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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview B-0010, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Igal Roodenko was born to first-generation immigrants in New York City in 1917. Throughout the 1930s, Roodenko was drawn to leftist politics and pacifism. He describes the internal dilemma that he and other pacifists faced as they sought to reconcile their ideals of non-violence with their belief that Hitler's regime warranted opposition. Ultimately, Roodenko became a conscientious objector during the conflict. Rather than facing a prison sentence for his refusal to bear arms, Roodenko spent most of World War II in a camp for conscientious objectors. Increasingly involved in leftist politics during the war, Roodenko participated in hunger strikes while at the camp and eventually did serve time in prison. Following the war, he utilized his experiences with peace groups and Ghandian nonviolence to become a leader in the burgeoning civil rights movement. Roodenko speaks at length about his participation in the Journey of Reconciliation in 1947. Already a member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Roodenko helped to organize the Journey, an interracial endeavor to test the Supreme Court's ruling in the Irene Morgan case (1946) as it applied to public transportation in the South. Roodenko describes the strategies CORE employed as they tested segregation policies on buses for Trailways and Greyhound. In Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Roodenko and fellow activists were arrested for refusing to abide by the bus driver's demand that black and white passengers not sit together. He recalls the threat of mob violence against the activists and the role of Chapel Hill minister Charles Jones in helping them escape town safely. Roodenko and the other CORE activists lost their court appeal and he spent thirty days working on a segregated chain gang in North Carolina. His recollections in this interview help to illuminate activist strategies, interracial cooperation, and reasons for limited success as the civil rights movement began to build momentum in the late 1940s.
Igal Roodenko came of age during the 1930s and became increasingly involved in leftist politics during those years. During World War II he embraced philosophies of nonviolence and pacifism and worked in a camp for conscientious objectors during the conflict. He became a member of CORE during its formative years and participated in the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation, an interracial endeavor to test segregation policies on buses in the South.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
I'm Igal Roodenko, born in New York in 1917, went though the New York City School System. Went off to Cornell in the early thirties and got a degree in Horticulture, and shortly after I got out, we got into World War II. I found myself being a conscientious objector, and was recognized by my draft board as one, but after a little while, felt I could no longer cooperate with conscription. I felt the state, any state, has no right to conscript people for any reason, least of all organized murder. So I refused to do alternative service any further, and ended up with a three year jail sentence, of which I did about twenty months. When I got out in early '47, I almost immediately got involved in a CORE project, the first CORE project in the South, the Journey of Reconciliation.
That is what brought me to North Carolina and Chapel Hill, where I was arrested, and we had to do a sentence of thirty days on a road gang, of which I did three weeks up near Reidsville. Then after that, I became a printer, a pretty good printer. I eventually had my own shop up in New York for about fifteen years, taught typography at Pratt Institute part-time for a couple of years. Continued my involvement with the War Resisters Leagure all this time, on the executive committee, then vicechairman, and for four years, national chairman.
I sold my shop a few years ago, and spent most of my last few years traveling for the War Resisters League. A great deal of talking and organizing. This is my major committment now, not so much to the War Resisters League as an institution, but to the idea that the human species has two or three generations at most to learn to live with itself, and otherwise if we don't learn to deal with our conflicts in a non-lethal manner, we stand a very good chance of destroying ourselves, perhaps destroying all life on this planet. To me, the key word is non-violence. It is a much misused word, but until we find a better word, I am addicted to it. There is my bio.
Igal I think that because of the overwhelming personality of Dr. King and the dramatic events of the late fifties and early sixties, most people believe that the civil rights movement began in the early fifties with the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and know very little of the civil rights activities of the forties, much less the thirties, A. Philip Randolph and that crowd. But in April of 1947, you were involved in a dramatic happening, the Journey of Reconciliation, the first freedom ride into the South. How did that get started? Who planned it, who organized it, what was the idea behind it?
I'd have to go back a little. The World
At any rate, here we were refusing to participate in the war against
Hitler, and we had to find ways to rationalize and so the World War II
period, those of us who were in CO camps and in prison—I'm not saying
very many of us were involved in this— but quite a number were involved
in the soul-searching. We found that we had to
Finally, we came to the conclusion that the area in American life which most called for the Gandhian approach was the area of racism. The traditional methods of dealing with racist problems until then, which was that of the NAACP which was quiet education and so on, didn't seem enough. We were impressed by some of the dramatic acts of civil disobedience that Gandhi engaged in against the British government. We already had the experience of civil disobedience, by being in prison for refusing to be drafted. So that the combination between the two seemed to be a logical one.
Some of the people who came out of prison then in the mid-forties
organized the Committee on Racial Equality,
These were primarily whites?
Yes, these were white, middle-class pacifists, and largely religious,
Christian. So they worked on this roller-skating rink and won. So we
worked on this swimming pool just outside of New York City that didn'y
allow blacks in, and there were a few heads busted and people jailed,
but we won that too. The Palisades swimming pool was opened up. Then, by
'47, the idea came along that we ought to get into the belly of the
beast, that is, into the South. We had this very simplistic Yankee
attitude that this was really where the discrimination and the hatred
and so on were, and that while we weren't perfect up North, we were
pretty good. It was the old missionary attitude, my soul is alright, it
is those poor heathen African souls which need saving. So the Journey of
Reconciliation was started. The specific idea was that, in 1946, the
Supreme Court passed the Irene Morgan decision. Here was a black woman
who contesetd the Jim Crow seating in public transportation and won, the
court holding that if one held a ticket going from one state to another,
the Jim Crow laws were an undue burden on interstate traffic. We were
very excited about this, but within a year we decided we wanted to
find
Sometimes the holdup was very brief, and sometimes it was stretched out. The Greyhound buses were very cooperative, in the sense that when they saw how determined we were, they overlooked us as much as possible. They ignored it, they did not occasion any arrests. Trailways were much more difficult about this, and there must have been six or seven arrests in the course of the Trailways trip, but the charges were all dropped except in our case, and this is the Chapel Hill arrest.
