Interview of Robert Farrell

1. Transcript

1.1. Session 1 (September 2, 2008)

Greene: This is Sean Greene interviewing Robert Farrell on September 2, 2008, at his home. Good afternoon, Mr. Farrell.

Farrell: Good afternoon.

Greene: I wonder if we could start out by talking some about your childhood. Could you tell me some about when and where you were born?

Farrell: I was born in Natchez, Mississippi, October first, 1936.

Greene: All right. How long did you live in Natchez, Mississippi?

Farrell: I was there with my mother perhaps about six or seven months before she returned to New Orleans. New Orleans had been our home. She returned for reasons, I don't know, to her home in Sibley [Mississippi], just outside of Natchez, to have me, and she returned to New Orleans in mid-1937, so from 1937 to 1946, New Orleans was home.

Greene: Good. Tell me a little bit about your parents, if you would. What were they like?

Farrell: My parents were divorced. My earliest memories have always been about my mother, and there were other surrogate males around, but it's been a matter of mother, great aunt, aunt, and women who primarily were there to give me guidance as I was growing up. My great uncle was the supervising principal for colored schools in New Orleans, Louisiana. We resided at his residence. His name was Professor A.E. Perkins. His wife, Julia, was my mother's aunt, and his residence at 2911 Milan Street was home until late 1946. He died on Easter Sunday that year, and it was later in that year that my mother, who had remarried, moved to Newark, New Jersey, and took me with her.

Greene: Wow. Talk to me some about what it was like in those early years growing up in New Orleans. What do you remember about the community that you lived in, if anything? You were pretty young.

Farrell: Right, but it was still--in today's terms, it was a middle-class community. It was an integrated community. We had a large house, which is still standing following [Hurricane] Katrina and I assume [Hurricane] Gustav. It was a community of mostly professional people, white and in the terms of the day, Negro. So I grew up race conscious, but not in as severe a racially restricted environment as one would imagine. Not all of the segregated experience was harsh. It was segregated; it was separate. But it lacked some of the interpersonal harshness that I've read and heard that other people experience in New Orleans and other Southern communities.

Greene: Do you recall as a child having friends who were white, for example?

Farrell: Yes, until I was about four years old. Then those youngers--they lived on the corner. The family name was O'Reilly--just all of a sudden you didn't play with the O'Reilly children anymore, and it was a matter of then just growing up with the other colored kids in the neighborhood and getting the orientation that is part of, or was part of, every Negro's life, having your mother and your other relatives begin to bring you along as to what social customs were and what your place was in them, and where your safe spaces were.

Greene: Did you have many brothers and sisters?

Farrell: No, just me. Only child.

Greene: You were an only child, okay. Did you want to talk some more about your extended family? Because you mentioned that they were a big part of your early childhood.

Farrell: I remember the beginning of World War II. I called my great-uncle Daddy, because he was the male presence. I called his wife, my great-aunt, Mother, because my mother worked and I called her Mommy, but I spent most time with these two persons. That Sunday morning he had an old Philco [Storage] Radio [Company]. We were having breakfast in the breakfast nook, and I remember the radio [on the breakfast table] and the announcer talking about the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor. It was a very vivid image, and from about that point on I was conscious of myself being involved in neighborhood activities that related to support for the U.S. [United States] in the war, gather paper and scrap and turning in fat to the butcher, buying War bonds and especially War stamps as was part of what was going on in the country, and spending a lot of time reading as best I could the newspapers.

Farrell: Books were available, and I was encouraged to read. My great-aunt was educated as a teacher, but she did not work, and as I mentioned, Uncle Perkins was a principal. I later went to that school, Daniel Colored Public School in New Orleans. So I had books and I had the encouragement of reading around me, and I enjoyed the paper, the "Times Picayune," and as best I could, I read the accounts of the Second World War, and I followed the maps as they would describe what was going on in the war. That paper plus the "Pittsburgh Courier" national edition were the major papers in the house, as I remember it. With the "Pittsburgh Courier," among the things that I really enjoyed--I clipped out the articles--were J.A. Rogers, with his pieces, his illustrated pieces on black history, and I liked George Schuyler, the conservative writer. I mean, I'm a little kid. What am I doing with Schuyler's writing? For whatever reason, his writing appealed to my great-uncle, and I guess it was out of that that I got an interest in Schuyler's writing.

Farrell: I also remember that Schuyler's daughter's name was Philippa, and she was a concert pianist, so that, too, sticks in my mind. It was a time when I was also introduced to classical music, and I had a great time listening to the radio, classical music, listening to all the radio dramas that I was allowed to, from "Stella Dallas" in the afternoon, the radio soaps, to the mystery, "The Shadow" and all that kind of great stuff, and, of course, the great sporting events, the Joe Louis fights. I remember just laying in front of the radio and listening to these things. So those are the impressions that came back to me.

Farrell: In addition, as Daddy and Mother took me with them--I was little Robert Perkins--they would go out with their friends as they socialized. They played cards together. So I had a chance to meet these other people who were, in terms of status, just like him. They were business professionals, physicians, a pharmacist, and other educators, and they comprised a circle that I was introduced to early in life, once again the value of education, speaking well, all those things that you associate, I thought were the norm of life. There I was, and meeting and engaging those children who were my peers.

Greene: As you describe your community, trying to get a sense--was your sense that the majority of people that lived in your neighborhood were from a similar socioeconomic kind of status? Or was it more mixed?

Farrell: Where we lived, the mix was race. It was around the corner and up the street that there were other folks who were more like what my mother was doing, folks who had regular jobs doing a variety of types of work, clerical, administrative work, the post office and like that, but not on the block where we were. It was teachers, principal, teachers, the executive of the Dryades Street YMCA for colored, a lawyer, like that. The police chief of New Orleans at the time lived across the street, and some other whites were there, so it was kind of a genteel area where people knew their place, but at the same time, people were respectful of each other and very much aware of the lines, but people grew up and everything was nice.

Greene: Was your family churchgoing? Were they active in a particular church?

Farrell: I was christened Catholic at one of the major churches in New Orleans for black people, Corpus Christi down in the Seventh Ward, Creole heaven. That's where many, many folks who are in the Seventh Ward, who have an aspect of their culture which ties into that Creole piece, attended that parish. But I went to Holy Ghost Catholic Church, which was just a few blocks away from where we resided. The major intersection near our residence was Claiborne Avenue and Milan Street, and Holy Ghost Church was on Feret Street and Louisiana Avenue. I would walk with a friend of mine, who was the son of some friends of my mother and who were related to my Nanan [godmother], who lived just next door on Milan Street, just a few blocks away on Penniston [Street], so it was out of that group of young people that I went over the Holy Ghost Church for that period of time, where I learned of catechism and religious instruction and through my First Communion. That was just part of my growth and development as a Catholic youngster there in New Orleans.

Farrell: But my early schooling was with my great-uncle, Uncle Perkins, Daddy, by attending the school where he was principal, Daneel [Elementary School]. So I went to my elementary school from nursery through about sixth grade there.

Greene: Did your mom work?

Farrell: Yes. She had a variety of things--as I found in later life, her challenge was that she had to work. She worked six days a week as a clerk in a pet shop, Dusses, D-u-s-s-e with an accent, pet shop, I think down on Royal Street or on Bourbon Street over in the French Quarter. That's where she worked, and she had typing skills. She learned how to type over at the Y on Dryades Street. She applied those typing skills in typing up two manuscripts for the books that Professor Perkins, Daddy, wrote, and I have copies of them downstairs, fragments of them, not whole bound books, but just fragments that I have. Later that skill provided her an opportunity to participate in the World War II workforce expansion, where she left New Orleans to go to Oakland, California, where she worked at the Naval Supply Center in Alameda [CA].

Greene: Is that right?

Farrell: And she took me with her, because she was still married to my father. They divorced sometime between 1944 and 1946, because we returned to New Orleans.

Greene: So this period would have been when the war was still going on?

Farrell: Yes. All of this is wartime.

Greene: Why Alameda? Did you have people there?

Farrell: The Naval Supply Station was in Alameda, and the demand was for workers to come participate in the war effort. She had typing and administrative skills, and Oakland is one of those places where you had kind of a terminus of the railroad, and you had a lot of people who, because of knowing people on the road, or sleeping-car porters and all that kind of stuff, we learned about Oakland, we learned about L.A. [Los Angeles], and she went to Oakland and got a job. My late father, Wilfred Farrell, was a longshoreman, and he was a longshoreman from his World War II days till his retirement and then subsequent death in the early 1990s.

Greene: And he was in California?

Farrell: He was in Oakland.

Greene: Did you live with him in the period of time that you stayed there?

Farrell: During the time my mother was in California, in Oakland, we lived together.

Greene: What do you remember about your father?

Farrell: Very, very little. I learned more about my father by stories told me by my mother and my aunt, his sister, but I did not have that kind of personal experience with him.

Greene: Were there any stories that stand out to you that you recall?

Farrell: Well, Wilfred Farrell--using his street name, Wesley Farrell--was a prizefighter. He was a welterweight, and he did very well in New Orleans. That was how he earned his living. He'd go out and fight. Perhaps that's a reason why the family never developed, because he was busy doing what he was doing.

Greene: So after your mom decides to leave Alameda and return to New Orleans, what was life like upon your return?

Farrell: Well, there was a qualitative improvement. In Oakland, we lived in a furnished room. In New Orleans, we lived in a house, and I shared the room with my mother, so we had a big spatial relationship, but I was still living there with my mother.

Greene: And the house you lived in in New Orleans, it was a family home?

Farrell: It was. It was a two-story home that's still standing. It has about eight rooms. Upstairs--we lived up--the house had two stories to deal with the issue of flood, and downstairs during World War II I remember units being built in the basement, because of the housing shortage, and they put in a couple of units down there. But I was always in a situation where there was a house with a lot of space, with the exception of the time I spent with my mother, and I saw another side of life, where we had to live in furnished rooms and share space like that.

Greene: As best you can remember, did your life change much after your parents divorced?

Farrell: The significant change in my life came after A.E. Perkins, Daddy, Uncle Perkins died. In 1946 my mother had remarried to a gentleman by the name of Ismael Delgado, a Puerto Rican gentleman who she'd met because during the Second World War white-looking Puerto Ricans were white, dark-skinned Puerto Ricans were colored troops. So she met him at a social in New Orleans, and they subsequently got married, and they moved to Newark, New Jersey. My mother came back to take me after the death of Uncle Perkins, and we lived in Newark.

Greene: And Uncle Perkins was your mother's brother?

Farrell: No. This is Uncle Perkins, Daddy, my grand-uncle.

Greene: Your grand-uncle. Excuse me. Okay.

Farrell: Right. My mother's aunt's husband.

Greene: So your mom remarries and relocates to Newark, and then once Daddy Perkins passes away, she comes to move you from New Orleans.

Farrell: Yes.

Greene: Tell me what that was like, that transition.

Farrell: Once again a move from a house with space to a furnished room, a traditional, Northern, post-World War II life. It was a community that had formerly been Jewish, and as the war ended and these folks moved out, we moved in.

Greene: "We" meaning?

Farrell: We people of color. We Negroes moved in, and among the ways that one accommodated shelter and space was to live in a large house where someone had acquired it and broken it up into rooms to be let, so that's how I initially was introduced to the North and to Newark.

Greene: Okay. What part of town was it?

Farrell: Third Ward, Newark. It was up on a hill, Spruce Street. You know Newark?

Greene: A little bit. I lived in Jersey City.

Farrell: Okay. This was up on the hill, Spruce Street. At Kinney and High [Streets], there used to be one of these Jewish Community Centers that was ultimately taken over by African Americans, so from that place you could basically look from High Street out towards New York [City], you could see the skyline. There was a big hospital between where we lived in Spruce Street and that community center, St. Barnabas Hospital. It was taken down and there's a highrise structure, highrise apartment structure that's there now. But the school was right around the corner, Monmouth Street Elementary School. It's gone now, replaced by apartments, and that block-long school that I remember had a replacement on Quitman Street, which was the next street over. It was High Street, Quitman Street, Monmouth Street along Spruce Street where I had my early teenage life.

Greene: So you're living in an apartment building, essentially?

Farrell: A house.

Greene: Sub-divided house.

Farrell: Right, with rooms, like here. Someone would live in that room, someone would be in each of the three bedrooms, someone would live downstairs, maybe a couple of people would live in the basement. There was separation between them, and we would share the use of the bathroom and share the use of the kitchen.

Greene: And you said the community was in transition, that it was largely Jewish?

Farrell: In Newark, it was all Negro, on Spruce Street where we were living. The merchants were still Jewish. There were two delis, Newman's and Friedman's on the corner of Spruce and Monmouth. There was a housing project two blocks away. That was all Negro. That's what I remember post-World War II, coming into Newark in '46, '47.

Greene: And was your sense that a lot of the people in your neighborhood had migrated from other places?

Farrell: Yes, they did.

Greene: Like where?

Farrell: Virginia, the Carolinas. We were kind of odd folks out, because we came from Louisiana. Everybody else was from Carolina, Virginia, like that. That seemed to be that Eastern seaboard kind of movement. That's the way that neighborhood was.

Greene: Did you mom work while she was there?

Farrell: Yes, at a place called Conmar Zippers. It was a zipper company, what they called--and it was down in the Neck. The Neck was an industrial part of Newark on the other side of the railroad tracks, so one had to walk from High Street down Spruce Street, across I think it was a park--I forget the name of the park, Military Park, something like that--then go underneath the tracks to the industrial area, and there was Conmar. It was a large, industrial zipper plant.

Greene: You said the way to get there was walking. Did your family have a car when you lived there, or did they need one?

Farrell: No. Would have been nice, couldn't afford that.

Greene: What impressions did you have of your stepfather?

Farrell: We were not close. He worked as a baker. He had a variety of odd jobs, so I was pretty much to myself, and I began to develop solo.

Greene: Okay, all right. Tell me a little bit about what school was like, what your friends were like, what your life was like.

Farrell: Given my early school experiences and environment, I did well in elementary school, so I had a lot of time on my hands. I was also short. I don't think I started growing until I was in about the seventh grade, and I remember clearly I was four feet four inches and seventy-six pounds when I first started having gym class in the seventh grade, and I was so proud of that, because I had my height and my weight taken. I just remember that to this day. So as a little guy, I spent my time reading and fantasizing, read a lot of magazines, was very much attracted to reading classified ads. I sent away for things. I got on mailing lists, so I found that I could just get a lot of mail and basically be someone by having all this stuff come to me, and that early reading gave me an opportunity to just expand on my experiences in Newark.

Farrell: So I learned at school, learned quite a bit at home from materials that I read and less from the streets, because Newark was a different kind of place, and I saw challenge and a certain amount of threat there, so I just stayed out of the way.

Greene: Is that because--were there gangs? Was there a sense anyone was dangerous?

Farrell: Yes, it was starting, it was starting. But it was more a matter of Negroes moving in, okay where you were in the Negro community, but as you got into the margins there were Polish communities and Italian communities where there were difficulties.

Greene: I see. So the danger you mentioned is some of the threat from some of the ethnic communities surrounding your neighborhood? And the boundaries that went with it?

Farrell: I don't know if that was fantasy, but it was just out there, something to have you be aware of, so that the community as proscribed by Springfield Avenue up around the north--where we were living is just the center of where our world was. But then when you went up the hill, we didn't go up past 18th Avenue. The swimming pool--what was that cross street in Newark? Paralleled High Street, it paralleled 18th Avenue, had the church, had the police station, Police Athletic League was there, and that was like a boundary as one would tend to go up. The adventurous among us found our way to walk from where we were living back over to Weequahic Park in Newark, going the other direction. We ran into a whole lot of whites with the Irish kids and then the Jewish community over by what was then South Side High School, which is now, I think, Malcolm X High [School]. But in that area, there was less threat somehow. Folks got along with the Irish, and Jewish folks were amenable to us being there as we moved in. It just got a bit sharper in terms of race feelings dealing with the Poles [Polish] and Italians. But that was the environment as I recall it.

Greene: That you could remember--I know you were a child when you were living in New Orleans, but did you have a comparable sense of places that one ought not venture into?

Farrell: In New Orleans?

Greene: In New Orleans.

Farrell: A sense of New Orleans and differentiation was white and colored. My Aunt Mildred, my father's sister, lived in another part of New Orleans, and during that time I lived on Milan Street, at least two or three times a month I would spend weekends with her. That gave me another kind of grounding, a childhood experience that I didn't have uptown, because my aunt was about my mother's age, and she was more active in allowing me to be out in the street and play with kids and get dirty and do the things that boys do, in a way that my great-uncle and great-aunt didn't.

Greene: So once you moved to Newark, who were your friends? I mean, you said you kept to yourself a lot with the reading and stuff like that. Were there people that you befriended in school or elsewhere?

Farrell: At the elementary school, but I stayed pretty close to home, with folks who lived on the same street. I think that's when I began a particular loner kind of existence. It's understandable. I had a great desire to go to boarding school or a military school. I guess I missed a sense of structure in my life. Maybe that's why I went to the Navy. Maybe that's why I would up wanting to compete for college and did well in that kind of structured environment that the military provided for me.

Farrell: Just adjacent to one of the delis was a candy store. It was an old-fashioned soda place, where you could get a malted milk or a milkshake. The guy sold tobacco and candy, and there was a pinball machine there. They also sold newspapers and magazines, and I would hang out over there. I got my first job in Newark by doing that, because I assisted a young man [Sol Jarnell], a teenager who worked there, to put together the Sunday editions of "The Star Ledger," and if you're familiar with newspapers, the inserts come before Sunday. It starts coming in Thursday and Friday, and what you do is you literally put those things in with the Sunday paper put out on Sunday for sale, and in that process of helping him I met the distributor, and I ultimately wound up delivering newspapers. I got a route and then I made myself available to work with the district supervisor in doing my route and doing other routes that may be vacant from time to time and work on other projects. So I would get up very early, do newspaper work, be back home in time to go to school.

Greene: How old were you at this time, more or less?

Farrell: Thirteen, fourteen.

Greene: And then what did you do with the money that you earned working at the newspaper? Did you like save in a piggybank? Did you use it to get your magazine subscriptions?

Farrell: No, I would get my magazines and things like that, reading materials, from just being over at the candy store and doing chores. Guys let me have that. Or they'd give me slugs and let me play the pinball machine, hanging out. But I think I gave my money to my mother. We didn't have a situation of being able to have cooked meals, so it was a day that you could literally buy meal tickets. There was a restaurant that had just, I imagine, opened up for a Negro clientele, called Bill's Restaurant, and Bill's had meal tickets. What happens is, if you're familiar with meal tickets, you get a ticket and you have certain numbers on there. For x amount of dollars you get so many punches, and when you come in to eat, whatever your order, things get punched out. So we would buy weekly meal tickets, and that was how we generally ate, ate at Bill's, and there were a few things you'd just keep in the room. Then subsequently, I got my own room next to the furnished room in which my parents lived, so there we were in two rented rooms on Spruce Street.

