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EK: You had spoken earlier a little bit about kind of the impact that the program has had on you, especially in hindsight.

LJ: Yeah.

EK: Do you want to add anything to that?

LJ: Yeah, it's funny, as I tell people now about it, and especially in today's day and age and today's political climate, to look back... it had an impact on me then, but to look back on it now, I think it's even more meaningful and it just... to look back on a group of people who were U.S. citizens, were living in this country, who had everything taken from them for no reason. And I don't know that now that would be recognized and dealt with the way it was, and I don't know that you could ever give somebody back what's taken from them in that circumstance. But to at least be able to acknowledge the wrongdoing, to in some way address it, I got it then in my twenties, but now that I'm older and have my own family and I can look back and see just how horrible that would be to have everything taken. It does, it was a very... I'm honored that I had the chance to work on that. Because I don't know that that, unfortunately, would happen now. I think there's other situations where it should, and I don't know that it will again, at least anytime soon. So it was definitely a special program.

EK: Do you recall being approached by people who were involved with the Tuskegee reparations or the Black Farmers groups?

LJ: I do remember a little bit of that. I feel like, at some point, I don't remember a lot of details about that, but I do think, yeah, we did start to hear from other groups who said, "Hey, how can you help us?" or, "What can you do?" and unfortunately for us, it was kind of out of our scope of what we could handle, but we did have a lot of that. And again, that leads back to, the community was so instrumental in getting the law passed and then getting things, helping get things processed, that I do think a lot of other groups of people took notice and said, "Wait, it can work, so how can we do the same thing?"

EK: Do you have any others that you want to mention, about their contributions to the program?

LJ: Other...

EK: Other people that you know, who kind of generally, who I'm speaking with, this go around?

LJ: We had, like I said, we had people come and go, but we had probably, we had a core group of maybe ten to fifteen who were there for the bulk of the program. Bob Bratt was the first administrator, and then we had a couple other administrators after him. But it was Joanne Chiedi who hired me as a full-time employee after I graduated from college after I'd interned. She, for a long time, she was a deputy overseeing logistics, and then kind of took over the administration in the later years and really kind of dealt with the day-to-day, all of the processing of that, and kind of spearheaded all of our efforts. But we had some people who worked, who oversaw all of our contractors, we had two big contracting groups, Aspen Systems and C-A-C-I, CACI, who had contractors in and out over the years. And we had some contractors who were with us for a very long time, and we had some who came and went a little faster. But Pat Nolan who oversaw Aspen...  Aspen, particularly in the beginning of the program, put a large number of contractors in the office and she had the job of managing them. And it was a big job, because it was a constant need, and needs fluctuated, and people got moved around to work on different stages of case development, then work on payments as payments started to be issued. That was a big job, and she did it well. And then the people that I worked with day to day for years and years, Aaron Zajic and Cynthia London and Angela Gantt, and you, and Tink Cooper. It was great, because that core group of us, I feel like, was there for so long working on things, by the end, it was just very easy because we just had a shorthand for everything, we'd been through so many, kind of... by five years in, I felt like we'd seen kind of every case type we were going to see. And we just knew, everybody knew what their role was, and it was long hours and it was a lot of work, but it was a very easy group to work with.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2019 Emi Kuboyama. All Rights Reserved.