't just the question of being white though. I couldn't, I being a white person if my father and my brother was not in the union, I could not become an electrician or a plumber or a pipe fitter, a tool and dye maker. So they knew how to organize; these unions were very well versed in organizing and organizing and that's who led the anti-busing, or that was one of the components of it. Of course, in 45:00Boston it was Irish and Italian and it was not unions per se, no. So we really faced a very dangerous situation here.

TK: How did all this come up and at what point did you get involved in it?

IG: Well, I was involved in the beginning.

[Phone rings -- tape paused]

TK: I was asking you how the school busing whole issue came up and how you got involved.

IG: Well, the school busing issue came up because a number of parents, black and white, mostly black, sued, and I think Lyman Johnson was also involved in that, African-American leader at the time, sued because of these separate and unequal situation of the school system. It was a terribly segregated school system. And 46:00it got to Judge [James] Gordon. Judge Gordon was a federal judge. I forget where he sat, maybe it was Cincinnati, and he was a right-wing bastard but he was not a stupid man, well, he was a stupid man, but in this particular case he was not a stupid man. He saw that it was a very clear case of the schools being segregated and one thing that I found that judges hate to be is to be reversed. They don't like to be reversed, so in his wisdom, again not because of his beneficent [unintelligible], he was not an altruistic, but for whatever the material conditions that existed caused him to rule that the school system should be desegregated. Now having said that, it was still a very unequal thing because my children, white children, were bused two years out of twelve, black children were bused ten years out of twelve, and this is across the United States. There were many ways, many permutations, and combinations, and 47:00probabilities. I'm not a mathematician or a demographer, but you could have had a school that had grades one to three, which meant that everybody would be bused into the same school, but no, the burden was on the people who were victimized! Do you got that on?

TK: Yeah, oh yeah.

IG: Okay. I'm not going to repeat this. The burden was on the people who were victimized to compensate. So there were a lot of things wrong, nonetheless, it was certainly far better than it was before. So for example, I remember Central High School, which was the traditional African-American high school. I don't mean traditional as opposed to innovative, but it was the black high school. As soon as the order came down and these rich white kids from Douglas Hills and the East End were going to be bused in, all of the sudden trees got planted around the high school. There was I think a gymnasium, a basketball court set up; never been before. I think they set up a biology lab with real microscopes! They didn't have these used books! Now anybody talks, saying that the integration was 48:00totally a phase has no understanding of history, is very, very naïve and almost destructive and does not have a good material analysis of the concrete condition that existed. So the school system was in a hell of a shape and this group, PIE, formed, again I was not an original former of PIE but I was involved in the very beginning. I think the original people were among white people were Anne Braden and Suzy Post.

TK: Suzy Post. That makes sense.

IG: I was involved in the very beginning and what I and a fellow named Bob Cunningham did, okay he's an African-American guy.

TK: I've interviewed him.

IG: He's a wonderful, wonderful person. He and I went out into the white working class areas to try to calm things down. That was our job, we decided that we 49:00wanted to . . . because we're both factory workers, real life factory workers. We were not petty bourgeoisie intellectual trying to identify with downtrodden people, and I've told you my background. And so we went out to Okolona, to Fairdale, to the South end off Taylor Boulevard. We spoke at a few churches. I can't say we were very successful, because there were not thousands of people there, but we gave people pause for thought and it was just wonderful to work with him. He was a very courageous person, well, we were both were courageous there. Because even though I was white going to a white area, you know, sometimes the so-called nigger lovers get treated worse than the black people. Forgive that word, but I don't know another word to use. And so PIE was very successful. Its approach was quite different from the Chamber of Commerce's approach in the sense that it tried to deal with grass roots people! But the fact that you had the Chamber of Commerce and business people who wanted there 50:00not to be confrontation was a very helpful sign. I probably would not have had the courage to admit then but now retrospectively, hindsight being 20/20, I would say that was the case.

TK: Did you know anything about an organization called Black Protective Parents?

IG: Yeah, Venetha Ellis.

TK: Did you work with them at all?

IG: Yeah, we did a lot of work with them. They were a constituent part of the. . . . In fact, now that you mention that I think Venetha was one of the plaintiffs in the original desegregation suit, but I may be wrong. She was terrific. She was a very strong woman, you know there were other women were involved, but they were terrific, yeah.

TK: You said that you had children at school at the time, were they bused right away?