Greene: A couple of questions. What kind of food did they have at Bill's? What kind of food was it, do you recall?

Farrell: At Bill's Restaurant? Typical black folks' food. Yes, indeed. I'll never forget, chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes, rice, white potatoes, yams, vegetables, like that, bacon-egg grits, bacon, eggs, rice.

Greene: Stick to your bones kind of food, huh?

Farrell: Yes. But early on, I developed a taste for just little extra things that my mom would get from the deli. I remember being introduced to smoked salmon, lox and bagels, Swiss cheese in addition to regular American cheddar cheese and white cheese, and the way these deli people would make sandwiches. I was developing that taste and that interest in that kind of food at that time.

Greene: And that was new for you, that kind of food?

Farrell: That was new, right. Rolls and onion rolls and gefilte fish, and as a sweet this halvah, if you're familiar with halvah. It's a kind of sweet delicacy that you find in Middle Eastern cuisine, those little wrapped packages with halvah, like that. There was also work at the supermarket, carrying groceries. So on Saturdays and Sundays there would be that opportunity to go and stand outside the supermarket and ask people if you could carry their groceries for them, pick up a nickel or a dime just walking people out to their cars, or for people who lived close by, to basically walk home with them and carry the bags.

Greene: You could pick up some extra money doing that?

Farrell: Yes. My mother joined the Elks, the Improved Benevolent Protective Order of Elks of the World [IBPOE], and her temple and the Elks Lodge was established in a building which was behind Friedman's Deli on Monmouth Street, and my mother maintained her active participation in the Elks that she joined in New Jersey, until her death in 1989, made a lot of friends through that relationship.

Greene: So was that coming into a community--joining the Elks for your mom was like coming into a whole community of folks?

Farrell: Yes, it was. There were a lot of supports, a lot of support. It was also the base for the Third Ward Republican Club.

Greene: That was my next question. Were there like hometown clubs or places where people clustered from different places?

Farrell: But we didn't have that in Newark, no, no. There was a 3rd Ward Republican Club, because the grand exalted--well, he wasn't at that--Hobson Reynolds was a lawyer out of Philadelphia, and for many years, like a generation, he was the Grand Exalted Ruler of the IBPOE Elks. So as he was Republican, most of the folks in the Elks were Republican. And remember, this is just post-World War II, so I don't think there was any significant difference for the folks like us, who were basically moving north from the South into new communities where I don't think anybody had been there that long. I saw parallels with the in migration of Latinos in South L.A. One moment we have vacant properties, dilapidated properties, and then all of a sudden those vacant properties no longer exist. People are moving in. And so they went through similar situations of building a community and personal networks, and I assume that's what we came in on in Newark, New Jersey.

Greene: You mentioned that you and your mom would eat at those restaurants. Were there other things that you can recall that you tended to do together? Or places that you might go together?

Farrell: She worked six days a week. It was almost like a similar thing in New Orleans, so I was pretty much on my own. So I explored Newark, found my way to the library and a great life in the Newark Public Library.

Greene: Is that right?

Farrell: Yes, down by Military Park.

Greene: Did they have programs, or you just kind of--

Farrell: No. To go down there and with the help of librarians--I always a good relationship with the librarians, have a chance to just go and read, find out about what's going on in the world, engage in fantasy, like that.

Greene: So reading was a constant for you.

Farrell: It was a constant.

Greene: It was something that you enjoyed doing.

Farrell: Right, for information and given life circumstances in retrospect, it was a great and safe escape.

Greene: Did you attend church when you were in Newark?

Farrell: I had some interesting experiences in the church situation in Newark.

Greene: Tell me about them.

Farrell: My Catholicism was not that devout. On High Street, down close to Springfield Avenue, there's Arts High School, and it still may be there, and across the street is a Catholic church, and associated with the Catholic church was a boys' school. The name of that church was just on my mind, and the school was just there. I remember--I want to say St. Benedict, but that may not be it [St. Benedict's Academy]. But I remember seeing boys go to class at the school, and they would wear blazers and they had their uniforms. I've always been drawn to that structure and uniforms and like that. St. Benedict's. And I went to church there, and I found a difference. In New Orleans, I went to Catholic church and I thought that Holy Ghost Catholic Church was Holy Ghost Catholic Church, and that's what Catholics were like. In later life, I've come to find out that Holy Ghost was a Negro Catholic church, and in Newark, St. Benedict's was a Catholic church, period. Most of the people who went there were Irish; white people.

Farrell: So it was like that kind of disconnect, because there was no one to talk to about why things were like that, different down South, and why all the people in church were like this. It's something you find out later in life.

Greene: What were some of those differences that struck you at St. Benedict's versus what you had known?

Farrell: White people.

Greene: [laughs] Plain and simple.

Farrell: Right. To see all these white people, only white people. I mean, not that it was strange. It was that many of them. I mean, I wasn't living among white people. Around the margins, but to have that many of them, I was surprised by that. And subsequently, I asked my mother to sort of check out the school with me, and she had the courage to go and check it out with me, and that's when we found out, oh, Catholic private school, ooh, no way we could afford that. I think that the administrators were about as surprised as we were, but they were cordial, and the issue that made it not possible was, as I recall, was it cost money. But I in retrospect later understand that there were other reasons, that if we could have afforded it, it wouldn't have been possible. Okay?

Greene: That was the official--

Farrell: Right. But that was something that I remember, and I always remember the courage of my mother in following my lead to want to check these things out, as opposed to saying no to me. We had those experiences. Then I found my way--if you know Newark, if you walk along High Street to Springfield Avenue, when you get down to Broad Street and turn right, you walk as far as you can go and there's the library, because after that the street curves and it goes up. Italians live up there. So I found in my walking along Broad Street and downtown that the movies were there, and the penny arcades were there, and to go down Market Street you got down to Penn Station, and lo and behold, I found something that was fascinating.

Farrell: When we did do things together, Delgado, my mother and me, often those trips were, "We're going to take the Hudson tubes to New York, and we're going to go to Coney Island, and we're going to go to Far Rockaway, and we're going to go up into the Bronx." He was a Puerto Rican guy, and that's where the Puerto Ricans were beginning to come in. So I early on just developed this fascination with riding the tubes, and out of that wandering--

Greene: Now, the tubes are we now call the Path trains, or were they something different?

Farrell: Whatever that train was that would go from Newark, Jersey City, into New York and then fit you into the subway system, whatever that was. It used to be the tubes.

Greene: It used to be the tubes, okay.

Farrell: Right. I found that down on Broad Street one time I saw a sign at Western Union saying "messengers." All you had to do was have a bike, and I had a bike. I got a job at Western Union delivering telegrams.

Greene: You would have been, like, fifteen?

Farrell: This was about fifteen now, late fourteen going on fifteen, and I got a job.

Greene: In Manhattan?

Farrell: No, delivering telegrams in Newark. And in a short while, I guess because I was diligent, whatever, I would get in on Sunday mornings and I would have one of the treasured routes. The telegrams that would come in Saturday late to Sunday morning, because things were slow on Sundays, they would bunch up all the telegrams, and there was a route that went up Broad Street up around where the Italians were, back out around Westside High School, come back down around South Side High School, back down to Broad Street, and it'd take you the whole day, and I used to get that route. So Sunday mornings were a matter of riding a bike around the city, doing that thing with the telegrams.

Farrell: Then I found out from Western Union that they had jobs in New York City for guys, and I applied, got a reference, and for a short while I would take the tubes over every morning and go up to 92nd and Broadway and deliver telegrams to Central Park West along 92nd, 93rd, 94th, 95th [Streets], right in that particular area, and then go back in the evenings. During this time I finished Monmouth High School, and I chose to go to Vo-Tech [Boys Vocational Technical] High School. I majored in chemistry. So here I was as a kid, going to Vo-Tech. I still gravitated towards the library and books, and a librarian took interest in me, asked me to have my mother come over. She basically said, "Your kid's bright. He shouldn't be here at Vo-Tech. He should be going to an academic school."

Greene: What kind of classes were you taking at Vo-Tech?

Farrell: They were basically vocational courses. Chemistry in the morning was the kind of work that you do to be an assistant in a chem lab. New Jersey has always had a lot of stuff with chemistry, all that kind of stuff, and this was basically preparing people to go to work in that.

Greene: Like around Elizabeth and places like that?

Farrell: In Newark. In Newark itself. A lot of industrial stuff, and the guys were doing chemistry, so that's where I was figuring I'd get a job. But I got exposed to science and I learned that--a lot of experience in that. The librarian says, "You should be in academic." Next thing I know, Mother is taking me over to South Side High School, academic high school.

Greene: Did the student population differ in Vo-Tech than it did in South Side High School?

Farrell: Yes. At Vo-Tech you had among these students young folks coming out of high school, and you had veterans coming back from the war. I met one who was a photographer who took a picture of me. Hold on a minute. Let me just do something.[Tape recorder turned off.]

Farrell: About this time I went to be with my Uncle Robert, my mother's brother, in Detroit, Michigan. I was attending South Side at the time, and by the time I came back, she and Delgado had moved to an apartment. We had an apartment on Livingston Street just off of Springfield [Avenue]. Man, that thing was a straight-ahead tenement. And in the old days, the way you would get an apartment is you bought out the apartment from the people who had lived there before, and you paid some kind of a key tax or something like that with a landlord anyway.

Greene: Was that to take over the lease? Is that how it works?

Farrell: However that went. But anyway, it was loaded with chinches. Never in my life have I been so consumed by chinches. But anyway, during that time--

Greene: Chinches? Like bedbugs?

Farrell: A bedbug, right. Because what you do, you have to buy the people's furniture.

Greene: Furniture, oh, yes.

Farrell: Right. That was part of it. You had to buy the furniture. So in going to Detroit, I stayed there for a semester and went to Cass Tech High School.

Greene: Did you? And your uncle lived in Detroit?

Farrell: Yes. My uncle was a pharmacist. And I don't know what that was about. I think that may have been him extending a hand to just be helpful to his sister, because we had some severe financial problems in Newark, just not being able to make it. Anyway, I go off to Cass Tech, have a wonderful semester there, because, of course, when I'm in the academic environment I go to Cass Tech, what's my strength? Well, doing sciences, this, blah, blah, blah, and I've had chemistry because I did this, this, this is right. Somebody says--so they say, "You've got to take chemistry over again, since you're familiar with it." So--

Greene: They made you take chemistry over?

Farrell: Yes. The industrial kind of chemistry that I was learning at Vo-Tech was the way you'd bring someone in to work in a lab. These are all the beakers and the glass stuff, and this is how you do maintenance on that. And these are Bunsen burners and how they were put together, and this is how they function. And these are the chemicals now. You have to learn that table so that you can understand how these things are organized and why they're kept a particular way, and this is how you work with someone, and these are the kinds of tools you'll be working with, because you're going to be assisting a chemist, so it's sort of like that, para-technical kind of stuff.

Farrell: So when I went into a class where we basically were doing chemistry out of a textbook, I mean, I was familiar with everything. I had not done chemistry out of a textbook, though, not that way. Mine was more about, "This is the way you prepare to go get a job after you finish Vo-Tech," and whatever. But relative to the people in class, I got bored. I remember the guy's name was Hoke, and Mr. Hoke got on my case for not paying attention ,and I told him it's because I knew this stuff already. And I guess that man had never seen a little boy talk to him that way, especially a little colored boy. So as I recall, he really did a number as it relates to chemistry on me, but I had been well grounded at Vo-Tech, so I was able to just sustain that, and I still got my A. But it was the first time that I come into a situation of an authority figure and really dealing with a subject that was his subject, and I was not attempting to be a smart ass. It was just that I knew it, and I began early on then to begin to understand that there were limits to being a colored boy and being too smart.

Farrell: So I began to say, okay. And I think, too, that that came into play later in understanding that sometimes you don't want to be too smart. You really don't want to do your very best. Yes, do your best, but you really don't want to do your very best, because if you're too smart--

Greene: It might put the wrong people off, is that what you're saying?

Farrell: Right. It's that there's a potential downside that you don't know about. I recall that being introduced to my mind. So after that semester, I came back to Newark, and I mentioned my folks had moved from Spruce Street up to Livingston, and I went to the nearest school, which at this time was at Westside High School. Remember Westside? So I went up to Westside. I think that was my best high school experience for, I think, a year I was there before my mother and I came to California. It was coed, college prep. I felt that I could be a runner, and I went out for cross-country and I made the team, but once again, being a little kid, I really couldn't keep up. I couldn't keep up with the better guys on the cross-country team, but I was good enough to win a letter. It was not a regular big old W Westside. It was W with a two underneath it, right on it. It was a smaller W, but it was still a W, and I was just so proud of that. But once again, when I grew up I was going to be able to run or something like that. But I had that experience.

Farrell: But about that time I think strains were beginning to show up in the marriage of my mother and Delgado, and she and I had a conversation, "Where shall we go?" No, before that I just dropped out of Westside High, because it was this time that I found that I could get a job over in New York City as a messenger, so I dropped out of Westside to just go do this work full-time at Western Union. What I did was, I had read about the International Correspondence School. It was ads in a magazine. And I talked my mom into letting me sign up for a correspondence course to finish up high school. I'll always remember the fact that this sales rep came to the slum, and he just couldn't get over the fact that here's somebody who wants to take the correspondence course, and it wasn't for Delgado. It was for me. Anyway, we got the clearance. I took the course. I finished high school by correspondence, got myself a diploma.

Farrell: And as the problems came up with my mother and Delgado, it was clear that she was going to leave. "Where should we go?" I suggested that we consider California. She had friends there. Conmar Zipper plant that she worked with all these years in Newark had opened up a subsidiary in the growing garment industry in Los Angeles, so that's what we did. We came out from Newark to Los Angeles by train.

Greene: By train. That was a long trip.

Farrell: And we went over to the Elks Hall and got a reference. We lived in a house over on Westchester Place, just off Pico [Boulevard]. Once again, African Americans buying a house that was formerly owned by whites, breaking it up into rooms for rent. But he was a brother Elk, so back in the day, remember the Elks or the Masons, you have what's called a traveling card. My mother had a traveling card. So when she came here and presented the traveling card, assisted by the Exalted ruler of the Elks--come back on it, because it was Gilbert Lindsay, the first meeting with Gilbert Lindsay, and we were referred to this particular place to live. From this place we could take the Pico tram, the street car.

Greene: What year was this, about?

Farrell: [19]52.

Greene: It was in '52.

Farrell: [19]52. You could take the street car downtown to the garment district. The street car turned and we'd walk down Pico, because the place that Conmar had, this building was on Pico just a few blocks west of Central Avenue, and my mother and I worked there at the zipper plant. It was a comedown, because my mother had a union job in Newark, and out here Conmar was non-union. She did zippers, and I worked on the floor, cleaning off zippers that would be dirty, or where there were errors made in the process of putting bottom stops on a zipper. On a zipper, it would come in a long strip on colored cloth, and as these would be cut to size, a bottom stop, a piece of metal would be placed at the bottom of the zipper, so that as you put as you put the slide on it, it would stop right next to the bottom. Sometimes these would be put on and it would not be a perfect fit, so they'd be tossed out. I would pick these up and clean them up and take off the bottom stops and put them back on.

Farrell: And I ran into a situation, because I had to have a work permit. A kid working in the garment--you've got to have a work permit to work in these places. So I went over to L.A. Unified [School District] office with my mom, and I took along my correspondence school diploma saying I was a high school graduate, and some kind person said, "I don't care if you have that. You're just fifteen years old." Remember, I'm a little kid. "You're going to school here. We're not going to give you a work permit." So the closest school to Westchester, where we were living by Pico, was Los Angeles High School. So they said, "Notwithstanding the fact that you have this thing, we want you to most certainly do the twelfth grade, and we want you also to repeat eleventh grade." We negotiated so I went in in 11-A, it was A-B, 11-B and then you go to 11-A. Whichever it was, I went the first half. They gave me the credit for the first half, so I just did the final part of the eleventh grade and then the full twelfth grade.

Greene: So they put you back like a grade and a half.

Farrell: They put me back a grade and a half. I went to L.A. High and did well there, except that as I was growing up in that area, I mean, I had some really impressive classmates in later life, and they were decent guys then. George Jackson, Johnny Cochran, a whole bunch of other fellows were coming through.

Greene: Is that right.

Farrell: Yes. But these were boys who reminded me of how I was growing up in Newark. Johnny Cochran's dad was an insurance salesman. George Jackson's dad was a physician. Well, my great-uncle was the principal of a school. I rubbed shoulders with people like that when I was a little kid. They would go out playing cards, and when I would be with my great-uncle and my great-aunt, they were AMEs [African Methodist Episcopal], so I'd go to Catholic church sometimes, then I was also at AME church, so I was familiar with that. So it was like reconnecting in kind of a class way with different outlook and expectations than I'd been exposed to throughout my whole experience in Newark, in our first arrival here in L.A., where we were basically working people on the underside, not making it.

Farrell: So L.A. High turned out to be the gateway for me in getting ready for the rest of my life. Because I had done well the way I had done well, I did well in English. I expressed myself. My weaknesses were in math and some science other than--I did okay in general science and chemistry. I think my weak science was in biology, but the thing is, I passed it. So mine was pretty much a remedial time. And I had a class in music appreciation I'll always remember. The lady's name was Mrs. Frost. Because I had been exposed to classical music early on, and I had listened to it from time to time, and here was an opportunity to just sit through a whole class in music appreciation. That's still with me.

Greene: If I'm hearing you right, you're saying that even though L.A. was a very different place, and it was certainly different from what you had experienced in Newark, that there was also something kind of familiar about it.

Farrell: Once I got to L.A. High. Right, because at the time when I got that assignment based on where we were living--subsequently I find out years later that black people were just moving into the attendance area of L.A. High. So once again I got a sense of how some Latinos felt, based on wherever they were able to live, how they got into whatever schools they got into, and that was the school attendance area. But once again, I'm not living in my daddy's house or my mother's house. We were rooming in a furnished room in the house of some guy who was an Elk, who simply just got this house. I mean, I remember the gentleman who owned the house. He was just so proud. He had been a cook for whites, and I don't know if this was the house that he purchased from them as they chose to go move someplace else. And his brother had been a chauffeur, and I remember the gentleman would just sit down in the living room and cross his hands and sit in a chair, and he'd just be so content doing that. And I learned later in life how things like that could give people pride, when once upon a time he was in the kitchen, and he came in the back where he had a little room, and now he had the whole house. It was his. But at the time, Mom and I shared a furnished room, used a common kitchen, had half of a shelf in the refrigerator, and that's how we lived.

