<Begin Segment 11>

TI: So I'm guessing that some, there were quite a few people who weren't really happy with all this, and because the Claver Center, St. Peter Claver Center was such a center for a lot of this activism, did the Catholic Church come under pressure to kind of put the screws on you guys?

BS: Oh yeah. Yes.

TI: So tell me about that. What happened?

BS: The archbishop was under a lot of pressure to stifle the movement from his groups. And I just remembered, and a group of Indians met there one day and it was Bernie Whitebear, and those Indians, they were planning the occupation of Fort Lawton at that time. And the FBI was sort of milling around the corners, and you could tell who they were. They were in, they were in their jeans and their lumberjack shirts. They all dressed alike. They tried to blend in, right? None of the demonstrators wore lumberjack shirts, and these guys were all white and they had all their hair trimmed good, and they were sort of cool, you know? And we knew who they were, but there was a lot of that going on. A guy named Jim Yearby was with the police department, he called, and we're at St. Peter Claver Center and Jim Yearby called Tyree one day -- no, no. Jim Yearby called Walt Hubbard one day and said, Walter -- 'cause Walter was still involved in Seattle Interracial Council -- and there was this system, Sonitrol system that would pick up sounds. You hired the Sonitrol company for...

TI: Like security?

BS: Security. So they picked up noise, and so the police, the police chief wanted Sonitrol to open up the mikes during meetings.

TI: So they could eavesdrop onto what's...

BS: To eavesdrop, and Sonitrol called Walter and said, "We're getting calls from the police department that they want to eavesdrop." And so Walter tells me, I tell Tyree, and we tape up all the, all the mikes that are up in the walls and stuff and had our, had our meetings that way. But then we lost control of security for several weeks while meetings were going on. So a lot of that kind of stuff was happening.

TI: But keep talking about, then, the pressure on Archbishop Connolly and...

BS: There was a lot of pressure on Archbishop Connolly, but he was a very stubborn, stubborn man, and he started instituting some programs that would bring the church even closer to the Civil Rights Movement. He started a project called Project Equality that would, that would force all church related business to do business with companies that had opened up their businesses to minorities, companies that integrated. And he, a lot of money was going through the archdiocese to these contractors and to these firms that did business with the archdiocese, and so he started up this program called Project Equality, and that was a big issue with a lot of companies who had to scurry around and start hiring minorities so they could keep their contracts with the archdiocese. That was a bigger issue than the construction issues.

TI: So not only was he, so he was walking the talk.

BS: Yeah, he was walking the talk.

TI: I mean, not only was he supportive with groups using it, but he would change the business practices of the archdiocese.

BS: Exactly.

TI: That's good.

BS: He was, he's quite a leader of the, of the movement in terms of the religious sector, and there were a lot of other leaders in the religious field that were also following suit. Rabbis, the American, the American Jewish Committee, AJC, and Father Katagiri with the, I think he was Methodist, they had their movement going. Probably one of the most powerful movements was Archbishop Connolly because if he wanted support for an issue in our communities, he'd force his pastors to make announcements over the pulpit during Sunday sermon, so he got a lot of mileage out of his, the movement got a lot of mileage out of his involvement.

TI: That's good.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.