IG: No, the first year they were not bused, but the school was boycotted and we deliberately sent them to school. I still remember I took a hammer and I had a 51:00hammer in a paper bag, just in case there was trouble. And I walked around with that. I accepted non-violence as a tactic in the 1960s and I had the shit beat out of me. I've proved myself, I suppose, I can say that, but I'm not a pacifist. [Laughter] Only as a tactic, not as a philosophy. So yes, that's what happened with my kids.

TK: Could you describe some of the opposition, things that the opposition did to try to stop busing or try to react to it?

IG: Well, there were . . . there was real fear of violence. There was a woman named Jean Ruffra, R-U-F-F-R-A, who, I think, she lived in Shively, and later on, she was, I think, a city official, or some sort of a municipal job. And she 52:00was one of the main organizers of it but she was not the among the most villiant people. There was real fear, people's lives were threatened! There were fistfights and all, but I don't remember the details, I'm sorry to say. It was a long time ago.

TK: That's okay. So that . . .

IG: Whether or not it's okay, that's what you got.

TK: Well, this is why you interview so many people, right? The more people you interview. . . . I always tell people if you can remember just one or two things that someone else didn't remember then, you know, eventually. About how long did it take for some of this to sort of calm down?

IG: Well, the most active, villain, demonstrative act that lasted a short time, maybe one school year.

TK: Okay.

IG: Maybe even less and then after that yes there were still pockets of resistance and activism. White kids were kept out of school by white parents, 53:00but I think it very soon became a normal sense, a normal situation.

TK: What impact do you think PIE had on the whole situation?

IG: Oh, I think PIE had a very strong impact, absolutely. At that time, as long as you're too close to the forest to see the trees, I think that we were very instrumental in helping to calm the situation down and to push the city and county fathers and mothers to do the right thing. They may have done it themselves, I don't know, as I say, these were not stone racists. By the same token, our being there to push was a very helpful, helpful sign.

TK: What was going on besides busing at the time? Other issues or other campaigns or anything like that?

IG: Do you mean in terms of left activity?

TK: Yeah.

IG: Opposition to the war in Vietnam.

TK: Okay, I was just going to ask about that. Was there any connections between those two movements here locally?

IG: I don't recall. That's a very interesting question. I've never really thought of it, but I think they were pretty much different.

TK: Not a lot of the same people or anything like that?

IG: Yes, some of the same people were involved, but I don't think that there was a correlation made publicly between one enterprise and the other.

TK: So just same people doing both?

IG: Yeah, I opposed the war in Vietnam and I was in favor of PIE and the work that PIE did. I was very active in PIE, so yes.

TK: Were you involved with the Alliance right from the beginning?

IG: No. I guess I was a member from the very beginning but not active in the very beginning.

TK: How did it get started?

IG: Well it was a national organization. It was called the National Alliance Against Race and Political Oppression. And that really was the culmination or 55:00the outgrowth of the various committees that were set up around the United States, actually around the world but I'm speaking of the United States now, to defend Angela Davis when she was busted. And again this is my recollection now, again Anne who has this pinpoint memory, or at least she did the last time I spoke with her about this in depth, she'll give you better than me in terms of the specifics. But Angela Davis' defense transcended national borders and also it unified all kinds of people in the United States. I mean she was absolutely railroaded, but they couldn't deal with her! I mean she was Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, people I generally hate. [Laughter] You do more [unintelligible] than I do, not anymore. And out of that came the Alliance, the National Alliance and Kentucky was one of the groups of the Alliance. The Alliance pretty much is dead in the water nationally.

TK: Yeah, I've never heard of it anywhere else.

IG: Kentucky is probably one of the few places where it's still alive. Maybe I'm 56:00wrong about that but that's my belief.

TK: Did the Alliance or does it still, deal with issues outside of Louisville or is it mostly a Louisville organization?

IG: Well, it mostly deals with issues all around Kentucky, but I think it the vast majority are in Louisville.

TK: And how did you get involved with it?