Farrell: So as I got into twelfth grade, I knew that if I was to stay in L.A., there was the garment industry. My circle of friends was high school friends, but I didn't know their parents or things of that type. And I had always enjoyed the ocean, so on one of my ventures in Newark I had talked my mom into just going down and talking to the people at the Coast Guard, to find out about the Merchant Marines, because maybe I could get on early as a cabin boy or something. Romance, okay? But they put in my mind that once I got to be seventeen I could go back, because that's the age you could, with parental consent, go into the Coast Guard. But since I was out here in California I said, "Well, I haven't seen anything about the Coast Guard out here. I think what I ought to do is sign up for the Navy," and that's what I did. I went down to the recruiting office. "I'm at L.A. High School, I'm going to be a senior. I'd like to go into the Navy." Sure. Processed it. "What's your mom going to say?" "My mom's going to support me." "Bring your mom down." Brought my mom down, signed the papers. The weekend after my graduation, I was on my way down to the Naval Training Center in San Diego, in 1954.

Greene: What was it about the service that attracted you, that caught your attention?

Farrell: Structure, discipline, to learn skills, to be aboard ship, to see the world.

Greene: Had you known people that were in the service as well?

Farrell: Army. My uncle, Delgado, were in the Army. My uncles. My mother's brother was in the Army. My aunt Mildred's husband, in the Army. But somehow I had just been drawn to the water and those who were serving on the water. I think the impression of the Coast Guard came as we would take those trips on the Hudson tubes to go to places like Far Rockaway and City Island and places like that, because Delgado liked to fish. And you could see out there, see the boats, and then you would see the Coast Guard boats coming around, driving and maintaining order and being there to be of assistance like that, and I think that's where the Coast Guard piece came in first. And then, of course, the Navy was just larger ships, more opportunity to see, because it goes places. The Coast Guard sticks close by the U.S. So that's how that came about.

Greene: All right.[End of interview]

1.2. Session 2 (September 5, 2008)

Greene: This is Sean Greene interviewing Mr. Robert Farrell on Friday, September 5, [2008] at his some. Good afternoon, Mr. Farrell.

Farrell: Hello.

Greene: I wanted to pick back up where we left off, at the point in which you had just moved to Los Angeles and were looking to begin working and ended up returning to school, returning to high school, that is, and you were attending Los Angeles High School. Could you tell me some more about your impressions in this first couple of years of Los Angeles and what was going on here and what the vibe was like, as best you can remember?

Farrell: We came west by train. First impression of Los Angeles was walking out of the Union Station and looking up and to the left at these interesting tall buildings, one of which was Los Angeles City Hall. The freeway system as it currently exists, as one would look from Union Station looking to the west-southwest is still pretty much about the same. So it impressed me that these tall buildings were right here next to this freeway, and as we got into a taxicab, we rolled through the intersection headed south on what was shaping up as the Harbor Freeway. I think we got off at Santa Barbara [Blvd.] and turned east to Central Avenue, and our first stop was at the Elks Hall, 4016 South Central Avenue.

Greene: The Elks Hall was your first stop?

Farrell: Yes.

Greene: This is in 1954, right?

Farrell: No. This is about [19]52, late '51, early '52, something like that. My mother had a traveling card. Back in the day, because of the nature of interstate transportation, segregation was rife. Members of national Negro organizations like the Masons and the Elks and the Taboreans had travelers cards, and what was done was that as a member would travel from one jurisdiction, one area of the country to another, one would go to the headquarters, show the traveling card that states one is in good standing as a member of the order, and the local leadership of the order are bound by custom and the traditions of the organization to assist and accept a member who presented him or herself, and my mother did that.

Farrell: It happened that the exalted ruler of the Elks Golden West #36 was Gilbert Lindsay. The exalted ruler was in his office, and I remember that my mother and I met him. He welcomed us in, extended the courtesies of the organization, and got on the phone and found someplace that we might stay. That was in a house that had been acquired by a brother Elk on Westchester Place in Los Angeles, and the taxi, which had waited for us, took us over there, and that was the beginning. That was the beginning.

Greene: You had mentioned some of your classmates, once you got to the point of starting high school. Who became some of your friends at that time, and where did you spend most of your time as you began to get familiar with the city?

Farrell: Working with my mother, because initially I worked with her at the Conmar Zipper Company, and as time went on, my mother made contact with one of her childhood friends, a lady by the name of Esther Claude. She and her husband Athus [Claude] had moved here from New Orleans; A-t-h-u-s. He and his family were established here. He was a sleeping-car porter. He had a house on 25th Street off of Arlington, and Esther invited her childhood friend Anna to move in with her and her family and her girls and boys. She had five children. So we moved from a furnished room into a shared house where we were made to feel as family, as guests in the Claude household. So it was from the furnished room on Westchester Place that I began my high school relationships at L.A. High, and they were furthered as we moved over on 25th Street.

Farrell: At the time, 25th Street was one of the streets in that expanse along Adams Boulevard that people called Sugar Hill, so that the large house that we lived in had a lot of other people living in large houses just like that all around. And the acquaintances I made--I mentioned George Jackson, Jr., and his brother McDonald, and Johnny Cochran, Thelma Oliver, a lady who became a professional dancer and an actress, and today she's known as Krishna Kaur Khalsa. She's Sikh, and you tend to see her if you go to leadership activities in our community. She's an elegant bronze-skinned lady, and she dresses in white.

Greene: Really.

Farrell: Yes. But she's still active and on the scene. Anita Lidell was another young woman in the neighborhood. She also went to UCLA, and she retired in recent years from a leadership position in the Probation Department. There were several others, but this my introduction to people who had aspirations other than the workplace, which was pretty much my experience in Newark [New Jersey] and especially coming out of the vocational high school Vo-Tech, likewise at South Side High School, and again to a lesser extent at West Side High School in Newark. But that's where the dynamic began.

Farrell: As I had delivered newspapers in Newark, New Jersey, I delivered newspapers here. I delivered "The Herald." I'd get up and walk my morning route, picked up the papers at Arlington and Adams, and the route was such that I would walk from there delivering the papers up to approximately Crenshaw [Blvd.] and Washington [Blvd.], and then at the end of that just walk on over to L.A. High, so that was the cycle of my days' activity, doing that.

Farrell: In the fall of 1953, I talked with my mom. We went down and signed me up with the [U.S.] Navy, so I might enter the service at the conclusion of my high school years, and the rest of it was just doing my work, doing my academic work and then just looking forward to graduation and what was going to come after that. Many of the people that I had met--and I mentioned some of the names--those folks were pretty much settling, going to college. But I did not have the resources to think about going to college because of my own current situation, and besides, I had this idea about going to sea. That was pretty much what was on my mind, and I fortunate to be able to have that come to pass.

Greene: So tell me about the Navy.

Farrell: I was part of a draft, a large group of people who left Los Angeles by train to go down to San Diego into the Naval Training Center, assigned to Troop 185, which was drawn from people who basically just came in from all across the country, and for me an interesting environment of being with mostly whites. There were three other Negroes, maybe about ten Latinos, and all of the rest white, and that was our group of colleagues for socialization for the whole of the period that we were in the Naval Training Center. And if you've read the stories about boot camp, I mean, that's when you get the orientation as to what the Navy is about. You get your first allotment of Navy clothing. You go through the whole process of discipline, all of the usual stuff about taking shots and taking aptitude tests, basically getting you ready for a consideration of skills and abilities and allocations so that you can go into the Navy workforce.

Farrell: During that process, on a variety of the tests that I took, I tended to score high, and one of the bonuses at the end of the training was based on your aptitude and other kinds of general classification tests that the Navy did, how you fared on your training and your scores there gave you a welcome to the competitive nature of naval service, in terms of those who tend to fare well had an opportunity to pick where they would go. The rest basically got assigned.

Farrell: So I developed an interest in a rating called quartermaster, because these are the guys who were assistants to the navigator. You're up on the bridge on the ship. It was being real close to the action of what running the ship was about, running a ship is about, a ship at sea. It was one of those ratings that were oriented towards one going to sea, as opposed to a variety of other classifications that related to administrative kinds of positions and technical positions that were shore-based. So I got to a place where, because of the tests and my rankings on the work in boot camp, I had an opportunity to go to Quartermaster School in Bainbridge, Maryland.

Greene: Let me understand. So they assigned people to different types of training based on how they performed on the tests?

Farrell: And the general classification test that you get. I mean, you come as bodies. They know you finished high school. So you take a battery of tests to find out how you might fit into the Navy structure, based on its need for personnel in a general way, and then as you go through basic orientation in seamanship and gunnery and leadership and all the other kinds of good stuff, drilling and doing other assigned tasks that you learn as part of just basic Navy orientation, they come up with some numbers at the end, and on the basis of those numbers they allow for a choice. For those of us who scored high, you had the opportunity to look at engineering, or you can look at what was called deck, the kind of things that quartermasters do. There were some opportunities to look at aviation. For those who might be interested in things medical, there were activities that relate to dental and medical corps kind of training. For those who were interested in supply and that kind of activity, there's the whole piece having to do with the Navy supply apparatus. So these were choices, and there were patterns of ratings that would allow you to go into these particular callings.

Farrell: The point was, if you score high enough, you get a choice. If you don't, you get shuffled based on the needs of the service. So there was kind of a motivation interest in doing that. At the end of this process, the ratings have different kinds of service schools to prepare people to just get their basics in that particular rating. Like there's a school for quartermasters, there's a school for people to become radio men. There were schools for people who were going to be doing gunnery. There were schools for people who were going to be involved in fire control. There were schools for people who were going to be involved in engineering, things of that type. Okay?

Farrell: So at Bainbridge, Maryland, there was the Quartermaster School, the Radio School. Fire Control Technician was there, and that place was, in a way, like a university. I mean, it was all about learning your craft. We were highly motivated. We were still kept in groups. Just as one went through boot camp in a troop, once one would go to a service school, you were organized in groups to be moved through the process of orientation from neophyte to a person who could come out to perform at different levels of skill as that particular school was organized.

Farrell: So once again into another group, this time a mix of people who were new recruits like myself, plus others who had had the opportunity to win a slot at the service school from the ships at sea. So at the same time you had the new guys, the seamen recruits like myself, becoming seamen apprentices once we left boot camp, you had people who were seamen who were first class. There was even one second-class quartermaster, who'd basically been practicing their craft at sea, and they were coming to the school to get just a basic orientation in what the whole thing was about. I think it's akin to one's learning one's discipline academically as you go to college, and someone who basically learned how to do the particular discipline on the job as they were assigned different pieces of it, given their lives on these ships at sea.

Farrell: So out of that mix, once again, the same rule applied. You have your classes. There's constant testing, tests at least once a week, and scores are posted, and I tended to do well on them. There's another interesting thing about the Navy. At the service schools we found out something else. The expectation is that you cut the mustard, and if you don't, you leave the service school. They don't just carry you through. If you don't do well, they send you back to the fleet from which you came, another ship, or if you're a person like I and some others were, coming out of boot camp and you didn't cut the mustard, they'd just reassign you someplace else. So early on you get a sense that this matter of learning your craft and paying attention to those rules is very important.

Farrell: So once again, I did well at Quartermaster School. Part of the curriculum had to do with being an assistant to the navigator and learning the skills that related to that, piloting, maps, and another part of the trade was as a signalman, semaphore flashing lights, being the communicator, so those were the two pieces that I did. It sort of grounded me in the craft, and as I scored high at the end of the training, there the options were once again. Here are the needs of the Navy. These are the ships out here that are looking for people who are quartermaster, seaman apprentice quartermaster, seaman, quartermaster third corps, and these are the service needs, and depending on how you score, you have a chance to pick.

Farrell: I had an opportunity to pick, and of all the ships that were listed there, I chose the ATF-107, the USS Munsee. It was a fleet tug based out of Long Beach. Why Long Beach? It gave me an opportunity to come back home. So in June of '54 I went into the Navy, Naval Training Center plus service school. I think it was in January or February of 1955 I was back in Long Beach aboard the Munsee.

Greene: Let me ask a couple of questions real quick. One is about the hierarchy of--where does the Navy fall in the hierarchy of armed services, or is there one?

Farrell: Armed Services of the United States: Army, Navy, Air Force, using today's model. Off to the side, the Department of Commerce and the Coast Guard, okay? Subset of the Navy is the Marine Corps. That's pretty much the framework that exists today, pretty much still in place.

Greene: At the time that you entered, was there any--you didn't have any qualms about joining the service, given World War II hadn't receded so far into the background yet? There were no concerns about, I don't know, where you'd end up?

Farrell: It was the Korean War.

Greene: Yes.

Farrell: It was still on. I didn't have any qualms. Remember, I'm positive in outlook. I'm a good American.

Greene: And wanting to go out to sea.

Farrell: Out to sea. And so I got a really good orientation, and I accepted it as any young, red-blooded American boy would have it. And in my experience through Bainbridge from San Diego, I had not run into anything that I couldn't handle, and most of those things were guys growing up together and living together. Especially on the race piece, that had not so much surfaced. It was obvious, but it was not that much of a factor; anecdotal stuff. I found myself in a hassle one time, and as I had struck up a friendship with a Mexican American chap from L.A. His name was Al Martine from Roosevelt High School, and through him I met these other fellows. When one of those little scuffles that show up among boys will come to pass, I found myself in one of those moments where white fellows were acting out their piece. The Latino guys, the Mexican Americans, sort of pulled me in, and there was a fellow by the name of Mario Almaguer from San Antonio, who had been in the Golden Gloves, and at a particular moment when things looked like they were going to get tacky, Mario stepped out on behalf of his colleagues. The white fellows just sort of stepped back, because it was clear that even though we were small in number, we had a capacity, especially with Mario as the front fellow, to deal with any kind of problem that would come up. That was about the one time that race and white and black-brown came up. The rest of the time we were just too busy learning what we had to learn, and keeping your clothes.

Farrell: Part of the function in basic is to keep you moving, keeping you organized and keeping pressure on you, because ultimately you're going to be in a pressured situation living aboard ship or whatever. So as I told you before, I had an interest in finding a way to be in a more disciplined environment. I was very comfortable with the environment. I didn't find it that restrictive. I didn't find that it was taking anything away. In fact, I appreciated structure.

Greene: What were your days like typically? Like what kind of stuff did you do in the course of your day?

Farrell: Up very early, clean yourself, march to breakfast and back from breakfast, clean up your quarters and begin your schooling, roughly nine to midday. Then lunch and back to schooling again, and about four at the end of the day, back to the barracks and study and get ready for the next day. We were also introduced to the process of watch, standing watch. The system of watch is that certain persons in the group from time to time, according to a regular schedule, are called on to stand and be alert to the circumstances of the structure in which all are together, to watch out for things like fire, unauthorized people coming into the barracks, things of that type, and to be on details, to make sure that things are cleaned up, to do basic maintenance, to get prepared for inspections and reviews, the other kinds of military things that are part of what the basic training cycle was about.

Farrell: That pattern repeated itself at Quartermaster School in terms of standing watch and when aboard ship, found out that was the basic organization aboard ship. Depending on your classification, you tend to have three watches, four hours on, eight hours off, and you integrate that into your work schedule so that that, too, was the structure of life. Four hours on, eight hours off. Okay. You wake up for a midnight-to-four-a.m. watch, the mid watch. You're relieved at four a.m. and you go back to bed for a couple of hours. The next watch comes up at four to eight a.m. Eight a.m. the next watch comes up, eight a.m. to noon, and then the process repeats itself. There's kind of like a fourth watch in there to allow for break and overlap, so that people get spelled so that you're not locked into this routine. But that was the standard routine, with these other pieces slotted into it, and that's the way we did our work. That's the way we lived our lives.

Greene: You mentioned something to me about--it was an instance about fraternizing that you ran into.

Farrell: That was in R.O.T.C., and that was on my senior cruise. That was between my junior and senior year.

Greene: So that was later.

Farrell: That was much later. And the fraternization was that officers are here, the enlisted folks are over here, and for the senior enlisted persons, the chief petty officers, they were in between. Enlisted, chief petty officers, and then at the lower level of the officer range there were warrant officers, and then you started off with the lieutenants on up, ensigns and lieutenants on up. Any gold braid, you salute. They're Sir, and you're just colleagues with your others.

Greene: So going back to when you were in the Navy, what was your social life like? Or did you have time to have one?

Farrell: Once out of boot camp, you had liberty. If you were not on watch, you could have the weekend, or if you're on watch one day of the weekend, you have one day off. And you find out that the system works that if you can have someone of comparable status to stand in your place, you can have someone to stand in is the term, stand in for you. So I early on earned a reputation of being a guy who could be counted on to stand in for other people. My mom was in L.A. I'm here because I enjoy coming into the Navy. Once I got aboard ship, I was elated. I mean, I was excited about things in Maryland, so I stood a lot of watch, my own and on behalf of others.

Greene: Who did you befriend while you were in the Navy?

Farrell: I found that life was a series of acquaintances. If I see a shipmate, maybe our paths will cross. Because of the dynamic of the Navy and the dynamic of the schooling process that I told you about and the scores and the rest of it, you were constantly seeing people leave and people coming in.

Greene: People kind of came and went.

Farrell: That's part of the cycle. That's just the way it was onboard ship. Some people come in, they're there with you all onboard ship for a week or two weeks, then they're off someplace else. What's that about? Well, the needs of the Navy. We're getting ready to do a particular task on the tug. We're going to go out and do such and such and such and such. They'd bring aboard some people who were, for example, divers, some people who specialized in going over the side and diving tenders and like that, and when that particular piece is over, the guys leave. They're assigned someplace else, go back to where they came from. So it was just part of Navy life that people were constantly coming and going.

Greene: Did you keep in touch with friends that you had previous to entering the Navy while you were--

Farrell: No. No.

Greene: And after your training, most of the time you were in San Diego?

Farrell: No, out of Long Beach, and once I got aboard ship I went out to sea. The appeal of the tugboat was that it was not a capital ship like an aircraft carrier. The battleships were still there. The destroyers and cruisers were there. You look at them and you think about the glory side. But the working Navy, the supply ships, ammunition ships, tugboats, repair ships, were out here doing stuff every day. That appealed to me, so I was on a tug that was part of the service forces Pacific. So we were towing targets, or we were towing equipment from one place to another, standing by when there were fleet exercises outside of San Diego, in case some ship would have problems or something broke down. Then we'd go and do our job and come back in, so that was the nature of the job, and I guess it oversimplifies, like the guys in the wreckers who drive up and down the freeway. Car breaks down? Go in, fix them up, pull them off, take them someplace, next, go back up there, but with a certain amount of romance, because it was still the Navy.

Greene: And how long did you stay in the Navy?

Farrell: I was on that ship, the Munsee, for one year. Travels on the Munsee--went up to San Francisco, picking up a floating dry dock, riding down to the Panama Canal Zone on the dry dock, being towed by the Munsee, was my first trip. The reason I was on the dry dock being towed was that years ago there used to be these concrete structures that would be pulled into specially designed sections of repair facilities where people did ship repair, and what you do is basically allow water to come into an enclosed area. Your floating dry dock goes into this cut in this particular piece of land that has been carved out, and then gates are closed. Gates between the ocean or a channel and this particular little cut that's been opened up for the dry dock in which the dry dock sits. Once those doors are closed, pumps are run to pump the water out, and as the water goes down the dry dock comes down to sit on solid earth. And once it is put in place, the posts go in again, and the dock area is filled with water. When the water is filled in, the gates are opened, and ships that require periodic repair are brought in. They're located atop supports that are in the dry dock, and as they are settled into place, the water is pumped out. As the water is pumped out, the ship settles in the frame, and when water is taken out, the ship is supported with beams to keep it in place.

