Title:Oral History Interview with Ted Fillette, March 2, 2006.
Interview U-0185. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007):
Electronic Edition.
Author:
Fillette, Ted,
interviewee
Interview conducted by
Thuesen, Sarah
Funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services supported the
electronic publication of this interview.
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Kristin Shaffer
MP3 file created by
Aaron Smithers
Southern Folklife Collection
First edition, 2008
Size of electronic edition: 112 Kb
Publisher: The University Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
2008.
The electronic edition is a part of the UNC-Chapel Hill digital library, Documenting the American South.
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2008-00-00, Wanda Gunther and Kristin Martin revised TEIHeader and created catalog record for the electronic
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Source(s):
Title of recording: Oral History Interview with Ted Fillette, March 2,
2006. Interview U-0185. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007)
Title of series: Series U. The Long Civil Rights Movement: The South
Since the 1960s. Southern Oral History Program Collection (U-0185)
Author: Sarah Thuesen
Title of transcript: Oral History Interview with Ted Fillette, March 2,
2006. Interview U-0185. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007)
Title of series: Series U. The Long Civil Rights Movement: The South
Since the 1960s. Southern Oral History Program Collection (U-0185)
Author: Ted Fillette
Description: 148 Mb
Description: 29 p.
Note:
Interview conducted on March 2, 2006, by Sarah Thuesen;
recorded in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Note:
Transcribed by Emily Baran.
Note:
Forms part of: Southern Oral History Program Collection
(#4007): Series U. The Long Civil Rights Movement: The South Since the
1960s, Manuscripts Department, University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill.
Note:
Original transcript on deposit at the Southern
Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill.
Editorial practices An audio file with the interview complements this electronic edition. The text has been entered using double-keying and verified against the original. The text has been encoded using the recommendations for Level 4 of the TEI in
Libraries Guidelines. Original grammar and spelling have been preserved. All quotation marks, em dashes and ampersand have been transcribed as entity
references. All double right and left quotation marks are encoded as " All em dashes are encoded as —
Interview with Ted Fillette, March 2, 2006. Interview U-0185. Southern
Oral History Program Collection (#4007)
Fillette, Ted,
interviewee
Interview Participants
TED
FILLETTE, interviewee
SARAH
THUESEN, interviewer
[DISC 1, TRACK 1]
Page 1
[START OF DISC 1, TRACK 1]
SARAH THUESEN:
This is an interview with Ted Fillette at the offices of Legal Services
of Southern Piedmont. Today is the second of March, 2006.
It's about ten o'clock. My name is Sarah Thuesen.
I'm conducting this interview for the Southern Oral History
Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for our Long
Civil Rights Movement initiative. I thought before we got into your work
with legal services in Charlotte, I'd like to hear just a
little bit about your background, your childhood. Tell me just a little
bit about growing up in Alabama. Where were you born in Alabama?
TED FILLETTE:
In Mobile.
SARAH THUESEN:
Did you live there until you went away to college?
TED FILLETTE:
Yes, I did.
SARAH THUESEN:
Tell me a little bit about your parents. What did they do?
TED FILLETTE:
Well, my mother was a housewife and my father ran a small steamship
agency, a company in the port of Mobile.
SARAH THUESEN:
Tell me a little bit about the schools you attended.
Page 2
TED FILLETTE:
I went to an ordinary elementary school in the public school system and
then in junior and senior high, I attended a local day military school,
called University Military School, in Mobile.
SARAH THUESEN:
What was that experience like?
TED FILLETTE:
Well, it was fairly intense for me. It was very important in some
respects. It helped me get a fairly good education in some ways. I went
on the debate team and I think that helped me become a public speaker
and ultimately, got me somewhat interested in law school. It was also a
severely conservative environment and, I think, very racially
conservative, and very authoritarian. I never had a great deal of
interest in joining the military after having experienced the arbitrary
powers exercised over young men in that school.
SARAH THUESEN:
What year were you born?
TED FILLETTE:
1945.
SARAH THUESEN:
So you would have been growing up in the early civil rights era.
TED FILLETTE:
Yes.
SARAH THUESEN:
How did that affect your worldview?
TED FILLETTE:
Well, we were very sheltered from the immediate parts of the civil rights
movement, because most of the important things in the early 1960s were
going on in Montgomery and Birmingham and in the rural black belt area
outside of Montgomery. For the most part, I was largely unaware of it. I
can vaguely recall being at a Key Club convention in Birmingham and
seeing the police take Dr. Martin Luther King away in a police wagon,
but I did not understand what he was doing and why they were arresting
him and the importance of that at the time. That's just
because I was in a very sheltered, segregated environment, for the most
part. It wasn't until I went to some international Key
Page 3
Club conventions, where there were a lot of northern
kids that were more aware of the civil rights movement than we were,
that questions came up about how we could tolerate racially-segregated
schools. I thought it was a very provoking question for me. Of course,
it was something that my parents had basically engineered without my
knowledge of it. I was largely unaware of what was going on in a serious
way until I got to college.
SARAH THUESEN:
I'm curious, when you interacted with kids from the North and
they asked you about the justification for segregated schools, what at
that time would you have said, do you think?