IG: Oh, I did it for the money. [Laughter]

TK: Sure. [Laughter]

IG: Well, they had various incendiary campaigns. I don't remember what the genesis was for me. But I was not very . . . it was not a primary focus of my activity, but I always was involved in one thing or another. They would have a demonstration or they would need somebody to help with something and I volunteered quite a lot for different projects. And then, because of my work on the Human Relations Commission, I became, and other things which we can get into if you would like, I became somewhat, I guess I can say this without being a jerk, I was considered sort of an expert in the area of Affirmative Action and 57:00disability discrimination and other kinds of discrimination. And through my tenure on the Louisville and Jefferson County Human Relations Commission, I gained a lot of information so a lot of people used to come to me to help them solve discrimination cases. I'm not a lawyer, I can't practice law without a license. Some of the lawyers can't practice law with a license, but I can't practice law without a license. So I got involved and they asked me to help with the employment committee, which is what you heard on the phone, but that's all.

TK: Could you tell me a little bit about your experience on the Human Relations Commission?

IG: Okay, I have to give you a little background on it.

TK: Okay.

IG: I really need something stronger than water to talk about the Human Relations Commission. I have to give you a little background about myself. I had a disability. I'm partially sighted, legally blind. And for many years, I got 58:00jobs by either having somebody with a similar build to mine take a test for me, or I would go into the unemployment office, I worked in factories and warehouses, mostly because I was a union organizer. I would memorize an eye chart or I would pay somebody off, a nurse. Finally, I decided I'm fighting for everybody else, I might as well fight for myself and then I said I wasn't going to do this shit anymore. So I went to the University of Louisville law library, I knew nothing about legal research. I knew a lot about research because I had done that for many many years. I traced interlocking directorates,

[unintelligible] sales of corporations. These fuckers are very proud of themselves, these corporate people, so you read about them in Who's Who in American Business and Moody's Industrial Guide and Standard and Poor's Corporation. I mean I knew all this shit, but I knew nothing about. . . . So I bought a book for two dollars and fifty cents, it's probably twenty dollars now, that shows you how long ago it was, on how to do legal research. Do you need to 59:00change it?

TK: In a minute.

IG: Okay, tell me. And I found this law called the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, Public Law 93112 Section 503 Subdivision 4a and 4b, I mean I knew all this. It says that any company that does a certain amount of business with the federal government can not discriminate against somebody with a disability, and furthermore has to make what's called reasonable accommodation, meaning, if you're in a wheelchair and you work in a place, they have to widen the door so you can get into the restroom. They have to widen the stall so you can go to the bathroom. If you're deaf and you're working around machinery that, let's say, it's a saw that starts up automatically and buzzer would go off to warn you, they would have to put a light in. So I took a test at the state employment office and I passed it, it was a manual dexterity test. And so I got called by Philip Morris and this was in 1975. And they asked me, by that time you got 60:00called after the state employment service screened you, so Philip Morris didn't have to do the total screening. And they asked me what shift I wanted, second or third shift, I couldn't go to day work and they had me fill out Blue Cross forms. So the assumption or the unspoken assumption for me was that I was hired contingent upon me passing this physical. And I took the physical and I couldn't pass it obviously, and so I called them up and they said, "Well, this guy can't, you know, we can't hire you." And I said, "May I ask why?" And they said, "Because," and then she checked with the doctor, Doctor Dent, his name was, "Doctor Dent says we can't hire anybody with vision that bad." And I said, 'Thank you" and hung up. Well, meanwhile I had recorded this and I had a guy from a group called the Kentucky Council of the Blind on the phone as my witness and I had gotten a lawyer. By the time this case ended, I had fourteen lawyers 61:00from different organizations.

END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B

START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A

IG: So I filed my complaint. This was not a lawsuit. A lawsuit would be filed in court. This was an administrative complaint with an administrative agent, the OFCCP, Office of Federal Contract Compliance Program and programs which is part of the United States Department of Justice. And after six months, it took six months, they wouldn't talk to me, they would talk only to my lawyer, very condescending. They think if you don't see too well, you don't hear too well. They think if you don't see too well, your vocabulary is rather limited, so they speak very simply to me, very bullshit. After six months of all this stuff, and we put some pressure on them, finally Philip Morris tells the Department of Labor, "We admit having discriminated against Ira Grupper and we give him one month's back pay for his time and trouble but we won't hire him." Why this deal? They said, "It would have taken us thirty days to find out that his previous job reference, last job reference, which he had said was satisfactory, was in fact 62:00unsatisfactory. He had lied on his job application, so had we hired him we would have been forced to discharge him. It would have taken us about thirty days to do it, that's why we're giving him the month's pay." Well my momma didn't raise no fool. I didn't know exactly what they would do, but in anticipation of anything they would do, I went to my last employer where I had worked three and half years and got a letter of reference saying that I was a satisfactory employee and that the only reason that I was laid off was because the company was moving out of town. By me presenting this to the Department of Labor, it meant that either I was lying or Philip Morris was lying; there's no gradation, there's no shade of gray somebody's [unintelligible] a fabrication. Well, it took another year before I finally won; I beat them. And this applies directly to the Human Relations Commission, which is why I'm giving you these details. I 63:00went to work with a year and a half seniority, back seniority. The ironic thing is, the Kafkaesque irony of all this is that just about everything else on that job application was phony. [Laughter] I hadn't accounted for being in jail and all this other shit. I had what they called impeccable references, meaning, if you called, you would get somebody at the other end that said he was a wonderful employee, you know, next to God. But they chose the one thing that was legitimate or one of the few things that was legitimate.

