<Begin Segment 2>

AI: Well, you just mentioned that you moved around a lot with your family. Where were some of the places that stick in your mind vividly during your childhood, places that were special to you or had some significance as you were growing up?

PI: Well, the first several places that we lived, I have no memory of. I wasn't old enough. I do know that we lived in Marblehead, Massachusetts. My father then went to Erie, Pennsylvania, where there's another General Electric plant. I don't remember Erie. The first place that I do remember was a, was Syracuse, New York. And there was a, another GE plant there. This was during the war, and my father was then working on a project to build jet engines for airplanes, which is sort of funny because both the Germans and the Americans were trying to build jet planes during the war. They, neither side succeeded before the war ended. But they were building jet planes, and in fact, they became, they started operating shortly after the war. And I do remember about that place. We lived in the most gigantic house I think I've ever been in. It was a mansion, literally. I don't know how we got into it. It's in a little town near Syracuse called Solvey, New York. And this house was so large that the kids had a playhouse outside which was the size of most people's houses. And we had solariums and music rooms and gigantic winding staircases. And that's literally all I remember about that house is just how huge it was and the grounds around it.

But my first real memories of things that I did was in another small town in New York called Skaneateles. Skaneateles is one of the, is the smallest of the finger lakes in upstate New York, the one at the very eastern end. It's a lake about twenty miles long and one mile wide. And at the northern end is a little town called Skaneateles. And we lived about eight, ten miles down the lake. A very small hamlet, in fact, it wasn't even a town, called Borodino, which was one of the towns in Russia that Napoleon's army had gone through. At any rate, that's where I first started going to school. We lived in a, in a farmhouse, a big farmhouse. And my father had left General Electric and decided to go into business making components of engines for himself along with his brother-in-law, my mother's sister's husband, and a friend of theirs. They were all skilled engineers. They'd all left General Electric, and they'd set up a little business, Skaneateles Manufacturing Company. And General Electric was their only customer. And the company decided for some reason to drive them out of business, which they eventually did. And my father went back to GE.

But the years we spent in Skaneateles were, I think, among my most enjoyable. We lived out in the country. It was on a farm near the lake. The lake was wonderful for swimming and sailing. We had a sailboat. And I remember going to school every morning really early on a school bus. And we'd go fourteen miles 'cause it wound around in the countryside before we got to school. And that was where my kindergarten was. And I had a great time. We had a farm and worked on the farm in the summer. And I remember even as young as I was, six, seven years old, driving a tractor, pulling the, the hay bales on a big, on a big flatbed, and baling hay and loading hay. You know, it was really a good time for a kid.

And then we had a year that I remember vividly because it was not much fun. My parents decided to send me and my brother, Rocky, off for a year to live with my dad's mother in Beaver, Pennsylvania -- Granny. And she was, and the image of her in my mind is that little old grandmother in Beverly Hillbillies. What was her name? Granny Clampett or something. Very small, very stern, and she didn't like kids. I'm not sure why we were there, but we spent a year there. I was in first grade at the time, the Abraham Lincoln Grade School. And it was, we had to behave so properly, and we really didn't have a chance to be kids, to go out and play and run around. And it was in a small house, and there wasn't much else to do. I remember that our only fun really was, was climbing up and down this huge slag-heap from the coal mines nearby or the steel mills. And we'd get all dirty, and my grandmother did not like that. And every day she would wash all of her, her window curtains and her chair coverings, the doilies that she had, and keep everything neat. And so we had to be very quiet. And I was really, really happy when we got back home after that year.

But I also remember very much enjoying my first grade. And I realized even then that I liked school. I did well in school. I was always a "teacher's pet." And so I would focus on doing well in school. My brother, Rocky, was much more exuberant. He had actually a harder time because it was harder for him to obey all my grandmother's rules. But I found much, much later, letters that my grandmother had written to my mother during that year almost every week, written out in pencil, and one of the lines that I never forget is, she said, "Rocky has all the friends, and Peter has all the grades." [Laughs] So... and it was interesting because I do remember after that, that I was much more focused on learning, doing well in school, relating much more to adults than other kids my age. And I became, I think sort of prematurely an adult, and I missed a lot.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 3>

AI: Well, I'm wondering also as the oldest child, the oldest son, did that have an impact that -- in some families, the oldest child, the oldest son has some particular other responsibilities, or takes on other responsibilities for the other kids in the family, or in some way has a different role. Was that the case for you?

PI: Well, I think being the first of seven did have an impact on me, but not in that way. I was not, I did not really help to take care of the younger kids. There were two boys at the top and then two girls, my sisters Amanda and Mariah. And they took care of the three youngest kids as they came along. In fact, they're both in sort of, my sister Amanda is now a special needs school teacher, and my sister Mariah is a nurse. And they were both of the, the sort of very caring, and so the older boys really didn't have that kind of responsibility. My responsibility really was to -- and it may sound odd -- to relate to my parents' friends and the people that my father worked with. And I was very early, for example, just to run through some of the places that we lived after we left New York at the end of World War II -- I think in 1946 or 1947, we moved to the state of Washington to Richland, Washington. And my father's job there was to supervise the engineering and construction of the Hanford Atomic Works. And that, of course, is where they were processing uranium into plutonium to make hydrogen bombs. Now, I didn't know this at the time. I was too young. And it was highly secretive. My father never talked about his work. My mother says that the whole time we lived there for about three years, she thought he worked in urban planning, which is totally ridiculous. There was no urban anything there anyway. It was this little town of houses built, ready-made houses in the desert. We had rattlesnakes in the front yard and cactus. And it really was desert territory.

And I have a lot of memories of that time in Richland. We went to several, the town was being built so quickly, you know, literally had 20 or 25,000 people coming in over a year or two, that I went to several different schools. I remember the Sacagawea School, the Lewis & Clark School, and a couple of others. And I don't remember my school, what happened in school those years as much as I remember the place itself. And my brother Rocky and I used to go out and -- into the, into the desert in the hills and play cowboys and Indians. And we had BB guns, and we would, we would shoot at each other and shoot things. And I was very much involved in, I got into the Cub Scouts and the Boy Scouts there and a singing group of young kids. And we left around 1950 or '51 and moved to Delaware, all the way across the country. My father had then gone to the Atomic Energy Commission, and they were, he was in charge of constructing a new plant in South Carolina, Aiken, South Carolina, where -- I'm not quite sure what they did, but it was heavy water, whatever. It was also part of the hydrogen weapons plant. And that plant was being constructed by the Dupont Company, which is headquartered in Delaware. And so he was the liaison between the Dupont Company and the Atomic Energy Commission. We almost wound up living in South Carolina, and I often wonder what would have happened to me, what my life would have been like if we'd gone to South Carolina, which back then was a rigidly segregated, very conservative state, in many ways still is. But we stayed for three years in Delaware. And we also lived in a mansion in Delaware in a little town called Newcastle, right on the Delaware River. It was called the Jean Vierre Mansion. It was a huge old brick house with these white columns in front, a portico. And one thing I learned in that house was that there was a gigantic fireplace in the kitchen, a walk-in kind of fireplace. And that fireplace had a secret opening, a door. You'd push on this, a brick, one particular brick, the door would swing open. And there was a stairway behind the fireplace up to a little room that was totally enclosed. And that was a stop on the Underground Railroad for slaves escaping to the North. Delaware was then a slave state.

And one thing I didn't realize -- and I was there from about the age of eleven to fourteen -- was that I went to segregated schools. These were schools that were racially segregated, and in fact were one of the school districts that was involved in Brown v. Board of Education. There were five cases, one from the state of Delaware. So the schools that I went to at the time I was going to school in junior high school were segregated and were being sued because of that. But I wasn't conscious of that at the time. And I've always reflected that -- and I've thought about it often in the years since then, that we lived, it was, we were actually outside the town of Newcastle in a rural area, and down the road just a mile or so was a little black community called Buttonwood. It wasn't even a town, but it was just a location. And we would go down there sometimes, just ride our bikes around. And there would be these black kids playing. And we didn't play with them, but we saw them a lot. And it never crossed my mind, where do they go to school? How come they don't go to our school? And it wasn't until we left Delaware in 1954, just at the time Brown was decided, May of 1954, and went to Ohio, to Cincinnati, Ohio, that it suddenly struck me because I was very conscious of the Brown decision, that our schools had been segregated.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 4>

AI: Now, tell me, what made you conscious of the Brown decision? You were still relatively young. You were a teenager. And at teenage years, many young people are not paying that much attention to national news or social or political issues. What caused you to be aware of this decision?