TED FILLETTE:
Well, I didn't have—I frankly was very ambivalent
about it. We had candidates from Alabama that were running for these
international offices and we were preparing them to answer questions in
these political debates for the office. Our standard line that was
developed by some of the older people was this is a matter for the
states to determine. So it was sort of a states' rights
rationalization, which had been essentially the argument used by
Governor [George] Wallace and the governors of Mississippi and Arkansas
to justify their segregated school systems. Other than hearing that pat
answer, I did not understand the implications of that and I certainly
didn't understand what the fourteenth amendment might mean. I
didn't understand what the Brown v. Board of
Education decision meant and its implications. There was no
desegregation lawsuit going on in the state of Alabama. There
wasn't an attempt to integrate the public schools in Mobile
until the late 1970s, after I was finished with college. So, I
didn't really learn much about what was going on until I
really left Alabama.
SARAH THUESEN:
You mentioned the Brown decision. Do you remember when
that ruling came down?
Page 4
TED FILLETTE:
I did not have any real awareness of it. I think the first awareness I
had about what was going on was watching my parents watch the National
Guard enforce the school integration in Little Rock, Arkansas on
television. I think that's what precipitated my
parents' decision to take me out of the public schools in
1957 and enroll me in a racially-segregated military school, because I
think they thought that if it was happening in Little Rock, that it
would be in Mobile soon thereafter.
SARAH THUESEN:
What was the name of the military academy?
TED FILLETTE:
It was called University Military School.
SARAH THUESEN:
Is it still around?
TED FILLETTE:
It is. And fortunately, they have demilitarized it and combined it with
the private girls' school that was sort of their counterpart
in another part of town. Now all the military uniforms are gone.
SARAH THUESEN:
Getting on a slightly different topic, you were talking about your racial
awareness at that age. Do you remember any incidents or just general
memories about when you became as a child of the differences between
classes, rich and poor?
TED FILLETTE:
I remember the most vivid memory I have is the time I rode with my mother
to take her housekeeping maid back to her house. I remember we were
driving in my mother's old Lincoln Continental down an
unpaved road by these completely run-down shacks. I saw these little
black kids with no shoes walking around with very little clothes on and
staring at us, like we were on some kind of a golden chariot. I
didn't fully understand it, but my emotional sense of it was
they must think that we are extremely privileged and somehow, I felt bad
about that. I felt somewhat ashamed. And then I watched my mother drop
this housekeeper off in front of her house and saw about three or four
kids run up to her and realized that when she was gone, there was nobody
there to take
Page 5
care of her kids. I still have that
memory pretty vivid in my mind. I was too young to ask any intelligent
questions about it, but I never lost that memory.
SARAH THUESEN:
Did you, at the time, see the class divide as somewhat similar to the
race divide, or were you also aware of class differences among
whites?
TED FILLETTE:
I was not that aware of class differences among whites. I think that that
was because the lower-income white folks mostly lived out in other rural
parts outside of the city of Mobile, very similar to what we have here
in metropolitan Charlotte, frankly. The poor people in the city were
almost all African-American. And so there was a heavy coincidence of
class and race as far as I could tell. Then when I got into college and
became much more aware of the issues and worked for an antipoverty
agency after my junior year in college, I was much more acutely aware of
how great the overlap of poverty and race, that is African-Americans,
was in that community. When I was in elementary school, there were very
few poor white kids in that school.
SARAH THUESEN:
So your family always lived right in town in Mobile?
TED FILLETTE:
Well, actually not. The first nine years of my life, we lived in town and
then the second nine years, we lived out in what was the country at that
time, but it later became incorporated in the city limits. It was out
about seven or eight miles from the center of downtown.
SARAH THUESEN:
So you decided to attend college at Duke University, right?
TED FILLETTE:
That's right.
SARAH THUESEN:
What made you decide to head somewhat north for college?
TED FILLETTE:
Well, I think that it was a combination of having a few very bright and
insightful professors in high school. My German teacher, who was also
the debate team sponsor, had taken us around to debate tournaments
throughout the South, and to
Page 6
Vanderbilt and Tulane
and other places. He strongly encouraged some of the better students to
leave the state. The two valedictorians in the classes ahead of me had
both gone to Duke and I knew them fairly well. I also knew that they had
applied to Ivy League schools and had not been accepted. When I applied
to another school, I think it was Dartmouth, I was not accepted. So, I
think that at that time, Duke was probably considered the best school
that people with good academic credentials could attend, from Mobile
anyway.
SARAH THUESEN:
What years were you there?
TED FILLETTE:
1964 through '68.
SARAH THUESEN:
So at the peak of the civil rights years.
What do you remember about the civil rights atmosphere in the
Durham-Chapel Hill area?
TED FILLETTE:
Well, there was quite a bit going on, at least at Duke. I did not
perceive that much going on in Chapel Hill, but I also was not there
very much. But Duke had an amazing array of speakers that came to the
campus from various parts of the civil rights movement. The most
memorable was Dr. King himself during my freshman year, when I attended
his speech and it was a pretty important life-changing event for me.