Well, it's nice to be nice to someone with a disability because we don't riot like black people, we don't burn our bras like you women would, we're just probably in need of social services, forgive that seeming condescension but that's the attitude that society has. And so a lot of things came my way. I got invitations to speak across the country on this because I was one of the first several people in the United States to win under this law. This was the predecessor to the American Disabilities Act.

TK: I thought there must be a connection.

IG: Yeah, but it was so new that they didn't even have the rules and regulations promulgated at that time. They didn't have any criteria by which to determine how effective this could be. Then I got a call from the mayor's office. "Would you like to serve as a commissioner in the Louisville/Jefferson County Human Relations Commission," which, it's not a paid position, but it's very prestigious. And I said, "Well, I'll get back to you." And I spoke to my friends, my friends on the left, and they said, "You know you're such an arrogant, narcissistic, egotistic guy, what the hell do you want to hang out with those jerks for, they're just a bunch of pompous people." So I wasn't going to do it. Then I get a call from Anne Braden. It was Anne and Suzy Post, both of them, I forget who said it to me but I think Anne said, "You're a damn fool. I want to see you." She said, "What do you care why they appointed you or they felt sorry for you. How often does a person on the left get a chance to sit in something like that." So she said, "Just take the damn thing." And I said, 65:00"Okay." Then she said, "But for God's sake, you got to do one thing. For a year, keep your big mouth shut; just be quiet." And so I did that and I was this anachronistic kind of a person. I went in there with a stinking from work. I would liked to have changed because I work on the assembly line, but I didn't drive a car, obviously my vision, I didn't have time to go home so I would walk into the Human Relations Commission to their meetings, wearing a tobacco worker's uniform and heavy steel toed shoes and earplugs and these stinking clothes and I stank! I reeked from this dust, but I used all these big words and I was always well-prepared and even at a time when I began to speak out, which was a long time after that, not a year but almost a year, they could disagree with me but they couldn't say that I was stupid or uninformed or ill-informed.

And so I moved up as they say. I was appointed the chair of the 66:00anti-discrimination panel which rule -- do allegations of discrimination based on race, sex, age, and disability in the area of public accommodations, employment, and housing. And how many leftists do you know have the power of subpoena and the power to levy fines. Now I had to maintain my credibility so if you were discriminated against and you could demonstrate what we call [unintelligible] case of discrimination, I'd have to rule against Tracy because I had to keep my credibility. But if you could demonstrate that you were discriminated against, we threw the book at these bastards! I put so many demographic requirements, I remember one company got really pissed they had to hire an outside CPA firm to. . . . [Laughter] So I was appointed to that and I was elected, was I elected? I was appointed or the other way around as the vice-chairman of the commission proper. So this is like around . . . I was 67:00appointed in 1980 so some time around 1982.

About that time Ronald Reagan nationally had begun to destroy the gains that were won by the civil rights movement. He appointed an African-American man named Clarence Thomas, who is now a Supreme Court Justice, to head the EEOC, and he began systemically dismantling all these things, these gains that were won through the sweat and bullets. Not just the civil rights movement, the women's movement because Title VII on the employment [unintelligible]. But the reason I mention this is to say that the Louisville/Jefferson County Human Relations Commission was what was called a 706-deferral agency here locally, you're also filing with the federal government, so there was this reciprocity. And so we were directly affected and it got to the point where I told my investigators, my 68:00investigators the commission investigators, I said, "Don't you dare send any of these God-damned complaints to the federal government because they just put them into a black hole; they disappear." Well, I was thrown off the commission twice.

TK: Really!

