Civil Rights Oral History Project Phase II Launch Event
Newsletter #410 - December 18, 2025
Heidi Burgess and Guy Burgess
On December 3, 2025, Bill Froehlich of the Ohio State Divided Community Project, Grande Lum, former Director of CRS (the U.S. Department of Justice Community Relations Service) and current Director of Stanford Law School's Martin Daniel Gould Center for Conflict Resolution, and I (Heidi Burgess) held a 90-minute webinar introducing Phase II and a relaunch of Phase I of the Civil Rights Mediation Oral History Project.
As we explained in the webinar, Phase I of this project started in 1999, when former CRS conciliator and regional director Dick Salem came to Guy and myself, worried that CRS's downsizing was resulting in the loss of much valuable information about the inner workings of CRS. CRS had been successfully mediating very difficult civil rights cases since its founding in 1964, as part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and Dick didn't want to see their knowledge lost.
Since Guy and I had long been saying that civil rights conflicts tended to be intractable, and intractable conflicts couldn't be mediated, we were interested to learn whether we were wrong, Dick was exaggerating, or what. So we agreed to work with Dick on what became known as the Civil Rights Mediation Oral History Project.
In Phase 1, we conducted sets of three, two-hour interviews with each of nineteen then-current and past CRS conciliators and regional directors. Our respondents had been involved in many of the most high-profile and challenging civil rights conflicts of the time: the riots after Martin Luther King was assassinated, after Rodney King was beaten by police in LA, the standoff at Wounded Knee, school desegregation conflicts, and many, many more. We learned about what the conciliators did to calm down the situations, how they did it, why, and what the outcomes were. We repeated this process in Phase II, interviewing 11 more people. We were eager to find out what had changed over the ensuing 25 years, and what had stayed the same. Those 11 videos are now posted on the new, combined website, along with transcripts.
In the webinar, Bill, Grande, and I talked about the origins of this project, some of the findings, and implications (including whether we were wrong or Dick was exaggerating. (Read on to find the answer!) We also got an update from Grande about the current status of CRS (essentially eliminated, but being litigated) and we heard briefly from four of the people we interviewed (Ron Wakabayashi, Thomas Battles, P. Diane Schneider, and Timothy Johnson). We then entertained questions from the audience. We want to share some of the highlights of our conversation here, but we also encourage you to watch the full video (or, if you prefer, read the full transcript, which is linked to below.
After Bill gave introductions to the speakers and the project, Grande gave a sobering update about the current status of CRS:
A lot of difficult things have happened. On [Presidential] Inauguration Day [2025], there were 57 employees in 30 field offices and HQ. Between March and September of this year, DOJ eliminated 42 CRS employees, who left on September 29th. Then [in October], the DOJ gave "reduction-in-force" (RIF) notices to 14 of the remaining 15 employees.
However, the Washington Litigation Group filed a complaint on October 24th on behalf of 11 civil rights organizations, whose CRS services were withdrawn. ... On October 30th, the court denied the request for a temporary restraining order [which would have blocked the layoffs]. But on November 25th, the plaintiffs filed a motion for preliminary injunction, asking the court to prohibit DOJ from eliminating CRS.
As of now, three amicus briefs are being prepared [to support the case for reinstatement]: one signed by 140 civil rights organizations from 35 states; another with 105 Congressional members as signatories; and a third from state attorneys general. These are all expected to be filed this Friday, December 5th ...and the evidentiary hearing is likely to be in December or January.
I do want to give a big shout-out to Julius Nam, a former acting director, who's leading much of this effort. For more information, go to America's peacemakers com, and you'll get a lot more there [about the] CRS Restoration Project. [And you can get updated information about the status of the litigation.]
The CRS Restoration Project website describes why CRS's elimination matters:
For six decades, CRS has been the country’s facilitator of peace during some of the most turbulent moments in American life.