Because he was not only eloquent, he was able to give the details about
what living in a segregated society in the deep South meant on a daily
basis for black people. It was more than just the symbolic injustices of
the separate water fountains and the separate schools. It was the
inability to get sufficient education and money to be able to live
productive lives, to participate in the political system, and to be free
from arbitrary police force, which was still the most important aspect.
I mean the sheer force and violence of police activity in concert with
private violence by the Klu Klux Klan or other groups was undeniable,
unchecked by the whole power structure in the states of Alabama and
Mississippi.
Page 7
After hearing about Dr. King, there were other people, students who went
to Duke who had gone to the Selma march and came back and gave talks and
workshops that revealed what had happened to them. It was pretty evident
that white people who acted in concert with the black civil rights
leaders were just as much at risk, physically at risk, as the black
people. In some ways, I think they were maybe more at risk, because they
were viewed as betraying the presumed racial pride that a lot of white
people were supposed to have, by participating in civil rights
activities. They were viewed as being traitors.
Page 8
[END OF DISC 1, TRACK 1]
[DISC 1, TRACK 2]
[START OF DISC 1, TRACK 2]
SARAH THUESEN:
As you were gaining a new heightened awareness of issues of race while
you're in college, what was it like going back home?
TED FILLETTE:
Well, it was very interesting, particularly trying to talk with my
parents and my other relatives. Although my parents, they were not
active racists in any way, I think they were what I would consider more
passive racists. They viewed the state of the racial power relationships
as being something that was given, that was wrong, but unchangeable, and
that people who attempted to change it were stupid or taking bad risks.
It made them worry that I was interested in some of these activities. I
can certainly remember a lot of very heated discussions at the dinner
table that would rival anything that was in the TV sitcom called All in the Family. We basically just disagreed about
everything politically, about the Vietnam War, about the Civil Rights
Movement, about the War on Poverty, the role of President [Lyndon]
Johnson. I can still remember watching live the Democratic Convention in
Chicago when the police turned on these protestors and beat the pulp out
of them. I said, "That's the worst police brutality
I think I've ever seen." My father, who had just
watched the same thing I saw, said, "What police
brutality?" So then I think I began to understand how people
viewed the same occurrences very differently from the filter lens of
their value system, as to even what happened. I had never really
understood that before. But I think that became very important later as
I began to try to understand politics and lawyering.
I also remember that in my senior after the assassination of Dr. King,
there was a great outpouring of distress and anger on the Duke campus.
The black employees' union, that represented all the
non-academic employees, decided to go on a strike and ask the
Page 9
students to join in the strike and to shut down the
university. This was in April of my senior year.
SARAH THUESEN:
So right after King was killed?
TED FILLETTE:
Right after he was killed. The same thing happened at Columbia University
and there was some national media about that. But I think unrelated to
that, there were just some people at Duke that thought, "Well,
this is the moment to try to bring the university's injustice
to light and to try to get the black employees' union
recognized by the university and have them pay better wages."
And it was a way of, I think, channeling the emotions of the time into a
concrete form of action. What that did was it divided the people on
campus, because those of us that wanted to support the union and shut
down the university were doing so at a time when their final exams and
their last papers were becoming due. So there was a question right there
that was very personal: Were we jeopardizing our chances of graduating
from the university, from being expelled from the university? Then for
the men, that meant: Would we be reclassified by the selective service
system 1A and drafted? All of those were pretty important issues and for
me, it was the first really important decision to make of whether
I'm willing to make that kind of risk because of the
importance of the political issue.
When I told my parents that I was going to join the strike, they thought
I was crazy. I was also the president of my fraternity and when I told
the people in the fraternity that that's what I was doing,
they thought I was crazy. But it was a very important time and there was
some very important national speakers that came. Joan Baez came and
other people came to support the strike. A lot of the faculty supported
it. What ended up happening is that most of my professors accommodated
the strike by letting us write papers in lieu of exams. So we were out
there in a demonstration in front of the Duke
Page 10
Chapel for several weeks. It was an important local political event. I
also remember the National Guard had helicopters that were circling the
campus. I think that they didn't know whether there was going
to be some kind of riot going on because of that. There were very fiery
local black leaders that came to the campus to support the workers and
support the strike. I think that it was a very emotionally electric
time.
SARAH THUESEN:
How was the strike resolved by the time you graduated?
TED FILLETTE:
It was resolved by the university, I believe I remember, making an
increase in their wages, but not formally recognizing the union. So it
was somewhat of a compromise that the union decided to accept, because
they thought they had made progress and they knew that when the students
left for the season, they probably wouldn't have that much
leverage. I was not one of the negotiators, so I was not privileged to
the inside view of it. But that's sort of what I remember as
the outcome of it.
SARAH THUESEN:
Then did you go straight from Duke to law school in Boston?
TED FILLETTE:
No, I joined VISTA, the Volunteers in Service to America program, which
was what they called the domestic Peace Corps. So about three weeks
after I graduated, I packed up and moved to the Roxbury community in
Boston to undergo training.
SARAH THUESEN:
You worked for VISTA for a year was it?
TED FILLETTE:
Actually two years.
SARAH THUESEN:
Tell me a little bit about that experience.