The orginal plan was for Joe Felmet here, and was it Andy Johnson, Andy
was black, for the two of them to sit in the front of the bus, and I was
sitting in the back, somewhere over a wheel, and Bayard [Rustin] was
sitting somewhere behind me, and there might have been two or three
others in the bus, I don't remember. Then the bus driver got into the
bus, ready to take off, and he
How did the other passengers respond?
They were—the nice middle-class white upbringing is that if you don't
know what to do about a thing, ignore it. I do that. There was sort of a
frozen non-response there. People obviously knew what was going on, but
there was no response there. I'll get back to this in a moment. As they
were taken out—and this is one of those nice examples of non-verbal
communication—$
Were there other blacks on the bus?
I don't remember on that trip, but on some of the other trips there were, and the blacks on other trips when arrests happened would become most worried, and say in effect that you can't change the world, so be good and don't cause trouble, and come back and sit where you are supposed to. Those who would express themselves whuld express themselves that way.
To the black people who were sitting in the front?
To the black participants in the trip.
Was there a dialogue with those people?
It depended, because we were very good at talking when we were amongst
ourselves, but it takes a little more when you are among strangers, and
in a tense situation. Probably the most fearless person in the whole
undertaking was Bayard, because he had been through a great deal of this
before. When we came up forward, some woman said to us: I can understand
the first two people refusing to move, but you two are deliberately
breaking the law, the implication being that the first two happened
People started responding. The preponderance of the feeling was—and we
felt this on many parts of the trip—was that people felt that, yeah. the
law was wrong and that discrimination against blacks was wrong, but that
to shake up the thing was to make things worse. I know that by the end
of the trip, in Kentucky at one point, we had been driving along with
the integrated thing for part of our trip and there were some more
passengers who came on, or maybe the bus driver was changed along the
way, and maybe this new bus driver wanted to break this thing up, and
some white passenger spoke up and said, don't give them any trouble,
these people have been sitting together since Roanoke or wherever, and
nothing
What happened after the arrests. I'm interested in how in 1947 the local citizenry in Chapel Hill reacted.
Well . . .
Were there any demonstrations for or against the thing that had occurred? Did it get a lot of media attention?
The demonstrations that happened were not planned, and had a pretty heavy
impact upon my sweating ssystem. We were being held, we went through
Whites?
Yes, and largely, well, the center of this were the cabbies, the people who hang around the bus station anyway. Jim Peck, who was on the trip but who had not been arrested, went out to make a phone call, or to get something, and he was jostled a little, but he responded quite calm and he came back to us, and nothing further happened.
Then, suddenly, Charlie Jones came into the police station, and the
procedures were completed Charlie Jones was a minister in Chapel Hill
and still lives here, and probably the focus of integration. Of what
integrationist feeling there was in the state of North Carolina, he was
it. He had integrated his church before anyone else had. I am told that
two elderly parishioners of his picketed his church every Sunday morning
during services because he had integrated his church. The Congress of
Industrial Organizations, the
Someone called Charlie . . .
We came to him when we came to Chapel Hill.
Did you have contacts in other places in the South where you were going?
Oh, yes. Part of the whole Gandhian thing was that we had a whole battery of lawyers that we could call on. Several in Richmond, Spottswood (Robinson)
Robinson, it was.
Yes. The ACLU people and the NAACP people, people we could call on in case of trouble. Part of the structure was not knowing what would happen, the people in the trip who were not the guinea pigs at any one point were absolutely ready to call on help in case anything should happen. Charlie was one such contact. He hustled us out of the police station and into his car, and he lived on . . .
Had you gotten out on bail or something?
I think so. Just as we were coming out, we saw a bunch of these guys pile into two cabs across the street . . .
I wonder why you weren't locked up?
You see the story had started coming back,
Is that just an assumption that Greyhound had instructed not to lock up?
No, I just think that the police said, we are not going to do anything
unless the driver presses charges, and the driver did not know what to
do unless he asked the parent company, and Trailways said no, don't let
it happen, and Greyhound said, no, keep it cool as you possibly can.
Charlie lived on what is Franklin, and there was a back alley between
Franklin and the street next to it, and he packed us into his car and
rushed down this back alley and we got through the back door into his
house. Just as we got in and rushed to the front window and started
closing windows and doors and pulling down windowshades and things,
these two cabs drew up in front of the house, and eight or ten men
started to cross the lawn with clubs or sticks or some|thing,
We sat around not knowing what would happen. There were a few anonymous calls in effect saying, get those nigger-lovers out of town before dark or else there is no accounting what will happen to you. Charlie had been smart enough. He had three or four daughters, and he had gotten his family out of Chapel Hill several days before, just in anticipation of what might happen. Finally we found someone who came along in two cars and just scooted us out of Chapel Hill. The assumption is that Charlie saved our lives or at least our limbs. There was no violence coming out of that. Then we proceeded on with the rest of the journey.
You wound up doing some time though?
Yes, finally we were brought to trial.
Did the Greyhound people go ahead and press charges?
Trailways did.
They brought you back or called you?
We were out on bail and the date was set, and we came down to Hillsborough County Court, was it?
Orange County.
Orange County. Andy Johnson skipped bail.
Bayard and Joe and I stood trial and were given thirty days.
What was the trial like? What arguments did the prosecution use? Could you give some detail about it?
Simply that there was a local ordinance.
Was there any media attention centered . . .
No, not at that time.
Were the local citizens interested at all?
I don't think so. At that time, we were pretty scared. In contrast to movement trials in the sixties where we tried to get as much attention as we could, we tried, we wanted this thing to go over as smoothly and as quietly . . .
How long was it from the demonstration to your court trial? Was it weeks, months.
A couple of months. That is routine experience in political trials
everywhere. You break the law and they drag out the cases and sort of
try to deal with these things one person at a time, with the hope that
the public will have forgotten about the issues. The judge could
understand Bayard as an uppity nigger, I suppose,
The Superior Court . . .