IG: Yeah, I had the dubious distinction of having been . . . well, that's not correct, Tracy. I served at the pleasure of the appointing authorities and they were not pleased. And so when my appointment came up to be re-appointed the first time, they refused and every women's group, every African-American organization, every older rights workers' group, every disabled rights groups in this city backed me and they forced my re-appointment. It was a great victory! We had a big party, there was a committee that formed and I mean, part of it was politics because the county judge was running against the mayor for something and they didn't like each other so the county judge appointed me instead of the mayor who refused to. The second time I was thrown off, after this time expired, 69:00by that time I was a total bad ass, I mean I was exposing them and it was amazing. I was able to do this, if I may say this, without sounding immodest, I knew shit, I mean I knew how theses companies functioned. They were all whores; they all played golf in the same clubs. What they did was they went to my union and they asked for an African-American guy, who was the chief shop steward, to be appointed in my stead. And they got a very prominent person who had been active in the civil rights movement to chair the committee in the discrimination council. It became a little bit [unintelligible]. It was not a clear case, it was a clear case of discrimination but it was not a clearly discernible case. But we did things like . . . again, is this helpful to you how this functions?

TK: Yeah.

IG: Discrimination is not always blatant. To give you an example, and this is 70:00more often than not, I'm a male supervisor, you're a female subordinate. I make an unwanted sexual advance towards you. I put my hands where they don't belong or I just try to proposition you and I try to use my power as the boss to force you to comply and you refuse. In the olden days, I would say "Bitch, you're fired," excuse my language. Nowadays, I don't say that, I say "Ms. K'Meyer," is that how you pronounce your last name?

TK: Yeah.

IG: "We would like to retain you in employment but you have not met our criteria for advancement." And instead of me saying that, I'd get a female supervisor. How to move discrimination? And I've lectured to women's groups on this, how do you prove it? And they say, "Well, raise hell." Raising hell doesn't mean anything by itself, you have to be . . . and if you think this is just an esoteric example, this is what happens all the time! It happens to black people. I mean I know companies that would hire a disabled, older, black, gay woman [unintelligible] just to put her in the front door and get her to do the dirty 71:00work for other people. So how do you do it? How do you prove discrimination? Well, that's a rhetorical question but it's a question that I don't have a [unintelligible] answer for. My view, and I've told people I've cleaned it up and I've made it gender neutral, if you grab them around the neck, their hearts and minds will follow. So you find a case of discrimination that easily provable and you throw the book at them and you put the fear of God into these people. And you create a climate such that these companies wouldn't dare do that shit! They dared because they had more power than I, but that's the way because it's very difficult to deal with in a one on one situation. It's your word against mine! The object is for you to prove it, it's not for me to disprove it. A person is innocent until proven guilty. So that's how I got involved in it.

TK: And these have the force of, your decisions have the force of law?

IG: They are the law.

TK: Okay. So it's sort of avoiding the court system by going through this?

IG: Yeah. What they try to effect there is what they call conciliation agreements. A conciliation agreement means that the company and the aggrieved worker say that we're going to agree to thus and such. What it really mean is that the company says, "We admit no discrimination but we're not ever do it again and we're going to make you whole by giving you your job back or return you to the spot that you would have been in had you not faced that initial discrimination, but you can't sue us in court. It's a concession to the companies. On the other hand, it's a concession to workers because most workers can not afford to go to court and even when you go to court it takes years and years and years. So it helped both of you, but the whole process is absurd.

TK: And how long were you, you were on until '86, did you say.

IG: Six years. I received the Fleur de Lys, the highest award that the city 73:00gives. I didn't get the key to the city. I became a Kentucky Colonel, you can call me Colonel.

TK: Yes, sir.

IG: It was funny, when I was refused re-appointment, the Human Relations Commission threw me a luncheon. Myself and two other commissioners, who are actually right-wing commissioners. And it was at the Rudyard Kipling. It was a really nice, it was a nice luncheon and they gave me this award, it was a plaque and all. They asked us to say a few words and I remember Phyllis, one of the people who's retiring on the right. She looks at me like please don't say anything else. I mean I wasn't about to talk about her momma, but I wasn't going to go out silently either. So they made their little speeches; "Thank you very much for the opportunity to do this and we've learned quite a lot," they were both lawyers. The other guy was Kendrick Riggs, a company lawyer worked for some 74:00big. . . . And it came to my turn to speak and I said, "Well, I want to recognize the valuable work that my two colleagues who are retiring with me have done. But I also want to say that I want to thank the people who I feel accountable to for helping me, the women's movements, to the African-American movements, to the civil liberty rights movement, the gay and lesbian movement, whomever. And I also incidentally I introduced myself through another [unintelligible]. The first piece of legislation, well, a recommendation for legislation, that would include what was then called sexual preference, now sexual orientation, as a legitimate protected class.

