<Begin Segment 8>

TI: So, Bob, we had just talked about how you started selling insurance for Knights of Columbus.

BS: Yes.

TI: And how you were, how you met Walt, I think you, did you, yeah, you talked about Walter Hubbard, meeting him.

BS: Yes.

TI: So this is kind of the beginning of your sort of social activism, social justice activism.

BS: Right.

TI: So let's get into it. So tell me about Walter Hubbard and...

BS: So Walter Hubbard was, he was president of the Catholic Interracial Council of Seattle. And at that time we had an archbishop, Archbishop Thomas Connolly, and he was becoming a champion in the Civil Rights Movement locally, with the local clergy, and so the Catholic Interracial Council of Seattle was born. [Coughs] Excuse me, start over again. Seattle became pretty prominent in the Civil Rights Movement because Archbishop Thomas A. Connolly is, his heart was in the Civil Rights Movement. And Walter Hubbard started the Seattle chapter of the Catholic Interracial Council with the blessing, you might say, of the archbishop. The Catholic Interracial Council would be the civil rights arm of the archdiocese. It's not officially, but it'd be an arm. And so there were a couple of demonstrations, a couple of meetings about the movement, Civil Rights Movement, and how the Catholic Church should be, locally, should be involved in the, in this struggle for civil rights. And we're talkin' about the mid '60s. Walter came up to me one day and said, "Bob, the Catholic Interracial Council's gonna sponsor this march on open housing." It was a march on supporting legislation for open housing that would allow blacks and other minorities to purchase housing anywhere in the city of Seattle. Seattle, in all these neighborhoods in Seattle there were these covenants where owners of the homes did not have to, they didn't want to sell their homes -- when they were, time to sell it -- to people of color, or Jews or, these covenants were very restrictive on who you could sell your property to. So the open housing movement became strong, and Walter said, Bob, come to the march. So I says, okay, I guess I -- Walter's my drinking buddy, so I said okay. So I go to the march. It's at St. James Cathedral, and Walter says, "Bob, why don't you hold this pole, this banner? There'll be another guy holding it over there and you don't have say nothing. You don't have to sing, you don't have to say anything. Just hold the banner as we march." And it was a November afternoon and it was rainy and windy, and I'm struggling to hold this damn banner, right, and I don't dare, I mean, I don't dare drop it, but it's really heavy 'cause it's blowing. And none of the other guys around, these beautiful Catholic people, they weren't willing to take it from me, right? 'Cause they knew it was gonna be, anyway, after that, after that march ended at the cathedral, all I could think of, I'll never join one of these marches again, ever. So I said, Walter, that was really mean, all this kind of stuff. He says, "You did a good job." So the next morning in the front page of the paper, of the Catholic paper, here I am holding the banner, Bob Santos, Catholic Interracial Council. I said, hey, that's pretty cool. I got media already.

So I started attending meetings, of course, and we were aligning ourselves with some of the other, Catholic Interracial Council was meeting at St. Peter Claver Center. That was their meeting place. And it was an organization called CARITAS; it was Community Action, Remedial Instruction, Tutoring, and Assisted Service, CARITAS. And it was a tutoring, a tutoring school that was funded by the state, and the responsibility of CARITAS was to match up students that were in a remedial program one on one with either high school seniors or college students so they'd get one to one tutoring to help them out in their schoolwork. So this old St. Peter Claver Center was the old Maryknoll school where I went to school and as a teenager hung out at St. Peter Claver Center at the dances and stuff, so it was like me returning home attending these meetings at the auditorium at St. Peter Claver Center, Catholic Interracial Council. And we would have banquets and raise money for some of the causes in the community, and Walter Hubbard was executive director of CARITAS program. And people would put the CARITAS program together with this Catholic Interracial Council, which really was no connection. CARITAS was not a Catholic program. It was just a tutoring program that happened to based at St. Peter Claver Center. So when Walter was offered a job as civil rights officer for King County, he asked me to apply for his job as executive director of CARITAS, so I applied for the job and got interviewed, and I actually got appointed to that job. So as executive director of CARITAS I had, it was my responsibility to go to all these schools to recruit tutors to, for one-on-one tutoring programs for the kids, mostly black kids, that were having problems. They weren't all black. Some of 'em were Asian kids, some of 'em were white kids, but ninety percent were black kids, and it was a very successful tutoring program, a very popular program. The St. Peter Claver Center, we had the old church, the auditorium under the church, and then we had a bank of classrooms, and there was a guy named Father Harvey McIntyre. Harvey was the pastor of Immaculate Conception Church up the street, but the archbishop had Harvey McIntyre, Father McIntyre, manage St. Peter Claver Center, to rent out the classrooms to community groups and rent out the auditorium. And since I was the, since I was on site as director of CARITAS, Father McIntyre said, "Bob, why don't you become my assistant and then you do the renting out, you do all that kind of stuff? You have a staff and they can take care of the rental and all the books and all that stuff." I said that's cool. So some of the first people that came to us were Elmer and Aaron Dixon. They were, they are, they were the leaders of the local Black Panther Party, the chapter, Seattle chapter.