PI: Well, this has a lot to do with what happened before we moved to Delaware. And to go all the way back -- my parents, my father came from a rigidly Protestant family and my mother from a Catholic family, and they both gravitated to the Unitarian Church. Now the Unitarian Church, which is not a large denomination, but it's always been fairly influential in this country -- a lot of our presidents were Unitarians all the way from Thomas Jefferson, William Howard Taft, in fact was Unitarian. But the church itself, which grew out of the sort of the Enlightenment in England and this country, and people like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau, the Unitarian Church was a church that had rejected the Christian Trinity. That's why they were called Unitarians instead of Trinitarians. And there's an old saying, "Unitarians believe in one God at most." And it's a church that always has emphasized thinking for yourself, developing your own moral and ethical code and theological opinions. And there's a real diversity within the Unitarian Church. There are people who consider themselves Christians, although not Trinitarians, and people who are agnostics and even atheists. So it's quite a mixture. And it welcomes people basically who are searching for the things that are meaningful in their lives. So my parents were Unitarians, and I grew up in the Unitarian Church. I went to Sunday school. When we lived in Richland, Washington, my father helped to found the Unitarian Fellowship, a group of people that is not really a church, doesn't have a minister, but they meet every Sunday and have a Sunday school for kids. So I grew up in the Unitarian Church, and I remember a lot of the lessons we had. I stayed in it all the way through high school. We spent a year, for example, with a textbook. And I remember all the Unitarian textbooks. They all came out of the church headquarters in Boston, 25 Beacon Street. And one was called Jesus, the Carpenter's Son. And it was a book really about Jesus as a person, but not emphasizing the fact that he was supposedly the Son of God, but just a real person. Growing up, his father was a carpenter. They lived a very humble life. And he decided that he wanted to help people, and he would do things to help people. And there was another one which was very influential, I forget what year of Sunday school, but it was called The Church Across the Street. And we spent a whole year -- this was while I was in high school, I think -- visiting other churches. Every other Sunday, we would go visit another church. And I remember we visited a Mormon church and a Greek Orthodox church, which I found fascinating with all the, the incense and liturgy. And we visited a Black Pentecostal church, where there was a lot of clapping and shouting, and Unitarians do not emote very much in church services. So I got a real appreciation from the very early days I was growing up of how everybody is different, and we have to respect those differences and appreciate them.

Another thing that I think influenced me a lot was that my parents made it very clear -- in fact, the one lesson that I remember learning very explicitly from my parents was racial tolerance and inclusion. We didn't have a lot of friends who were not white. The General Electric Company didn't hire them. They didn't live in our neighborhoods. But we did know people and went out of our way, and in fact the Unitarian Church, particularly in Cincinnati where I spent my high school years, was a mixed church. And my, the Sunday school teacher who had the most influence on me was a black woman. And I don't remember her name unfortunately, but I do remember when I went to prison as a draft resister and was first put in jail, waiting for a transfer to federal prison in Cincinnati, Ohio, she came and visited me. She'd read about me in the newspaper, that I started serving a prison sentence. And she came to visit me. And I remember the guards at the, at the jail, the Hamilton County Jail, saying, "Irons, you have a visitor, but I, it must be a mistake because she's black." And I remember, in fact, when I recall this, which is not that often, I remember how much that meant to me that she came to visit me. So that had a tremendous influence on me as a child growing up.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 5>

AI: When, you mentioned how important that lesson was that your parents gave you about racial tolerance, can you remember any particular examples or words they might have used or what it was that they impressed on you so deeply?

PI: I don't remember so much words, I remember things that we did. For example, even when we lived in Richland, Washington, where there were very few black people, we had, there was a woman -- and I think she worked for my mother in the house -- who had two kids about our age. And they lived in a, literally a little shack on the Columbia River. And we would go visit them and play with them, with their kids. And this, I was about nine or ten years old at the time. And this was something that most kids of my age at that time didn't do. There was hardly any interracial experiences the kids had. But my parents made a point of having the kids in my family visit them and play with them so that we would get to know them.

I don't remember any specific lessons like, you should think this or you should think that. It was just the way we lived, the way we behaved. And there were places that we lived, particularly in Cincinnati, that were racially very segregated and very intolerant. And I became aware, in fact, I went to a high school that, during the time of the Little Rock incidence, in 1957, when federal court in Little Rock, Arkansas said that nine black children had to be admitted to the public school, Central High School. And I remember on, in the newspapers and television at the time there were riots in Little Rock because the people there, the white people tried to keep the black kids out. In fact, they had to call in the army to get them into school. And in my school, my high school in Cincinnati, there was a tremendous amount of prejudice against them. And people would say things -- the governor of Arkansas at that time was Orval Faubus, who stood up to the federal government until the, he was forced to back down. And I remember kids in my school saying things or putting up little notes like "Faubus for President." And there were black kids in my high school, fairly small number. It was an almost all-white community, but there was a very small black neighborhood on one edge. And the black kids in my school did not mingle socially with the white kids. I don't think I ever went to a dance or a community function -- we had a community center in Wyoming, Ohio, which is a little suburb of Cincinnati. I don't remember a single one of those where any of the black kids came. So that...

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 6>

AI: So it was in this setting, near Cincinnati, that you were in high school, and this school desegregation was happening in Little Rock. It was national news.

PI: Right.

AI: And you even had this prejudiced commentary by some of the other white students in your own high school. Now, what were you thinking about as this was happening? What were your own reactions to the situation in Little Rock, and were you having a conversation in your family or with friends or peers?

PI: I don't remember conversations with my family, but we must have had them, because we had a tradition in our family. It was a large family. And when we sat down for dinner we would go around the table, and everybody would say something about what they had done that day or what they were thinking about. And my father would ask us questions, sort of current events kinds of things. I do remember that. So we must have talked about that. But this was also a time, I think starting in 1956, when my father got ill. And it turned out that, he was then working in Cincinnati for the General Electric Company. He had gone back to them. And they were, the project he was working on as the chief engineer was to develop an atomic-powered airplane. And they had this project at the GE plant in Cincinnati to build an atomic-powered airplane. It never took off. It just wasn't feasible at that time. And I don't think there's ever been an atomic-powered airplane.

But at any rate, my father got ill. And in my family, we talked about many things, but we never talked about very unpleasant things, particularly people getting ill and dying. So for about two years while I was in high school and just when I went off to college, my father was progressively more and more ill, stayed home, went to the hospital. And all during that time my parents, both my father and my mother, never talked about this issue. I don't even recall learning what the problem was. I do remember once that my mother took me out in the car and -- just me -- and I think I was just about to go off to college at the time. And we drove around, and then she stopped and she said, "You know, your father is, is going to die before too long." And that was all we said. And it wasn't even an invitation for me to express feelings. Just letting me know that that was going to happen. So that whole experience, I think must have had a really significant effect on me. At the same time that I was becoming politically and socially more active and aware, I was sort of struggling with how my -- what am I going to do with this?

I think probably the most significant decision that I made was to go to Antioch College after I finished high school. Antioch is a small private college about 60 miles north of Cincinnati. It's in a little town called Yellow Springs, Ohio, which is literally the middle of nowhere surrounded by hundreds and thousands of square miles of farmland in central Ohio, corn fields mostly. But Yellow Springs is like an oasis. In fact, it originally was an oasis. It was called Yellow Springs because the natural iron springs were -- it was a health spa. It started out as, in the early nineteenth century, people would go to the Yellow Springs and sit in this hot, stinky water supposedly for their health. And a small college was started there in the 18-, early 1850s. And the first president of that college was Horace Mann. Now, Horace Mann was the founder of American public education in Massachusetts. He'd later gone on to be a congressman. He was an abolitionist. When he left Congress, he came to Antioch as the president. And Antioch was one of the very first two or three schools in the whole country to admit black students. And it was also a stop on the Underground Railroad before the Civil War. So there was a tradition of social activism at Antioch, and that's what attracted me to the college. I was given a lot of advice -- 'cause I'd done well in school, in high school -- that I could go to a really good Ivy League school like Harvard, some other prestigious university. And I decided from the very beginning -- I went on a visit to Antioch, that that's where I wanted to go to school. And I started there just at the time, just a few months before my father died. And so I was away from home for the first time, and the minute I arrived at Antioch, literally, I got active in political and social things, particularly in the Civil Rights movement.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 7>

AI: What was the first thing that you got involved with?

PI: Well, I remember, this was the year that, the year after Little Rock. But there was still a lot of excitement.

AI: So this was the fall of 1958...

PI: The fall of 1958.

AI: ...that you entered college?

PI: And at Antioch at that time, there was an organization, it was called the Youth Branch of the NAACP. And they had a chapter at Antioch. Antioch did not have very many black students, but it had a fair number. One that I remember very much and that had a tremendous impact on me -- when I first arrived at Antioch as a freshman, she was a senior, woman named Eleanor Holmes, who is now Eleanor Holmes Norton. She is the member of Congress from Washington, D.C. And Eleanor Holmes, even back then was a very striking, very articulate person. And I became involved in, there was, in fact, a barbershop in Yellow Springs -- very small town, about 5,000 people. Gegner's Barbershop was segregated. Lewis Gegner, who owned the barbershop would not cut black people's hair. And so he became the focus or the target of Antioch students who wanted to do something for civil rights. And poor Mr. Gegner, just, he was, his barbershop was picketed, there were demonstrations, people even sat down and blocked the highway in front, on Main Street. The state police came in and dragged people away. And I went to Washington, D.C., I think in the fall of 1958. It was called the Youth March on Washington for Integrated Schools. And it was the first demonstration, big demonstration, I don't even remember how many, but it was several thousand people went to that. We all got on buses and went to Washington. So that was one thing that I got involved in very quickly.