Farrell: Things you do, you scrape the bottom, you repaint the bottom. If a ship has been damaged in any way, folks will go in and do repairs underneath. While that's going on, usually there's other kind of work that's going on on topside, on the upper parts of the ship, parts that you normally see, or replacing engines, doing maintenance, upgrading the radar, stuff like that. That's usually done in a dry dock. After that work is done, the water is put back inside, gates open, poles knocked away, ship moves back out, the doors close, waters drain away, the dry dock is made ready for the next ship to come in, that kind of stuff. So once again, if you're not interested in that kind of work it could kind of be boring. But if you're interested in it, it's exciting to see all of that stuff and to go out to sea and tug and do all of that stuff.

Greene: The way you describe the dry dock sounds a little like how I once heard the Panama Canal described, that there are these lifts for the boats as they come through.

Farrell: Yes, exactly, the same kind of thing. They go into locks. Water is introduced or pulled out. Boat goes up or down. Doors open, go in, boat, go out. So it's one of those places where you find a lot of guys involved in engineering of one type or another. And it was while aboard the Munsee that I caught the eye of a young ensign. He was just beginning his naval career.

Greene: Is that what they call them?

Farrell: It'd be comparable to a second lieutenant in the Army, right. His name was William Kruse, and he took a professional interest in me. He just noted my demeanor and the way that I conducted myself and my attention to work. And he noticed something else that I had begun to do. I began to take--because I had been exposed at the correspondence school I told you about--I began to take courses from the Armed Forces Institute, correspondence. So an interesting thing. Here's this guy, "What are you doing? What do you want to do?" "Well, I'm interested and I just like to learn these things." "Oh, really. Well, what do you want to do with it?" "Well, I just want to be able to do my work." So I just viewed that as talking to the officer who I most related to as a member of the crew, and lo and behold, he began to inquire about me, found out that I was a reasonable fellow and I had ambition, and he got information about advancement opportunities for folks in the Navy.

Farrell: He found that in the annual cycle of things, that the Navy had promotional opportunities most certainly for its enlisted people to move up in rating, so that as a young person coming out of Quartermaster School, I was expected to do my duties as assigned, know my rating and be prepared for the one above, as well as being prepared to work with some others who may be subordinate to me, to learn the craft, next person down. So as I was going through that process of improving myself, I moved from quartermaster seaman apprentice to quartermaster seaman, and from quartermaster seaman to quartermaster third class.

Farrell: Kruse asked if I might be interested in taking an aptitude test for college, and I said, "What the heck. I'd be pleased to." I was honored that he asked. One of the interesting things about studying aboard the tug--we were out at sea. Time was made for those who were studying. Literally had some study hall time, and we would go down to the mess hall in the afternoons between lunch and the evening meal, and that's when we would work literally in that space, because all the space on the tug is taken up with either equipment or working machinery or working people, and that was about the only open space that we had to go and do our study. We would do studies, and then you would have someone attest to the fact that you did the work, and it gets sealed up and it goes off in the mail.

Farrell: I had taken one of those screening exams, and lo and behold, several months later while we're overseas, I get the word to come to the yeoman's office, and Kruse advises me that I've scored very high, and I passed. I mean, that was like, "What? I did?" But that was basically how the issue of college came back to front and center in my life, because of my successful completion of the test and the fact that Bill Kruse had that kind of confidence in me.

Greene: Had you continued to read during this time as well? I know reading was a big favorite pastime of yours over the years, so was that something that you kept up?

Farrell: I was constantly reading.

Greene: Yes? What kind of stuff were you reading?

Farrell: I was reading the maps that we had, that we as quartermasters were responsible for, basically learning my trade, reviewing the books, the guides that were there to assist the navigator. Others had the responsibility of working with the navigator and using the sextant and shooting Sun lines and things like that in traditional navigation. We were a small ship, so we did not have the latest in terms of the technology. But there was a new technology, LORAN, long-distance radar and ranging [LOng-RAnge Navigation]. That was the acronym, long-distance radar and ranging, big box, little bitty screen, that was one of the early devices that the tugs were using to determine place and distance. But in addition to the electronics that were being used, the traditional way, shoot the stars, shoot the Sun, and also use dead reckoning. Going twelve knots, we're going to go twelve knots, and we're going to be going towards San Diego along this plot, and we're out here two and a half hours, where should we be?

Farrell: And as those were the opportunities to sit and work with the navigator, it was like, well, if we're going to be going that way, what is it going to look like? Where did we go last time? Where are some of the older charts that we used? How does the navigator like to have things set up? Which are the pubs that he's going to be looking for? That kind of stuff to just be good at one's craft and to take advantage of the moment to learn something. I mean, that was more me than anything else. More often than not, when time came for liberty, I was there to take over somebody else's watch. I'm not preparing to go over to town in San Diego or Long Beach. What am I going to do, go to a bar? I mean, I wasn't that much into drinking. And besides, I could pick up another five or ten dollars to just be there on behalf of someone else, standing watch. It was okay.

Farrell: So that was pretty much the way things went. Wake up in the morning and do your assigned tasks. We have things to do, we have places to go, we have things to do to prepare for it, and we have things to do while we're going from Point A to Point B. When we get to Point B, we have things to do, things to check, things to review, things to revise, anything broken, time to have it fixed. If we'd been at sea, we come back to port. This is the time for anybody who's been under the weather to check out and go over to the hospital to get checked out, all of these kinds of several things that are involved in human activity. I enjoy it very much, and I fit in well.

Greene: It sounds pretty constant.

Farrell: Yes.

Greene: Like you said, it was sort of constant moving, constant work, constantly things to be done.

Farrell: Yes, yes, yes.

Greene: And I'm trying to imagine what it must have been like to transition to someone in civilian life after that, after having that kind of structure and that sort of constant busyness.

Farrell: Well, for me, it tended to dissipate, and some other things began to fill in the space. But that was what took place during and after UCLA.

Greene: Okay. You mentioned that college first became a possibility, or in your mind at least, once you scored well on the aptitude test that you took, right? Is that when you first started thinking about--

Farrell: No. When Mr. Kruse just talked about it, and when, in fact, he got that information, "Hey, I want you to take this test." It wasn't like you prepare for anything. The test comes in the mail, officer opens it, you're called, you're put into a monitored situation and review the material, take it, get finished and give it back. That was the kind of mindset that I had. I was enjoying where I was and what I was doing. It was just the next thing to do.

Greene: So then what happens? After you take the test and pass it, you go on.

Farrell: This process takes time. During that time we go to Sasebo, Japan. Sasebo is a former Japanese naval base that the Americans have taken over, and we crossed the Pacific [Ocean] to get there. So it was from Long Beach to Pearl Harbor, Honolulu, then from Pearl Harbor to Sasebo, a long stretch. We caught the edges of a couple of typhoons and saw some high waves.

Greene: Hmm, typhoons.

Farrell: Went through this whole process of being seasick a couple of times, but at the end of the day it was all just part of growing up.

Greene: Seasickness didn't happen much for you?

Farrell: It happened a couple of times, but for me it was just part of something to experience out at sea, just as it was sometimes you'd go out at sea just off of Long Beach here, and as you're out there you just feel the rolling of a current, so there's just a nice rocking to go with it. It had its own kind of romance, and I enjoyed that romance.

Greene: How long were you docked--I don't know the terminology--how long were you docked in--

Farrell: By the time we got over to Japan, I went out on a couple of exercises there, and in one of the exercises as we were towing a target, the towline got caught up on the screw, on the propeller. So the Munsee had to go into dry dock.

Greene: Oh, had to be repaired?

Farrell: Right, to untangle that, to repair the damage that was done underneath. And while I was there--I described to you what these ships in the service forces were like--I saw a refrigerator ship, and I had never been aboard a refrigerator ship. A refrigerator ship is kind of like the Lane Victory that you see, the historic vessel that's down here in San Pedro. It was a cargo ship whose primary function was taking foodstuffs out to the major ships, the capital ships that were patrolling off the coast of China and off the coast of Korea. So you've heard this thing about replenishment at sea, the term? The cargo ships, oiler, the ammunition ship would tend to go out. At a particular point, the cruisers or the carriers show up. The destroyers show up. They come alongside and you hook up, and you go in a straight line, and while you're going in this straight line, you open the hold of the ship and you transfer all the stuff that you have in terms of foodstuffs and other materials to the capital ship. They send back what they have or what they need to unload, and then you hook it up, and when everything is squared away, you pull off, they pull off, you go back to the naval base. But part of the job is to help keep those guys at sea at sea.

Farrell: Well, the Munsee was going to be returning back to the United States after it came out of dry dock, and I wanted to stay in Japan. So I struck up a conversation with some of the fellows aboard the Graffias, this refrigerator ship, and found that there was a third class who had a short time to go, short time in terms of his enlistment, and he was of a mind, "I'd like to just get back. Let's see if we can swap." People of comparable skills with comparable positions. It was approved, and I packed my bag, and I went aboard the Graffias. That other fellow packed his bag and went aboard the Munsee.

Greene: Why did you want to stay?

Farrell: Exotic Japan. It was a mind blower. Plus it was still service forces, but it was a different kind of a ship, a different kind of a quartermaster experience. On the Munsee there were three or four of us trying to get a lot of experience. Aboard the refrigerator ship, there must have been about ten people. That's a lot of folks. Well, it was kind of like an upgrade in the level of responsibilities and the different kind of skills one had to develop. When I was aboard the tug, I also qualified as a helmsman, the guy steering the ship. And aboard the refrigerator ship, the key thing for the quartermasters, who tended to be the better helmsmen, was on replenishment, because as I mentioned, replenishment is keeping the ship in a straight line while replenishment activity is going on. So what tends to happen was most seamen, rated people as bosuns, or non-rated people would get a watch and learn how to use the helm, part of the orientation in the Navy if you're on the deck. But the quartermasters were the better-skilled people in doing that work, so once again I developed another skill which was being a helmsman while the replenishment is going on. And, of course, well, how do you train for that? Well, there's a guy who's on the helm while a replenishment is going on. "Come take the helm." He stands next to you. That's how you get a sense of feel for the ship, feel for the wheel, that kind of stuff.

Farrell: So it's all in skill development and teamwork and camaraderie, and I had an opportunity to share again. So there I was, still functioning as a signalman as well as quartermaster. This time there were other people that I had a chance to supervise, because it was a larger crew of people who were quartermasters. And it was on the Graffias that I got the notice that I had passed and been accepted and was being ordered back to the Naval Prep School at Bainbridge, Maryland. So I left Japan and I left the Graffias to go back to Bainbridge, Maryland, same location as the Quartermaster School, but Tome Hall in the U.S. Naval Academy Prep School was located here in the traditional area, and the enlisted training programs were pretty much over here. So I went back to an area that I had known from Quartermaster School days. I was just in a different set of barracks. Instead of marching off in the morning to schools where we learned of our ratings, we marched off in the mornings to an academic prep school.

Greene: Really.

Farrell: Right. English, math, a lot of review just to sort of get us ready for a selection process, and at the same time, consideration of which schools that had NROTC programs might these folks go.

Greene: And how do you then select where you might go? Who determines where you might go?

Farrell: That came as a result of, number one, faring well during the process, because as I said before, the Navy process is the Navy process. Even though this was the Navy Prep School, you had your tests. If you didn't fare well on your standard tests, as well as the weekly test that came up, you got shipped back to the fleet. Was that an incentive? Yes. But it also was something about keeping you on a particular edge, being reminded of your responsibility, motivated so that when time came for study--we're all young guys, they were grab ass and all that kind of stuff--we were all still very, very serious to not wind up getting bumped from this to go back to the fleet, you know, when here's this college education being offered in front. So it was down towards the end of that cycle at the prep school that it was clear that I was going to be making it through the process.

Farrell: I had selected one school. I said UCLA. Why? We'll come back over this. When the folks just surprised me and offered me, "Would you consider going to the Naval Academy?" And I hadn't tracked that. So what I said was, "I'd prefer to go to UCLA." The difference is that if one were to go to Annapolis, they would keep you for another year's cycle, and you would go in with the incoming cadets the following summer. That's the way things were set up to go to the Naval Academy. And I was up for a new kind of challenge, especially after being accepted at UCLA. UCLA at the time showed in its catalog that it had a program called Near Eastern Studies curriculum, Arabic language, literature, history, programs about the Middle East, and I'd begun an interest in that area. So that was what was motivating me about going to UCLA.

Farrell: From time to time I've said in hindsight, maybe I should have gone over to the academy. I would have stayed there. I would have been with another fellow who did choose the academy, whose name was Bird, William Zeal Z-e-a-l Bird. Bird graduated from the academy in '61, and we would have probably been paired going through. It was subsequent to this that I really began to learn about issues of race and segregation and how even at the academy things were a particular way, and for those of us who were of color going through the program, we made it on our merits, but the Navy was on its own, dealing with experiments on how Negroes might fare. But once again, you find that out a generation later.

Greene: You didn't necessarily feel--as you describe the experience in the Navy, it sounds pretty almost egalitarian, right? You didn't necessarily feel like you were--

Farrell: It was more egalitarian than what I had experienced in life up until that point. Remember, the fundamental orientation coming out of New Orleans was colored. This is the way colored people function. This is what you do and what you don't do. This is the way it is. Should it be this way? But this is the way it is. So it was private conversations about how things should be different, but remember, this, too, in kind of hindsight. The Korean War was still going on. In hindsight, this was a time of the cold war, and America was being called on to practice its principles at home that it was talking about abroad. So in hindsight later, this was one of those kinds of activities. I didn't see that at the time. It wasn't something that clicked for me.

Farrell: The few times that I went on liberty from Bainbridge, Maryland, to go up to Washington, D.C., to check out the monuments and go see Howard University's campus and things like that, it was just like I just have some time off from Bainbridge, Maryland and the training center to just go see the sights and then go back. Yes, it's Maryland, just remember. It's Maryland and it's different. It's not like Newark. But if you talk to people about the times, you just pretty much understood that. It wasn't a big deal. It wasn't a big deal in the circumstances of my life as things came up. For others, there were moments that were a big deal. I respect that situation for others, but it was not something that was a major consideration of mine. I had my responsibilities and I was handling my responsibilities. I was in an environment that I appreciated and liked. I, once again in hindsight, missed out a lot by not having a constant source of race information shared with me, but I don't know where I would have found it. This is information and insights that have come up later, reflecting back on that.

Greene: So what got you interested in Near East studies? You said it kind of caught your attention that UCLA had a program like that, but where did your interest in that develop out of?

Farrell: The romance came out of my readings. When I was in Detroit for a semester--I told you about that--living with my uncle and going to "Cass" Tech, I found a library in Detroit just off of Woodard Avenue, which is one of the main drags, given the way Detroit was laid out, main drags and then a series with spokes, with the X-mile road [unclear] the city. One time I was reading a life biography and a light history. I liked looking at some of the travel things, and there were a series of books about Arabs. A guy by the name of Christopher Wren, I believe--"Beau Geste" was one book. Another one was "Beau Sabeur," and they were about guys in the French Foreign Legion dealing with the Arabs, romance in the desert and that kind of stuff. In addition to that, there was an Arab community in Detroit.

Greene: Even then? Even in the fifties?

Farrell: Yes, a small one. Sidebar: Arabs went to Michigan about the same time black people went to Michigan. When Henry Ford was recruiting black people from the South, he was recruiting people from overseas. At that time, a small group of Arabs came, and they settled up around Dearborn, and even to today, Dearborn is the center of the Arab and the Arab/Muslim piece in Michigan. So it was there and as I found out subsequently, for Muslims as well as Christians, they came and they settled in. That's where the romance came, because I was fascinated about the people and their history and some things about the society before I had a chance to meet them.

Farrell: I'd been exposed to Muslims by reading J.A. Rogers. Remember, I told you as an elementary school kid I would clip the J.A. Rogers columns out of the "National Pittsburgh Courier," which Professor Perkins received at our home. And in the little captions to these illustrated pieces, if you've ever seen the way the columns were laid out, four columns, and he would have a heading, and there would be an illustration and a little summary, and another illustration, another summary, another illustration, so I was exposed to the fact that these were elements of my history, my life. So then I had kind of an affinity when I saw this. So it was just something that was on my mind from that time.

Farrell: When I went back to Newark, New Jersey, from Detroit, I was like a fish out of water over there on the West Side of Newark. I didn't know anybody over there, because this was like going further up the hill. The white guys that I met in my class were all thinking about where they were going to go to school, and they were talking about Seton Hall, Seton Hall up the street, Seton Hall and basketball, Seton Hall and cross country, things like that. I told you I got involved with cross-country running, got my little letter there.

Farrell: In the cafeteria I happened to meet a sister, an African American lady who was a Muslim [Wanda Sharif]. So at lunchtime I would sit and I would talk with her. You know how it is in high school. Folks go and gravitate wherever they were. Here was this lady and I chatted with her, all proper, because at least I had an interest in Muslims, and I wasn't like some of the other youngsters around. I was sincerely interested in her and her religion. She was not traditional Muslim. Down on Springfield Avenue near High Street in Newark, going up the hill was a Moorish Science Temple, and that's where she and her parents had their membership, in the Moorish Science. They were Moorish Science folks, but still it was an introduction to this world. So it was like these things all coming together and still spelled romance and something that was interesting and appealing other than what we were still living here.

Farrell: So those things came back, and I was thinking I can go to school and do this, because what am I going to do? Ultimately, I'm going to come out as an officer, you see, and then as I served as an officer, what will I probably do? Well, I'll probably want to go back out to sea, probably go back out to ServPac [Service Forces Pacific]. What do you know? You go back to where [unclear] be nice, maybe be on the same ship I came off of, but rare that that would happen. But the point was, I had a sense of where I was going to go and how I was going to ultimately get there. It comes out of like this. You're working your rating. You want to move up. And then after you make that, then what do you want to do? Where would you like to serve? These are things that are just part of your everyday life. Otherwise, you could be in the naval service and be out on a ship, and it can be awfully boring. Where are you going? From here to there. Or, where are you going? Well, we're out to sea. When will you come back? Well, we'll come back when we get back. For some people that was problematic. It was not problematic to me. There was a romance associated with it.