TED FILLETTE:
Well, it certainly did educate me about what had happened in the northern
urban centers with respect to the black leadership. The community of
Roxbury had become very radicalized in leadership over a number of
issues, police brutality being one of the main ones. It was evident from
the day I arrived that Boston was polarized racially in a way that was
even greater than what I had observed in Alabama. What I mean by that is
all
Page 11
the police appeared to be white Irish and they
patrolled Roxbury with these large batons and large German shepherds.
There were a lot of black leaders that wore dashikis and they were into
a lot of the black separatist rhetoric. They were attempting to create
their own community institutions that were independent of city
government, and trying to fight various forms of urban renewal and other
city programs that would displace any low-income black people. They had
very little interest or tolerance for white liberal people wanting to
help or being present. So even the VISTA class that was brought in that
had probably fifteen to eighteen young people, mostly college grads,
that were three-fourths white, became an issue for the black-controlled
community antipoverty agency. So for the first time in my life, the
validity of my presence and my interest in providing some kind of help
was questioned purely on the basis of my status as a white person. That
had never happened to me. It never occurred to me that there was
anything wrong with me just because of what I looked like or how I
talked. But it was an immediate issue when I got there.
It became then very interesting to see where we were allowed to be
trained, what organizations were willing to accept white VISTA
volunteers. And it turned out that most of the indigenous black
organizations in Roxbury were unwilling to take any VISTA volunteers.
Most of us were placed with an organized called the Massachusetts
Welfare Rights Organization, which was the organization that attempted
to organize welfare recipients, who were almost totally black in Boston,
to develop economic power through numbers. That's where most
of the VISTAs were placed and they were black and white. They were
accepted because the national organization was led by a former chemistry
professor who was glad to have cheap organizers from anywhere.
That's what VISTA provided.
Page 12
SARAH THUESEN:
This was the National Welfare Rights Organization that the Massachusetts
branch was affiliated with?
TED FILLETTE:
That's right.
SARAH THUESEN:
Did you have similar experiences working with African-American welfare
recipients in terms of their skepticism about your involvement?
TED FILLETTE:
Generally not. I think that's probably fairly understandable,
because number one, most of them had never had anybody interested in
helping them deal with their very difficult challenges with their lack
of income, lack of clothing and food, insensitive landlords. And having
college-educated people show them how they could use the legal system in
a way to get them basic things they wanted was a victory in their minds.
I think they largely appreciated that.
SARAH THUESEN:
What do you feel like you and the other VISTA workers were able to
accomplish through that work?
TED FILLETTE:
Well, I think there were some obvious short-term victories in that we got
a lot of people who had needs some basic things like furniture and
clothes and food, that they needed for their survival. I think that a
lot of them learned about power and politics for the first time. They
learned that, by organizing and acting in numbers, that they could
change the psychological balance of power somewhat with the social
workers in the welfare system. Prior to the organization coming, they
didn't have any idea what their rights were, how they could
get them, and they were pretty much subject to whatever the personality
whims of the social worker assigned to them happened to be. If they
didn't get along with the social worker, they
weren't going to know that they could get clothes for their
kids in the winter or furniture to have beds for their kids to sleep on.
There were plenty of more poor white people in the suburban communities
outside of Boston that I found were totally
Page 13
powerless and essentially blamed themselves for everything that was
going wrong. So I learned a lot about the psychology of powerless people
and how that could somewhat change with an organizational framework.
I don't know how long those lessons lasted when the
organization was essentially destroyed about 1970 by the governor
changing the welfare system so that individualized needs could no longer
be considered. The welfare system went to what was called a
"flat grant" system where the amount of assistance
became purely a mathematical function of the number of people in the
household. If you had three kids and one parent, you got a flat amount
of money and if that was not enough, it didn't matter. So
there wasn't anything left to organize people around to get.
About twelve months after that, all the organizations fell apart. I
think some of them were reincarnated later by ACORN [Association of
Community Organizations for Reform Now], because the head organizer for
the Mass. Welfare Rights Organization was the guy that went to Arkansas
and formed ACORN.
SARAH THUESEN:
What was his name?
TED FILLETTE:
His name is Wade Rathke.
SARAH THUESEN:
So were you still working for the organization at the point that it
started to fall apart?
TED FILLETTE:
Actually, no. I had decided to go to law school. I had sort of made a
decision that I was not that well suited to be an organizer for a
career. I had been accepted at law school in 1968 and now it was 1970.
The situation with the draft had changed and I was willing to take the
risk of going to law school at that point.
SARAH THUESEN:
Did you see moving toward a law degree as a fairly sharp departure from
your activist career or were you thinking about combining the two in
some fashion?
Page 14
TED FILLETTE:
I'm not sure that I thought about combining them so much as I
saw how the lawyers were a critical part of supporting low-income
peoples' organizations. We did have lawyers. There was a
VISTA lawyer who was assigned to represent the Welfare Rights
Organization. His ability to advise us strategically was essential in
terms of knowing what to do and what not to do and trying to get us out
of trouble, even when we did what we thought was right. So I had a good
chance to see how that worked while I was one of the organizers. Then it
was of course, fairly evident that the civil rights lawyers who had
worked with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and SNCC and
other people down in Alabama, had played a critical role in making some
of those grassroots organizational efforts work. I learned later that
had the lawyers not been able to sue the city of Montgomery regarding
the segregated bus system, the original Montgomery bus boycott probably
would have failed. But going to federal district court and getting an
injunction was the key to the ultimate victory in making that happen.