TK: Oh really!

IG: It was not the ordinance that the Board of Aldermen passed, but it was the Human Relations Commission's recommendation. And I had more shit from that then I did even in the civil rights movement!

TK: Really.

IG: People threatened my life. I remember I got one threatening call where they told me the times that my kids went to school and you talk about being, you know, that really upsets you.

TK: Wow.

IG: What was your question?

TK: Well, my question was, I had asked you how long you were on it and then you went off because you sort of got not renewed.

IG: Okay, I was on for six years.

TK: And then, well, my next question, you already answered it, was why did you leave it? But you left it because . . .

IG: I didn't leave on my own volition.

TK: That's basically the answer there. I want to make sure, one thing that you mentioned a little while ago and you're the first person to mention it so I want to ask about it, is Angela Davis. Didn't she visit here?

IG: She visited here twice.

TK: Okay, back then?

IG: She visited, I don't remember the year.

TK: Because like last year or so she visited here.

IG: She visited in the eighties and they gave her the key to the city and they took it back.

TK: That's the visit I've heard about.

IG: And then she came here a couple of years ago and they gave her the key to the city, they gave her all these things; they made her a Colonel.

TK: She spoke at U of L the more recent time, I'm pretty sure.

IG: I think that that's right.

TK: Yeah, because I was there at the time. I mean I was actually teaching class so I wasn't actually at her talk. So I think we have pretty much the whole chronology. What I would like to do towards the end of the interviews is ask people some questions that are sort of opinions about things, questions.

IG: I got opinions on everything.

TK: Okay, yeah, well, this is about sort of the movement itself. One thing that I always ask everyone is if you were writing a book on the Louisville movement, when would you start it and when would you stop it? [Phone rings] Saved by the bell.

[Tape paused]

TK: And the first wrap up question is the if you were writing this book, when would you start it and end it? It would be hard for you to say start because you didn't get here until '69.

IG: There has been a civil rights movement ever since there has been civil wrongs. Civil wrongs didn't start with me it started when the first person was discriminated against. And discrimination has not ended; it's if anything . . . it's not worse. People who say it's worse really don't understand what it was then. Anne used to say, I remember she heard people say it's worse and then she said, "I can't say it's worse or it's better, but would you really want to return to the system of enforced segregation. This is apartheid made in the USA, Jim Crow." And I don't think it will end in my lifetime, I think part of it's intrinsic in the capitalist system. So if I were writing it, I would say it started hundreds and hundreds of years ago and when will it end it will end way 78:00after I'm pushing up daisies.

TK: What would you say were the, in the time you've been here, some of the most important turning points or moments in terms of struggle for racial equality here?

IG: Well, just before I came here it was the open housing demonstrations. Of course, the school desegregation battle was very, very important in the seventies. The move for community control for schools was very important. The recognition that integration is not the be-all and the end-all because the integration was not really integration. It was token integration and one of the things I neglected to say earlier, to give you an example, my two younger 79:00children were in the advanced program, which you don't skip a grade but it was an intensive learning experience. And we enrolled particularly my son. He was becoming a behavior problem in school. He needed to be stimulated. He went to an African-American school, Tracy. He looked like [unintelligible]. His was almost all white class within an almost all black school.

TK: Really!

IG: Yeah, and so that's not integration, that's a sham! If there are a few black kids in these advanced programs, it means one of two things, either the black children are innately inferior to white children, which neither of us obviously agrees with, or that the school system is racist and that the way of administering tests is racist. I mean one example I remember somebody using 80:00years ago, they asked what color a banana is and some second graders, I don't think this was in Louisville, it was elsewhere but it's applicable here. The second grader said it was yellow, white second graders. Black second graders and Hispanic second graders said it was brown and yellow color, because when they go to the supermarket they get the inferior fruit, which is not yellow or greenish turning yellow!

TK: Interesting.

IG: If this is an example, it shows that these tests are middle class biased, and they have no understanding of what it means to be poor. It's not just black and white, there are white poor people, too. So it's skewed.