The Superior Court, and that was in Durham . . .
Hillsborough.
Alright.
Were you kept in the pokey while you appealed?
No, the bail was continued.
Did you spend some time there in the Orange County . . .
No.
We made bail immediately.
I had the feeling that they all wanted us to go away. They would have
been happy if we had forfeited the bail and the whole thing would have
been forgotten. But the trial was a peculiar one. The arrangement
before-hand was that I was to be the witness in the witness chair. We
got into a lot of contentions about what our intentions were. The lawyer
said, no wait a minute, your intent could be to burn down the White
House, but unless you start talking, really planning the thing, it is
pure nonsense.
The legal thing was that the prosecution was trying to show a conspiracy to violate the segregation statute, which is a misdeamenor punishable by two years in prison.
I don't remember any of that at all.
You lost the appeal?
We lost the appeal, and I suppose enough time has gone by so the fact can be brought out that the lawyer we had—I don't remember his name: he was the oldest and most prominent black lawyer in the state and was called the dean of the black bar in North Carolina.
Do you remember his name?
I do, but let's leave his name out of it, he's dead now, why embarrass . . .
Yes.
Why would he be embarrassed?
He couldn't be embarrassed, but let me tell you what happened. He had a couple of assistants, who were black professors of law in Raleigh. Isn't there a black law school?
No, in Durham.
They were pretty sharp, but this older man who had been practicing law
for thirty years, and this
Then finally, the thing dragged out for a year and a half . . .
Was that how it was, Joe?
I think I can clarify the legal situation. The Supreme Court reviewed the written record from the Superior Court and because our lawyer had not brought out the evidence that we were in interstate commerce, that issue was not before the North Carolina Supreme Court, and as Igal says, that issue was not considered by the North Carolina Supreme Court.
So, when you lost the appeal, what happened?
Then we had to start doing our thirty days, so Joe and I went down, and we surrendered, and we hung around a local jail for the better part of a day and maybe a night, and were finally toted over to the road gang over at Reidsville.
How was that decision made to put you on a road gang, rather than hold you . . .
That's an administrative decision of the state.
Do you think they saw this an additional form of punishment to put you on a road gang? In those days, was it humiliating to put you on a road gang?
It was very common.
I think that was the routine for a misdemeanor, local drunks and petty
crime, and minor things, you were put out on the road. I saw this old
newspaper man on the road with us, who served twelve thirty-day
sentences and in a course of one year, because he would get out on good
behavior after three weeks and get drunk in the next day or two and be
right back again. That was the routine thing for minor crimes. By the
time I was coming down there, I was really frightened. A good friend of
mine in New York said, Igal, you are going down to a place and you are
going to be in a place where people take their white supremacy quite
seriously, and you are not going to fit in there, and if you are out
What was the sweatbox?
Well, I never saw it. Do you know about it Joe?
Yes, that was solitary confinement. I don't know that it was a sweatbox, but it was solitary confinement. That was where a prisoner had to stay alone . . .
In pitch darkness.
I'm not sure of that.
What were working conditions like on the road gang?
Well, I can tell you the nice side of it. We were doing the time in the early part of the spring, like this. We left New York after a three day snow storm, and we got down to North Carolina and the sun was shining. We spent some of the time in a rock hole, which was pretty much protected from the wind. We were stripped down to the waist with the sun beating down, good hard work. A few weeks of that and I came back looking like I had been down in Miami, and I think my mother was a little bit disappointed. I think she saw herself bringing me back to health after this harrowiing experience, and after the dissipated life of the city, this was a marvelous experience for me.
Here is an amusing sidelight on this. Igal, an ethical vegetarian, had to eat Navy beans cooked in pork or not eat.
Well, it was pork and beans twenty-one times a week, and I wouldn't eat
that, and there was very little for me to eat. There would be a little
fruit in the morning, stewed peaches or something that the women in the
women's jail (State Women's Prison) would put up. But there was a can of
blackstrap molasses on every table, and the other prisoners wouldn't eat
it, because they wanted the refined molasses, but I remember my mother
said that blackstrap stuff is the most nutritious. So my meal
consisted,
What do you mean he got milk and buttermilk for those that had the money?
He would go over to a nearby farmer and buy the stuff, and the prisoners who had the money would buy the stuff. This was over and above the prison feeding.
Were the groups of whites and blacks separated?
No. The jails were segregated. We were in a white road gang. Bayard was of course in a black road gang, but he fell in with a group who were very supportive of him. He did quite a bit of organizing and agitating, and he did a sociological report on the thing that I haven't seen in a long time. His was a more positive experience. It wasn't too bad, it was pretty bad for Joe. One day he wasn't working fast enough to please one of the guards there, and the guard called him out and told him to dig faster, and Joe didn't increase his pace fast enough, and they warned him a second time and then finally they spreadeagled him and tied him to the bars for . . .
All night.
All night.
That was the only kind of punishment you saw?
Yes. Two of the prisoners had leg fetters on, they had tried to run and were caught, this was before we got there. Chains, locking their . . .
Connecting their two legs . . .
Every time they went in and out of the jail, the guard went over every link in the chain to make sure no attempt had been made to cut them apart. They slept in these things, and they slept in their clothes because of that.
Were you treated any differently because of what you had done? Did the guards know why you were there?
I am sure the guards knew. The guards there like anywhere else make a
pretense that they are just doing their job and they don't care what you
did, their job is to keep the jail running. The prisoners found out soon
enough. The very first night we were there, there was a guy who was
called Peaches, and we saw him sort of moving around and whispering to
the other prisoners and sort of looking towards us, and I got pretty
paranoid. It was, it worked out alright though, after a time. Let me put
it this way: the first few days, when people would ask me what I was in
for, I said I got into
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
You sure don't know how to chain gang, and I said what do you mean? He
said it is a funny thing about these rocks, as many as you shovel one
day, there are just as many the next day. I said, I am glad you told
Igal, were you familiar with that expose about the Georgia chain gangs that was written during the thirties. I am wondering if the experience turned out to be much less terrifying than you had been led to believe by documentary . . .
