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AI: Well, then, I wanted to ask a little bit more, kind of following along this train of what you had been doing in the relocation and property management work, because, as you had mentioned before we started the interview, that at first, I think you were a little hesitant to go into that area?

HM: Yes, I was. I had, by that time, been in the field of intergroup relations, as it then became known, for about ten years. But I was looking for a job, and referred to the director of the Oakland Redevelopment Agency. And he offered me the job of Relocation Director. I said, "Well, it sounds very interesting, but I'm not sure that I want to leave the field of intergroup relations. "Well," he said, "if you don't think relocating 4,000 Negroes in Oakland isn't going to be race relations, I don't know what you're talking about." And he sold me. That year, well, that project, I was given the most wonderful support group. The agency had a contract with the Council of Social Agencies in Oakland, which had an inspired director. And so I had two professionals on my staff representing the council. One was a social worker who had worked in the Alameda County Welfare Department, and he knew the rules better than most social workers. And the other was a community relations specialist. So the social worker, whenever we ran into problems of a family being relocated, not having enough money or not having furniture and things like that, Warren could go to the Welfare Department or to the military, wherever there might be money, get the welfare grant increased as necessary, get this veteran his benefits that he hadn't realized he was entitled to, and so he was a great help in that aspect of relocation. My community relations man would go out into the communities where our people were being relocated, and he would see to it that the community was expecting the family, and there would be representatives from Girl Scouts, or the Camp Fire Girls, or the Boy Scouts or whatever, to make sure that the family was integrated into the community. Well, we had a pretty wonderful relocation experience, but when I moved to the Los Angeles agency, the Los Angeles social work community was not of the same feelings, and I was not able to reproduce my two wonderful auxiliary staffpeople, and so although I think we did a reasonably good job, it was not the exciting one that we had had. And the Council of Social Agencies had a special committee chaired by Nick Petris who was, I guess he was a senator then, I'm not sure, in the state legislature. And we had people from the major social agencies who would hear some of our problem cases, and recommend to us how might, we might handle them when we hadn't been able to solve the problem ourselves. So we had a wonderful experience in Oakland.

AI: Well, I'm wondering also, to be in such a position, such a public position in a public agency that was really responsible for carrying out some major shifts in the populations, and quite visibly, because of moving, well, four thousand people, I'm wondering if your agency or you ever came under at-, well, I should say attack, but negative commentary from the news media or people in politics?

HM: When we opened our site office in West Oakland, we were picketed for a year by people protesting relocation. Yes, there was considerable opposition, but we had a very good administration, the mayor had a housing committee of which I was a member, and it didn't stop us. And the interesting thing is that there was noth-, nothing personal between the pickets and the staff. And when we would have, somebody would have a flat tire when his car was parked out in front, a staff member, the pickets would help fix the flat tire. [Laughs] And so it was friendly agree to disagree. So there was nothing threatening about it. But we persevered. And when we would have public hearings about additional projects, of course, there would still be the people who had all the dire stories, the bad effects of relocation. Same thing down in Los Angeles.

AI: What, for people who don't know about that era, what were some of the things that people were so afraid of? Why were they so strongly against this type of relocation?

HM: Well, for one thing, basically, urban renewal started out as "slum clearance." So we were viewed as going in and displacing the most vulnerable part of the population. And I think people did not appreciate how much the staff worked to help people, and all they saw was slum clearance. And the bad effects, people who had to give up their businesses and leave their home neighborhoods and go out to strange places, and there were those who suffered psychologically as, of it and so on. And the unfortunate thing was that in the early days, it would be total clearance, pretty much. There were generally possibilities for owner participation, which meant that somebody that owned property and had the resources to hang on to it and redevelop it in line with the new plan, were allowed to do it. But by and large, it was buying up blocks and blocks of slum housing that was beyond repair, and then selling it at discount prices to developers who would go in and generally -- although they tried to have some low and moderate income housing included -- it was a gentrification situation with not much opportunity for the people who had been displaced. Well, over time it became not slum clearance but urban renewal, with emphasis upon rehabilitating housing and helping businesses to upgrade and remain in the community, and the whole game was changed. But I was working in projects primarily that were the old slum clearance model. But you get very little of that today in the urban renewal agencies.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.