TK: That sort of indirectly leads me to another question, which is what do you consider the most important contemporary issues in terms of struggle for 81:00equality, things going on now?

IG: I know what contemporary means, believe it or not. [Laughter] But you can define it that's okay, you won't hurt my feelings. Let me hearken back to the civil rights movement and say that it was not enough for a black behind to sit next to a white behind at a lunch counter if you didn't have the money to buy the hamburger, or the tofu burger as they say nowadays. So there was an absolute correlation between the national struggle and the class struggle, the struggle for racial equality and the struggle for economic justice and I think that that pertains, that is relevant today. There is still a fight to end racism. Every time one thinks that some of this discrimination is ended because there is a lot 82:00of integration. There is a growing black middle class, although the majority of African-American people are still part of the proletariat. But every time this happens, there will always be a case of the Denny's restaurant refusing to serve those FBI agents in Washington not too long ago or some woman getting messed over in the glass ceiling or something else happened. So discrimination still exists although there are protections and I, as someone on the inside, saw that there were certain protections. Blatant discrimination is forbidden, you can't get away with blatant discrimination for the most part, but the subtle is still there and yet the economic struggle is still unresolved. And unfortunately the 83:00progressive movement is a negligible part of the working class and the middle class. This is not to put anybody down but we do not have the impact that we need to have. You don't have . . . we're losing union members, not gaining them in proportion to what's necessary. The women's movement is not, in my estimation, is not very effective. The movement of disabled people, there are constantly rules and regulations being promulgated that render effective many of the gains that were won before. I was asked by the gay and lesbian community to help to give a workshop not long ago on their rights, and somebody made the statement, "Well, we need to be as strong as the African-American movement." 84:00Well, yes, they do need to be strong as the African-American movement, but the African-American movement is not very strong and if they're that much weaker, they're in a hell of a shape! So I would say that the same problems that persisted years ago persist today only in different form. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, as corny as that sounds; the middle class is very insecure but the degree of class-consciousness is at a low ebb. Philip Morris workers are highly paid workers, what's left, we had 4,200 workers and there are three hundred left and forget about the ethics of working in a cigarette factory but that's not another story. Actually they're multi-national. If you eat Breyers ice cream or Kraft cheese or Philadelphia cream cheese you're eating Philip Morris, [unintelligible] chocolate.

TK: I knew it was really significantly reduced here. I didn't know it was down to three hundred.

IG: Miller beer. Yeah, they moved out, they moved to, but that has nothing to do with the losses, it's just that they're consolidating their production. But 85:00anyhow these are well-paid workers. When I worked there, I think the lowest paid worker earned almost twenty-two dollars an hour and I retired last year as the lowest paid worker, comparable to what, say, workers at Ford Motor Company earned. And what do I see the people reading? They're reading the stock page, the fucking stock page to see how their stocks and their bond adventures went! I mean that's not class-consciousness. I can't blame them because within the context of their understanding they want to make some money, but that old fire, that old. . . . I still have the fire in my belly but that's because I have an understanding of the way the system runs. That's not there and it's not there in the women's movement, either, it's not there in many different movements. It has to be rekindled. Now the system itself is going to help rekindle it because 86:00people are getting fucked everyday! Excuse my language. I'll keep apologizing.

TK: That's okay. One of the things I want to do with the book is in the sort of epilogue make connections with some of the contemporary, you know at whatever point I finish writing whatever is going on then, you know because it will take me two or three years to actually write this. With the school stuff that was going on this past semester and the merger stuff and the police civilian review board, which I heard you mention before, some of these issues. Sort of getting close to the final question that I like to ask people is in your mind, there's a lot of books about [the] civil rights movement in various cities, what makes Louisville's story worth telling? What makes Louisville different or interesting, I guess, is a different way to put that?

IG: Well, Louisville is an example of how the powers to be, recognizing the 87:00potential for conflagration if they don't make certain concessions, did in fact make certain concessions, whereas Birmingham, Alabama, Bull Connor, they were adamant in their refusal to integrate. It had to be fought in Albany, Georgia, southwest Georgia it had to be fought. Louisville's an example of, I don't know if the word is co-optation, but certainly a way to generate this dissatisfaction into non-constructive busy work. So I think it's very important of an example of a way that them what's got seeks to keep control through limited concessions and that's a very important manifestation of how the system runs. I also think that Louisville's a very interesting city because we were a blue collar town for 88:00many, many years and that's what the left here in the late sixties and early seventies, we didn't really talk about that but that's a whole other story. Every left group was in this city. It was a bonanza because all these factories, real live factory workers, the degree of unionization of the industrial proletariat was at a very high level. There was also a relatively low unemployment rate so that if I went to work at General Electric at that time, it had 23,000 workers when I came here. There used to be a program called the GE Theater, General Electric Theater with Ronald Reagan. That's how many years ago it was and how much older I am than you. How old are you?