Two things, one, I believe that all expreience tends to be less
horrifying than one anticipates. I think a lot of things are just like a
dentist's drill just before it makes contact. You are sitting there in a
chair, and the thing is whirring, and you say, I will die. Then finally,
it makes contact, and it is bad, but it is not as bad as your
imagination built up. Then, the other thing is that it was more than
just exposes, back in 1940 I worked for a year in Albany, Georgia for
the Agriculture Department in an experiment station, and for a couple of
weeks there was a chain gang with chains and literally the striped
suits, and the things you see in cartoons nowadays, working on the roads
just outside of the laboratory. So I knew
You didn't have a striped suit?
No, no striped suits.
Igal, the early CORE experiences and demonstrations were a little ahead of their time in the civil rights movement, It didn't bloom until the middle fifties. The time was just not right. Why was the time not right then?
I don't know, I suppose one can become scriptural about and say there is
a season for everything and God in his own good time. I don't know. I
think that what a lot of people said to us as we started out on this
journey and after it, is that you kids are a bunch of beautiful
idealists, but you don't have any idea about what the reality is about.
I remember one man saying, absolutely sympathetic and sensitive to the
problem, do you think that in two weeks of traveling, you can undo three
centuries of body and economic slavery? If it was put to us that way, we
would have said, no we are not going to undo it, but we could start the
process toward the undoing, and the essence of what we had to say in the
dozen or so meetings we had and all the stops we had through these four
states was to say, here we have
What kind of groups did you speak to?
Black colleges, black churches. We did stop at Black Mountain College, which was the one white institution we went to.
And we spoke at a high school in Asheville. The thing I remember about that, I had never heard James Weldon Johnson's Negro National Anthem sung as beautifully as it was sung that day by a high school audience which was impressed by our presentation so much that the audience was virtually inspired.
Did you speak to any interracial groups, or have any support from the YWCA's or the Southern Regional Council, or any southern based, interracial . . .
No.
Did you try and get support in that way, and were unable to do it?
I don't know what the office was doing. It was mainly Bayard Rustin and
George Houser who or|ganized
No white contacts anywhere?
We had the thing in reverse once. We came
There was this black woman student and I sitting in the front, and three in the back, and he said, if any of us even look at one of your white women, you are ready to lynch us, and here you are riding through our part of town with black women. Catherine Johnson was the girl, and she was very outspoken, she yelled at him, you dumb nigger you don't know what these people are doing down here. They are fighting your battle, so get the hell out and shut the door, and he was totally abashed and left, and he went off.
Back in the twenties in sociology, the blacks and whites did eat together here in Chapel Hill.
I don't know about the twenties, but when I was here two years ago, I asked some of the people here in Chapel Hill to show me the place on the library steps where Eleanor Roosevelt sat having lunch with a black woman twenty-five years ago. I said if we radicals had any sense like the conservatives do, we would get together and put a bronze plaque there on the steps, and the people I asked didn't know anything about it. There are a lot of good things in our history that we ignore.
Were there any women involved in the journey?
No. That was a deliberate decision that we didn't want to add another divisive element, and I don't know how we would think about it today, but the climate of opinion, the whole way of thinking is just completely different. I imagine it was probably wise at that time. I think it would be wise to have a sexually integrated project today.
What was the followup to the project?
Nothing. We really hoped that slowly at first and then more and more students would start doing these things and breaking down the segregated seating pattern, but if there were any such, we never heard of it. We all went back to whatever our things were in Chicago or New York, and CORE limped along for a long time.
What did all these groups that you spoke to,
Well, we tried to say, now here are the patterns, and if you are concerned about a better integrated society which is what we all believe in, here is the litigational and political efforts at this, which are legitimate, and we have to give them something to work on, and this was it. You can stand pleading for decency for a long time, and this can precipitate action, and this can bring out a lot of white elements in the community that will be supportive. I think that, in our audiences that were largely black, and listened to us with a great deal of pride and appreciation, but as if it was completely off on a different planet and had nothing to do with their own lives. Would you say that . . .
Well, I wouldn't want to leave the implication that the journey was inefective . . .
No.
It wasn't. I would put it this way. There wasn't a Negro in any of the four states we traveled in who isn't today aware that he can sit anywhere in the bus that he chooses. I am not saying that this is solely the result of what we did, but I feel that our contribution was significant in the climate that exists today in race relations in those four states.
Do you see any direct lines of continuity between your activities and the black initiated southern civil rights movement, civil disobedience adopted by black students?
I can't prove it. I don't think there is any proof. Maybe there is some sociologist who can find some papers or documents that can prove it. I think that we started changing the climate. Let me think of an analogous situation: the first kids who burned draft cards or the first who refused to pay war taxes. The certainty in the country was that if you break the law, if you don't put your tax return in the mailbox by ten minutes to twelve on April 14th, then ten minutes after twelve the skies will open and an IRS agent will come down and get you; if you burn your draft card, if you think of burning your draft card. There was this famous FBI memo that J. Edgar Hoover sent out, that we want to create the feeling among these radicals that there is an FBI agent hiding behind every mailbox. In any kind of structured situation, the bulk of people really feel this, there is this terrible fear that if you break the law in any way, particularly the racial pattern, within seven minutes, the Klan is going to be there.
What we were doing, in effect was saying, now look, those things don't
happen. The skies don't fall. In that sense, I think we created the
mood, or opened up the mood
Igal, of course, one of the principal participants in the Journey of Reconciliation was Bayard Rustin. Immediately following the Rosa Parks incident, Bayard was dispatched from New York, from the War Resisters League office as a representative of the War Resisters League to assist Dr. King in the boycott. I even heard one story about how Rustin talked King out of buying a gun during that period. Can you fill us in, since you were with the League at that time, on Rustin's involvement with King?