Another thing about Antioch is that it had a tremendous mixture of students, most of whom were from the metropolitan New York area -- a lot of people said Antioch was Washington Square West. And a lot of the kids who went to Antioch with me came from what we then called "progressive families," which meant that their parents were Communists or socialists or radicals of some kind. My roommate, my second roommate at Antioch, came from a Communist family, and the first live Communist I'd met. And this in fact was during a time when the Red Scare, McCarthyist period. And the thing I remember most is that although I never felt attracted to that ideology, I was very much attracted to sort of American homegrown radicalism, people like Eugene Debbs and Norman Thomas, and people -- the Wobblies. People who were sort of a very loose combination of socialists and anarchists. But the main thing they had in common was that they were agitators. They wanted to organize and improve people's lives. They didn't believe in strong parties. I was never attracted to the idea that there was a party, which you needed to follow the party's line to achieve things. And so I would have violent arguments with my Communist roommate about this. If he was losing the argument, I remember, he would pick up a volume he had on his bookshelf over his desk in our room, The Little Lenin Library, and there were about thirty or forty volumes, all bright red. And he would pick one up and throw it at me. So, but it was a very active time, and this was before the '60s. This was a time when America in general and college students in particular were supposed to be very quiet and passive and conservative, but Antioch was sort of a seedbed for a lot of social activism and radicalism. And a lot of people who came out of Antioch at that time became very active in the Civil Rights movement, the antiwar movement, all kinds of things that later developed into big mass movements.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 8>

AI: But this was just before that time, and here you are entering college, you're on your own. And I'm wondering at that, that first year of college, did you already have something in mind that you thought, plans for the future? Did you have an idea of what you might be doing? Did you have a purpose, like a career purpose in entering college or any particular goal in mind?

PI: Well, I actually had two, very different. When I was in high school and I was very involved in the Unitarian youth groups -- it's called Liberal Religious Youth -- some people call it "Little Radical Youth." But I wanted to be a Unitarian minister and in fact had even decided to go to a Unitarian seminary for training as a minister, Saint Lawrence Seminary in New York. But I changed my mind, I think, just before, just at the time I got to Antioch. And my idea then was that I wanted to be a public health doctor. The person who had first told me about Antioch was a friend of my family's in Cincinnati, a doctor, in fact, husband and wife who were both doctors. And they had worked with Albert Schweitzer in Africa, and they had worked in hospitals in Haiti and Burma, I think, and various places in Asia. And I was very attracted to them. And I really wanted to become a physician and work in public health. But I realized very soon that I did not have any aptitude or interest in chemistry, physics, math, the sciences that you needed in order to go to medical school. And so I then sort of changed my career plans and thought I would go into a very odd field called epidemiology, where you study diseases. You don't treat people, but you study diseases, how they begin, how they spread. It's a public health kind of thing. And in fact, Antioch is a college where the students spend three months on campus, and then the next three months, they go out and work on a job. It's called the Cooperative Education Program. Antioch is the only college in the country that requires it of every student. And it's a five-year program, so you spend alternating three-month periods working and studying.

And I had jobs, and they send you -- these are real jobs. They're not just internships, they're real jobs. My first job in Washington, D.C. was with the U.S. Public Health Service. And I was working in epidemiology. It was actually something called the Air Pollution Medical Program, studying the ways in which air pollution affected people's health to show that there was in fact a link between air pollution and illness and death. And I really enjoyed that, but also living in Washington, D.C. And that's where, even though I'd been active politically and socially at Antioch, I realized, here we are in the nation's capitol. This is where a lot of things happen. I got very interested in what was happening in Congress. This was a year where we were getting ready for a presidential election in 1960. And so I got active in a number of things in Washington, most importantly the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 9>

AI: Before we go there, I wanted to just mention that you had said earlier how sick your father was, how ill he was. And I was wondering if he, if either he or your mother had said anything to you about your plans for the future or influenced you in any way?

PI: It's interesting because my, my dad never did. He was an engineer, very good at science. I, all the way through high school, struggled with the things that he was really good at. But I also had things that I was, excelled at -- writing, speaking, social sciences, the kinds of things that I'm still doing fifty years later. And he always encouraged me, and my mother did too, just to pursue what I wanted, to do what interested me. And if it wasn't the same as him, that was fine. I never recall having a specific conversation sitting down, you know like, "Well, son, what are you planning to do with your life?" This was a period, of course, that was very difficult for my whole family, with my father being ill. But I do recall that he was very excited about my going to Antioch. And I felt very sad that he couldn't come visit the first few months that I was there, because he was very ill at home and in the hospital. And I do recall the time that he died. It was my -- it was in January of 1959, my first year at Antioch. And there was a memorial service for him in Cincinnati at the Unitarian Church. There was no funeral, but this memorial service was very meaningful to me because a lot of people that I had not known or knew very little, friends of my father, people he worked with, got up and spoke about him. And he played classical music in a little group, and people he'd played with -- he was a clarinet player -- played his favorite music like Schubert's Trout Quintet and things and it was just... and spoke about him in ways that I had never known of his influence on other people. And the main thing I remember from that is how much he cared for the people he worked with and who worked for him, and how the tradition of engineers being sort of cold, hard people, following the rules. My father never followed the rules, and he made it very clear to us in, in indirect ways, all the kids in our family, you, you have to obey your inner rules. You shouldn't hurt other people. And there's a real role for rules, for laws, for behavior, following those rules. But there are higher rules. And I think a lot of that came out of the Unitarian philosophy, that there are higher rules than just man-made rules, the whole tradition of civil disobedience, going all the way back to Thoreau and the abolitionists. So that was sort of a thread that came through my whole life, even though it didn't, wasn't stated explicitly.

AI: So that was part of your father's legacy to you?

PI: Yeah. In a way that I never consciously realized until many years later. Now, my mother, her impact -- my mother grew up and lived for most of her life a very normal, middle-class housewife and mother. She had seven children, a big house to run, and from all appearances -- garden club, coffees with the ladies, this kind of thing -- she looked on the outside like your typical house-and-garden mother. But there was something inside that never came out until after my father died, a very different side of her. She was a poet. She had been writing poetry for years and never showed it to anybody because she didn't think my father would approve. I don't know if he would have or not. But a very creative, free-spirited kind of person that had been inside this middle-class life all the time until my father died. In fact, right after he died, she decided that she would leave Cincinnati and go someplace totally different. She moved to Exeter, New Hampshire, with six -- I was in college -- but six kids with her, hardly any money, not much of a pension from General Electric. But she was determined to raise her kids and send them to good schools. That's why she moved to Exeter -- sort of ironic -- Phillips Exeter Academy, it's a great private school. We lived two blocks from the academy, none of my brothers and sisters went to Exeter Academy. Some of them went to Quaker boarding schools and various other, the Emma Willard School. One my sisters went to North Field School for Girls. But my mother did everything possible to get all the younger kids through school and go to good schools. And I remember the, the very minute that my youngest brother, Dean, graduated from high school. My mother called a family meeting. I was then living in Boston. We all gathered, and she said, "Well, I have a surprise. I'm moving to Greece." And none of us had the slightest inkling, and she did. She sold her house and moved to a little island in Greece and stayed there for ten years. And all that time she was writing poetry and being sort of a Gertrude Stein character.

AI: So, some insight into your mother, as well.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 10>

AI: Well, just before our break, you were about to tell us about more of your activism in college, and in particular the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. So I'll ask you to start in there, please.

PI: Well, I had gotten involved in the Civil Rights movement on the Antioch campus with the Youth Branch of the NAACP, going to Washington for the Youth March on Washington for Integrated Schools. And I went back to Washington for another job at the National Institutes of Health, what's called the Clinical Center. And I was there, living in the hospital in Bethesda, right outside of Washington. I was part of a, an experiment. It was a very odd experiment they were doing to look at the relationship between your body's production of various hormones and your emotional states. So we had to do two things while we were living in this hospital. One was to keep a daily, very detailed diary and checklist of how you felt every day. And then at the same time, we had to collect all of our urine, and they would measure it and do various tests. And this was all part of a big experiment that never -- we never found out the results of because something happened while I was there, which was that the experiment got closed down. The funding was withdrawn, and the two doctors that ran it were both fired because all the Antioch students who were living in the hospital and a group of students from Howard University in Washington -- which is a, almost all-black, historically black college, university in Washington, and they were living on the ward with us. So there were about twenty us of us all together in this one ward, I think about a dozen or fifteen Antioch students and five or six Howard students. We all became active at the very beginning in the sit-in movement while we were living in the hospital. And the sit-ins started February 1, 1960, in Greensboro, North Carolina. And they spread fairly quickly. There was a lot of publicity about it, the four young black men who sat down at the lunch counter in Woolworth's. And I remember the pictures in Life Magazine and the television. And so we became very active in that at the very beginning. And we started going out on sit-in demonstrations in the Washington area.

