<Begin Segment 15>

AI: And I'd like to ask you a little bit about what you did, in fact, do next. After you finished the study in Seattle.

HM: Well, I went back to my home. I didn't have any connections left, so to speak.

AI: Excuse me. Your home in New Jersey?

HM: In New Jersey. So my mother said, "Well..." Oh. I had contacted the professor that I was working for when I left for Minidoka. By then he had become the president of San Francisco State. So he offered me a summer job in '46 as assistant director of the race relations workshop. Well, my mother said, "If you're gonna teach that workshop, you'd better find out what you're talking about." 'Course, by this time, I had decided that there were far more people who could teach than who had had the experience I had with another culture. And so I determined, after Minidoka, that I was going to go into race relations. So I went to the New School for Social Research, took one course from Rachael Davis DuBois, who was the intercultural specialist, and from Milton Konvits, who had worked with the NAACP legal staff in the test cases, mainly Negro civil rights. And then I headed back to San Francisco, and as a result of my work with the workshop, I was hired to develop conferences in communities in the Bay Area for the National Conference of Christians and Jews. Well, they were having problems, and after I had done, I think, about six conferences, I decided that that was enough. And then I went to work for the San Francisco Council for Civic Unity. And I worked there from, I guess it was about January '47 through 19-, September '48.

AI: Excuse me. For people who don't know some of this history, could you say a bit about the significance of the Council for Civic Unity, and nationally, its significance?

HM: The San Francisco Council for Civic Unity was a private organization. It had on its board of directors the cream of the leadership. The president of Levi Strauss, Bill Matson of the Matson line, a man who later became a regent of the University of California, the wife of a judge, Amy Steinhart Braden, whose Steinhart family contributed the Steinhart Aquarium in Golden Gate (Park). It was really top-level social and leadership. So they were a highly respected group, and we had an executive who was very talented, and we would undertake to solve the problems. For instance, we spent a whole two or three months when Willie Mays came with the Giants to San Francisco, he was having trouble finding a home. So my boss got acquainted with Willie Mays, and the outcome was a report "Housing a Giant." Well, he worked with Willie Mays and his real estate man. Willie Mays got to be such an important figure in the intercultural problems, that the mayor of San Francisco invited Willie Mays and his wife to come and live with them until he could find a home. And it was that kind of intercession and finally resolving problems that was our, really, accomplishment.

My boss had a weekly radio program -- I think it was sponsored by the Commonwealth Club, which was, again, a citywide, high leadership group that had lectures and so on. And so it was a very... by stand-, by our terms today, it would be a very conservative group, but in 1947 we were the conscience of San Francisco, I should say. Well, I decided that I needed some theory behind what I was doing, and the director of the California Council for Civic Unity arranged for me to meet Louis Wirth at the University of Chicago, who was the top expert in race relations academically. And also organizationally. So I went down to Stanford, was interviewed by Louis Wirth, he promised me a job if I would come to Chicago. And so, under his sponsorship, I turned up in Chicago and worked for Louis Wirth, first with the American Council on Race Relations, and then I was awarded an Anti-Defamation League fellowship for a year. And I, meanwhile, was getting my Ph.D. And after Louis Wirth died, it fell to me to wrap up his research legacy with all of the students that he had been supervising. Now, I wasn't in a position as a fellow Ph.D. candidate to critique their work. But I was the one who saw to it that it was moving along, and I was the liaison between the faculty and the, the students. And then from there, I went back to the Council for Civic Unity, and became assistant director. And then when my boss left to become head of the Fair Employment Practice Committee of the city, I was not chosen to be the director, and I wound up being hired as Director of Relocation and Property Management in the Oakland Redevelopment Agency. And from then on, I was working at the local or regional level with organizations who were funded by the Federal Housing and Community Development monies to implement their programs. And after Oakland, then I moved to Los Angeles and was Director of Relocation and Property Management, and along the line I had a few consultation counseling -- consultant jobs with consultant agencies. And then when I married I came back up to the Bay Area and worked for the Association of Bay Area Governments, and from there I went to Fremont as Community Development Coordinator, until I retired in 1983.

AI: Well, this, to me, is very fascinating. Because at the time that you were doing your Ph.D. work, my, my understanding is that in the late '40s and early '50s, this was really a time of laying groundwork for really a different kind of race relationship. That groups such as the ones you were working with really believed in solving the problems of...

HM: Yes.

AI: ...perhaps "racial hatred" might be too strong a word, but prejudices, discriminations, and so forth. And so I'm, I'm so interested to hear, at that time, what were some of the visions that were being discussed? A vision of a new relationship among the races in America. How, how did people speak of those things at the time?

HM: I don't think they spoke of them in those terms. I was very fortunate, because at the time I was at the university, I think under the leadership of Louis Wirth, who was the director of the American Council on Race Relations, they developed the organization called the National Association of Intergroup Relations Officials, which was made up of the professional staffs of the kinds of agencies that I had worked with. And that group met for annual meetings so that I was in touch with the directors of the Commissions on Human Relations, the private groups, the city groups, the state groups, and, oh, I guess there were perhaps 250 or more of these professionals. And we would exchange letters and experiences, and my goodness, when we get together for our annual meetings, it was like a family reunion. And by 19-, oh, mid-1950s, the profession of intergroup relations had developed to the point where instead of having, say, one race relations specialist in a federal agency like the Housing and Home Finance Agency, they had several in a number, and there, I remember there was one from the navy, and several from housing agencies, and I don't know what all. And they began... and I would say there were a large proportion of Caucasians when the organization was first established. Well, by the mid-'50s, many federal agencies, particularly, were beginning to have more and more race relations specialists. And, of course, this offered opportunities for minorities and a different kind of professional developed, so that it was not quite the idealistic group that NAIRO had started as. And I stayed with them through about 1959. I coordinated the annual conference in San Francisco and then, because by that time I was with the Oakland Redevelopment Agency, it was not considered quite appropriate for me to take such a leading role in NAIRO, as we called it. I had been on the board of directors and so on. And I just gradually phased out.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.