Not too specifically. I mentioned at the beginning that the World War II experience and Gandhi made us more open to the question of how we can apply Gandhian tecniques to the racial situation. So we were constantly looking for opportunities. Some years later when the first big March on Washington occurred, Bayard engineered [it], partly because he was the only person whom the black organizations could trust, since he had no affiliation either with the Urban League or with the NAACP or the churches, the black churches. He was independent. We were constantly looking for these opportunities to engage in boycotts and public demonstrations against racist situations.
Jerry, I'd like to go back and talk about the World War Two experience a bit. Is that alright?
Yes.
When you talked about the pacifists, you disti guished between your socially concerned pacifism and religious pacifism. Before World War Two began, were you a committed pacifist so that as soon as the war began, you knew that you had to come to terms somehow with conscription?
I don't think it was quite that simple. I had no formal religious training whatsoever, and I grew up in what would be called a humanist and vaguely socialist home.
Were your parents first generation immigrants?
Yes, and it was just a matter of accident that I was born here and not in the Middle East. My parents were committed Zionists, and they had gone to the Middle East before World War I and planned to stay there, and then because all that country belonged to Turkey, when the First World War came along, they wanted to draft my daddy, so he didn't go to Canad, he came to the U.S. instead, and I was born shortly after that.
He was a draft resister?
Oh, yes. It should be pointed out that a new generation of draft
resisters comes along every three
I'm familiar with the First World War. I was in high school in 1917, I have a Quaker background, so I am familiar with pacifism.
I point out all over the country that an enormous number of people have one ancestor at least who came to the United States because they refused to serve in the English Army, the Russian Army, the Italian Army, the Swedish Army, the German Army, and that draft resistance is very central to the American experience and when people get up and start putting down draft dodgers as if it was some foreign crime, it is pure nonsense. There is no country in the world that has draft resistance as central to its experience as does the United States.
Yet, I didn't quite consider myself a pacifist in the complete term as I
do now. I still thought in what I see now as superficial political
maneuverings. I remember writing a paper at the outbreak of World War II
in which I suggested that the pacifists dicker with the War Department
and with the government, in which we would say we will cooperate with
the war if they will integrate the Army. Looking back at it now, I see
that this is pure nonsense. It is trying to mix things that didn't have
anything to do with the realities of the situation. As I say, in the
thirties I was away at school, and very much involved withJapan was raping China.
The Spanish Civil War— there I was ambivalent, pacifist in a way, but I was completely on the side of the government and against the fascist overthrow. I think I tried to do what a lot of well meaning people try to do nowadays, without making that absolute commitment to the thing; yes I am a pacifist, but. I know the Women's Strike for Peace had an enormous problem within itself at the time of the Six Day War in Israel. Until then they felt they were pacifists, and suddenly there was a war and their pacifism couldn't stand up to it.
The Peace Movement then was very split, and most people who considered themselves part of the Peace Movement between World War I and World War II supported World War II.
Right. Interesting. The anti-war groups which were not absolute pacifists
fell apart and became very weakened. There was Fred Libby's group in
Washington, the National Council for the Prevention of War, and he was
into an amount of politicking with what were then isolationist Senators
and Congressmen, and that thing fell apart. Women's International
The Fellowship of Reconciliation did hold their principles all the way through, didn't they?
Yes. The FOR and the WRL because we stayed absolutely pacifist, if anything, we grew, because at the outbreak of war, it meant that that big middle ground where people are ambivalent, simply wasn't there anymore. So people fell to one side into supporting the war, or fell into the other side of becoming absolutely committed pacifists. The groups that functioned within the middle and didn't have an absolutely pacifist position, lost a great deal.
I think, although I talk a great deal of ideology in politics and am fairly verbal, I think that people start with a hunch and spend a lot of time rationalizing the hunch, rather than the other way around. That is, the human being is an intuitive creature rather than a rational creature. We are rationalizing. Whatever it was, when the draft finally came along, I was working in Albany, Georgia at the time, and I had nobody to talk to, and I had this questionnaire to fill out and send back in ten days.
I'd sit staring at it night after night trying to add up the plusses and
the minuses, am I or am I not a pacifist, trying to be very rational
about it. What happened was that one night I would add up the plusses
and minuses, and
In contrast to that, I remember running into a professor of philosophy at
the University of Jerusalem some years after that, a colleague of Martin
Buber's. At one point in the evening I asked him whether he considered
himself a pacifist, and he said, you know, I never really had to decide.
I didn't say this to him, but here is a man whose function in society is
to help young people think through the basic questions about what life
is about, and the basic questions of life and death and organized
warfare, he hadn't thought it through himself. You take a bunch of
snotty eighteen year olds back in the United States, and the draft board
says, you've got thirty days in which to make up your mind. Then they
may change their mind, and they may do a bad job in thinking the thing
through, but they establish some ground on which to stand and on which
to function. I think this is important. This is particularly
How many CO's were in jail during World War II, do you know?
There were about 15,000 draft violators in jail, and about half of them
were Jehovah's Witnesses. They maintained they were ministers. They
don't call themselves pacifists or conscientious objectors. Finally, the
draft system, the government, came around to some accommodation. After
World War II, they were not jailed as much. Then there was a fair number
of what we would call technical violators, the kind of people whom I
felt very superior to when I first went into jail. Here am I,
conscientious objector, man of principle, and there are those draft
dodgers. But one of the great enlightening experiences for me in jail,
was that in a very few weeks of living with these draft dodgers, I began
to see that the sharp line separating us
Was there a class line between the two?
There was a class line in a sense . . .
Poor people?