Farrell: So that's how the piece hit me in the face with that, and I said, "I would like to do that," because the other things were there, business, sociology, all the usual undergraduate majors. And as I found out, I said, "Suppose I were to go to the Naval Academy? What'll you do there?" Well, naval science, naval engineering. So there was another piece. I said, well, if you go to the academy, you're USN. If you go to the R.O.T.C. [Reserve Officers Training Corps], then that's R.O.T.C. What's the difference? Well, the difference is in your standing as an officer and your numbers. Remember, I told you how you get numbers? You get a particular number as you come out with your class. Your standing and stuff like that means something on the Navy side. But since I'm not focusing on Navy--well, at Tome, and I remember the day until today. High above the Susquehanna [River], there's a bunch of saps. They're known as admiral strikers, because they go to NAP, or they attend NAPS [Naval Academy Preparatory School]. Susquehanna is the river right outside of Bainbridge. A bunch of saps, you know, folks who don't know what's going on, admiral strikers, getting ready in preparatory school primarily to go off to the Naval Academy. Well, what comes out of the Naval Academy? If you're going to go up in the structure, I mean, that's where you're going to be a career officer, that means you're going to stay there thirty years and ultimately where do you want to go. You want to get to lieutenant commander as quickly as possible. That's about fifteen or twenty years out there, and then you go beyond that and you get to be commander and captain. Then you are an admiral striker. Well, that's [unclear].

Greene: That's the ladder.

Farrell: Just like if you're an enlisted guy. I'm quartermaster seaman, quartermaster third, then quartermaster second, then I'm going to be quartermaster first, and then I'm going to be chief petty officer quartermaster. These ranks are there, and they're things to aspire to, because they're specific things that you do. And remember, if it's not working out for you, it's not working out for the service either. I was caught up in it. So I thought that this would be a wonderful opportunity to meld a sense of romanticism with real opportunity, stay in the naval service. And that's the way it was when at the end of the process I was accepted at UCLA, finished up the work at NAPS, said farewell to folks, promised Bird that I'd stay in touch with him, but I didn't, and I was off to UCLA.

Greene: Wow. That was in what year?

Farrell: In the summer-fall 1956. Then I got disappointed and had my face broken when I got here. My mother had moved over on 36th Place just west of Normandie, and when I got home with all my papers, I went down the street to UCLA to sign in, and I found out that the school that I thought was UCLA was really USC. I didn't know where the hell UCLA was. I checked in with R.O.T.C. and they said, "We don't have you on the roster here." I had my papers and I was wondering what was wrong, because here--"No, you're at UCLA." "UCLA, where's that?" "In Westwood." "Where's Westwood?"

Greene: You were embarrassed.

Farrell: And subsequently I find out where Westwood is. Hmm, how am I going to get out to Westwood? Go Vermont, Wilshire Boulevard, a bus, get on that to UCLA. Okay. Check in at UCLA, and then some other things fall into place, and some orientations fall into place, and I begin to reconnect with people as I see some folks on campus, and the UCLA journey begins.

Greene: Let me ask you--you mentioned your mom. What was she up to at this point in your life? How was she living?

Farrell: Mom had moved out of the shared-living relationships with the Claudes. She remarried. She divorced Delgado during this time and remarried Matthew Lipscomb, who was active in the Elks, so it was like an Elks family. He had a place at 1470 West 36th Place, and that was their home, and that was the place where I started my adventure at the collegiate level. She had also stopped working in the garment industry and applied for a job with the County of L.A. [Los Angeles] as a typist, and she was employed there.

Farrell: My mother was a very fair woman, a "caramel cutie," and as was the way things worked at the time, she went into a typing pool, ultimately started work in the Office of the Public Administrator of L.A. County, and when she retired many, many years later, she had worked her way up to the executive secretary to the Public Administrator, so that's where Mom was and that's how she was doing her thing at this time.

Greene: Did you still keep in touch with your relatives in New Orleans much?

Farrell: Yes. I think I had visited--no, I had not visited as an enlisted man. But when I would go on the summer cruises, the first cruise was out of Norfolk, Virginia, so in the process of going on that first cruise, either going or coming back, I visited with the folks in New Orleans. I also visited again with my uncle's folks in Detroit. I forget which one was going and which one was coming back from Los Angeles. I did that in between cruises, because I had that opportunity to travel, going from Point A to Point B for orders. But when I did travel, I traveled looking like a civilian.

Greene: You didn't wear your uniform. Why was that?

Farrell: I don't know. I think I just wore civilian clothes till I got to my duty station. Then you show up at your duty station and you change into your uniform. I think it was more a matter of convenience than anything.

Greene: Let's stop here.[End of interview]

1.3. Session 3 (September 9, 2008)

Greene: This is Sean Greene interviewing Mr. Robert Farrell on September 9, 2008, at his home. Good afternoon, Mr. Farrell.

Farrell: Good afternoon.

Greene: I thought we'd pick up where we left off the last time and talk about your experience entering the NROTC program and beginning to study at UCLA. You described a little bit to me how you decided to study at UCLA. Tell me about your first day and how you got started there.

Farrell: Well, I'll start off with the great disappointment, which is pretty much where we closed off last time. As I was with my mother at her residence with her third husband on West 36th Place, I walked down the street to UCLA to check in. I crossed campus and I went into the athletic building and went up to ROTC, and I was advised that they didn't have me on record there, and I was a little bit put out. I took out my papers, because you have your papers and documents in a nice folder, and I asserted that, "Yes, I'm coming from the Naval Academy Prep School. I've been released from the service, and I have been accepted here at UCLA." And the yeoman on duty says, "UCLA? Well, where do you think you are?" "UCLA." "No. This is the University of Southern California." "What?" "Yes." And I had this awful sinking feeling about, what have I done? This isn't UCLA. What is my next duty station going to look like? And the guy says, "No, UCLA is out there in Westwood. Down Vermont, go to Wilshire Boulevard, take the bus, go to Westwood, transfer and go over to UCLA."

Greene: A long way away from your neighborhood.

Farrell: Long way away from what I was expecting to be familiar surroundings for the next four years. But anyway, the long bus ride up Vermont, transfer at Wilshire, Wilshire to Westwood, Westwood up to campus and get off the bus at the little loop that's still there. That's fascinating. After all these years, as I've driven by I've seen the same bus stop, with the steps going up behind the administration building. And across campus, through the quad, down the hill to the Men's Gym, and in the Men's Gym a section for ROTC, Army, Navy, and Air Force, and there I went. Checked in, right place, right time, and school began. After checking in with ROTC, it was a matter of going over to Kerckhoff Hall at the time, the place where student activities, where they check in, get class cards and begin the actual life of a student on campus.

Greene: What were your impressions of the university when you got there?

Farrell: To me it was a total surprise. It was all brand new, and inside of about half a day I had made some of the connections. What do I mean by some of the connections? I checked in to NROTC and that starts the administrative process. But you have to remember the nature of the time, 1956. So I look around and you wonder where people were, students, people. And then as I had mentioned to you, at the time for people who were at UCLA, they were aware of down in the student union there was this permanent bid whist game that was going on, and around the bid whist game itself, hangers on and people who were there to cheer, just that was the spot. So lo and behold, I met some of my friends from L.A. High [Los Angeles High School] and began to make that connection and then pretty much it was on. The routine of engaging college life, the routine of making new friends, the routine of making new contacts within the framework of the Navy family to begin this new journey.

Greene: Tell me a little about some of the folks that you reconnected with.

Farrell: You know, as we talk right now it's kind of hazy. It'll come back, though.

Greene: Sure, sure. But these were people that you knew from the neighborhood that you lived in from high school?

Farrell: No, from L.A. High School. I was a year and a half, two years behind. I was twenty coming in as a new freshman. These folks had gone from L.A. right into UCLA. They were either frosh [freshmen] or sophomores themselves, and out of that connection is where you find out, "Oh, where are you staying? Need any assistance? What classes are you taking?" that kind of camaraderie that comes up when you make a connection with some folks on campus. And the situation at Kerckhoff Hall tended to be the community home away from my formal residence, and the gym location of the NROTC office and classrooms.

Farrell: At the time, Westwood Boulevard used to go all the way through Sunset [Boulevard], so the big challenge was to figure out how I was going to get to campus, to get into some kind of a carpool, and to think about getting a car myself. Those were kind of realistic things for the moment. But that worked out, and in a moment I was then in class, and life began to take on some dimension.

Greene: You had just come back from--you had moved back from Maryland was it, from the Naval Academy?

Farrell: Right. The Naval Academy Prep School was in Maryland, so once I was released from the service I basically went back to my formal residence, my mother's address, and I just started life anew here in Los Angeles from there.

Greene: And you had been away for a few years by that time?

Farrell: About two years.

Greene: Do you remember your impressions of L.A.? Did you have a sense that L.A. was any different or was the same?

Farrell: It was about the same.

Greene: About the same. It was home.

Farrell: It was home, and the purpose of coming home was to go to college.

Greene: Did you have a sense that you had changed while you were away?

Farrell: Not that much, except that I was feeling good because I had a four-year paid scholarship. All I needed to do was perform, and the expectation was when I finished up I would get a commission and go off into the naval service.

Greene: That was one of the conditions of your ROTC?

Farrell: That's the way the process works. Whether you come from the fleet or you get an NROTC scholarship, in essence, when you get a four-year scholarship, you must maintain grades, you must do these cruises, and the bottom line is at the end you commit to a tour of duty. That was no problem for me, given the way I got my scholarship in the first place.

Greene: Because it wasn't new to you.

Farrell: It was just a matter of being assigned here is like another service school. That was initially what happened. It's just another four-year assignment to service school with the summer cruises in between, and then afterwards go back to the fleet.

Greene: Since you were a little more mature, did you have a sense of what you were looking to study, or what kind of stuff you wanted to be able to read, or did that come later?

Farrell: I knew UCLA out of catalogs that were available back at the Naval Academy Prep School. That's where in my own searching I'd found out that there was this program called Near Eastern Studies, a new area studies curriculum that apparently was being established in colleges and universities. UCLA had this one, and it was at home, so that's the place I want to go. So I had a sense that it really was going to be something brand new. But I had an interest, and I wanted to follow that interest.

Greene: And where did that interest come from, do you remember?

Farrell: As I mentioned to you in our last session, my exposure to the Arab world, the Muslim world, came in kind of a romantic way, out of books that I read, primarily books that I read at the Woodward Boulevard branch of the Detroit Public Library, and I just carried that impression with me when I returned from that time that I spent with my uncle in Detroit back to Los Angeles, and I just held this as a romantic notion and an interesting notion, as something of interest for me that was worthy of further inquiry and pursuit, and maybe see if there's a way to work it into one's career, at least work it into some aspect of one's studies.

Greene: Tell me this. Were there people that you met that sort of encouraged your interest or deepened your interest in what you described as Near East Studies or in the Arab world?

Farrell: No.

Greene: No professors in particular, do you think? No?

Farrell: No. This was just something out of my own personal interest and drive. I don't think that I had met any Arabs. I was aware of Muslims. I had met Muslims in Newark, New Jersey, but--

Greene: Black Muslims?

Farrell: As I recall, Moorish Science Temple participants, because this was primarily at West Side High School through conversations building off of an acquaintance that I made at lunchtime at West Side High School. So it was still distant, it was still romantic, but it was something that fascinated me. It touched me, in a way.

Greene: So how did your interest evolve while you were there at UCLA? Were you taking language classes and the like?

Farrell: On campus? I stared off taking Arabic, English, philosophy, naval science and some other things, because I had the basic requirements to deal with. But I plunged right into my major by taking the sequence in Arabic language that was on campus. No, I misspoke. I referenced Kerckhoff Hall as the place where the student union was located. It was not at Kerckhoff Hall. Kerckhoff Hall was where I spent most of my time, because that's where the Near Eastern languages were taught, and Near Eastern studies were in Kerckhoff Hall and in adjacent Haines Hall. That was where I spent the bulk of my time on campus, in those two buildings.

Greene: Fair enough. What kind of extracurricular activities were you involved in while you were there?

Farrell: As I met some of my friends, I was invited to join the Scrollers Club of Kappa Alpha Psi [fraternity]. While on campus I found out about the YWCA Coop just across from the bus stop on Hilgard, as a place where men were invited to come in to have meals. It was an experiment in cooperative living with the girls living there on Sorority Row, and men coming in to have meals and participate in the cooperative experience. We shared the workload in the common spaces, preparing meals, getting together as students, shared studying and a sense of participating in the governance of the YWCA Coop itself.

Farrell: And not right away but shortly thereafter, as a student of Arabic, meeting other Arabic speakers on campus and becoming aware of the Young Arab Organization [YAO]. That was my major on-campus organization for the next three years.

Greene: Talk about the Young Arab association.

Farrell: Well, the Young Arab Organization was an organization of Arab students on campus. At the time, as I was beginning to just blossom anew and really absorbing this environment of all these different people and all of these different cultures, there was the International Student Center with its program pulling folks together, and I gravitated towards that, too. It was in that context that I made these other connections more specifically with Arabs, to learn about Young Arab Organization and then to begin to participate in meetings and activities that it sponsored.

Greene: What kind of people did you meet? Where were people from, for example?

Farrell: Oh, the whole range of the Arab world. Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, people from Tunisia, as well as some students of Arab heritage who were Americans who just connected in a cultural way with the YAO. Basically, it was about the usual student concern, finding oneself, having a sense of connection, because UCLA was a big place. It wasn't as overwhelming to me, because if you go on a naval station, Naval Academy Prep School, the Bainbridge Naval Training Center, the Training Center down in San Diego, the Long Beach Naval Center, you get used to being around large numbers of people and functioning with large numbers of people. So for me, the campus was just another space, but for many other students it was a heck of a challenge, because from wherever they came, they were coming into a new society, a new culture, a new environment of student life that was really large and expansive, and relative to other situations that I had been in in the Navy, very little formal discipline. It was pretty much, you're on your own. You live where you live. You go to the coop to eat and participate in those programs, and your class hours are like this, and you just show up. There's no one there to check things off. There's no one there to provide discipline, as I described to you how the Navy process worked. There was no one there looking over your shoulder and providing reinforcement that you should get things done in a timely manner and there would be consequences if you don't. You're pretty much on your own.

Farrell: Don't let your grades drop. If your grades drop--that sense was pretty much still there, but there was not the kind of structure of your appointing authority or the people responsible for your being there with you 24/7.

Greene: Now, you had talked about being drawn to the Navy and to the Armed Forces in general because you liked the idea of the structure. And you worked on ships with all kinds of life--

Farrell: Yes. I bought in, and I bought into the philosophy. I was a volunteer. I went into the service knowing that it was military service. I had a strong sense of patriotism. Even though things were a little bit hyphenated, I still had this strong sense of patriotism and purpose and a real sense of the American-ness of this, notwithstanding whatever problems are relating primarily to race. But I was still strong in that, and that sentiment is still pretty much with me until today.

Greene: Yes. So now you were spending your days in the middle of Westwood, and that must have represented--

Farrell: No, on campus.

Greene: On campus, yes. So that must have represented a big change in terms of your day-to-day life, right?

Farrell: Yes.

Greene: As you describe them, much less structure. How did you deal with that?

Farrell: It was like being in a candy store. Oh, my gosh. The opportunity to go to all these places and do all these different things, the cultural offerings on campus. I mean, I was spending my time at the library and checking out whatever the free programs were, going to lectures that were there, in addition to the regular responsibilities of my own classes. I mean, I just felt that I was in a good place. Now, the Village [Westwood Village] was something else. I didn't go into Westwood Village that much, because it was an unfriendly place to Negroes.

Greene: Describe unfriendly.

Farrell: Well, unless one were an athlete, it was not as though you were welcomed to come. Couldn't get a haircut. Women could not get services there. It was a matter of you could be served, but it wasn't a matter of as though you were being welcomed. I mean, "Come in," is all right.

Greene: That's not like anything you experienced while you were in the service, right?

Farrell: No.

Greene: Generally, no. So did that kind of smack you in the face?

Farrell: Yes. But I wasn't the only one. All us Negroes were getting smacked in the face by that behavior in Westwood Village. And a little bit later on in my time at UCLA, that was the focus of some of our local anti-segregation, pro-civil-rights activities, to organize and mobilize to do things in the Village.

Greene: You want to talk about how some of that came about? I know we're jumping a little bit.

Farrell: Right. But it came out of just shared experiences and feelings and a sense that in the late 1950s people were doing something about those kind of circumstances in other parts of the United States, and some of us felt that we should do something about it here. I mean, it wasn't like North Carolina or South Carolina or Florida or Georgia or Tennessee, but relative to what was going on in California it was still an embarrassment. Our campus leader on matters that dealt with organizational work and civil rights was my friend Bob Singleton, Robert Singleton. He's currently an economist over at Loyola Marymount University, and his wife Helen [Singleton]--they, too, were a service family. Bob had been in the Army, had been stationed in Germany, and it was the kind of stuff that based on life experiences, we did not want to accept this, and we felt that this was about the time we could do something about it.

Farrell: So began early organization of activities with the NAACP branch on campus at UCLA, around that. We did our little work, we did our organization. We had our little demonstrations down in the Village. We protested the fact that housing was very, very difficult for African American men and women around campus. There were just a couple of halls on campus. I think there's one called Hershey Hall that's a ladies' residence on Hilgard. There was the Interracial Coop up on Landfair where men would stay, and eventually I would stay up there at the coop for a while. But other than that, a student would go to the housing office and would see listings on the board and find out that the listings were not open. They were listing for students, but not necessarily Negro students, especially Negro males, room, student, like that.

Farrell: So among the things we did was, thanks to the leadership of Bob and Helen and some others, took on that and made an issue of it on campus. If I'm a student, I have an expectation if I go to the housing office that I should be able to go up there and take one of those references to a place to stay and be able to go and get that room, or have access to that apartment. And over the long haul our efforts succeeded, but in the process it was a lot of fun just coming to grips to who we were, our place in society, what we were going to do about it, how we were going to organize to reach out to people, Negroes most certainly, but to other people who were interested. And it was also fascinating to find out on campus that there were many, many people who were as concerned about my plight as a human being as were many Negro students on campus, and, in fact, it was a surprise to find that people who had those interests far outnumbered us. So it was a kind of awakening to just the human condition and that when things were wrong, a lot of people were prepared to take a stand against things that were wrong, and that was something that was a guiding factor in everything I did until basically leaving as an undergrad.

Farrell: I was in the class of 1961, because I had spread out my units. I developed the interest in anthropology and archeology, and I'd gone off to that field school, that Summer Field School in Utah, sponsored by UCLA, people to learn field techniques.

Greene: In archeology?

Farrell: Archeological field techniques.

Greene: Like on a dig?

Farrell: How to do a dig, how to classify. You learn about it in the classroom and a workshop, but then to go out there on-site to do it, and that was the whole relationship of this location up in Utah, to go to an Indian site and actually do a dig and participate in a dig and the recording of materials, to organize materials to bring back for cataloguing and classification. But that was the summer of 1961, and the people in CORE [Congress of Racial Equality] had taken a stand in the Freedom Rides, and that summer there was action to be done by those of us who were affiliated with CORE on campus and affiliated with CORE in the Los Angeles chapter. So a number of us went south on Freedom Rides from Los Angeles, and I was with one of the last groups to go in August. The Singletons and others had gone in late July. They eventually went to New Orleans and up to Jackson, Mississippi, and then out to Parchman Prison, and the group I was with went down by train to Houston, tied in in a collaboration with the Progressive Youth Association in Houston and went to jail, spent some time there.