That lesson was not lost on me.
I think the other thing is I learned that if you don't have
access to the political system or the legal system, the political system
will learn how to co-opt or shut down grassroots movements.
Massachusetts had the biggest grassroots welfare rights organization in
the country and after two years of enormous success in organizing over
seventy local organizations, including about eight really big ones in
the city of Boston, it was completely demolished with one legal stroke
by the governor, that was not challengeable.
SARAH THUESEN:
Who was the governor at that time?
TED FILLETTE:
Francis Sargent.
Page 15
[END OF DISC 1, TRACK 2]
[DISC 1, TRACK 3]
[START OF DISC 1, TRACK 3]
SARAH THUESEN:
So you began law school at Boston University in 19—
TED FILLETTE:
'70.
SARAH THUESEN:
At that point, were you already anticipating the types of law you wanted
to get into?
TED FILLETTE:
I was. I thought it would be what I used to call civil rights, which had
a fairly wide spectrum to it. I didn't know whether that
would involve community organizations, poverty organizations, race
discrimination, or labor. I was still learning about a whole lot of
aspects. But I knew that it would have something to do with
troublemaking and change; I knew that much.
SARAH THUESEN:
Troublemaking on your part?
TED FILLETTE:
Well, the trouble was being made. I was just going to be one of the
engineers that tried to either improve it or protect it or whatever it
was. In my first year, I was working for a campus organization called
the Civil Rights Research Council. I decided to bring Angela
Davis's lawyer to the campus to talk. If there was anybody
that was well-known for troublemaking at that time, Angela was pretty
high. This lawyer had been a graduate of Boston University and was an
African-American and had been in Atlanta for twenty years or so. I
thought he was a perfect person to come and talk to students about how
you protect troublemakers.
SARAH THUESEN:
What was his name?
TED FILLETTE:
I don't remember.
SARAH THUESEN:
This would have been early 70s?
Page 16
TED FILLETTE:
Yeah, it was probably 1971.
SARAH THUESEN:
So how did you make it back down to North Carolina after you finished law
school?
TED FILLETTE:
Well, that same organization was part of a national network that somehow
connected law students with civil rights lawyers all over the country.
Most of them were in the South and the woman that was the head of that
organization selected me to be matched up with the ACLU [American Civil
Liberties Union] lawyer in Charlotte. So after my first year of law
school, I came to Charlotte to work for him. They gave a healthy stipend
of fifty dollars a week to live on, which was the same amount they paid
in VISTA.
SARAH THUESEN:
Wow.
TED FILLETTE:
By that time, I had learned a lot about poverty.
SARAH THUESEN:
How long did you work with the ACLU lawyer?
TED FILLETTE:
That was just for one summer.
SARAH THUESEN:
And that was right after law school?
TED FILLETTE:
No, that was after my first year in law school. So I still had two more
years of school to go after that. That was a very critical experience,
because I got to come to a community and see what difference a
courageous federal district court judge could make. We had the best one
in the South. This lawyer had numerous cases with him and he let me
argue a motion in front of the federal district court judge as a
first-year law student. It was an enormous opportunity for me.
SARAH THUESEN:
Just to clarify, the judge you're referring to is
McMillan?
TED FILLETTE:
Yes.
SARAH THUESEN:
And who was the lawyer?
TED FILLETTE:
George Daly.
Page 17
SARAH THUESEN:
What did the case involve that you worked on that summer?
TED FILLETTE:
It was an attempt to consolidate four or five individual suits against
the city police for police brutality in violation of the Civil Rights
Act. The procedural motion that I was arguing was whether or not it was
proper to join all of those suits into one big suit, versus leaving them
as separate cases to be tried individually. So it was a big strategic
question.
SARAH THUESEN:
What was the upshot of that case?
TED FILLETTE:
Well, the upshot of it was that the judge denied our motion to combine
them, which surprised me greatly and surprised the lawyer. But the
lawyer later explained to me that the reason the judge must have denied
the motion is because we had made a stupid strategic decision to join
them. The judge was actually probably making a better decision,
strategic decision, because one of the four victims had been a drug
dealer and he had shot at the policemen before they shot and paralyzed
him. The lawyer I worked for realized in retrospect that if that case
had been part of the bigger presentation, that the three other victims,
who were much more sympathetic and innocent-looking, probably would have
lost, because they would have been guilty by association with the drug
dealer who was the fourth plaintiff.
SARAH THUESEN:
So McMillan was sympathetic with your cause in fact, even though
initially it appeared otherwise?
TED FILLETTE:
I think so, not that he said it in any of those kinds of terms. He just
did what he thought was the right thing, even though we probably had a
good legal argument to combine them. So I learned a lot from that.
SARAH THUESEN:
During that summer, was this the first time you had ever spent any
significant time in Charlotte?
Page 18
TED FILLETTE:
Yes.
SARAH THUESEN:
Did it strike you as a place you might want to return to?