Exactly. Then, I began to realize that a healthy organism reacts to the draft in a healthy way and says no. Now, if you are middle-class and college trained and articulate, you say no with a twelve page statement to the Attorney General, but if you come from the wrong side of the tracks, then you dodge, which is what the experience of these kids was all their lives. They dodged the truant officer and the cop, and so on and so forth. From some abstract point of view, you can say that standing up and saying No openly had some greater impact on the social scene, but from a personal standpoint, any kind of resistance is justified. I think this is the essence of our draft counseling all throughout the sixties. A kid would come in, and we would say, yes you can go to Canada, yes you can get a CO, yes you can go underground, you can pretend you are gay, you can get a 4-F, you can do all of this. What I did is this, these are the consequences, but you have got to find the best thing that is the most right for you.
Can you talk about the experience of COs in jail during World War II, how they were treated?
Could I go back a minute? There was something very important that happened during this era to the pacifist movement. I want to incorporate your question and ask a two-part question . . .
Before you ask that could you cut that off . . .
Did you take any bus rides and which part of the bus did you sit on?
I wasn't involved any more. When was the Jim Peck Freedom Ride into Alabama?
About '61.
Almost that amount of time elapsed . . .
Almost fifteen years.
What I wanted to know was, did you ride buses after that and did you sit where you were supposed to, or did you sit where you wanted to?
I don't recall ever submitting to the mores with respect to that issue. I would have to search my memory to give you an answer to that question. I am satisfied that I did not have to make compromises. What, does that answer your question?
I wondered, after segregation was overturned, I wonder why, having been opposed to it, I wondered why I never realized I had the freedom to go and sit in a black waiting room. It never occurred to me that this was something I could do. If I had thought of it, I think I might have done it.
Didn't segregation break down pretty quickly in this period, after 1947?
Not that I know of in 1947.
Segregation break down in 1947?
Yah.
No, I should say not:
Not in Chapel Hill.
Uh, huh, oh.
1947 was when you came to Chapel Hill on the bus?
Yes.
The question I started to ask you a minute ago, Igal, was a very complex one. After you got recognized as a conscientious objector, you went to the CO camp. While you were in the CO camp, something very important to the pacifist movement happened, and a bunch of you went to jail from the camps. What were the camps like? What about this big shift in the pacifist position in this period, and what happened in the prisons.
What was it that turned you to the question of race at this point?
Well, race was before that.
For the pacifist movement in general?
I thought you were talking about me personally. I was, like a lot of good
folk, thinking of
What were they called:
They were called work camps. Selective Service, and I think the President
of Michigan State University was the original director of Selective
Service, and a very decent guy, I think he had worked with the [American
Friends] Service Committee, set up this pattern of work camps.
They had rules that you could do your alternative service, but you had to
be at least fifty miles away from any place you had ever lived in. So
you wouldn't be a focus for anti-war activity of any kind. The other
problem is that conscientious objection is pretty much of a middle class
phenomenon. Here are people who are idealistic and dedicated and
competent in one way or another, and they found themselves digging
ditches. We didn't object to digging ditches per se, we objected to the
tremendous waste of competence when there was a shortage. There were a
lot of teachers who were CO's, and there were a lot of places in America
that needed teachers and needed them badly. We weren't given anything in
which we could put our efforts and our abilities. This kind of
accentuated a growing dissatisfaction and disillusionment with the camp
system.
I know what happened within me, and I think this is fairly typical. There
is a great deal of apprehension because, I wasn't part of this crusade
against this ultimate evil of Hitler, and there is this guilt feeling.
Two, I wasn't serving in any other way. I was cutting brush down in the
Eastern Shore of Maryland in a project, and later driving a truck on
someproject in Colorado where the resident engineer said the only reason
they are doing this thing was that they had free labor. If they didn't
have our free labor, they wouldn't do it, it wouldn't be justified, the
earthen dam we were building. There was the guilt feeling about not
being part of our generation fighting Hitler, there was the frustration
of our energies and abilities not being used. Then there
Having come to that conclusion, I had to wait for the right moment. In
this Colorado camp, there were a lot of troublemakers and we were
running a contest with the camp administration. They were trying to get
guys to leave and go in the army, and we were trying to get guys to
leave and go into prison. We had a big score-board outside on the wall
of the latrine, and we were always two or three ahead of them.2 In the course of several months, about
thirty guys broke, and refused to cooperate, left and didn't come back
and were ultimately arrested and jailed. Finally, and it was a moment
of— one has to wait for a moment of total ripeness, it isn't simply
intellectualism, it is not simply a gut decision, it is something that
you have to live with—when we got word that a group of our people and
Dellinger was one of them at Lewisberg Penitentiary in Pennsylvania had
gone on a hunger strike because of excessive mail censorship. This mail
censorship can be really petty. They will let Playboy in and won't let
the Peacemaker in, or something like that. That was it. I'd never met
Dellinger, but
Jerry, was that an answer to your question? What was the change in the pacifist movement.
I think more significance is attached to it in historical accounts. It was the sort of real gut level political birth of the resistance movement, was when the first guy walked out of the camps. The letters he wrote about what was going on. For me, a younger person coming along and reading the history of the movement, a lot of importance was attached to it.
It is really Columbus' egg. He is sitting around with a bunch of people
in Queen Isabella's court, and he is trying to sell his trip sailing to
America, and he is being put down. They are saying it will never work,
that it was impossible, so on. We hear all of these things about our
projects. Finally he turns to someone and says, can you make an egg
stand on its
I think this is very important as a generalization of where we are now, and where we are to be from now on. Another way of saying it is that the problem we face now in 1974, is not that we need more information, what we need is more courage and imagination to act on what we know already.
Then things happen.
What led you to escalate further shortly after you went to prison? You stopped eating for eight months, and that was another escalation. That story, and how . . .
I didn't get into jail because of all these appeals, and these other
things, until a few months before Hiroshima in the spring of '45.
Within
There was a young Methodist minister named Roger Axford who came out of Danbury, and he decided he would go to the Attorney General's office, this was '46, and say, you ought to leave these people out of prison . . .