Losing CRS is already leaving a significant gap in the nation’s ability to respond to violent conflicts before they escalate. The future cost of scrapping CRS could be astronomical — in lost lives, damaged properties, wasted taxpayer dollars, fractured communities, and increased police-community, cross-racial, inter-religious, gender-based, and anti-disability conflicts and hate crimes.
In the event that this lawsuit fails and CRS is not reinstated, the Civil Rights Mediation Oral History Project is one of the most extensive repositories of information about CRS's past efforts that exists. The other one is Grande's book, co-authored by former CRS Associate Director Bertram Levine: America's Peacemakers. As far as we know, there is no other place where such extensive documentation can be found about what CRS has done over its 61 year existence. If anyone needs convincing that their efforts made a big difference, we urge you to read Grande's book, or look at a few of the interviews that we have in the Oral History project.
After his update on CRS status, Grande talked briefly in the webinar about how he used the Phase I oral history project interviews extensively as he was preparing to become Director of CRS, as well as when he was acting in that role and as he was writing the second edition of America's Peacemakers. That was, at least in part, why he was interested in instigating a Phase II of the Oral History Project and why he was willing to put so much time into that effort.
Bill then asked Grande to explain how civil rights mediation is different from other kinds of mediation (such as court-based or labor- management mediation) and why those differences matter. Grande explained:
There are huge differences, and some similarities. [In court-based mediation] you have a plaintiff and a defendant, or you have two parties, and it's a formal [process] and you have a four hour time limit. [In community-based civil rights conflicts], there is no time limit, and all the community citizens are parties. It leads to some very different questions — from thinking about [other kinds of] mediation when [you don't know who] the parties should even be. Who should come to the table and who should not be at the table?
How does a mediator [in a community civil rights conflict] gain entry versus, in a mandatory, civil-based mediation you pick from a roster of folks or the court provides them to you?
What should the goals be? I think it goes to Heidi's question that she has been thinking about for years about intractable conflicts. The goals can't be "resolving" our value differences or agreeing to them. It has to be something else. It could be lowering the temperature in a situation, getting protestors to protest in a safer location — protesting in ways that don't create the possibility of more conflict.
How should the conciliator operate? I remember reading about from Wallace Warfield [a Phase I respondent] about neutrality and impartiality. What does it mean to operate that way? ...There's so many questions with the type of conciliation that CRS does, and there's a lot of artistry to it, because it is more open-ended than closed ended.
Bill then asked me (Heidi) to explain what I saw as the differences in responses we got in Phase I and Phase II. Before I went there, though, I noted one big similarity, because we'd just been talking about that in terms of Grande's questions — that was the importance of building strong relationships.
Almost everybody that we talked to in the first phase and second phase stressed the importance of relationship building. Now, it got harder to do as funding went down, and staffing got short. Then it was more a story of running and putting out fires, rather than being able to do the proactive relationship building. But that's so key to gaining entry, gaining trust, being able to work effectively. And everybody talked about that.
But part of the reason I was so excited when Grande called and asked if we'd be interested in doing Phase II, is that seemed to me that the environment that CRS had to be working in then [2020] was a lot different from what it was earlier. I had the sense that bringing people to the table would be much harder now than it maybe was before, that people were much more hesitant to negotiate. They wanted to win, they wanted to make their point. So I was really curious about that, and I asked everybody that I talked to in the second round, a question about how the civil rights scene had changed over the years, and did they feel it was harder to work with people now?
And I got answers across the board. Ron Wakabayashi said, "Yes, there are problems now. Working with Antifa, the Proud Boys is certainly hard, because they don't want to have anything to do with the government. ...
But he also pointed out that they had folks back in the day who they called "anarchists," and those folks behaved the same way. He acknowledged that there's more of that now, perhaps, than there was before, but there's always been those folks. But, then he honed in on the fact that there's also "regular folks." There's regular folks who just want what's fair, and you can work with them, and they are willing to come to the table. So he really focused on working with the regular folks and getting things done, even if the Proud Boys and the Antifa didn't want to have anything to do with it. And P Diane Schneider really talked the same way [particularly when describing what she would have done in Portland after George Floyd's killing, though she was retired by then].