Greene: We're going to delve into that a little bit more deeply. Before we get there, I want to ask you to back up a little bit. Tell me something about the black students at UCLA that were involved in some of the activities you describe. Were most of them native Angelenos, or were they from all over, that you can recall?

Farrell: It was a mix. People were from all over.

Greene: You mentioned that as a group you kind of had a sense of the work that was happening in other places, civil rights-wise. How did that sense develop? Was it stuff on television?

Farrell: Well, it was stuff on television, it was stuff that we shared among ourselves. Some Negroes on campus were active in the fraternities and sororities, and there were networks that talked about what was going on. It was a conversation among the athletes, and once again, athletes rule. At the bottom of the walk coming up, they still do that, or close by that. Once again, the fascinating thing about seeing that culture in UCLA was the levels of integration. I mean, it was mixed and open. It was something to see. But in a way, it's not always been that way with athletes. But the mid-to-late 1950s on campus at UCLA, I mean, Red Sanders was the football coach. I mean, UCLA ruled. I mean, that's when UCLA was number one for a couple of years there in terms of football, and it was just a different kind of energy that was there, about as complete an environment as you could find. You do your study. Athletic teams are doing okay, so a really exciting place to go and to be.

Greene: So there was a lot of energy.

Farrell: A lot of energy, yes, a lot of energy.

Greene: Were organizations like the NAACP chapter you mentioned, were they interracial as well, that you can recall?

Farrell: That didn't happen during my first year on campus. It was more a matter for me of discovering just the range of humanity and having the opportunity to have that experience, that integrated experience, from the NROTC classes with this evolving Officer Corps training to my classroom experiences themselves. Integrated environment, a lot of people, shared interests.

Greene: And then did the CORE chapter already exist?

Farrell: No.

Greene: It came into existence while you were there?

Farrell: The CORE chapter was organized subsequent to the NAACP student chapter on campus. NAACP at that time had a strong control mechanism. There was a lot of democracy in the chapters, but there was still a strong organizational tie with anything that had the name NAACP on it, so that was a bit more restrictive than some of the things that we felt that we wanted to do, and we took advantage of CORE with its commitment to nonviolent direct action as a place to channel youthful energies. I mean, NAACP had its picket line, but there was more going on around CORE. CORE people were going through the discussions about nonviolence, dealing with the intellectual aspect of it, and going through trainings about, "Are you really to the place where you could do that?" Because there were big discussions, as you know. "I might be able to participate in that civil rights stuff, but I ain't going to have no white man hitting me up against my head or spitting in my face. I mean, if they do that to me, I've got to fight back good." Well, that's the kind of thing if you sincerely feel that way, then CORE is not for you.

Farrell: And then there were people who that was just "woof" tickets to them. "I ain't going to step in anybody messing with me. I mean, I'm--." We're growing up and those were sincerely held feelings, and it was another sense of buying into a way to deal with a larger challenge, where in the places where that particular activity was the main focus, that there were consequences for going over there. We believed that there was ultimate safety in the moral stance that we took, and in addition to the safety of the moral stance, and you're building up your own sense of value and purpose that you can do something like that, that puts you in a threatening space, it's the recognition that by taking that stance you help generate the contradiction among those who are in positions of authority, who are, in essence, your oppressors, when they know that you're not going to strike back.

Farrell: I mean, folks who are involved in the military or paramilitary are trained to deal in an aggressive way with people who are expected to be aggressive. But when you have people doing things and smiling and having a different kind of demeanor, it's unnerving. So that was part of a shift in mindset and understanding of its role as a strategy in attempting to bring about change, because until you had someone, as we'd gone through some experiences in Westwood, call you nigger and shut the door in your face, ask you to leave, things of that type, you can get a particular attitude and have feelings one way. But in a collective exercise where this group makes a decision to go to protest discrimination--"We're going to go to a picket line. We're going to stand in a particular location. We're going to pass out our materials. If people come to threat, we're not going to get involved in that. We're going to stay down there. We're going to go at three o'clock. We're going to leave at five o'clock." That kind of a disciplined approach to bring about change was new and exciting to me, so in a way, I gravitated to that.

Farrell: I responded to the leadership of, as I said, Bob Singleton and others who had come together to just deal with this thing that we must do something, and a realization that whatever the something was that we would do would be important, because we knew that there were others who had similar attitudes and similar feelings, but who were not yet to the point where they would go to just a picket line, or to do anything to publicly express their dissatisfaction with the status quo. "I'm a student, I've got my scholarship. My parents don't want me getting involved in this." Just whatever those things were that at the time began for me and I'm sure for other young people--for the first time you're starting to make adult decisions. Well, what are the consequences of my doing this? What does it mean if this word gets back to my parents and they say, "Don't do that. I didn't send you to Westwood to go up there to get involved in social action. I sent you to Westwood to go study." All that great conversation went on among us, and I think it was character-building for everyone who was involved in the process.

Greene: Did your mother have any opinions on your involvement in some of the CORE activities?

Farrell: Bottom line: yes. Bottom line: supportive. But I knew that there were times when she didn't like it, especially after going south and picking up the arrest record, because back in the day that was the last question on the application forms for public employment, probably private employment, too, down at the bottom. "Check this box if you have ever been arrested." And people look at that, check the box, put it over here in this pile, and probably you don't hear from anybody anymore. Who wants to deal with anybody who has an arrest record? You're a criminal. You've got some kind of problem with moral turpitude or maybe you're one of those kind of Negroes, and nobody wants any of those kind of Negroes around. Come on. Agitator.

Greene: As you mentioned, given your military training, nonviolence represented a whole other philosophy and approach to dealing with aggression.

Farrell: Absolutely fascinating challenge intellectually.

Greene: Yes, yes. And did you have to be sort of persuaded in that direction, or was it something that resonated with you.

Farrell: No, I got it.

Greene: Yes? In some of these discussions that you were having around nonviolence, did you look at nonviolent struggles that were happening in other places, maybe India? Was that part of the discussion as well?

Farrell: No. There was reference to Gandhi and his writings and his application of his philosophy in bringing about change in India, but most of the discussion was about our real-life application here in the States.

Greene: I imagine that you had some developing sense of the work that CORE was doing in places in the South and other places?

Farrell: Yes, and there were relations that our leadership established with James Farmer and others, so we had a chance to meet these people who were leaders of that movement. Collectively while we were on campus, Adam Clayton Powell came by, I think [James] Baldwin came by a couple of times. On another aspect of something, Tom [Thomas Joseph Odhiambo] Mboya [Kenyan trade unionist and statesman] came by as part of some African-related stuff that was over there on campus, and it was all enlightening, and it was not at a distance. It was something that, I guess because it was UCLA, it tended to draw the actors as well as the action and discussion of these things to the campus.

Greene: You mentioned in a previous conversation some of what you were learning from your classmates and colleagues in the Arab organization as well.

Farrell: Right. The Young Arab Organization?

Greene: Yes. Could you talk about that some?

Farrell: It was learning about nationalism. It was learning about national purpose, because with some of these folks there was a dynamic of change that was coming to the Arab world. There was the rise of [Gamal Abdel] Nasser [President of Egypt]. There was the rise of the non-aligned movement at Bandung, where you had [Kwame] Nkrumah and Nasser and [Josip Broz] Tito and these guys coming together to deal with something other than this East-West split which was the cold war, and it was appealing to see that. And the Arab students, mostly male, would talk about the kinds of things that were going on in their countries and their need to help bring about change, a heavy introduction to socialism, especially Arab socialism.

Farrell: What's the distinction? A lot of socialisms around, and depending on where you are and the nature of the people involved, it takes on a particular kind of color, based on those people's experiences. So the Arab experience was one of countries that, maybe with the exception of Saudi Arabia and the little Gulf states, were not under the colonial thumb of some person or another. The Egyptians, the Syrian-Lebanese folks talking about the French, the Brits in Jordan, over in Iraq, but that was just the sentiment of the time. In the late 1950s you had the breakaway of Algeria from France. People were talking about the FLN [National Liberation Front] establishing an effort in Algeria to seek its independence, and then France you get this response, the Algerie-Francais, that, "Algeria is a part of France, just as these other colonies are part of the French collective," the other side of the British Commonwealth, and people should draw their sense of national purpose from that. So all this stuff is coming together.

Farrell: So I got more of a dose of nationalism and perspectives of what was evolving as Third World before I really got into the study of American government on campus at UCLA. In NROTC, the undergirdings of naval science and the several philosophies that undergird the strategies and perspectives of the U.S. Navy. So I had some sense of these pieces coming together, and I was just fascinated by the opportunity to sit and just play with these models. No class assignment to do it, but it was still fascinating to see how these things worked, one with the other.

Greene: And to be involved in those conversations that were going.

Farrell: And to be involved in the conversations. And to be involved in the conversations. The African Studies Center had not yet been established on campus, but there was a program called Project India, and I imagine that Project India is still around at UCLA. There was a sociology prof by the name of Council Taylor, who evolved as the faculty mentor, the person who brought different ideas and perspectives to us, and we gravitated to Taylor. He lived in a house out in Malibu, and he gave great parties. So in addition to having a situation of having Council Taylor on campus talking about and encouraging us to deal with this issue of Negroes and being aware of the changes that were coming on in Africa, there was the social piece that went with it. So there was this perspective on Africa, there was this perspective on the Arab world, there was this perspective on the Navy, given its part in this military piece. It was the dynamic of change in the United States, our direct involvement through NAACP and CORE in doing things, and at the same time maintaining our grades on campus. So, I mean, it was really, really good tension, I mean, great tension.

Greene: How did your involvement in CORE sort of deepen, and how did you get to the point of traveling in Texas? I imagine there was training involved before you went.

Farrell: Yes. Over the years, I guess I'd begun to develop my own sense of purpose as one who was a student activist on campus. The major event for me came before the summer of 1961. Another one of those student leaders was an economist now, a student by the name of Jesse [Turner] Morris. He subsequently moved down to Mississippi, was involved with the Freedom House, some ideas about the establishment of coops. He got married and he stayed in Mississippi. But among the things we did together was he and I opened up a little coffee shop on Jefferson Boulevard, and before we could even get into--remember, the fifties' coffee shop, little hip place, little something-something, go on, put that together [the arts and culture center].

Farrell: But what happened was one of our mobilizations--the people in some county in Tennessee were having a difficult time, and we began to use the coffee shop as a place for the gathering of foodstuffs and clothing, Haywood County, Tennessee, for food and clothing for Haywood County, Tennessee. So our idea of having an enterprise in a coffee shop went by the wayside, and it kind of turned into a social action center, and we gathered so much food and clothing, it was a very large trucking load of stuff that was picked up, and I was part of the group that took those materials down to Haywood County and distributed them on behalf of our people who were caught up in the struggle there. And in the meantime, ran out of money as far as the coffee shop. Coffee shop didn't get off the ground, but we had a great place for community mobilization and support for people in Haywood County, Tennessee, who were just engaged in a struggle against segregation. It was that kind of stuff, really living what we were believing, which was exciting. Coming out of a structured environment, you have your beliefs, but this was live your beliefs. Yes, going to do this.

Farrell: It wasn't exactly power-to-the-people time. That came much later, when I was no longer on a campus. But it was still a time of our own finding out who we were and what we were about. The literature of the day, "Bonjour Tristesse," [J.D.] Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye," all of this post-World War II becoming aware of stuff, "On the Road," [Jack] Kerouac's stuff is coming out, [Lawrence] Ferlinghetti's poetry, jazz that's bebop, just this whole aspect of a cool life evolving, and beatniks and all that good stuff and it's interracial-intercultural aspect, finding out that there's a Venice Beach and a little Beat community going on over there at Venice Beach. Also know that Venice is a place where there's segregated housing and the usual segregation of the times as in Los Angeles, racially restrictive covenants. But still, there was this excitement of being on campus while all this was going on and the fact that as students we had choices. I mean, we could go in and participate and pull in or pull out. All the people down there are having a difficult time. Right. Go to Haywood County. We're going to Haywood County to be helpful, but at the end of the day I know I'm leaving. They've got to stay--and becoming aware of those kinds of distinctions, and understanding that there is a role for people who function as catalyzing agents, go in to do something. You're well motivated and you do it, and you pull out, and your satisfaction is in that you did your part, which was an important thing to learn.

Farrell: As you're a student and you're growing up, you're bullet proof. "Ain't nothing going to happen to me." And you have all the answers. "If people would just do this, that thing would be set." And then to run into the realities of, well, we're involved with the Freedom Movement and the rest, and somebody tells you, "I appreciate what you're doing, and accept everything that you all are making available to us." But then, "How long are you going to be here?" "I mean, we're here to--." "Yes, but you also have to go. We appreciate what you're bringing, but you're here to bring this stuff. You're not coming into this community to live with me and take on whatever I've got to take on when you leave. And we do appreciate this, and we'll send the letters. We appreciate the money that's being sent. But we are living in this every day, and as you come in, everybody's watching you come in. You're not among your people. You're an outside Negro coming into our town, not big cities, towns, small communities, and you are doing these several things that speak to principles in America and all that kind of stuff. It is running against the grain of established stuff, and just the fact that some of us are meeting with you is a big deal for us to do in our communities where we have to work and live and all these other things." So it was a matter of also understanding what that was about.

Farrell: So a little later as a Freedom Rider, real clear about our role going into Houston to join with others, to help create this moment of tension and some resolution, and yes, we're going to jail. Being jailed helps to set up the legal case which goes to court. We have faith that once this thing gets to court, the issue is going to be resolved, not at the level where we're arrested and brought in, because everybody's going to be found guilty. But it's going to be on appeal, where we get this piece into the federal system, where the Constitution pieces get invoked. That's when the resolution is going to come, and that's the way we're going to make our contribution. Are you willing to be that kind of a soldier? So that was part of the romance of it, and I was caught up in that romance.

Greene: Could you talk more about the Freedom Rides and also talk more about your arrest and how that came about? How were you received as Freedom Riders on your way?[Interruption]

Greene: You were going to talk some more about the Freedom Rides.

Farrell: By the time the Freedom Ride activity came up in 1961, I was clear about what my role was, what my task was, what my mission was. It's bearing witness. It's being a steward to this cause. We're going to take this train, we're going to go down and collaborate with people in Houston, we are going to go into a restaurant, we are going to sit down at a counter, we're going to be instructed to move, and we are not going to move. We're going to be arrested, and we're going to go to jail, and we're going to stay in jail two weeks, three weeks, a month. We will come out of jail on trial and then that'll be it. Once the trial is over, we come on back. It's still romantic, even though it is a mission. People who are going understand the risks. You've been trained in terms of your disposition and what's expected of you, so it's at that point carrying out the mission.

Farrell: In many ways, the more exciting part was going through the internal process, learning what it was going to take to bring about the kind of change that we believed needed to be done and to be done now. Freedom now. Integration now. And to have that kind of a discussion beforehand, that to me was the exciting piece, what took place before one signed up to go on the Freedom Ride, the interaction with others and learning the context in which you would be doing this work and then feeling that you wanted to do it. We knew Negroes on campus are going through this stuff at the same time, we're maintaining our grades. That was exciting, because relative to what we'd heard from other people--the academic experience was come and do well in your major, and do something in this fascinating student government on campus that had seen one--just before me, Sherrill Luke, then Willard Johnson and then Rafer Johnson, to have Negroes actually win student-body presidency at UCLA. I mean, that was kind of big. That was kind of exciting. It just spoke to promise about what was going to be out there.

Greene: These were black students?

Farrell: Yes, Negro students. And we were going through those kinds of things about Negro, capital N Negro, and what's going to happen one day when all those kinds of barriers are going to break down. Strong emphasis on mutual understanding, so that we were basically integrationists. And yet at the same time while I was on campus, we had this fascinating young guy come up, Ronald Everett, who later is Maulana Karenga, who is part of a different kind of consciousness that also is feeding off of this and creating something different out of our experience here in the U.S., and crafting it into something that a decade later shows up as something significant. So it was a terribly exciting, to me, intellectual environment to be in with all of this stuff going on. I mean, how can you go just live one day and go home at night and sleep, get up the next morning and do your studies and go to class, with all this stuff going on?

Greene: You said you came into the sense of yourself as an activist and even came to understand your role as sort of bearing witness to these struggles as they unfolded and playing a part in them. Did you understand what you were doing at the time as properly political, as political? Because you said you were acting on your beliefs.

Farrell: That showed up later. It showed up much later.

Greene: How so?

Farrell: After campus. Politics in a practical way was supporting the student-body campaigns of Willard Johnson, Rafer Johnson, Joel Wachs following Rafer Johnson, who I later came to know as a friend, as when he was a member of the city council, I was a member of the city council, that it was just an extension of what we were doing. This was also a campus at the time, where you had Henry Waxman and Howard Berman attending as undergrads, and the discussion about the Young Democrats. But for me and most of my close colleagues, it was less about the partisan politics as much as it was our own awakening as individuals in our consciousness as Negroes that was the driving force. Did we wear it on our arms? Yes. Was it there as a badge? Not that heavy a level of participation. It was certainly there in terms of pride and openness and awareness and high expectations. That came out of my college experience.

Greene: How did being involved in all these things and being a student, how did it affect your relationship to the community you had been living in? I guess I'm getting the sense that your sense of yourself, your very sort of identity and the things you were engaging were changing really quickly at this point.

Farrell: I reference the fact that my mother was a member of the Elks, IBPOE of the W. When I was a youngster in Newark, New Jersey, I was part of what was called the Junior Herd, which was the youth component of the Elks. And when I returned from the Navy, I joined the Elks. I was a member of the body, 4016 South Central Avenue, Golden West Lodge Number 86. But there I was a twenty-something, and here were these men who represented a really broad cross section of Negro life in Los Angeles, and I was new to that environment. Of course, there's always a discussion, I find, in our organizations, where there's an encouragement of young people, want to hear from young people, and there are always young people, I believe, who once hearing that assume that they're prepared to step up right now and take over the lodge, because, of course, here we are, all enlightened, coming from places like UCLA, we want to bring stuff back. And we're still in many ways naive to understand why things are as conservative as they are and what the real and true values of organizations like the Elks and the Masons are, and what they represented in terms of cultural continuity and survival.

Farrell: So there were the clashes of, "Oh, let the young man speak. You don't want to disappoint him, because you want to hold on. That young brother has some promise." So he'd get up and always have these folks encourage him to speak. At the end of the day, when you see the votes come down, older and wiser heads prevailed. I maintained that tie primarily out of the love and affection of my mother, and the Elks were supportive. My mother was in a convention in '61 when we were arrested, and the way she told me how proud she was when the word went around that, "Our brother from 86 in Los Angeles was with the Freedom Riders." She cried, but yet she said she felt so proud, because that, too, was something else to learn about our organization, where you have roots in an organization like the Elks or the Masons or in a church, and you would take a stand around issues where those men and women at their place in life right now, would not necessarily do that themselves, but were very understanding and supportive of those who would. That was something important to learn about our community's organizations.