TED FILLETTE:
It did, just because of the good people and the good relationships. There
were very interesting and fun young people, lawyers, people that worked
for the media, the Charlotte Observer. One of my
friends already worked for the Charlotte Observer and
so I sort of met some of those people at the same time.
SARAH THUESEN:
Any individuals stand out in particular you met that really made an
impression on you?
TED FILLETTE:
Well sure. My friend, Frye Gaillard, was a young reporter who was
covering the school system and so he had a lot of interesting things.
One of his best friends was Doug Marlette, who was the cartoonist. Then
some of the people I lived with, like Marvin Sparrow, who was one of the
leaders of the counterculture group. To the extent that there was any
antiwar protests or civil rights protests or anything in that regard, he
was going to be in the middle of it.
SARAH THUESEN:
And you lived with him that summer?
TED FILLETTE:
I did.
SARAH THUESEN:
Did he sweep you up in any protests?
TED FILLETTE:
He didn't sweep me up in them, but they had begun
to—they were having meetings in our house to plan a
demonstration when President Nixon was coming to town for a fundraiser
with Billy Graham at the coliseum, which later became ensnared with part
of the whole Watergate hearings later. But that's a whole
different story.
SARAH THUESEN:
So the school desegregation battle was fairly intense at the time you
were down here.
Page 19
TED FILLETTE:
It was, although that summer of 1971 was the time when the Supreme Court
decision that upheld the judges' original integration order
from 1969, was decided. I can't remember whether it had been
announced before I got there or not. But during the summer months, there
was nothing particularly evident to me about that. More of it occurred
in 1972 while I was back at school. When the order was being
implemented, then what happened was a lot of the so-called riots and
fights were going in the school system, which resulted in massive
disciplinary actions being taken against virtually only the
African-American kids, which then resulted in another lawsuit by the
Legal Aid office at that time against the school system for having no
procedural rules for suspending kids from school, which was an important
case, again decided by Judge McMillan.
SARAH THUESEN:
Were you reading about all that back in Boston?
TED FILLETTE:
I didn't read about that actually until I came here in 1973 to
start work. I did read about some things and kept in touch with George
Daly about some of his civil rights cases that I had worked on. But I
had my own other things to do. I did have to study and work at the Legal
Office in Chinatown in Boston too. So I had plenty to do.
SARAH THUESEN:
Sure. So how did you come to work for the, at the time it was called the
Mecklenburg County Legal Aid Society?
TED FILLETTE:
It was called Legal Aid Society of Mecklenburg County.
SARAH THUESEN:
Okay. And you came here in '73 then?
TED FILLETTE:
That's right.
SARAH THUESEN:
Right after law school.
TED FILLETTE:
That's right.
SARAH THUESEN:
How did you make the decision to come here?
Page 20
TED FILLETTE:
Well, I made it obliquely. Originally, I had interviewed at four places
in North Carolina and I had decided North Carolina was going to be where
I would locate and I signed up to take the bar exam. I had offers from
two of the Legal Aid programs, Winston-Salem and Durham. There was no
offer in Charlotte, because they didn't have an opening at
that time. So I accepted the position in Durham, had rented a house for
a year, and came down there to take the bar review course in Chapel
Hill, and then learned that the person who had hired me in Durham had
resigned and gone in private practice, had not told me that. And the
Durham Legal Aid Board was threatening to hire an unlicensed lawyer to
be the director and had gotten a letter from the Office of Economic
Opportunity saying that they were going to withdraw the funds for the
program if they hired this fellow. None of that sounded very appealing
to me.
Then while I was taking the bar exam, the three-day quiz in Raleigh, I
met the director from the Legal Aid Society of Mecklenburg County, who
said that the person that was holding the staff position had changed his
mind and gone into private practice and now they did have an opening and
wanted to know if I was interested in that. So then when I looked at
that opening in Charlotte versus the impending financial train wreck in
Durham, I decided it probably made more sense to go to Charlotte. So at
the last minute in August, I changed my plans and I relocated to
Charlotte and started right after Labor Day. I think that's
when I got the results from the bar exam.
SARAH THUESEN:
When you first came here, some of your early work was picking up on work
that had been done by your colleagues here, helping victims displaced by
urban renewal. Is that right?
TED FILLETTE:
Yeah, that was the first big case that I was assigned, shortly after I
arrived.
SARAH THUESEN:
This was the Margaret Green Harris v. HUD case?
Page 21
TED FILLETTE:
That's right, in federal district court, one of Judge
McMillan's cases.
SARAH THUESEN:
Could you tell me a little bit about Margaret Green Harris?
TED FILLETTE:
Well, this was a lady who had lived in the community of Greenville, which
was an African-American neighborhood just north of the downtown area,
who had lived in a house that the city considered dilapidated and wanted
to demolish it as part of the urban renewal program. The problem for her
was that the city did not offer her an adequate replacement house that
was affordable to her. The basis of the lawsuit was to challenge the
displacement of people in the urban renewal neighborhoods, who were not
offered a suitable alternative home that was affordable to them. That
was the fundamental legal principle involved.