But Tom Battles was much more reluctant. He said that he would be worried about sending conciliators into these really rough situations now. He acknowledged that he had been in some really rough situations back in the da. But he saw what was happening now as more dangerous, less controlled. And saw the chances of bringing people to the table and getting them to agree to something were much smaller than they were before.
So answers were all over the board.
The other big difference is there wasn't social media back in the Phase I, and there is in Phase II. That's just been a sea change in terms of terms how the disputants are getting their information, and what they're doing, and also how CRS operates, because they could both get information and have problems that were generated by social media. So that was a big difference.
Grande added that in the second phase, there was "a wider acceptance of dispute resolution than there was in the first group." One of the things that Grande thought was remarkable in the second group — and he knows many of those folks personally — is
their ability to talk to so many different stakeholders. Start with Thomas, for instance, who just seems to be everywhere and nowhere all at once. He seems to have known, in any community, the people who know what is the pulse of that community." ...
So, too, Grande said, with Rosa, who had been a police officer and a U.S. marshal before joining CRS. That gave her credibility, "to bring people together, but also to convey it." [Her own credibility and trustworthiness.]
Bill told a similar story about one of his interviews involving a law-enforcement caused death of a black man. Quoting his unnamed respondent:
I'd go into that community and I'd try to gain entry. And yes, I would talk to the mayor, and I would talk to the elected officials and the city manager, and I'd ask them who to talk to, and they'd tell me some folks, and well, those were the usual suspects. And then I would go to the black mortician in the community, and I'd talk to him because he had the pulse, or she had the pulse of what was happening in the black and brown community.
Bill also talked about a story Rosa Melendez told him about her gaining entry in a community after the law-enforcement caused death of an indigenous wood carver.
Rosa described that one of the indigenous representatives of the community said they weren't sure if they trusted Rosa. But one of the other indigenous representatives told her peer, "you will trust Rosa. I trust her. Do not call our relationship into question." Because Rosa had built that relationship, that party to the mediation session, that stakeholder stood up and told her peer, "you won't question what Rosa's doing here, because I trust her." And that really demonstrates how building that trust, using her Rolodex, being an advocate for CRS's work, pays dividends in mediation sessions, in conversations with community.
We also talked about what "success" meant in the CRS context. It did not mean racism went away and everybody lived "happily ever after," but it did mean that situations calmed down, relationships and trust were built, people saw a nonviolent way forward. Heidi mentioned one respondent (here I didn't remember who it was) who said that "success was getting recommendations." If past recipients of CRS services recommended CRS to his or her peers (as happned in the story Bill told about Rosa) — one conciliator thought that was a good measure of success.
After Grande, Bill, and I (Heidi) talked for about 20 minutes, we invited the former CRS conciliators who were on the call to say a few words.
Ron Wakabayashi, who had been regional director the Western region of CRS from 1999 to 2020 noted that
We all had to learn to become feds. That was a different role [than the ones we had before], which had a plus and a minus to it. You know, feds are both loved and hated at the same time.
He noted that there was a good network of CRS conciliators who could help each other out with entry or other issues. They could give you guidance, as well as help get you into a community. "They became part of the credibility that you have."
Thomas Battles was a conciliator and then a regional director with CRS in the Southeastern Regional office from 1984 to 2019. After noting that he really appreciated the opportunity the project gave him to share his stories about CRS (thank you, Thomas!), he noted that
The longer the people worked and did their job, the more committed they got. They got into it, and they felt that they made a difference. And they did make a difference. And that's what's so hurtful about what has happened to the agency. ... That's why this oral history is so important. Because I think it'll outlive us all, and it will tell the story of this agency. But, I think the fight continues because I saw an email today from the n\National Chairman of the NAACP, who said, "I support the amicus brief" [calling for the reinstatement of the agency].So there are people joining every day on to this [reinstatement] project.