And I recall the first time I was arrested was at a bowling alley in Prince Georges County, Maryland, right across the district line. There was a segregated bowling alley. I don't know who picked it as a target, but we all went there. And we decided to go in in three separate groups. The first group was all white, and that was to make sure that it was open and they would serve us. And so they went in and started bowling. The second group was mixed. I was in that second group. And the third group, which actually never got inside, was all black. Well, as soon as the mixed group came in and the bowling alley staff were quite -- they didn't know what to do, but they decided first of all to let us start bowling and secondly to call the police. So we started bowling. And I have this vivid memory, pretty sure it's true, that I was on my way to a 300, perfect game when they closed down the bowling alley, about the fifth frame. And I remember I was so upset when they put the thing down in front of the pins to shut down the bowling alley, that I threw a ball down there anyway and broke it. So we were, the police came in. It was a very cordial arrest. Nobody was manhandled. We were taken to the county jail in Prince Georges County. And I recall there were several people with us who later became very famous in the Civil Rights movement, Stokely Carmichael for one, who was the national leader of SNCC, a man named H. Rap Brown. And we were put into segregated jail cells, white and black. And there were a small number of women also, and they were put in this separate -- they didn't have a women's section, so they just put them together in one cell. But I remember there was one person with us, and I forget his name, but he was a mixed-race person. And he looked sort of, well, he looked more Italian than anything else. And the jail staff couldn't figure out what to do with him. And so we decided, we gave them a hard time. They first started to put him in the white cell, and we all started yelling, "You can't put him in here. He's black." So they decided they'd put him in the black cell. And they said, "Well, we can't, you can't put him in here. He's not, he's white." And it was turning into a whole comedy. So they finally ended up -- and this is a true story -- they put him in the broom closet by himself until we got bailed out and left the jail.

So we started, and I remember picketing, we picketed movie theaters that were segregated, some of them in Washington, D.C. We picketed the White House. And then the, because of the publicity and the Washington Post had stories about us, this group of students from the National Institutes of Health, the two doctors who ran our project were fired, and they ended it. Now, because the chairman of the Senate Health Committee that appropriated all the money for the hospital was Senator Sparkman of Alabama, and so this was an affront to him. That's why they closed down this project. We stayed in the hospital until the end of our three-month period. I don't remember what project, there were a number of other projects after that.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 11>

PI: But at any rate, so I became active in the Civil Rights movement. And I went back to Washington that fall in 1960. And we, a group of us went down to Atlanta, I think in late September or early October of 1960. We drove in a car together. There were about six of us, three black and three white, as I remember. There were several carloads going down to Atlanta from Washington, mostly from Howard University. And it was my first trip to the deep South. I'd never been farther south than Virginia. And I had worked on a co-op job, an Antioch job in Virginia between those other two jobs. And this was in rural Virginia, Loudoun County, Virginia, very segregated area. So I recall, in fact I remember in the small town of Leesburg, Virginia where I worked, going to the movie theater there and discovering that they had a separate balcony section for blacks. And you could only get there by an outside stairway, so that you wouldn't be with the white people in the theater. And I remember going to the public library in Leesburg and discovering that it was segregated, too. Blacks could come and check out books, but they couldn't sit down at the tables.

AI: Well, now, excuse me, at the time that you were planning with your friends and colleagues to drive down together, did you have an explicit discussion about potential dangers of being a mixed-race group in a car together going down to the deep South?

PI: I think what we discussed was that we were just going to drive straight through. If we stopped, if we had to stop at a gas station or restroom -- I don't think we even went into restaurants together, we brought food with us -- that we were not going to cause any trouble. We wanted to get to Atlanta. We didn't want to get arrested. So we went to Atlanta, and the conference was at Morehouse College, which is a black college in Atlanta. And the things I remember most distinctly about that were two speeches. There were probably 150 of us at this conference. It was the first National SNCC Conference. And all of the sit-in movements around the country which were fairly uncoordinated before then, sent people from Nashville and North Carolina, and a lot of different places. And there were three people I remember vividly from that conference. One was a woman named Ella Baker. Ella Baker was probably the most influential civil rights activist who never got recognized, partly because she was a woman, I think. She was a very, she was the best organizer in the whole Civil Rights movement. And a lot of people say that Martin Luther King would never have been able to develop the Southern Christian Leadership Conference without Ella Baker. She also helped organize SNCC. She was then I don't know how old. In your early twenties, you think everybody is old. But she was the one who taught us in these workshop sessions how to organize, how to have committees, how to raise funds, how to deal with the media, how to get lawyers to help us when we were arrested.

Another person I remember was Martin Luther King, Jr. And what I remember about him, he, of course, was already famous from the Birmingham bus boycott and all of that, was that he came in, gave a very dynamic speech, and left. Now, I'm sure it was because he had many other obligations, but he did not sit around and spend time with us. He just came in to deliver a message from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which had a very nervous relationship with the sit-in students. For one thing, we were all getting arrested, and it cost a lot of money to bail us out of jail. And we were very autonomous and didn't take direction from older people. And they viewed us basically as young upstarts. And this is true, I think, in a lot of mass movements. The younger people, the more active, the more risky kinds of things. But Dr. King gave in -- came in, gave a very good speech about nonviolence.

And then the person who affected me the most was a young Baptist seminarian -- wasn't really a minister yet. He'd been expelled from a seminary in Nashville, Tennessee for leading sit-ins, named James Lawson. James Lawson reminded me a lot of John Lewis, who was another SNCC leader who's now a member of Congress from Georgia, of being at the same time a very down-to-earth, practical kind of person and, and also being very charismatic and inspirational. James Lawson gave a speech -- he's now a Baptist minister in Los Angeles and in his, I guess, mid- to late sixties. But at that time, he was probably the most respected civil -- sit-in leader, probably because he was somewhat older than the rest of us, in his mid-twenties as opposed to teens or early twenties. And a lot of the sit-in students and leaders were high school students, still teenagers. But James Lawson gave an incredibly powerful speech, the theme of which was, in fact I think his title was "Jail, Not Bail" -- that those of us who had been going around having demonstrations, getting bailed out, organizing new ones, were not really making the system hurt. We were not shutting down the system. They could process us pretty quickly. One group would move into jail, another group would replace us. His theme was you have to clog the system. You have to shut it down. If thousands and thousands of people get arrested and stay in jail and don't get bailed off, out, the system will have to either shut down or respond in some way. This will keep up the pressure. And he also said that we have to cut our ties to the system. And it struck me -- and I don't remember, it's not like I have an instant where the thought suddenly came into my mind, and it probably wasn't until I'd gotten back to Washington from Atlanta. I do recall that when we left Atlanta to drive back, well, I remember two things -- excuse me. One is that a group of us was walking around downtown Atlanta, a mixed group -- and it was the first and I think only time I've been in downtown Atlanta. And there was a construction site, building going up, and construction workers who were all white up on the construction, the upper stories, were throwing things at us, nuts and bolts, throwing them down at us. And I also remember driving back to Washington, stopping in one small town for gas I think, and restrooms in South Carolina, and being verbally threatened. And it was a very scary situation until we all piled in the car and left. Nobody got hurt, but I do remember that.

AI: Excuse me. Before that time, had you had any sense of personal danger to yourself or to your friends before that incident where you were threatened?

PI: No. I had never felt personally in danger. I'm not sure why. There were times when I was afraid or nervous. There were some demonstrations, in fact, in Washington where the American Nazi Party would show up and counter-demonstrate, and things would get very tense. But I don't recall feeling that my life was in danger. I think I felt the worst thing that could happen was I'd go to jail. Now, I didn't, that didn't scare me. In fact, I sort of liked the idea that this is a way of putting your beliefs on the line. And you have to remember in the sit-in movement, that going to jail was considered a good thing. Now, a lot of people whose parents -- and of course, my father had died by then -- were very nervous. They didn't want their kids to go to jail or perhaps lose the chance to go to a good school or get a job later in life, but that never bothered me.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 12>

AI: Had you thought consciously about the potential consequences of losing opportunity, the problems of having a jail record, arrest record and so forth?

PI: No, it never did. I always felt that whatever I wound up doing, and at that time my career plans had, I had shifted from medicine to sort of social activism. And for a full-time social activist, this is just part of the job. So I never felt I had any danger. I didn't have any long-range plans of going to, of even of finishing college or going to graduate school or even ultimately going to law school. This was something I didn't even think about at the time. I was basically a full-time activist. And after I got back to Antioch after this experience -- well, to, going back from Atlanta to Washington, we were at the Clinical Center in Bethesda. This was before they had closed down or I had gone back a second time as a matter of fact, was living there. I decided to, that the most visible symbol of my connection to the system, to the government, was my draft card. Now, when I was eighteen I registered for the draft in Cincinnati. In fact, I think I came back down from Antioch to my hometown, Wyoming, Ohio, gone into the local draft board, which was in the police station, the county -- the city building, and registered. And it didn't even strike me as anything to think about. You had to register when you were eighteen. And I was a college student and I'd get a deferment. And I went back to school.

And it wasn't until two years later that I thought about this. And it's interesting because the motivation for sending my draft card back with a letter saying I was no longer going to cooperate with the Selective Service System had nothing to do with the Vietnam War. This was before the war had started. It came out of my feeling that I did not want to or was unwilling to serve in an army defending a country that was still practicing racial segregation. And this was also -- there was a very important event. Most people don't remember the influence it had on the American Civil Rights movement. Shortly after the sit-ins began in February of 1960 -- and I think this happened in April or May of that year -- there was a massacre called the Sharpville Massacre in South Africa. And students, young people who had been demonstrating against the apartheid system in South Africa were massacred by the police. And I think sixty of them were killed. And this event had a profound impact on the students in this country, the sit-in students, because it, it symbolized for us that even though we were not being massacred, even though people were in fact being murdered in this country, that we shared the same thing with the people in South Africa, the blacks in South Africa, which was segregation. Theirs was more vicious than ours but they were exactly from the same motives: to preserve white supremacy. And I think, and I remember being very much affected by the Sharpville Massacre. And I think this had something to do with all the thoughts that finally expressed themselves in sending back my draft card.