The suit was negotiated to a settlement in 1972, the year before I
arrived, with fairly broad language about how the city would, from that
point forward, not displace people that were in the urban renewal
neighborhoods, without providing them the "suitable relocation
housing;" that's what the phrase was. By the time I
arrived, that lady had already gone somewhere else. But the lawsuit was
aimed at the whole class of people that were similarly situated in other
neighborhoods subject to urban renewal or what was then called community
development, which was the same thing. It was essentially demolishing
dilapidated housing without necessarily any other plan to replace it or
substitute it, either in that neighborhood or anywhere else. It was
essentially a demolition of poor people's housing is what
that was.
SARAH THUESEN:
What was the eventual upshot of your work with that case?
TED FILLETTE:
Well, what happened was some of the other residents of neighborhoods that
were in the path of the community development work started to come to
our office and complain that they were getting notices to leave, but
weren't getting any offers of
Page 22
alternative housing that was either in good shape or affordable to them.
What we determined was that the federal law that was tied to the
funding, that supported this program for the city, required that if they
were going to remove people from their home, they had to provide
suitable alternative housing that was affordable. So there was a formula
to determine what was affordable for a family. Essentially, it was they
would not have to pay more than twenty-five percent of their net family
income for rent and utilities. And as a practical matter, most of the
people that were in these neighborhoods lived on disability or welfare
or minimum-wage jobs and it was virtually impossible for most of them to
pay market-rate rent for houses that were decent, safe, and sanitary. So
at that time, in the early 70s, to be able to rent a house that had any
kind of good heating equipment, a furnace of any kind, would cost about
three hundred dollars a month. But most of these people could not afford
to pay that much rent plus utilities. The city was not finding places
for them and paying the difference.
What we did was bring another motion in that case in the federal court
before Judge McMillan and combined it with a new suit that my former
employer had at that time, George Daly. The caption of his case was Kannon v. HUD and the City of Charlotte. That was a
commercial lease in the first ward neighborhood, but there were also
residential complainants in that suit too. So we combined those together
and had a trial in front of the judge and showed the judge that the city
was still not providing adequate relocation housing for residents or
adequate relocation assistance for businesses. The judge ordered the
city to stop displacing people. That then resulted in a new court order
that was enforceable by contempt of court. So we then spent the next two
years monitoring the performance of the city under that new order, to
see whether or not they were actually offering suitable housing and/or
financial assistance for people to find suitable housing.
Page 23
[END OF DISC 1, TRACK 3]
[DISC 1, TRACK 4]
[START OF DISC 1, TRACK 4]
Page 24
SARAH THUESEN:
Just to clarify a couple of details, the new order came down in
'74?
TED FILLETTE:
Yes.
SARAH THUESEN:
This new order applied, whether the city was using urban renewal funds or
community block grants—is that correct?
TED FILLETTE:
That's right. It was any federal funds that resulted in
demolition, because the urban renewal programs were essentially phasing
out. They were almost finished. But there was a whole new set of funds
that came from the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974, that
was sending millions of dollars to cities like Charlotte to demolish
deteriorated neighborhoods and do other things that were considered to
be good for the total community.
SARAH THUESEN:
Could you tell me a little bit more about—the Mr. Kannon you
referred to is Mitchell Kannon; is that right?
TED FILLETTE:
That's right. Now that was Mr. Daly's client. I
remember I met Mr. Kannon. He was an elderly white guy who had a laundry
in the First Ward neighborhood that was a very convenient laundry for
local people both in the neighborhood and for people that worked
downtown. They said his laundry had to move and they were not offering
him enough money to set up a business somewhere else. So it was going to
destroy his business is essentially what it was doing.
SARAH THUESEN:
Did you generally find after the new order came down that the city
changed it ways?
TED FILLETTE:
I found that they changed their ways initially and certainly for all the
immediate clients that we had presented to them and before the court,
that they knew that we knew. But for people that were not part of the
lawsuit, we found that more and more of
Page 25
those
people kept coming to our office. Eventually what we decided was rather
than just have them come and have us discover their plight by
happenstance, we were going to systematically go out and find them
ourselves. So we did what was called "discovery." We
forced them to provide us the names and addresses of all the people that
they intended to displace. Then we would interview them either ourselves
or with law students or other people that could help, to determine what
they had been offered and whether it was suitable and met the legal
standard for affordable housing, and determined that there were still
many people that were not getting offered adequate, affordable
relocation housing.
So we filed a motion for contempt of court, which then resulted in yet
another order being entered that was done by negotiation. This time, the
order did a couple of things. First, it included some new housing to be
built by the city that would be considered permanent relocation housing,
that would be accessible by the relocatees. What that did was provide
some ready inventory of housing that would be identifiable and
wouldn't have any market-rate rent charge. The minimum rents
were fifty dollars a month. So that was affordable to almost everybody,
even the poorest people.
We also got the city to agree to fund a monitor, who was a lawyer that we
agreed upon with the city attorney, who would scrutinize all of the
relocation decisions made by the department to see whether or not they
would in fact meet the legal standard of affordable and up to code. What
that did is it built in the enforcement mechanism at the front end,
rather than us having to continually go back and chase and catch them
after the fact and try to remedy the problem. In this instance, the
monitor had the power to tell the city staff that they
couldn't displace family X, because the housing they had
shown the person didn't meet the housing code or the rent and
the utilities combined for that unit were not affordable for that
family. He had the authority to essentially veto any individual
Page 26
displacement that wasn't going to meet
the legal standard. I think what that did is that, by having someone who
would provide that regular oversight and be a lawyer, it really did
finally institutionalize the city's effort to do it
right.