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
He sort of worked his way up to some secretary or receptionist. They
said, do you have an appointment, and he said, no. They said, the
Attorney General is a very busy man. He said, that is alright, I will
wait. They said, you don't understand, he is all booked up. No, I will
wait. So he sat down and waited until five o'clock when they closed the
office. They asked him to leave and he said, no, I will wait. Finally,
they had to carry
His position was he was going to stay there until the last hungerstriker
at Sandstone was released. There were eight of us on a hunger strike.
The hunger strike had started some months before that. We had heard that
there was to be a big demonstration in May for the release of all the
draft cases, and we thought at Sandstone that it would be nice to have a
hunger strike.
At first, because there we were non-cooperators, they wouldn't even let
us apply for parole, then they said you can apply, and we said we didn't
want too. Then, they tried to get people on the outside to offer to be
our parole advisors. The warden called me in one day and showed me a
letter from Norman Thomas offering to be my parole advisor. It in effect
meant that if the government ever wanted to know where I was,
So you got thrown out of prison?
I got thrown out of prison.
How long were you . . .
It3 was getting on to nine months.
So they asked you to leave?
I gained weight on that. It was a pretty good diet they fed us. I lost most of my hair then.
In your political activities in the thirties, before you went to jail, did you think of yourself as a socialist?
Yes, but socialism had a very strange meaning for me then. I don't call myself a socialist now . . .
Why is that?
Mainly because it doesn't mean very much anymore. There are too many varieties of socialists and there are a lot of bad things.
Do you think it was the political climate of the thirties, or do you think it is you that has changed?
Well, there are a lot of people, including myself, who think of socialism in the same way my pious grandmother would think of paradise. You sort of get there, and then everything is nice. The hard questions of the interrelationships between individuals and government, the hard questions which have been raised by the Soviet and Cuban and Chinese and Algerian experience.
The kind of simplistic garbage that Buckley throws in his anti-socialist
stuff, as if we weren't concerned with those types of questions. Anyone
who isn't for his concept of the state must therefore be a total
authoritarian and a Stalinist. That is pure bullshit. What does one mean
by socialism? I look at my childhood vision of socialism, and I see I
really was a nice little fascist, because my idea of socialism, while I
was in high school, was that they, the anonymous masters of society,
those who know everything, will give every child a test at a propitious
moment to find out exactly what his or her aptitude is, and put that
child in a little niche to grow up and live happily ever after. The
freedom and
Simply to say, throw open the prisons, I know I wouldn't want to. I'd
find some equivalent of prison. I might build a moat around my house,
with poisonous snakes at the bottom of it, do something. The kind of
thing that people say when they say socialist doesn't think of these
things. I think that there is another false assumption in calling
oneself a socialist, which is taking sides in what I see is an
absolutely useless debate, the debate between those who say society
makes the individual and those who say that the individual makes
society. People argue this, and this is basically the difference between
Freudianism and Marxism within the Western context. People who argue
this argue as if there is an answer to the question. I say there is no
answer to that question. I am both, and to say which comes first is like
saying, is it more important to sleep than
For what?
I don't know. For my own fulfillment? There are different ways of describing it.
It sounds like you are an anarchist to me.
I wonder where Norman Thomas, did he have any influence at all, did he say anything that gave you any ideas . . .
When he offered to by my parole advisor?
Not only that . . .
Norman Thomas was one of my major prophets all the time I was growing up.
It wasn't the word socialist that impressed, though at that time I did,
but what was important about Norman Thomas was that he was such a whole
and together person. The best about Norman Thomas was not the ideology
of socialism, the best of Norman Thomas was the real clearheadedness of
adressing himself to specific problems of the time, which is what makes
Paul Goodman such a great person. Cutting ideological labels away: here
is a problem, what are we going to do about it. I don't care what you
call it, a capitalist solution, or a christian one, or a socialist
But you are willing to use the label pacifism, and are willing to trace your whole life to the moment in which you adopted that word as what you were going to to be about and doing.
That is a label in itself . . .
Did you see that, you don't see that as an ideological trap?
No, not quite. When I call myself a pacifist, and I mean non-violence, I see non-violence not only or primarily as an ideological thing, I see non-violence as a self-disciplinary tool. If I deny myself the right to impose my will or my sense of rightness on a particular problem, then I have to really find other ways of dealing with that problem. If I can't go and raise an army to fight Hitler or Nixon, then I have to find other ways of dealing with Nixonism. Non-violence to me is hardly anything more than the commitment of a fine watchmaker never to use a sixteen pound sledge in fixing a watch.
It is not the answer to all hard questions facing society, an approach . . .
An approach, right.
Do you think a lot of these things come out of
I don't think of them as anarchists. There is a side to anarchism which is appealing to me, but there is a side which is not. That is when it becomes ideological to me.
When the anarchist says destroy the state, and the goodness of people will come out, I think this is putting the cart before the horse. I think people have goodness and they also have evil, and I think the potential for both is in each of us. I think that the way you get rid of the heavy state is not by destroying it, but by functioning well socially and creatively, and then the need for the state falls away. If everyone on Mott Street where I live in New York would sweep th street in front of their own houses, then we wouldn't need the Department of Sanitation of the City of New York to come in and do it for us. If we dealt with problems of international cooperation, and I don't quite know how to do these things, then we wouldn't need a State Department, or a War Department to do it for us.
If we dealt with the problems of the bums on Bowery, and I live two
blocks from the Bowery, and I am indignant that society lets them wallow
in their own vomit, but I don't do anything about that indignation
except feel righteous about it. The city comes along in a very poor way,
full
When you look back over the things you have been involved in over your life, do you think of the project of your life as being personally satisfying? Are the turning points, the things you look back at with satisfaction, the turning points in you conception of morality, as opposed to looking back over the success of the movements that you have been involved in, at some sense of social progress? Do you see your approach to social problems as having been . . .
Justified?
Successful.
Not successful, but justified. I don't . . .