AI: Did you, was this act of sending back your draft card, was this singular, just you yourself? Did you talk to others who were contemplating the same thing? Did you know of anyone else who also cut their ties by sending that, their cards back?

PI: At this time, in the fall of 1960, I don't recall anybody else doing this. I don't recall talking to anybody about it. It was just an act I did by myself. And I had some connections with pacifist groups, Quaker groups, people who had been conscientious objectors in World War II, but there was no organization. Now, I later became active in Students for a Democratic Society and helped organize anti-draft activities. But the very beginning in 1960 was just by myself. I didn't even try to talk anybody else into doing this. Later on, I did. But it was just something I felt I had to do.

AI: And did you have any thought about what the consequence might be of sending your card back?

PI: Well, I knew that eventually if I was drafted that I'd have to decide, am I going to go into the army? What am I going to do? I knew the consequences could be a criminal conviction and going to jail or prison. But at that time, it didn't really concern me. And in fact, after I sent my draft card back and carried on this very odd correspondence with my draft board for several years, because they kept trying to persuade me to apply for exemption as a conscientious objector, and I refused to do that. And that was because -- and I think this was my first experience with legal training because I remember looking it up and going to the law libraries in Washington. To become a conscientious objector at that time and to be exempted from military service, you had to fill out a form. And one of the questions, I think it was Section 6J, was -- and you had to check this box -- it says, "I object to participating in war because of my belief in a supreme being." And then it, it defined that. It said, a relation -- "...involving relationship superior to those arising out of any human relationship." And I remember that distinctly from the form. And I could not sign that, first because I did not believe in a supreme being in the sense that I'm sure they did, some omnipotent god, and secondly that there was any relationship, any obligation superior to that of human relationships. I thought of myself as a humanist. That all of life is human relationships. And so I refused to sign that, and I told them so. In fact, I wrote very long, sort of pedantic letters explaining this to them. And for about four years, nothing happened. And in fact I had gone back to school. I had dropped out of school. I had come back to Washington to work. All during a time when the draft board wasn't actually doing anything.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 13>

PI: Now, just to keep this chronology straight, I went back to Antioch in the end of 1960. And I had a number -- I stayed active in the Civil Rights movement. And I had some jobs, my first jobs outside Washington. I went to Boston, worked at Harvard University School of Public Health for a while, and became active in Students for a Democratic Society, SDS, and went back to Antioch from there. And in the spring of, or the winter of 1962, I ran out of money. My father had died. I didn't have a scholarship.

And I had decided that I wanted to go into full-time organizing and social activism. And so I dropped out of school the beginning of 1962 and went back to Washington. And what I wanted to do, and what I did was to help organize a student demonstration in Washington against nuclear testing. It's called the Student Peace Union, and, an organization that I was very active in later became affiliated with Students for a Democratic Society. The Student Peace Union was made up of all kinds of people from Quaker Pacifists to some Communists, not very many. But the basic idea was that we took what was called "The Third Way." We were not going to follow either the East or the West. And in fact, now that I remember, we were very much opposed to Communists being active in SPU, and in fact, we tried to keep them out. And they, of course, tried to come in and infiltrate or influence our organization. But we were "The Third Way."

And we had set up a demonstration in Washington that was going to picket both the White House and the Russian Embassy -- which was just up the street, a few blocks north on 16th Street, from the White House -- and call for an end to all nuclear testing. This was a time when there was a lot of testing above-ground in this country and by the Russians in the Pacific, and there was a lot of concern about nuclear fallout and proliferation. So I worked full-time, and I lived in a little house in Washington with other organizers. And I remember we lived mostly on peanut butter and crackers and soup. And my job was media work and liaison with the police. We did not want this to get out of hand. This was not a confrontational demonstration. And we were going to send delegates from our group into the White House and into the Russian Embassy, or at least ask them to meet with us and appeal for a worldwide treaty banning nuclear testing as a first step toward ending the arms race. And so I worked on this.

And it turned out, this was in February of 1962, and I think it was February 13th and 14th, if I remember. And there was an unexpected snowstorm in Washington the day before the demonstration, and we were sure that nobody was going to come and that we might have at least a few hundred people, mostly from the Washington area. And as it turned out to our total surprise, people showed up out of nowhere that we had no idea were coming, in busloads and cars. There were about 8,000 people. Well, we'd been telling the press that we were expecting a thousand so that when 2,000 showed up we could say, "This is twice as big as we had expected." And 8,000 people showed up. We had a terrible time finding places for them to stay because it was a two-day demonstration. A lot of them wound up sleeping on church floors. And we got a lot of publicity, front page of the Washington Post. We had a rally at the Washington Monument. Somebody had, oh, there was a journalist, very important, influential guy in American radical politics, named I.F. Stone -- very independent guy. Put out a little four-page weekly newsletter, I.F. Stone's Weekly. And I read it religiously. It was all the news the New York Times didn't print. Izzy Stone was his name, and he lived in Washington. A guy who was then in his fifties or sixties, sort of a uncle or grandfather type figure to us. And he had the bright idea -- came to a couple of our organizing meetings -- of having our march, instead of going straight from the White House to the Washington Monument, which is not very far, of going all the way across the Potomac River to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington Cemetery and then back. And so we thought this was a very good idea, not realizing, of course, that there was going to be a big snowstorm. But I remember on that march -- and we didn't stop, we just filed past in a single line, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the idea being that this is what we want to end, people being killed in war and buried like this in unknown graves. And one of my jobs was to stand at the Fourteenth Street Bridge, climb up on one of the pedestals there and count the people as they marched by. And I counted, and that's why I learned we had 8,000 people there. Counted every one of them. And that was a very powerful experience. I was for the first time a full-time organizer. And it was hard work, but it was really exciting, and I learned a lot from that.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 14>

PI: So I stayed in Washington, having dropped out of college. And I spent, after that demonstration ended in February, I went up to New England where my family lived and became an organizer, a political organizer for people who were running for Congress on what was then called peace platforms. One of them was a Harvard professor named H. Stuart Hughes, a history professor. And he had decided to run for the U.S. Senate as an independent candidate. His two opponents were very young, in fact too young to serve in the Senate at the time he was elected -- young man named Edward Moore Kennedy, now Senator Ted Kennedy. And his opponent was the son of another former senator, Henry Cabot Lodge, a man named George Lodge. So the scions of these two powerful political families were running against each other, and Stuart Hughes was mounting a campaign. And we really thought he had a chance, maybe not of winning but certainly of finishing well above expectations. And something happened. And I worked on his campaign, then I went to New Hampshire to organize a congressional campaign for a woman who was running for Congress as a Democrat, and I went from there -- she lost the primary -- to western Massachusetts to organize another campaign for a man who was running for Congress as a Democrat who was supporting Stuart Hughes for the Senate against his own party's candidate, Ted Kennedy. And something happened just before that election that changed everything and that was the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962. Stuart Hughes had been running about 20, 25 percent in the polls. In fact, we thought he might even come in second and beat the Republican. And as soon as the Cuban Missile Crisis hit and everybody rallied around the flag except our candidates, we died politically. Stuart Hughes wound up with about four percent of the vote. The guy I was then working for, Bill Hefner, running for Congress wound up with about 28 percent of the vote as a Democrat. And that experience showed me that as hard as you work, things can happen unexpectedly that change the situation radically. And you have to be prepared for that and you have to survive those experiences. And I think a lot of the work that I've done in the years since then has taught me, you temper your enthusiasm and your optimism. So you learn that like life, politics is full of unexpected things happening, and that you have got to go back to the grassroots and many times start over. Same thing happened with the Civil Rights movement after Dr. King was killed, and literally the Civil Rights movement had to start over again. So at any rate, those were important events.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 15>

AI: Well, it sounded to me that when you first began the organizing around the peace issue, you must have had some very high ideals. And I'm wondering, did you really have a personal feeling that it was possible to bring the U.S. and U.S.S.R. to new positions that would make peace, real peace, and the end of the Cold War a real possibility? Did you personally believe that at the time that you were beginning your peace organizing?

PI: We really did. And the reason is that we felt that if you can just reach people and tell them what the dangers are of nuclear weapons and nuclear testing, that there would be this sort of groundswell. People would rise up against their governments and demand that they ban nuclear weapons. As I said, the Cuban Missile Crisis changed all that. We realized that on both sides, the leaders were prepared to go to war, and we almost did at that time. But, and a lot of us, many people who face situations like that become cynical and drop out. And they're not in it for the long haul. And we realized, particularly in our political campaigns, the people said, "Oh, yes. I'm going to vote for you. I'll give you some money. I'll help put up a sign." They are not going to follow through if they perceive that their country is in danger, that they might personally suffer from this.

So, at any rate, after those elections in 1962, I decided not to go back to college. First of all, I still didn't have the money for it. I hadn't really earned any money in that work. And I went back to Washington without any idea of what I was going to do. But I had met somebody earlier that year who worked in the United Autoworkers Union. He was on the staff of the UAW in Washington, a man named Lewis Carliner. And I'd actually met him by having a blind date with one of his daughters. And as it turned out, we didn't get along at all. But I spent hours and hours talking with her dad and just being fascinated by what he did -- sort of political organizing work in Washington, representing the union which at that time was a powerful union with over a million members. And went back to Washington without any idea of a job and walked into Lew Carliner's office. I remember this, it was on a Monday morning. And he had sort of vaguely said months and months before, before I went to New England, he'd said, "Well, if you're ever in Washington and you need a job, come look me up." So I went back in, and I said, "Remember? You offered me a job?" And he said, "Yeah. When can you start?" And I said, "Right now."