TI: And before, so when Father McIntyre was in charge, did these groups use the St. Peter Claver Center?

BS: They weren't, not so much yet. There was a Catholic women's group that met there. They were called the Marion Club. They were elderly women. My aunt was part of the women's group, and they met there once a week for tea and coffee and talked about social issues. And there was another Native American group that would meet there once, once a month, and they were the Blackfeet Indians from Montana whose families moved to Seattle, and they'd get together once a month at St. Peter Claver Center, just sort of a tribal family get together. But they were the only two groups that, when I became director of CARITAS, they're the only groups that I remember meeting there.

TI: Okay, so I just want to establish, so before you had that responsibility, there were a couple of groups and they would be probably groups that the Catholic Church would have no problems with using that facility.

BS: Yeah.

TI: And before we get into these other, other groups, I just wanted to ask a couple other questions. Archbishop Connolly, did you meet with him? Did you know him personally?

BS: Father McIntyre is the one that met with him a lot. I met with the archbishop several times, sometimes under stress, and I'll get to that later.

TI: Okay, so we'll get that. The other question was, we're talking about the '60s, I was just curious, the influence of having President Kennedy, a Catholic, become president and his sort of stance in terms of social justice and all that, I mean, what was the influence of Kennedy on you and other Catholics during this time?

BS: I think the influence of the Kennedy administration on Catholics locally -- I don't know about anywhere else -- was very strong, because this was the height of the Civil Rights Movement in the South, where the Attorney General, Bobby Kennedy, had to send down FBI agents to the South and at one point sent the, called out the National Guard in Mississippi and Alabama to protect the rights of black kids trying to integrate the schools. So Kennedy had an impact on many Catholics around the nation, but in Seattle the impact was very, very positive, that the archbishop and a lot of the priests and many of the nuns felt very comfortable getting involved in the Civil Rights Movement because of the Kennedy factor.

TI: And how about you personally? Was that something that you were kind of paying attention to also in terms of what the Kennedy administration was doing?

BS: I wasn't that involved in the Civil Rights Movement, but I, I was interesting in watching, when I could, some of the issues that the Native Americans were having on their fishing rights issues on the Puyallup River. That was local, that was on the local news. Even before the local civil rights movement with Tyree Scott and the black movement, the Indian fishing right movement was heating up, and this was in the late '50s and into the '60s, where the traditional Indian fishing rights were being, were being compromised by local commercial fishermen and there were problems on that river. Remember Marlon Brando would come into town and sit in a canoe out in the river and highlight, and that would bring the attention of the Indian issues on, the fishing rights issue to a national prominence because Marlon Brando came here and then Jane Fonda, she followed and she became part of the fishing rights movement along with her anti...

TI: Anti war.

BS: Vietnam War issues. So when Jane Fonda started showing up on the river I said, hey, I could get involved in this. So I started following what was going on there actually, not physically going down there yet, but I started following that issue in the newspapers and on television. Back at St. Peter Claver Center, Aaron and Elmer Dixon, they want to start their Black Panther breakfast program and they asked us at St. Peter Claver Center whether they could use the kitchen and the auditorium during the school week for their breakfast program, and Father McIntyre said, "Bob, that's pretty cool. Give 'em a key." And so that's going on, they're having their breakfast program, and after a couple weeks Father McIntyre comes up to me and says, "Bob, have they paid any rent yet?" And I'm thinking, I said, "No, Father." He said, "Well here's an invoice, and why don't you hand it to Aaron or Elmer Dixon?" So the next morning I, after the breakfast program and they're milling around, I start walking up to Aaron and Elmer Dixon, and when I looked up they were about eight feet tall. And, "Yeah, Mr. Santos, can I help you?" And I says, "Um, how's everything going?" You know, oh, fine, fine. I take the invoice and I place it behind me, and we're just chatting and stuff like that, program's going good, there's twenty, twenty-five kids coming down. I turn around and I walk away. And McIntyre said, "Did you get the money?" I said, "You know, Father, they're really the Lord's work." So he lets the archbishop know that these guys are doing the Lord's work and we shouldn't charge them. Well, the word gets around, so all these other civil rights groups, they start calling to have their meetings at that little auditorium. One of them is a group called the Central Area Contractors Association, Jim Takasaki's a member of that.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.