Farrell: It would be later that I would learn of people like Loren Miller and the Marnesba Tacketts and the H.H. Brookins and other people who represented civil rights leadership and community leadership in L.A. as it was changing, because it was after I left UCLA that on the strength of my own credentials and the credentials of CORE, I began to have access. How do you get access? You get access because you're a player out there. What does that mean? Well, are you Freedom Riding? Yes. Just like the folks who were the support group for King, primarily Baptist preachers, but at the same time there was Tom Kilgore over at the Second Baptist Church, who had been one of young King's mentors years before, who met Martin in the household of I could say "Daddy" King, because King was one of the mentors of Kilgore, who was out of Morehouse. So these pieces kind of came together later. But at the time, I guess I was just earning my own and doing my own in that context as a student, and being involved in a more broad way with the community around the issues of the NAACP, the student chapter, and of CORE, and it was as important for me taking that away from UCLA as it was in getting the diploma, especially when I found out I wasn't going back into the Navy. It was kind of a transition for me, and that was fine. That was fine.

Greene: How did you reach that decision, that you wouldn't go back into the Navy?

Farrell: The circumstances of going on a cruise each summer, active service. First summer you go out with colleagues and you basically live as comrades on the ship. You go on the cruise, you do your exercises, you learn what you learn, you fill out your workbooks and you come back in from the cruise and then you come back home. The second year, you go to base stations, one for an orientation into the practical aspects of the Marine Corps, because the Naval Service is split, Navy, Marines, and the NROTC program in developing people for the officer corps gives people a kind of orientation that leads to either one or the other, Marines or Navy, and that split comes in the last year, where those who choose to go to the Navy will have a particular orientation that last year. Those who choose the Marines would have a similar different orientation the last year that you're in school, but for the first three years it's just a basic, generic naval-service experience.

Farrell: On the visit to Little Creek, Virginia, I think I had mentioned to you orally that that was about the first time that the Negro piece popped up, when I was called aside to be advised that I had an option to stay and be on duty in the barracks, or I could go to the social activities with my colleagues who were there, but I would have a date provided. I was to stick with my date. Bottom line, don't associate with the white girls. The activities of my friends from UCLA and our own kind of camaraderie and us fellows coming together, and one of my colleagues, courtesy of wanting to dance with my date, and the corollary, I danced with his date, and bingo, there's the violation that is noted by our folks who are in charge of us. "We told you don't do that, and you went ahead and you did it anyway." Well, the distinctions began to show up in the way the naval service functioned.

Farrell: After the Marine function, we went down to Corpus Christi, Texas, for an orientation to what Navy Air was about, and that was the time when I referenced that as I went into the Officers' Club with my colleagues from UCLA and others who were as part of that program were socializing and just enjoying this new, exciting place called the Officers' Club, when someone more superior than us came in, "Nigger, what are you doing in here? Get out. Nigger, get out of here." Just the chilling silence and the fact no one moves. This is an older person who has stripes, basically ordering me out, and the great embarrassment and frustration of being ordered out when I'm just one of the other people, and the greater disappointment was that the officers in charge of the midshipmen, to the best of my knowledge, did nothing. So from that point on, I went to my classes and I went through whatever was there, but for my experience in Corpus Christi, Texas, I did not go to the Officers' Club anymore, and I just left the base. I mean, I'd go off on liberty rather than stay in the barracks or still social things, just go off to Corpus Christi, and, of course, where can you go in Corpus Christi as a Negro? Negro part of town. So I'd go over there and have a great time, but it was not a particularly happy period for me.

Farrell: And there were consequences that I had to discuss when I got back to UCLA. "What was this about? And what was that about?" I said, "Well--."

Greene: These are the ROTC folks questioning?

Farrell: Yes, because, of course, you come back with whatever your dings are, and you discuss, "How did you like the cruise? What did you learn?" and stuff like that, and that came up, and from my perspective there was no resolution. There was no side conversation to say, "Well, look, accept this. The Navy's an organization in transition. This experiment of Negroes as officers, I mean, Truman said, 'Do it,' and the place got integrated, but we're still going through our growth pains," and conversation like that.

Farrell: Then the last cruise, the cruise between my junior and senior year, 1959, went on the USS Shangri-La, and my wardroom experience, where the officers as well as us midshipmen types, gravitated, no one spoke to me. I'm here with my colleagues and other midshipmen, but beyond that, part of the process of socialization this way is to have you to interact with the men who are Navy and the kind of stuff you're going to be onboard ship. But then to perceive myself frozen out with no one to talk to, and it was kind of a pecking order, the military. What tends to happen is you have seniors in the room, you wait for the seniors to talk. You don't go talk to those guys. You wait for them to talk to you. I mean, it's structured. And it didn't happen. So I said, okay, I've got a feeling this is like Corpus Christi, and rather than have somebody say, "Get out of the wardroom," I'd just have my meals and leave.

Farrell: And that's when I got into this thing about fraternization, because what you could always do, you have the liberty of the ship to go find out what's going on. People like to have students come around and midshipmen come around to explain things, stuff like that. And I met a friend who was in boot camp with me, so it was more a matter of camaraderie and talking and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and that was taken to be negative--

Greene: That the two of you were going around?

Farrell: Right. Officers don't interact with the enlisteds, and that sort of fraternization piece came up as a ding, rather than, "Oh, by gosh, Farrell found someone from boot camp. How great," whatever, motivating. So that put the damper on that piece. And then, based on the kinds of things I was doing on campus at UCLA, I'm opened up to these things about what's happening in the rest of the world. And at one of our stops in Japan I saw posted that there was a United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization session going on over at a Japanese university. I requested permission to go to the meeting. I enjoyed the thing, I had a good time, wrote it up in a nice little thing. I stayed out of the way of people. I was over here looking at this international piece, wearing my little uniform, meeting students.

Farrell: There was a subsequent meeting that was going to be held in Hong Kong, and I found out that our carrier was going to be down in Hong Kong at a time that that meeting was going on in Hong Kong, so I requested permission, "When we get to Hong Kong, may I go and do that?" So I did that, and I guess it was as though I just was going to liberty. You want to feel like you're doing something to contribute, and mine was just as though--so you went up on campus, big deal, in Hong Kong. So you went over there and you participated in that, and you met some people. No big deal. "We're going to be leaving." And in a place called Sasebo, Japan, I told you I had been there before, because the fleet tug was there, and the Graffias, the refrigerator ship, was stationed there. The fellow in charge of all the midshipmen, "Now, one thing I'm going to make sure you do--do not bring any hibachi pots back aboard this ship." So as I'm out, I meet a family that I had known before, and as I'm leaving, what do they give me as a gift from the family? A remembrance, a beautiful hibachi pot to take back to, "Have this with you at school. Take this. Put this in your apartment."

Farrell: So as we're lined up, "You know I told you guys not to do that, and, of course, guess who's got a hibachi pot?" So it wasn't like, "But, but, but, you know, I didn't go buy anything. This is not some little souvenir I picked up. These are people who I knew before. And, in fact, the boy in the family, the son in the family had visited me on campus at UCLA when he was on a tour in the United States. This was a family gift to me." No. I was just a fellow who had--"All the things for you not to do, I told you just don't do that, and here you--," whatever, so once again I get another ding. So I came back from the cruise and said, "You know what? This thing is not going to work out for me." I'm finding out about the world and these other experiences, and maybe it's time for me just to sing.

Farrell: So when I went in to share that with the exec officer and then with the CO, the guys just processed my paper. And in a way, I was shocked with that. I mean, I've gone through whatever this is. I'm an enlightened Negro doing all this extracurricular stuff. The guys see it. They see my school records, and they'll let me just go like that? Yes, then maybe I am making the best decision for me.

Greene: There was no exit interview?

Farrell: No.

Greene: No check in of any kind?

Farrell: No, no. And I didn't find out until a couple of years ago, when I sent off for my record, some of my naval records, that those guys wrote, "And is never to be considered as a naval officer again." I mean, it was like the ding I got was for deportment, and I think if I were leaving school right now and I had a chance to see that, I would have said, "No, no, no, no. You misunderstand me. What I want to protest against is that none of you guys stood up for me when the stuff went down on issues that related to race, nor did you just pull me in to say--," because given my own record as a 4.0 sailor all the way through, you tell me that something's a particular way and give me an explanation, I'll accommodate to that. I'd done that before in the service, once I was clear as to what it's about. But if you're just going to like let me sit out there and you're going to let it hang out there like that, no one's going to speak on my behalf to basically say--take it back.

Farrell: The UCLA students in Little Creek, Virginia, as I told you, they rallied around me. Apparently, someone talked to them, because between Little Creek, when my colleagues rallied around, "Well, he's a Negro." "So what? He's from UCLA. He's one of us." That particular spirit was not in place in Corpus Christi when that stuff--

Greene: You noticed a change.

Farrell: Right. When the time came when I was ordered out, I didn't see any UCLA buddies stand up then, so I just assumed that what happened was somebody just talked to them about the reality. "You're down South now. Whatever you do in California, that's all right. But you're not in California now," because they're not aware that stuff goes down like that. But there was no apology from the guys at UCLA to say that, "You know, we're sorry that that happened to you, but toughen up. This is something that you want to be. It's going to be out there as a barrier for you, and here's the things that are in place with Navy policy," so whatever. No discussion like that. So I said to myself, okay, better that I go this way. And it broke my heart.

Greene: It changed your mind about the Navy.

Farrell: No. I still had my own romantic notions, and I would have liked to have had service in the Middle East and all that other kind of stuff, but it was clear to me that was over. I wasn't going to be out there. I wasn't going to have that chance to request that I go and do Islamic studies or anything like that. It was over. But I guess out of the whole experience of being an evolving human being on campus at UCLA, most certainly the kinds of supports that I'd gotten from my friends at the Young Arab Organization about this really being a good thing to do, and glad to know that you're studying this--one guy says, "Knowing Arabs is going to be the best thing ever to happen to you." All this kind of stuff just sort of had me to feel that, okay, I had grown a particular way, and if the guys here didn't see it, maybe they really represented what the Navy is about today, and it's okay. It's a big disappointment. It's not going to happen for me, but all right. There's something else over here.

Greene: Did it leave you more resolved to kind of address discrimination or racial barriers in other areas?

Farrell: Well, remember that during these times stuff was tough all over. I did have in the back of my mind, why didn't the folks at UCLA say anything to me about this? Could it be that some of the things that I was doing on campus, or my associations on campus, my being involved with these demonstrations and the rest of it, they basically said, "It's good that that guy's not coming in. We don't need any guys like that."

Greene: You wondered if you had been labeled already as a troublemaker?

Farrell: It was something I--no exit interview. There was no one for me to--I chose not to engage in a situation to check this piece out, because I made some assumptions about the fellows in the command structure. These guys are in charge of a unit on a campus like UCLA, and they don't see the strength of what's happened in terms of my personal growth over these past three years. Maybe the guys are going to be that way in the service itself, and whatever I would do, I'm going to be dinged. So notwithstanding why I believed I had a contribution to make as an American who was not an Arab, not a Muslim, being involved and interested in an area of the world and its people, and ultimately being one who's going to be an advisor within his structure to the nature of the world there? Okay. I guess I'm not going to be one of those Americans.

Farrell: So even today we find this phenomena. If we talk about what's going on in the Middle East, we don't have enough Americans who are Arabic speakers. Oh, wonder why not. We have to put classes and do crash--oh, you mean UCLA really was one of the few schools that taught Arabic? Oh, you mean you never really reached out to encourage people to take this important language? I mean, you look at the development of the African Union, four language, Arabic, English, French, Portuguese. We're concerned about the development; one would assume that there'd be a big push, if not in the major universities, the historically black colleges and universities, to say, "We're going to have you all to learn Arabic. Why? As we look to the future of the African Union and the continent, the dominant languages are going to be these four, because that's the way the organizational structure is coming up. And if there's going to be a lingua franca, it's going to be Swahili." So what's that all about? I just viewed myself as being on the cutting edge and it just wasn't acknowledged, so I said, "I'll take it someplace else."

Farrell: And I had my tight jaws, and I still related to my friends in the Anthropology Department, who had influenced my thinking about this and how culturally you applied this knowledge and insight that you've learned about the study of cultures and what makes up culture and the value of language, and the ethnography of it and how to study it, and the archeology of it, how you dig it and get the history from the earth. I just have to put it to work someplace else, in some other kind of structure.

Greene: We're going to leave it there.

Farrell: Okay.[End of interview]

1.4. Session 4 (September 23, 2008)

Greene: This is Sean Greene interviewing Mr. Robert Farrell on September 23, 2008. Good afternoon, Mr. Farrell.

Farrell: Good afternoon, Sean.

Greene: I wanted to pick up where we left off, talking about some of your student activism while you were a student at UCLA and ask you, what do you recall about other students who were active in CORE or who participated in some of the civil rights work that you described.

Farrell: Other students? The most significant was Robert [Bob] Singleton and his wife, Helen [Singleton], who were in essence, from my perspective, our team leaders in dealing with those issues of life as students and life as students being involved in the momentous challenges of our times. Intellectual discussions, the conversations we had concerning what other students were doing, and discussions about our own responsibilities.

Farrell: Another person was Jesse Morris, Jesse Turner Morris. Jesse was an econ major who was also part of this ongoing discussion about responsibilities of students, responsibilities of people, what we should be doing about things. Jesse was the fellow with whom I partnered for a moment in opening up our own coffee shop on West Jefferson Boulevard, which was more a matter of a place of mobilizing in and raising food and clothing for people in Haywood County, Tennessee, than a real coffee shop business. So after a short while, we went out of business as a coffee shop, but we had an exciting run as a place of community mobilization to raise materials to be sent south to Haywood County.

Greene: Why Haywood County?

Farrell: At the time, they were doing community organizing, and they put out a call for assistance. As a result of their own homegrown mobilizations, many people who were sharecroppers or poor people were losing jobs and being pushed off land, and this was part of a national effort to just get them support from outside, to let them know that others were aware of their struggle and were being supportive.

Greene: Another question that I have was about some of the perception--we talked some about how your mom and some of the elders that you knew viewed some of your activities and involvements. I wondered if your fellow students in the Arab student organization had any perspectives that they shared with you on the civil rights work that you were doing, or even some of the civil rights activism that people were engaged in around campus.

Farrell: Not that I can recall at this moment. The general attitude was supportive, because in many ways, given the tenor of the times, this concept of Arab nationalism [unclear] was something that they bought into intellectually. But I really don't know how many of them actually were involved in hands-on demonstrations as students back at home. One of the things I learned from the students as they were in the United States was a great deal about their feelings and their sentiments, what they believed was appropriate for the future of the Arab world. But I don't recall any of them really being activists comparable to what we were evolving into being as people involved in the civil rights struggle. Many of them were here on government scholarships, and when they went home they would be going back to structures which they while students in the United States were openly criticizing. But once they went home, they were going back to the very conditions that they were critical of, and were going to become parts of those social-governmental structures.

Greene: Was there a comparable situation that existed for yourself and other black students that were cutting their teeth as it were, on activism? Was there discussion around what it would mean once you left the university?

Farrell: No. Once you stepped across certain bounds, even though you were at the university, those numbers were few. I think Jesse Morris had been in the military, Bob Singleton had, and I had, and I think that that experience, that military experience tempered us in being aware of the kinds of risks that we were taking. So it did get to be a very personal and significant consideration that many other students who were active at the same time did not have to consider. When I stepped back from NROTC, I stepped back from a fully paid scholarship. But what did I have to fall on as I stepped back? Well, as I was out of the service for purposes of taking advantage of the ROTC scholarship, I still had the G.I. Bill. So I had that to fall back on, because I had earned the G.I. Bill and college benefits. But it was still a loss. I don't know of others who necessarily chose to take that kind of a stand for what they were believing. I did, and that's what I meant about things getting very, very personal.

Farrell: Could I have dealt with those other things that were going on in the context of the Navy situation? Perhaps, if I had not been as active and as vocal and going through my own processes of thinking about what citizenship meant, what America was standing for, and my role in bringing about a change at this point in my life as a student, the contribution that I could make. Perhaps had I not been a campus activist, I would have simply been a person of my time. I would have probably understood this is what Negroes go through. Hey, man, you've got a year to go. Go on and finish this thing up, get to be an officer, and go have an interesting career.

Greene: But your activism and your involvement in some of the organizations you've talked about led you to question those?

Farrell: No, I took a stand.

Greene: You took a stand on it.

Farrell: I did do the resignation, because I sensed that if this was what was going to be happening to me once I was an officer, based on where I was today, I would find that not acceptable in a way that, for my first two years as a student--I mean, I was talking about it, but I was not prepared to challenge. But noting what other students were doing and the consequences of what it meant to those students in North Carolina when they sat in, and other students throughout the South, the consequences to them for what they were doing, hey, I might lose out on something, but, well, this is a particular moment in time. What does a stand look like to me? And I got up real close and personal with myself and my strengths and my weaknesses and my shortcomings and my shortsightedness, my sense of what I viewed as the long-range value of what I was doing on campus, and that's what I did.

Farrell: I had no idea that doors would open up that would lead for me to a career in politics, a career not only in politics but as a public elected official. They were not on the horizon. They were not even in a place of conception.

Greene: And what year, remind me, are we talking about here roughly?

Farrell: 1959, the fall of 1959.

Greene: You mentioned the G.I. Bill. Did you have any sense that you might have difficulty drawing down some of the benefits, the G.I. benefits, because you were Negro?

Farrell: No. No, no, no, no, no. If there would have been problems, they would have simply been a problem because I wanted to stay at UCLA, where I had the scholarship. Now I was out of the scholarship program, and I wanted to stay under the G.I. Bill. But that worked out.

Greene: It worked out pretty okay. Okay.

Farrell: This was still before the Freedom Rides. I mean, what was building up was the discussion about nonviolence. I mean, remember, I'm a person of a generation where one's American status was important. It was important as one was a Negro just beginning to explore what that was about as times were beginning to change. And then to be part of a catalyzing agent to accelerate that change I found to be appealing. And, well, hey, man, I'm in my early twenties. I'm bullet proof. All of these things come into play, or came into play for me. There were other students who were prepared to be active in the work that was being done on campus. As I told you, Bob and Helen Singleton have the index cards until today of the people that we contacted to give their leadership, to pull into this discussion about NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] and CORE [Congress of Racial Equality]. And for other people, they were not prepared to make these kinds of sacrifices, or miss work, or have a conversation about their scholarships and what it might mean, or they're working while going to school.

Farrell: I don't do this to be critical of my school peers. Young people have a great opportunity, and it's a gift being in college, when you can discuss, who are you, what you're about, to engage this concept of taking a stand, for what and why, and understand that there may be consequences. That was part of my rationale. As I look back literally today, as I look at my transcript and I say, "Ooh, I got a C there. Ooh, I got a B there." I had become aware of this concept of the gentleman's C or the gentleman's B and noticed some students on campus, some of my NROTC buddies, some of my other age peers from the community who were going to school, who understood that at times you don't go flat out. Part of the college experience is something other than just striving for A's and B's constantly. Personal growth is important, and I engaged that with a passion, to just see what these limits were.