So I started working for the Autoworkers Union. I had never been in an auto plant in my life. Still haven't. I was strictly a, what they call a "pork chopper." It used to be that the staff, the union members who paid the dues and had the dirty, hard jobs, they'd say, "Well, we've got to eat scraps, and these people, they eat pork chops." And they called them pork choppers. And so I worked in the union, and I was a very, very junior lobbyist and political, I wasn't an organizer, but I was a political representative. And what I did for the union was to edit their weekly Washington newsletter that was sent to all union officers and local union officers and staff, about 30- or 40,000 of them. It didn't go to the entire membership. We had a monthly newspaper that did that. It's called the UAW Washington Weekly. And I modeled it very consciously on I.F. Stone's Weekly. But it was very different. We had color, and I used to steal Herblock cartoons from the Washington Post. But I spent my time going to congressional hearings and keeping up with all the bills in Congress that affected the union very widely, Medicare, civil rights. This was the time when Medicare was passed. John Kennedy was president. It was very exciting to be in Washington. I was actually earning a living. I think I made $8,000 a year. And I loved that job.

And I spent three years working for the union, feeling, and at the same time being involved in other political activities. I was still active in the student peace movement. And we organized the very first, to my knowledge, the very first demonstration against the Vietnam War. It was at the National Press Club in Washington. I think it was March of 1962. This was before I started working for the union, or '63, I don't remember. But the wife of the Vietnamese dictator, President Nhu was giving a speech. She was known as Madame Nhu. She was also a very, she was politically powerful in Vietnam. She gave a speech at the National Press Club. And we picketed that speech. And our message was to the president, don't send troops to Vietnam. They had, at that time the American commitment to Vietnam was very, very small -- just a few hundred so-called "advisors" who weren't in combat, advisors to the South Vietnamese Army. And largely through I.F. Stone, reading him, talking to him, becoming aware of the, what was happening in Vietnam, which most people in this country had no idea about, I, that was an issue that I really focused on.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 16>

PI: So I, I was both doing that kind of work and working in the union at the same time. And for those three years until the fall of 1965, that's what I did. I worked in Washington, and really was, it was an exciting time. I remember vividly the day that John Kennedy was assassinated. I was working for the union, and I was on Capitol Hill in 1963, in the office of Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois, meeting with someone on his staff. And somebody came bursting into the office and said, "Turn on the radio. The president's been shot." And we turned on the radio, and we heard the bulletins, "The president's been shot. We don't know what his condition is." And then suddenly, "The president has died." And Senator Douglas came out of his office -- I remember he was very, very tall, distinguished-looking man, sort of like Abraham Lincoln -- and he said, "I'm going to the Senate floor." And along with two or three other people on his staff, I just tagged along. In fact, we went on the little, the little car, that little railroad car under the Capitol to the Senate floor. And I remember going up to the visitor's gallery while Senator Douglas went on the floor. This was in the late- or mid-afternoon, I think. And senators were beginning to gather. And Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, who was a Republican, the only woman in the Senate at that time -- and this is something that became famous, I guess, afterwards. She was known for wearing a red rose every day on her, her jacket. And she had sat next to John Kennedy when he was in the Senate, and they had become close friends. And she took off her red rose and walked over and put it on the desk that Kennedy had sat at as a senator. And I remember that very vividly. And then I decided I've got to get back to my office. The weekly edition of the newsletter was just about to come out, and I wanted to change it. And I remember I took a taxi back, stopped at a bookstore, and got a copy of Famous Speeches and went back to my office and called up the printer and said, "Hold up printing." This was on a Thursday, and we printed it Thursday evening. "Hold up the printing. I'm coming over." So I went over to the printer, and we put a black border around the front page and excerpts of a funeral oration by one of the Greek, I forget which one, about the death of a famous leader.

So that, Kennedy's assassination, Lyndon Johnson becoming president, and I became very disillusioned with him very quickly. In 1964, while I was working for the union, the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, which I went to, the union was backing Johnson one hundred percent against Barry Goldwater. At that time and growing out of the Civil Rights movement, the sit-ins in the South, was a grassroots organization in Mississippi called the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. And the Freedom Democrats were mostly black, there were some whites in it, who sent a delegation to Atlantic City demanding to be seated in place of the all-white Democrats who were all segregationists. In fact, most of them wound up supporting Goldwater. But there was a bitter fight in the Democratic Party over this. And it was quite clear that the union staff, we had very mixed feelings about this. In our hearts, we supported the Freedom Democrats, but we were afraid that this would break the party apart as it had in 1948, very similar kind of split in the Democratic Party. So the union wound up supporting a compromise that would give three of the Freedom Democrats passes to the convention, but no votes. And they would seat the regular delegation. Well, some of us were so outraged we wanted to protest, but we were convinced that we shouldn't do that. And I remember that was a lesson I learned, that some compromises are not good, very damaging. I felt terrible. There were people I met in that Freedom Party delegation,Fannie Lou Hamer, I remember was one of them, a woman, fairly elderly black woman, who had never gone past the sixth grade. She was from Sunflower County, Mississippi, I think, which is Senator Eastland's home county, a leader of the segregationists in Congress. And that was, and she gave a speech. It was at a, not an official thing, but we had a, we had our meetings. And to me she represented the, the very best of what this country should be. You know, just an average, ordinary person who at tremendous risk to herself took on probably the most powerful, entrenched party in the country. And she didn't win, but she got a moral victory from them. So I remember all those, those episodes.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 17>

PI: Now, at the same time, my draft situation was going along, back-and-forth letters between me and my draft board. Nothing was happening. But in 1964, in August just after the Democratic Convention or at about the same time in that summer, the Vietnam War officially began. Now, we had been sending more troops to Vietnam, but fairly quietly. And in August of 1964, supposedly the North Korean -- or the North Vietnamese, without provocation, attacked a U.S. ship in the Gulf of Tonkin right off of North Vietnam. Well that ship as it turned out later -- and I.F. Stone was the person who raised the first real questions about this -- it was not unprovoked. We in fact had been provoking the North Vietnamese, sending in surveillance and harassing their coast. And they had retaliated. There never was in fact an armed attack on the navy destroyer. But, and U.S. officials as it turned out later through the Pentagon Papers in the 1970s flat out lied about what had happened because they wanted an excuse to start bombing North Vietnam. So Congress passed, with only two or three dissenting votes, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, saying that the president had the power to commit American troops in Vietnam, literally as he, as he pleased. Congress was not going to second-guess the president. Tremendous, patriotic rally behind the flag kind of thing.

Well, the week after Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, I was indicted by a federal grand jury for violating the draft law. Back in 1963 I got my notice to report for military service, and I had simply ignored it. In fact, I sent a letter to my draft board, "I'm not coming." Show up at Fort Dix, Kentuckyat 6 o'clock in the morning, when I was living in Washington. And I really hadn't thought that much about what would happen, the consequences of that. And it was a year later that I got this notice that I'd been indicted. And the Justice Department -- Bobby Kennedy was then the attorney general -- the Justice Department had decided that they would indict a draft resister in every one of the federal districts around the country to send a message -- we're now at war and you've got to obey the draft law -- because they had anticipated correctly, first, that they would have to draft hundreds of thousands of troops to serve in Vietnam and, secondly, that there would be resistance to this. And they wanted to stop that resistance as quickly as possible. This was before, or about the time people were burning their draft cards, and there was serious concern in the government that there would be a widespread draft resistance. And in fact, the draft resistance movement was pretty strong at the time.

AI: So this was a huge shift from the time that you had first sent your draft card back...

PI: Right.

AI: ...to now we're in 1964, and the draft resistance movement has really grown tremendously.

PI: And I was very active in that draft resistance movement. I had, in fact circulated before I left Antioch, had circulated a pamphlet all around the Midwest college campuses urging people to send their draft cards back and resist the draft. In fact, I had been visited by the FBI after that, while I was on the Antioch campus. They had threatened to come back and arrest me for sedition, and they never showed up. But I realized, I guess at that time that there was a possibility that at some point this would put me in, have to make a choice -- go to prison or cooperate. And I could always have gotten out of it by becoming a conscientious objector.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 18>

AI: So when we broke, you were just on the point of telling us that you were going to be indicted for your, the draft resistance.

PI: The funny thing is that I can't remember how I learned that I had been indicted, and I was living in Washington at the time. My draft board was in Cincinnati. The indictment came from a federal grand jury in Cincinnati. And the way it works is that if a prosecutor, in this case a federal prosecutor, decides that there's evidence that somebody has committed a crime -- my crime would have been not showing up for military induction, and in fact, not showing up for my physical exam even before that, because I'd been ordered to do that and hadn't showed up. And this had, of course, happened more than a year earlier. But if I had committed a crime, a prosecutor can get an indictment, which simply means that a charge is made against somebody and they have to defend themselves. Not every indictment goes to a trial. But in my case, it was fairly clear since I had made a public thing out of this, that I had in fact violated the law deliberately. The question was not whether I was guilty, but whether there was any good defense to that.