SARAH THUESEN:
Did having a monitor in place like that, did that position continue past
the community block grant program?
TED FILLETTE:
I think that it did not. I can't remember exactly which year
his role ended, but it was probably in the late 1970s or early 1980s. It
could have been as late as 1980 or '81. So it went on for a
pretty good while.
SARAH THUESEN:
Your work on these issues extended into the late 70s. I know you worked
fairly closely with the Cherry community, right, on similar issues?
TED FILLETTE:
Yes.
SARAH THUESEN:
Could you tell me just a little bit about that?
TED FILLETTE:
Well, the Cherry neighborhood was one of the historic black
neighborhoods. It was somewhat of a mix economically. It had a fair
number of middle-class people who owned their homes. It was
predominately rental with most of the rental homes owned by one
particular family and rental company. Most of those rental houses were
in very deteriorated condition by the middle 1970s. Cherry was one of
the nine neighborhoods targeted under the community development program
for demolition. The original plan in 1975 called for the virtual
complete demolition of the neighborhood.
But in 1977, there was a new city council elected, which created district
representatives for the first time, and the representative for district
number one in the city, which included Cherry, was willing to entertain
some other approach other than complete demolition. The president of the
neighborhood association at that time, whose name is Phyllis Lynch,
thought that it was unnecessary and, I think, just plain wrong to
demolish
Page 27
the entire neighborhood. She came to our
office, the Legal Services of Southern Piedmont office, and asked us to
assist the neighborhood organization to try to get a change of that
plan. There was over a million dollars allocated to that neighborhood
and all of it was budgeted for acquisition of the absentee landlord
property and demolition of the houses. So what we did was assign one of
our young lawyers to help draft a new plan for the neighborhood, which
essentially was demolish only the structures that were totally beyond
rehab, acquire the rest of the rental housing from the absentee
landlords, and sell those homes to a new non-profit organization that
would own and manage them for low-income tenants. Our organization, that
is the Legal Services organization, incorporated that non-profit, which
became the Cherry Community Development Corporation, so it could become
the owner of the rental housing for the lowest income people.
The other part of the plan was to have the Housing Authority build fifty
new units of public housing that would be affordable for the very lowest
income people, so that the subsidy was built into the housing itself.
That was owned and operated by the Housing Authority and put into the
areas where the demolition had to occur for the poorest structures, so
that we ended up with the city council in 1979 did approve the
redevelopment plan that had been designed by the neighborhood
association and our lawyer, to save the neighborhood from demolition. It
was a very different approach.
SARAH THUESEN:
What was the new public housing complex called that was built? Or was it
more a scattered-site structure?
TED FILLETTE:
I don't remember what the Housing Authority called it, but it
was actually sort of a series of duplexes and four-plexes that sort of
were put out on the street and added up to fifty units. So it was not a
tall brick building or a sort of old, conventional public housing at
all. It was blended in fairly well with the neighborhood.
Page 28
SARAH THUESEN:
I'm just curious how the original plan that you eventually
helped to overhaul, how that even made it at far as it did, given the
ways in which the city had been forced in the past to make
accommodations for folks who'd be displaced by development
projects.
TED FILLETTE:
Well, you had the city staff saying to the city council, "There
is this enormous stream of federal money and it can be used for these
purposes. We have housing inspectors who have been through these
neighborhoods and seen that a lot of the housing is old and in bad shape
and the landlords have not maintained them well." The staff
basically had the view that the only thing that you could do was
demolish everything that looked bad. No other alternative view had been
discussed before. If this had been in Roxbury, [Massachusetts], you
would have had community leaders out in the streets saying,
"You're not taking our neighborhood." There
were no militant folks here that had that kind of ability to challenge
authority. The authority of the city was generally viewed as
unchallengeable. So until the Cherry fight happened, other than to try
to use the federal litigation to help individuals, no one had really
thought about trying to save the whole neighborhood itself. But once we
saw that that could be done—and it was done mostly
politically. There was not an order from Judge McMillan or anybody else
that said to the city, "You have to stop demolishing this
neighborhood." It was not part of the Harris-Kannon lawsuit. It
was a political decision.
SARAH THUESEN:
And do you think that reflects the changes in the structure of the city
council?
TED FILLETTE:
I think it was a perfect confluence of the new city council being much
more responsive to the constituents in their district, and that
particular council member happened to have been a lawyer who had been a
law clerk for Judge McMillan for two years, back when the school case
was going on. So I think he had a particular sensitivity. And then it
just made sense to try to save a neighborhood if it could be done. So
having a positive
Page 29
alternative plan with a
neighborhood that was somewhat organized made it an attractive
alternative.
SARAH THUESEN:
Who was the city council member you were just referring to?
TED FILLETTE:
Don Carroll.
SARAH THUESEN:
I realize we're getting close to the time you need to set up
for a staff meeting. So why don't we stop right there and
hopefully pick it up later?