TK: Thirty-six.

IG: I'm fifty-six. They used to say at General Electric progress is our most important product, and they'd advertise dishwasher, it was all Louisville made 89:00that here. So if you got fired. Let's say you got drunk and you had a fight with your old lady, with your spouse, and you got fired or quit. Well, if you got fired at GE, you could go work at Ford or International Harvester or American Standard or Fossett Printing Company or Rohm and Haas and Dupont [unintelligible], so many companies here! Then sometime in the seventies, jobs began to be less. It was a very low unemployment rate, relatively low unemployment rate, and so the unemployment rate was three and four percent. All of the sudden it began to shoot up way high and people were displaced and the city fathers and mothers, well, they're all a bunch of mothers, city fathers and mothers. . . . Oh, forgot it's all being tape recorded. [Laughter] I'll go to jail. They were very smart, they were very enlightened. They began a systematic attempt and a successful attempt to attract for example regional offices of 90:00corporations. They reached out to the health industry; they attracted Humana. Now Humana is a bunch of vultures, but they attracted them here. They attracted Columbia HCA, which, in a sense, moved out. They're also the headquarters of Kentucky Fried Chicken and Pizza Hut and what's that third restaurant, Taco Bell, altogether Tricon that used to be part of Pepsi. They had their headquarters here now, so they were very smart in being able to rationalize things or make things run on an even keel. So I think that's that a very important lesson for we who wish to take our realms on out to the walls of Jericho and change things for the better. We have to learn how they function and they function, again, this is my experience as a city office, a city and county official, high official, they try to seek to generate dissatisfaction to 91:00non-constructive busy work. They don't want the confrontations. At times there are confrontations like recently with police brutality, Adrian Reynolds and other cases I haven't kept up with, ever since I've been in the Middle East all summer. But the city knows how to keep control. Someone like Armstrong is not a very smart man. He was always to me . . . he wasn't an evil guy just trying to the graft, but he wasn't an altruistic guy either. He's just is a politician, a nothing, [unintelligible], zombie, you know, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing. But that's how they want to rule here so I think that these 92:00are very important lessons for us to have and I don't think you'll hear a lot of people saying it, if I may say it, and that's, "I'm so smart. I have such insight." But people often times don't think a long those lines, progressive people, but I do. So I think for these reasons Louisville is a very important city and . . .

END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A

START OF TAPE 2, SIDE B

IG: In many other cities, different groups hate each other's guts and they fight, here people have made some sort of, I don't know if the word is [unintelligible], but we have to live together and people have been pretty helpful to one another, I think. I mean the movement is not large and cohesive and effective and organized and militant enough, to my way of thinking, but that which does exist, people work together, they don't try to cut each other's throats.

TK: My impression since I've been here, and this is something John Cumbler used to always tell me, is that there is a lot of overlap, too, within different organizations, you know, the FOR and the Alliance, you know, there's quite a community that sort of circulates among different. . . .

IG: Well, as you must know, or maybe you know I don't know, I write a newspaper column for the . . .

TK: For the FOR paper?

IG: Yeah, and I'm not a pacifist! I told them up front I'm not a pacifist. I 93:00gave them whatever the contribution is to be a member, I gave them the equivalent amount. I said, "But I'm not a pacifist." And it was fine, you know, and then the Alliance, well, they wanted me to do free work. [Laughter] Which I'm happy to do, but people get along okay, that's very important.

TK: One of my fewer goals is to write a, after the civil rights movement, do a sort of book less formal on kind of what happens to the left after the civil rights era in the seventies and eighties, and this is John Cumbler's idea. He wants me to write this book basically. [Laughter] But that's was actually my last questions unless you can think of any other topics that we haven't talked about that we should talk about.

IG: What does John Cumbler think?

TK: There's not enough tape for that. About what? I'm just going to get ahead and turn this off.

END OF INTERVIEW