So at that time, I was living and working in Washington for the Autoworkers Union. The people in the union were very supportive of me. I was not in danger of losing my job. So I found a lawyer who -- and if I recall correctly, my boss in Washington knew of a lawyer in Cincinnati from when he went to college, and I couldn't find a civil liberties lawyer in Cincinnati -- very, very conservative place. In fact, I called up the American Civil Liberties Union in New York and asked them if they knew of any attorneys in Cincinnati who could defend someone on a draft charge, and they said, "Oh, the draft is not a civil liberties issue." The ACLU was not challenging the draft back then. So I found this lawyer who was a private corporation-type lawyer, very nice guy. He had never handled a criminal case before. So we went to trial in Cincinnati before a federal judge. My lawyer had said, "You don't want a jury trial. Let the judge decide this, because a federal grand, a federal jury in Cincinnati is likely to be twelve retired American Legion members, and they'll send you right to jail." Well, as it turned out, the judge himself -- a man named John W. Peck -- was very conservative. He had a son serving in Vietnam at the time. He was very hostile to me from the very beginning of the trial. Now, I had done some research myself, because the only issue in the case was not whether I had a violated the draft law, but -- and this was a lot like Gordon Hirabayashi's case later on. There's no question that he violated the curfew. He'd gone down to the FBI and turned himself in. So the question was, was there a constitutional defense?

To get ahead of myself, what my lawyer and I did not realize was is that there was another even better defense, which probably could have won the case, kept me out of prison, but we didn't know about it at the time. And that was whether the draft board had followed its own rules and regulations in drafting me. But our sole defense was that requiring a conscientious objector to swear that they believed in a supreme being violated the Constitution because the Supreme Court had ruled -- and I dug this case up myself in a law library, a case called Torcaso v. Watkins, back in the 19-, I think, '50s -- that governments could not require people who applied for official positions, in this case a notary public commission, that they believed in a supreme being. And the Constitution itself says, "No religious test shall ever be used for an office or service under the United States." And I considered military service to be service under the United States. And this was a religious test, very clear. So when I went to the trial, I remember going up on the witness stand. My lawyer had said, "Just explain why you were doing this." So I started explaining. There was hardly anybody in the courtroom. There was no publicity about this trial. And I said to the judge, "Well, Your Honor, I decided that I did not want to apply for exemption as a conscientious objector because the religious test was unconstitutional." Now, that's not why I originally did it. As a matter of fact, I knew nothing about it. But it seemed like a good point anyway. And the judge looked down at me, and I'll never forget as he looked down at me with this look on his face of total scorn, and he said, "Young man, what law school did you go to?" Now, I hadn't gone to law school then or even thought of going to law school, but I realized right then that I was in trouble. So at the end of the very short trial, took less than a day, the prosecution didn't call any witnesses because I had already agreed, stipulated that I'd violated the law. So the judge found me guilty right on the bench and set sentencing for a month later.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 19>

PI: I went back to Washington. I stopped in, I forget whether it was that day or soon after, at the federal probation office to be interviewed, a pre-sentencing report from the federal probation officer. And in fact, we had a very pleasant conversation. I explained to him why I was doing this. He seemed quite sympathetic. And when we went, when I went back a month later for the sentencing, the federal prosecutor, the assistant U.S. attorney, presented the pre-sentencing report to the judge and recommended that I be placed on probation. And of course, my lawyer said the same thing. And Judge Peck looked down and said, "Well, I've read the pre-sentence report. And I'm going to sentence the defendant to five years in prison on the first count," -- which was violating the, refusing to show up for my physical exam -- "and five years on the second count," failing to report for induction. Nobody that I knew of had ever been convicted of both of those offenses. I mean, failing to show up for your physical is a Mickey Mouse offense. And so I was sentenced to ten years in prison. At that point -- and this was totally unexpected -- at that point, the assistant U.S. attorney, and I just remembered his name, Arnold Morelli, very nice guy, stood up, and he said, "Your Honor, may I approach the bench?" And the judge said, "Yes." And he went up there, and they had this whispered conversation for several minutes. And at the end of it, the judge says, "Well, I've listened to the U.S. attorney and I've decided to change the sentence. I'm going to sentence you to three years on the first count, three years on the second count to be served concurrently." Well, that's a victory of sorts, but three years in prison was something I had not expected, because I had anticipated being placed on probation. I had a job. I had no other criminal record except for a few sit-in arrests. And I wasn't any danger to the country, I thought. And the judge felt that I was a danger in setting an example of refusing to serve in the military at a time -- this was in 1965 -- when the war was becoming, was blowing up. And we were sending hundreds of thousands of troops to Vietnam. So in a sense, I should have expected what happened.

Now, the U.S. attorney in Cincinnati told... no, I have things wrong. I have to back up. My lawyer decided that we would appeal to the United States Court of Appeals, appeal my conviction on the ground that I'd raised, of the consti-, the First Amendment, the religious test. And so I had some time before that appeal was heard and decided, so I went back to Washington to my job with the autoworkers. And I decided that it may take a year or so, but I wanted to go back and finish my degree at Antioch. So I left the union, and they said, "You can come back any time." But I left the union, went back to Antioch and finished my last year. While I was there, my appeal was argued in Cincinnati before three judges on the court of appeals. I remember going down for that. And one of the judges was obviously extremely hostile to me, a very elderly judge. One of them, you couldn't tell which side, he just sat and listened. And the third judge was obviously very sympathetic to me, asking very critical questions of the U.S. attorney. I later discovered that this judge had -- whose name I forget right now -- had worked for the Autoworkers Union years before. Although I don't know if he knew I did at the time. And his nomination to the federal court of appeals had been very controversial, because as a young man he'd belonged to the Socialist Party. And I had been very active, while I lived and worked in Washington, in the Socialist Party. So when the decision came down, it was a vote of two to one against me. Now, at that point, we had another choice to make, appeal to the Supreme Court. The problem was, I didn't have any money. My lawyer was not free. I already had a bill of $2,000 or so. And the chance of winning in the Supreme Court seemed to us to be very slim. So I decided that I would serve my sentence.

Now, after I graduated from Antioch in, I think, May or June of 1966, waiting for this opinion from the appeals court, I decided to go back to New Hampshire where my family lived, my mother was living there, and go to graduate school at least until the case was decided. So I entered the University of New Hampshire, in graduate school in sociology. I actually spent only about three months there. My case was decided in December of 1966. I remember getting a call from my lawyer, "You've lost. Do you still, what do you want to do?" And I said, "Well, we can't go to the Supreme Court. I'm ready to go." And he said, "Well, I have some good news. The U.S. marshal in Cincinnati who's a friend of mine, says that you don't have to report for prison until after Christmas." He said, "You can report any time up to the end of the year." This is about the middle of December. So I had two or three weeks free. And I decided -- this is wintertime in New Hampshire -- that I would go to California. I had never been to California, and one of my sisters lived there in Santa Barbara, and I would visit them. And I got out there, and it was, I had a wonderful time. It was warm and sunny, and sort of preparing myself for this experience. And I had actually before I went to prison talked to a number of people who had been in prison, mostly as draft resisters -- what the experience was like, what to expect. And nothing can fully prepare you for being in prison, but at least I had some sense of it.

AI: What was that sense? What were you...?

PI: Well, what I was basically told was, "You have some choices to make. You could cooperate and do your time, and get along and things will probably be okay, or you can resist and get in trouble and wind up in solitary confinement. It won't get you out any sooner, probably later. And you can make either choice." I decided to cooperate.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 20>

PI: Now, I have a vivid memory, and I'll tell this little story because it means something to me, actually. I was told that I could report to the federal marshal's office in Cincinnati any time before the end of the year. And I took that literally. I showed up on New Year's Eve. And just before their office closed, and they put me in a little holding cell in their office in the federal courthouse to be transferred to the county jail in Cincinnati to be held there before I was transferred to a federal prison. I didn't know which one I would go to. And so I showed up, turned myself in, had a very pleasant, shook hands with the federal marshal, a very nice man. He was the first federal marshal in the country who was black. And he said, "Well, we're going to take you over to the prison, to the county jail later on. But for a while, you'll have to sit in here." A little holding cell. And one of the deputy marshals came over, and he said, "Is there anything I can get you? You've got a couple hours to wait." And I said, "Well, could you get me a copy of the New York Times?" [Laughs] And there was one newsstand in Cincinnati right across the street from the federal courthouse -- and I knew this because I had lived there -- where you could get the New York Times. And he went over and got me a copy of the New York Times. So I sat there reading it in this cell while I waited to go to jail.

And when I went, they took me over to the Hamilton County jail in Cincinnati, and I realized right away, this is a terrible place, overcrowded, noisy. I was a federal prisoner, not a local or state prisoner, and I was not even really supposed to be there. But I spent about a week in that jail waiting to be transferred. And the thing I remember the most is that most of the, about half of the inmates there were white and half were black, and they kept pretty much to themselves. It's not rigidly segregated because we'd, it wasn't a big prison, it's just a local jail. And I wound up for four or five days that I was there getting to know a group of black inmates. And we would sit around and sing gospel music. And from my days in the Civil Rights movement, the sit-in movement, I loved singing gospel music. And the white prisoners in there thought I was something very strange. But, and there's a big difference, a local jail, it's noisy and crowded all the time. They don't turn the lights off, and it's, and the food is terrible. And people kept saying, "You're so lucky. You're going to a federal prison. You get regular meals. We have to sit here."