I think it is telling that The National Chairman of the NAACP and 140 civil rights organizations from 35 states are supporting the Amicus Brief, arguing that CRS should be reinstated. CRS walked the line of impartiality very carefully, but amazingly successfully. They were always fair to the minority community, as they were with the (usually white) authorities in a community. They pushed for mediation, not continued confrontation or escalation, as so many people on both sides of the aisle seem to now be calling for. But 140 civil rights organizations are willing to step up and out and say that CRS's mediative work is valuable. It needs to be continued.
P. Diane Schneider was a conciliation specialist and Acting Regional Director Region 10 (in the Northwest) from 1987 to 2008. She noted
One of the things that CRS was able to do over time, was to employ increasingly skilled field staff with broad, diverse expertise. [That helped us do] better assessments of emerging conflicts that were occurring, and which maybe we hadn't specifically dealt with with before. ... Our diverse experiences and points of view helped us, in the post-conflict resolution situations, to work toward what later began to be called "community development." We could have some effect on inclusion and participation of members of the community that did not used to be included. So we were happy to see that we could see what their needs and goals were, and help them find ways to focus on those and make progress. They felt that their opinions were valued, where in the past, it was felt as if they were just shouting into a bucket or something, and were not being listened to.
Timothy Johnson was with CRS from 1984 to 2010, serving as Conciliation Specialist, Chief of Field Coordination and then Senior Conciliation Specialist. Timothy added to the earlier discussions about gaining entry and building trust by saying that
[One thing that] is common to all mediations is that you have to sell the process. People don't understand it. People at the highest levels don't understand it. So you have to sell it. You explain what it is that you are doing — what is the nature of the table we are inviting you to, and why is it valuable?
Timothy also pointed out that
Most people who joined CRS stayed there. Why? Because of what CRS is and what CRS could do and what CRS should come back to be doing. You don't get that in other federal agencies. You get a lot of jumping around, you know, people will say 'I was at HEW and then I went to Defense, and then I went to here, and then I went to there. CRS, not so much. People stay for 20 or 30 years. In closing, let me just say, we still have the [civil rights] problems. We still need to be proactive and reactive, and hopefully this project is going to get that done. Thank you.
One of the audience members asked whether universities could take up the slack being left by the absence of CRS. Grande and Heidi agreed that universities might be able to play a role in that, at least in bringing people together, in holding dialogues and working toward reconciliation. But Heidi was somewhat skeptical that they would, because so many universities have fallen into the political polarization trap, and have come out strongly on one side, not as impartial mediators as CRS had been. I also didn't get a chance to point out, but should have, that few universities have the capacity to go into community conflicts and mediate the way CRS does, particularly in communities outside of where they are situated. Some have — indeed, the Ohio State Divided Community Project, which Bill directs, has played that role at times. And quite a few universities have programs that run community deliberation projects on particular community problems. But these tend to be policy oriented, not crisis oriented. Several I know about have deliberated about how to solve the homelessness crisis in a community, or how to get better child care, or how a particular piece of land should be developed (or not). They don't tend to respond to crises and be immediately available the way CRS does.
So the consensus was very clear: CRS provided an invaluable service to communities across the United States, and their mediators had the relationships and skills that enabled them to do things that few others can do. We agree with the statement we quoted earlier about the potential "astronomical loss" that might well result if CRS is not reinstated — quickly. We very much hope that in a month or two, we will be able to report that this has happened. Check out https://www.americaspeacemakers.com/advocate-for-crs for suggestions about what you can do to influence this decision. And in the meantime, we hope you will watch or read the transcripts of our whole webinar, and explore the new Civil Rights Mediation Oral History site.
Civil Rights Mediation Oral History Project Homepage
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