In personal terms, or in the changes which
I am pretty smug. I think it is true not only of me but I think it is true of most people that the things one regrets when one gets older are not the things one did, but the things one didn't do, all the opportunities one missed. I think I should have done more. I think not only should I have done more in some political context, but the only way one grows is by doing, the old John Dewey concept, that this is why your generation has an advantage. I mean, every generation has an advantage, you can sort of stand on the shoulders of the preceeding ones. The kinds of things kids do know, when the civil rights movement really got into Alabama and Mississippi in the early sixties, and I couldn't imagine myself having the courage to do that.
Now, or at that age?
Well, I sort of was past my Journey of Reconciliation. I sort of did my thing in '47. Here in Chapel Hill. Then I had gone back and become a printer, and the printshop was a marvelous excuse for not doing anything, because I was printing for nthe movement. I know in a historical perspective, we were being as courageous coming down to North Carolina in '47 as others were in going down to Alabama in '61, within its own context.
When the busdriver was asked if he would not allow people to ride where they pleased, and quoted the Supreme Court ruling, and said, I don't work for the Supreme Court lady, I work for North Carolina.
That's right.
I don't want to open another whole long can of worms, but one thing, you in your life and in your times, the last few years it has been possible for you to become more radical in terms of your own homosexuality. We left this all out of your earlier experiences, jail and camp and the freedom rides in '47, but did this play any role at all.
Of course it did. I think I became aware of being gay when I was in high
school, and it was the most horrible experience. I thought if I couldn't
cure myself—that was the way I thought—that I'd commit suicide. I think
that the awareness, the self-awareness, gave me such a sense of being an
outsider, that the natural socializing qualities had to find a way of
relating to the world, or otherwise it would have been the nuthouse or
committing suicide. Being gay certainly made it easier to do time in
prison. The sense of an all-male society is not difficult for me
Only within the context of the gay liberation movement of the last couple
years have, has it been, possible, easier, to live within my own small
circle of friends in the radical and peace movement, and within the
world at large. It is still very awkward. When I am on tour, when I get
into a situation like this, when I overhear, I overhear myself saying
the things that I am saying, I have a certain sense of drama. Maybe I
play things up a little to make things more interesting and dramatic.
People said, wow, and I can sense this, wow, big hero, all the things
they said. This has happened many times in the past, the question isn't
asked. People have suggested indirectly that I must be a
self-sacrificing saint, I gave up all the joys of a family and of
raising children for the cause. Now, if someone asks me that pointblank,
I would say, no that isn't it, I never had a family, because I
I can say what I have to say.
Igal, when did Quakerism enter, or did it?
I had no contact with Quakers until I got to the CO camps in '43 . . .
You became a CO on your own?
Oh, yes.
New York, and I thought everybody was Jewish.
The peace churches in setting up the camp system became a buffer between
the radical pacifists and Selective Service. Anytime we4 wanted to take some action against Selective
Service, the Service Committee would be caught in the middle, they would
suffer because they were getting it from both sides. There was a time
when I was so angry with the Service Committee that I
I'm interested in how you may regard, for instance, the $2,000,000 food giveaway, the kidnapping, the sense that the SLA5 was a relatively secret group, there was nothing for the white males of America to react against of this, essentially, this meant millions of food was given away, and more poor people fed, without right-wing social repercussions. I'm interested in what you think of this as regards an individual moral stand.
I don't think it is one way or the other. I think one can take social action without engaging in that kind of activity, without the moral righteousness.
In that kind of activity, in the sense that it had a very, direct, pragmatic end in mind. It seems to me that this self-sacrifice is shooting at broader kinds of social . . .
I think that can be done without kidnapping. The Panthers, for example— I
don't know whether they actually kidnapped or not. But they discovered
that every time they got into a confrontation with the state, even a
verbal confrontation, it was the blacks
There is a distinction between the SLA and the Panthers. Do you think that the Panthers were almost arrogantly visible, and that all the rest of the society could directly see and oppose, whereas the SLA has been sort of an invisible force someone, somewhere who picks up somebody.
I am even more opposed to that. When I start with the most important reality of our time, which I think I mentioned before you came, that the human being as a biological entity has two or three generations in which to learn to deal with conflict in a non-lethal manner, Positively, it means each of us must evolve to the point where we see ourselves relating to four billion human beings rapidly increasing, that we have to create some sense of community which involves everyone.
This comes from patience in politics, though it may lead to this greater
conflict and confrontation, which is a greater breakdown in community.
The extreme Marxist groups, the extreme revolutionary groups are playing
the same kind of politics that Richard Nixon is playing. In effect
saying, this world would be a better world if those bastards didn't
exist. The only ones who can build community is us. Neither the great
upholders of capitalism or the great upholders of Marxism can.
Building
I'm also interested in one of things, the life is too short to effectively carry out what you are trying to do, so Thoreau carried out his little thing with the state, and refused to pay taxes and went to jail for a while then went off in seclusion. Considering that most us don't have the option of not paying taxes. Just the very concept of being able to change the whole environment that we are in. How do you feel about that?
That last part I feel a little shaky about, because I think on the one
hand to start out with a determination to change the world is fairly
much of a trap, because it is very easy to become self-righteous any
way, and authoritarian, and very elitist, and lose sight of the real
goal. This also is part of our Western
There are problems. You agree to sod over the area when you are through.
You have leaflets and you have signs, and instead of having the
traditional Christian-Marxist manner of admonishment, delivering a
sermon, sinners, sinners, or apathy, or this same type of tone, and
every time after the sermon the good Christians come up and say that was
good sermon. The guys come up and say that was a very heavy rap you laid
on us, and then everybody goes back to his own thing. We have to find
forms of drama and joy in getting people involved. They are not really
against, but there is a sort of lethargy, a continuum, a rutty way of
living
The adherents of capitalism, the Buckleys, say that the reason capitalism
has never succeeded is that we have never given it a fair chance, which
is exactly what the Marxists say about the failures of Russia or China
or
END OF INTERVIEW