AI: Well, what was going through your mind at this time as you're mentally preparing yourself to serve your sentence in prison? Did you, had you started formulating anything yet about the future, thinking, "What I'm going to do during my prison time and then after." Had this experience of the trial and this extremely negative experience with the judge, your first judge if, had this had an effect on your thinking and plans for the, the coming years after that?

PI: Truthfully, I didn't have any long-range plans. I just wanted to get through the prison experience. I had pretty much decided that I didn't want to go back to the union and that I wanted, because I'd been in graduate school before I left for prison just for two or three months, that I wanted to go back to graduate school. I wasn't quite sure what I was going to study. I had no idea at that time of going to law school or being a lawyer. So I had been advised by several people who'd been in prison to use your time productively. That's one reason I didn't want to resist because they just throw you in a cell and there's nothing, literally, to do. So I decided to use it as a chance to educate myself. And you have a lot of spare time in prison. I could read. I didn't realize at the time how hard it was to get reading material, but that was my plan. And in fact, since I was in prison for almost two and a half years, I did use that time.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 21>

AI: And, excuse me. Where was that? Where were you?

PI: Well, I started out, after the Hamilton County jail, they sent me, drove me in a car with two other prisoners up to Milan, Michigan, federal correctional institution about 30 miles from Detroit, very small town. And this was a youth correctional facility, basically. In fact, I was then twenty-six years old. I was one of the oldest inmates in that prison. Most of them were in their late teens and early 20s. They were there on what were called youth correction sentences, what prisoners called a "zip six." You had a sentence that could be anywhere from zero to six years. And getting out early depended on your behavior.

So most of the inmates there, they were in there for things like interstate auto theft, taking a stolen car across the state line, which is a federal crime. Number of moonshiners from Kentucky and Tennessee, very interesting people. And a large group, about fifty Jehovah's Witnesses. I'd never met any Jehovah's Witnesses before then. They were all there for violating the draft, because Jehovah's Witnesses claim exemptions as ministers, and they all claim to be ministers. Well, they have no formal ministry in the Jehovah's Witness, the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society. I learned a great deal about Jehovah's Witnesses. Got to know them pretty well. They tried their very best to convert me the whole time I was in Milan. Very nice guys, most of them married with families, even though they were very young and totally dedicated. I mean, to give up a family, particularly when you have young children, and go to prison voluntarily is tough. I didn't have children. So, at any rate I got to know them very well, admired them, had long debates with them about theological doctrine and evolution, which they opposed vehemently.

And truthfully, the seven months I spent in Milan were not bad at all. I had a very easy job. I worked for the Protestant chaplain, who was a black Baptist minister, very, very nice person. He would even take me out of prison on Sundays to visit in Ann Arbor, which was nearby, go to church there. So it wasn't a bad experience at all. And I would have been very happy to spend my entire sentence in Milan. But I got into trouble. And the reason I got into trouble was that when the Vietnam War was getting more and more bad for the United States, the Jehovah's Witnesses in Milan, most of them, were allowed to get out of prison during the day, what was called work release. Most of them were skilled construction workers: electricians, carpenters, plumbers. And they were allowed to go out of prison and work regular jobs for regular pay. Some of them made more than the guards in the prison. And they'd come back at night. And this was a way to support their families. And the prisons had work release programs for nonviolent inmates. And suddenly an order came down from Washington, "Stop all outside programs." They couldn't go out to work and they couldn't go out to church. And I decided, took it upon myself to protest what was happening to them. And I contacted people I'd known and worked with in Washington, members of Congress. I can't remember exactly who, but they were on committees that dealt with the federal Bureau of Prisons. And the letters I sent out to them were read and intercepted.

And I was suddenly awakened one night and told that I was being transferred. And it was quite obviously retaliation for what I was doing. In fact, they didn't even tell Reverend Bivens who I was working for, that I was leaving. Took me out in the middle of the night and drove me down to Terre Haute, Indiana, federal penitentiary. And I didn't stay there long because I was, and they wouldn't even tell me where I was going. It wound up that I was being transferred to Danbury, Connecticut, but -- where there's another federal prison. But I spent what was probably only five or six days but seemed like forever, in Terre Haute. This was a real penitentiary -- bank robbers, murderers, people like that. And it was also, it's in southern Indiana. It's an old, old prison, huge stone walls, a place that was run both by, the inmates and the guards, by the Klan, the Ku Klux Klan. Southern Indiana had been a Klan stronghold. This was a rigidly segregated prison. This was in the late 1960s. This was not supposed to happen, but it was rigidly segregated. And I got into trouble in Lewisburg, I mean, in Terre Haute. In fact, I was threatened -- I can't remember whether he threatened to kill me or just to lock me up -- but threatened by one of the guards, the lieutenants, because I had written a letter outside saying, "Help. What are they doing? Where am I going? Nobody will tell me anything." And he said, "You're at our mercy. You're going to stay here until you rot." And we don't, and I had integrated the dining room, the big, huge cafeteria where the inmates had their meals -- all blacks on one side, all whites on the other side. And I had sat on the wrong side. And I was told that I shouldn't do this. And so that was one experience that I came close to deciding not to cooperate anymore, and just resisting. But then I was suddenly moved from Terre Haute to Danbury, Connecticut, back to a fairly easy place to do time. And I spent eighteen months or so in Danbury and went back to cooperating, working in an office, typing parole reports, doing lots of reading, and learning a lot about American history that I had never known before.

<End Segment 21> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 22>

AI: So it sounds like you had quite a variety of experience at these three institutions. And as you had been warned ahead of time, you did have to make those choices on how you were going to behave and get through it. Let me ask you one question that occurred to me is that you commented on many times, the cordial treatment that you received outside of the Terre Haute experience. And that's curious to me because at the time the Vietnam War was becoming very contentious, and the U.S. was...

PI: Losing.

AI: ...losing. And I'm surprised that you, as someone who would be perceived as a draft resister, a "draft dodger" in the terms of that time, that you would receive such cordial treatment from people who were in this criminal justice system, who might...

PI: Well, actually that wasn't always the case. For example, when I was first sent to Danbury, Connecticut, which was known as a white-collar prison, the closest federal prison in New York City, a lot of doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers, white-collar criminals who were sent there, mostly older. A lot of Mafia members, in fact, were sent there who, for federal income tax violations and things. And they were all non, it was a medium security prison, not a bad place to do time. But one thing, when I first got there I was put in a cubicle with another inmate, an older guy. And somehow he found out, and I don't think I told him, but he found out that I was a draft resister. Well, he claimed to be a survivor of the Bataan Death March in World War II. I don't know if that was true or not. But, at any rate, he became extremely agitated and threatened to injure me. And, in fact, I had to go to the prison authorities and say, "I'm being threatened." And he was eventually moved and sent to another prison.

But one of the interesting things about Danbury at that time, and this was in 1968, '67 and '68, and -- I remember Dr. King was assassinated while I was in Danbury, and they locked down the whole prison and separated all the white inmates and all the black inmates which they hadn't done before -- was that almost without exception the black inmates and the Hispanic inmates were very much opposed to the war for the very simple, obvious reason that they were the ones getting killed, disproportionately, in Vietnam. And they saw it as a white people's war against colored people. And this was the time when Muhammad Ali made his famous statement. He went to prison for violating the draft. And Muhammad Ali made the statement, he said, "No Vietcong ever called me 'nigger'" And so there was polarization even within the prison. I remember the white prisoners in a state prison in Louisiana all signed a petition volunteering to go to Vietnam and fight as a way to get out of prison.

And there was one episode -- I'll just tell this one story about prison. Every Saturday night they showed a movie in the cafeteria. And the inmates would segregate themselves pretty much by race. Not rigidly, but the whites would sit in the front, the blacks behind them and the Puerto Ricans and others in the back. I usually sat in the middle section. Well, one of the movies they showed was the Green Berets starring John Wayne. And there's a scene in the Green Berets -- movie about the war in Vietnam -- where the Green Berets, the elite army troops, come swarming into this Vietcong village in helicopters. They blow everybody away on the ground with their machine guns from the helicopters, jump out of the helicopters, run over, pull down the Vietcong flag, which was flying in the village, and run up the American flag. And at this point in the movie, all the white inmates erupted in cheers. And then, or earlier in the movie -- I got this backwards -- but earlier in the movie, the Vietcong overrun one of the American bases, and the black and Hispanic inmates all cheered. So when John Wayne came storming back to raise the American flag, and at that point they shut down the movie. The guards realized that there might be a riot. And they shut down the movie. We never saw the end of that movie because there was so much racial polarization over the war. And that, it brought home to me what I'd already known, but many people don't realize is that this really was a war about race. That the whole way Americans thought about and talked about and treated the Vietnamese, you know, they were all "slopes" and "gooks" and "slant-eyes." A lot of the resistance within the military to the war in Vietnam came from black and Hispanic soldiers who suddenly realized that they were being sent to kill other "colored" people, and this was something they didn't want to do or couldn't do.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.