Farrell: I mean, I went out for cross country. I got an A in PE [physical education] because I went out for the UCLA cross country team and track team. Well, I had a physical ed requirement. I mean, I was nowhere in terms of the class of those young men who were there, many of them on scholarships, to do that, but just I'm going to go out on a field and I will run, and, of course, they're going to be ahead of me, and I'm going to come in late, and I'm not going to earn a letter. But the point is, I wanted to just get out there and make a go of it. There's a sense of competition, just get out there. Nothing embarrassing about that. You see where you fit. And in a way, I guess, the social experience was even part of that. You do interesting things when you're young, and to me that was part of being young and being on campus, to go for that. My gosh, if I had been a couple of inches taller and a little bit more physically fit and apt and endowed, heck, I might even have gone on and tried out for football, be a walk on, for the fun of it. Clearly, not going to make the team, but to be part of that atmosphere of growing up and wanting to try new things and see what it's like. That's just how liberating the UC [University of California] experience was for me, totally liberating, totally liberating.

Greene: What was it like when you were done, when you graduated?

Farrell: Well, remember, I didn't really graduate. The end of the summer semester in 1961, all my credits were done and I needed to finish out one course of study, and I was doing that at the Archeology Field School that UCLA Department of Anthropology/Archeology had up in Cedar City, Utah. So I went off to Archeology Field School. So I was away for the summer graduation, and shortly after I came back from field school, I was mobilizing to go on the Freedom Ride with CORE. So it wasn't like having a graduation per se. It was just a transition, diploma in the mail. That's fine.

Greene: What did you go on to do after that, after field school?

Farrell: After field school, an interim time here working with the local CORE chapter. The mobilizations were underway. Got included in a group to go on Freedom Rides, and the group that I mobilized and melded with was the last group going, and as other groups were focusing on going to Parchman Prison--i.e., you go to New Orleans, take the ride up to Jackson [Mississippi] and go to the bus station in Jackson, get arrested, go to the local jail in Jackson. You're ferried out to Parchman Prison. And as the mobilization at that time was students were staying in, so we knew as we were getting ready to go down that we're prepared to stay in for a while. But we were diverted to Houston, Texas, and went to jail in Harris County Jail, in a mobilization with the local Progressive Youth Association and young people that we met there.

Greene: Talk to me some about, you mentioned that those experiences opened doors for you later. Could you give me some preview as to what that looked like?

Farrell: I didn't have any preview at the time. Going south on the Freedom Ride was a culmination of all the other things that I had been doing with others as students, joining with people in a community to protest segregation, and this was basically putting it on the line to go bear witness and my time to go. To me it was an easy shift in mindset, because remember, based on my most significant experiences, it was military. Time to go. So it wasn't, "Oh, my gosh. What could happen?" Just time to go. I'd been a leader in this. I most certainly am going to be on this draft. I'm going. And it was an open question on what was going to be happening next.

Farrell: I assumed I was going to be coming back to L.A., but I could have stayed in Texas. I could have gone from Texas elsewhere in the South, because in '61 things were beginning to rev up, and there was a critical mass of people who had gone through experiences like the Freedom Ride, who were beginning to coalesce in what was evolving to be the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC], and other kinds of things, where the people from the outside were going south to be of help with local organizations like the Progressive Youth Association in Houston, or in other outreach things that people were doing from other organizations in Mississippi and Alabama. So it wasn't certain that I was going to be coming back.

Farrell: My friend Jesse Morris had gone down to Mississippi, and he was subsequently involved in the development of Freedom House and the Council of Federated Organizations that was based in Jackson and some of their statewide activities, so it wasn't assured that I was going to be coming back to Los Angles, but I assumed that I probably would.

Greene: And when did you become interested in journalism?

Farrell: While I was in jail, in Harris County Jail. I remember seeing a copy of "The Forward Times," a black community newspaper in Houston that's still being published, I think. The technology at the time was just shifting over from letterpress to offset, and I thought that the layout of "The Forward Times" was atrocious. I said, "Hey, I can do better than this." And I thought I could do better than the writing that I was reading in "The Forward Times," so I just said, "I'm going to just check this out. It might be fun to do some of this journalism."

Greene: And that led you to do what?

Farrell: When I returned, I was aware that the NAACP lawyer, Loren Miller, had a newspaper, "The California Eagle." I went over to the "Eagle" and I spoke to the managing editor, spoke to the sports editor, and wound up getting a job. Basically it was a welcome. Grace Simons was the managing editor, and Edward Abie Robinson was the sports editor, who I found out subsequently knew my dad, Wesley Farrell the boxer, when he had come up from New Orleans in the late 1930s. But after meeting them, I had a chance to meet Loren Miller, and I mentioned my interest in wanting to do something at the newspaper. They told me they didn't have any money. I said, "I don't need that much money." So I wound up working for seven dollars a week. I would pick up a personal check from Loren Miller's office once a week, and that's how I got into journalism.

Farrell: From being around UCLA, I found out there was a journalism school at UCLA. I took one evening course in magazine writing, and as I took that course--that was given by Bill Brandt, who was the head of the department. He invited me to consider working on a master's, and I checked that out, and Grace Simons wrote a letter of support on my behalf, and click, I was in journalism school. And I had my V.A. benefits, so they covered the cost of that.

Greene: What kind of work did you do at the "Eagle"?

Farrell: I learned how to do a little bit of everything. I had writing skills, so the matter of learning how to write stories and edit was a pretty easy stretch, given the mentorship that I had from Grace. But most importantly, on behalf of the newspaper, I began to move in the leadership circles of South L.A., because of Loren Miller's status, because of the status of the newspaper. I began to go to cover events. I would go out with Abie Robinson to cover social events and got introduced to people who were movers and shakers at the time. I met Loren Miller's cousin, Leon Washington, who was the publisher of the "Los Angeles Sentinel," and I after a while went to work for the "Sentinel," because Leon offered to pay me more.

Farrell: I mean, he and his cousin Loren were rather dynamic in what they did. "The California Eagle" was more of a personal love affair for Loren Miller, where the "Los Angeles Sentinel" was a business enterprise for his cousin Leon Washington.

Greene: At "The California Eagle," what kind of paper would you say it was? What kind of thing did they cover?

Farrell: Opinion leaders. The strength of the "Eagle" was its editorials, and the few stories that it wrote tended to have more social and community significance than comparable news stories that you would find at the "Sentinel."

Greene: Who worked there? What kind of people tended to come to work at "The California Eagle"?

Farrell: People who were devoted to Loren Miller, civil-rights oriented, civil-liberties oriented people. The staff was very small. On the other hand, "The Sentinel," Leon Washington's newspaper, started off as an advertiser, so the thrust there was driven by revenue. Heavy social and sports coverage.

Greene: Social meaning like social events?

Farrell: Right. "The Sentinel" in a way was the newspaper of record for black society, Negro society in Los Angeles, and in like manner, because Brad Pye [Jr.], the sports editor, is still alive. Brad Pye's writing about sports, another fellow by the name of Brockenberry writing about sports, and A.S. "Doc" Young writing about sports and features was top of the line in our community.

Greene: And at the time, particularly when you were at "The Eagle," what kinds of things were going on in Los Angeles at the time?

Farrell: The continuation of the Civil Rights Movement; a big issue, "No on [Prop.] 14," dealing with the aftermath of the Supreme Court decisions on non-enforceability of racially restrictive covenants and that kind of good stuff, which gave me an introduction, too, to the liberal community of L.A., whites, Jews, some Latinos; introduction to Ed[ward] Roybal, the councilman in the Ninth District; most certainly Augustus [Freeman] Hawkins, the assemblyman that was our rep in Sacramento.

Greene: What was your sense of the relationship between some of the liberal community, as you mentioned, and the Negro community in Los Angeles?

Farrell: At the time, it was a coalition, because even though they were mostly Democrats, there were still key people in Negro community leadership who were Republicans, so one could have a conversation about Republicans or Democrats. Goodwin Knight was Republican governor, when he was liberal, a Democratic governor. [Edmund Gerald] Pat Brown came behind Knight, so for a moment there was a tension where people were paying attention to Republicans, people were paying attention to Democrats, and would craft these ideas about Negroes having a role to play in both parties. I was exposed early on to that particular kind of bifurcation in terms of where we fit in this collective of political forces out here. Then, of course, there were the people to the left that were out there, progressives, communists, like that, but nowhere to the extent that it existed in places like New York City. It was minor, but it was still present.

Greene: And you mentioned that at this time you're taking a course in the evenings on writing?

Farrell: Magazine, right. Magazine article writing is a different kind of media writing than you'll find in newspapers. Newspapers, you stack things up, facts, facts, facts, facts, facts. Magazine articles, you have a bit more space to write. You have the opportunity to craft a whole story.

Greene: Did that along with some of your experience lead you to do freelance work at all?

Farrell: No, I didn't do any significant freelance work. The one freelance kind of thing I did for fun was I was a stringer for Johnson Publishing Company, so I had a few pieces to show up in "Jet," and I did some--

Greene: What is a stringer?

Farrell: A person who is other than a reporter, but who from time to time will submit some copy or be assigned to cover something, and then it winds up under somebody else's byline, just that kind of work.

Greene: Oh, okay. And so you were about to say that you were doing some work for "Jet."

Farrell: Yes, a little bit for "Jet." Louie Robinson was the West Coast editor for Johnson Publishing, and he did "Jet" and "Ebony" out of an office over at 2400 Wilshire Boulevard, so it was another pattern of access for me in the people who were evolving as Negroes in the Hollywood scene at that time, because Johnson Publishing was here primarily because of that entertainment industry, and the ads with the movies and like that, the glamour of Negroes beginning to make it in entertainment.

Greene: You said that once you went over to "The Sentinel" it was primarily because they could pay you more?

Farrell: Yes, pay more.

Greene: Did the nature of the work you were doing change much, given that it was a slightly different kind of paper?

Farrell: No, not for me.

Greene: Not for you. What kind of stuff were you doing at "The Sentinel"?

Farrell: Same kind of material that focused on the evolving politic, education, some community affairs, and then filling in on general assignment.

Greene: What are some of the things that you can recall that were either big issues for the community, or that were eye opening for you as you continued to work?

Farrell: Well, big issues for the community was the Democratic National Convention of 1960, the formation of the New Frontier Democratic Club and a range of other Democratic clubs following that particular period, when the Democratic Party became a new Democratic Party, and we were open to the excitement of what was happening with the California Democratic Council and people like Alan [MacGregor] Cranston, and also noting the rise of Jesse Unruh as those factions began to surface in our community, the desire to have representation on the City Council, the desire to have representation on the Board of Education took on a particular life of its own. With the reapportionment following the '60 census, in 1962 we had Augustus Hawkins to go to Congress and an opening up of an Assembly seat, which was won by Mervyn [Malcolm] Dymally.

Farrell: There was a mobilization to see if we could get, was it two Senate seats and four Assembly seats, that was headed by the managing editor of "The Sentinel," a fellow by the name of Wendell Green. Wendell was also the first person that I can recall who made an issue out of immigrants from Mexico taking over black jobs. There was a slaughterhouse, and I think the slaughterhouse was the Farmer John [Meats] people, Farmer John Meats, and I think the union butchers that used to be there at that time were black men, and they were in the process of being replaced by Latinos.

Greene: This would have been what year?

Farrell: [19]61, '62, right in there someplace.

Greene: And what kind of position did Wendell Green take on that?

Farrell: Wendell was the alarmist, raising concerns that notwithstanding what we saw as new opportunities opening up for Negroes, there were still threats there. The threats were not only the negative feelings of whites, whose interests were tied up with a segregated society, but also with others. I mean, the concept that we are moving forward and our time has come is mitigated when you find out that, oh, my gosh, some of your union guys are no longer working. Oh, really? What happened? And this was also a time when there was great excitement about advancements within the framework of labor, post-World War II, Korea, era of Korea, and the idea of getting African Americans, Negroes to be bus drivers at Greyhound [Buses], to be Teamsters driving trucks doing liquor delivery, put pressure on the liquor distributors to hire blacks to, in fact, drive trucks that were dropping product off at the liquor stores that were in our community. A sense of the black entrepreneur being the men and women who acquired motels, liquor stores and like that, on their own or as the community was transitioning from black to white, buying out the whites who were there; also folks taking over dry-cleaning stores, like that.

Farrell: The presence of barber shops and beauty shops. In fact, there was a mobilization of the cosmetologists who were women working on black hairs as barbers, to get to the place where one got a license in California for being able to do hair, not just for doing black hair or white hair. I think I had mentioned earlier that we attempted as students to integrate the barber shops and beauty shops in Westwood Village, because they said they couldn't cut Negro hair, black people's hair, regardless of the texture. They tried to sit in and do something, run the clippers. "I told you I couldn't cut your hair," this kind of stuff. But that was just the tenor of the times.

Farrell: The efforts to deal with the integration of housing, the development of Fair Housing Councils, where black and whites would pair up and go out--blacks would go out seeking an apartment. Whites would go out to seek an apartment. Blacks would be denied, whites would get the apartment. Then you come back with the Fair Housing Council and lay out to the sales rep or the owner, "See, we caught you in a contradiction." And we were optimistic about doing those kinds of things and then explaining the contradiction would get people to change their mind and then open their properties to African Americans, Negroes.

Greene: Did that prove successful?

Farrell: Those Fair Housing Councils are still in existence. They have different functions now, but yes. But in a way, these were interesting and exciting and rather naive things that we were doing, naive in the sense that we believed that simply when you would point out the contradiction, people would get it and say, "Oh," and change their ways. We believed that that was happening, and it did happen. We also found out that it wasn't about changing beliefs and things of that type. It was a matter of business and as long as it paid, folks were going to do things, and what one had to do was still attempt to use other devices, i.e., the politic, to have them pay for the privilege of discrimination. So the big thing was the Fair Employment Practices Commission at the federal level, then we started to advocate FEPC things here in California, and the Brown administration, Pat Brown began to do some things like that.

Farrell: We could see the direct benefits of our involvement in the struggle. Legislation was being introduced. We were having conferences, and things were happening. We believed that people were changing their attitudes, because you could actually see the change taking place.

Greene: And this sense of change and momentum, is this what's underpinning what you described as a kind of new Democratic Party coming along?

Farrell: No. These were the times.

Greene: This is what was going on.

Farrell: Right. The stuff with the Democratic Party was simply part of that. These were the times when it was a big deal to have a Negro get hired. I mean, a little bit later you put your tongue in cheek and said, "The spook who sat by the door." But if you were around at those times, the spook who sat by the door, the first Negro being hired was really a sense of accomplishment, because people were choosing to do that, and we believed that by suasion, by basically showing that we were good people and competent people and capable people, it was having some response. People would look forward to that.

Greene: So what was significant about the Democratic National Convention that you mentioned in 1960?

Farrell: The fact that it was here in Los Angeles, and so many people had a chance to go down to the Sports Arena and walk into the convention. It was open, and many people had their first experience of a national convention and a party by going down to the Sports Arena to see all the stuff that was going on.

Greene: And the New Frontier Democratic Club?

Farrell: Some of the young men, Herb Carter, Julian Dixon, [Honorable] Dion [G.] Morrow among others, folks who lived around the Crenshaw area sort of got together to say, "We want to get involved in this." And they formed a Democratic club and called it the New Frontier Democratic Club, and off they went.

Greene: What kinds of things did they engage in?

Farrell: Well, the interesting thing about most of the fellows who were active in New Frontier is they were lawyers. So over the years as it's evolved, New Frontier Democratic Club has been a place that has facilitated the growth of lawyers who wind up getting consideration as potential judges in California, and it still has that reputation.

Greene: So in that sense, it became an avenue for folks. Were there others?

Farrell: Not with the staying power or prestige of New Frontier.

Greene: You suggest that at least early on, that most of those folks lived sort of west. What was going on on the East Side?

Farrell: People were beginning to move west. The racially restrictive covenants were down. The enforced segregation of people over towards Central Avenue was breaking down and relatively newer properties were beginning to come on the markets as whites fled to the suburbs. They were choosing not to stay in numbers to live with us in South L.A., so as they left, there was a void. I mean, this is post-World War II. There were people here prepared to move into those communities, and we still have people alive today who were the first persons of color to move on their blocks.

Greene: You mentioned Jesse [Marvin] Unruh and some of the factions within the Democratic Party that you suggest were significant.

Farrell: Well, that showed up because it was just the nature of the Democratic Party in California. California Democratic Council, Jesse Unruh and his folks, and people had factions, they had choices. People had their own surrogates, and later that comes to show up within the politics of African Americans as we evolve our own kind of leadership, internal community leadership structures.

Greene: What was your sense of those internal leadership structures before those Democratic Party factions had such a strong presence in the black community?

Farrell: Well, my point of entry was as a civil rights activist. As I mentioned and shared that insight as I came across some materials, you had the folks who were out there, partisan political folks. You also have folks who identify themselves as civil rights leadership, working in coalitions, and these were not the same things. They were different, because people were working towards different goals. Those who were beginning to get active politically were looking at participation in the Democratic Party and what was there. As we had this newfound presence and a recognition of that status, people gravitated to it. The ongoing challenge with the civil rights leadership was coming to grips with how we apply what we are learning and earning to our own participation in governance in L.A. They're two different things.

Greene: And the two different things, were they ever at odds?

Farrell: No, just were two different things. If I have time to spend, and I want to spend it with the United Civil Rights Committee, talking about civil rights and coalitions with folks in the Jewish community and the Anglos and Mexican American community and things like that, that's one thing. If I want to go over here and start talking about how I'm going to take advantage of the fact that I'm working with Jesse Unruh in these Democratic clubs, that takes time, too. Got to volunteer, go to meetings. It's how you cut your priorities. We're all of the same world, because we're Negroes together, but it's where people put their emphasis and their energies in doing this work of race advancement.

Greene: So you're painting a picture of sort of a vibrant time politically for the black community.

Farrell: A very vibrant time, right.

Greene: And you're covering this stuff as a journalist at "The Sentinel."

Farrell: As well as being a participant, given the fact that I was out of CORE, I was a Freedom Rider. I not only came as an observer representing the newspaper and this thing called press. I mean, I was out there. I was a younger guy, but I already had my spurs from freedom riding and being in jail. I viewed myself as one who had significant civil rights experience and participation along with some of the other persons who were there. It was strongly driven by NAACP activists or NAACP-influenced leadership. It was evolving that way. So I was part of like a younger faction of folks coming along.

Farrell: The Urban League at the time was not the Urban League of Whitney [Moore] Young [Jr.] yet, so it was still supportive, focused on skills development, getting Negroes into the workplace, present but not a front in presence in the activities that were going on.

Greene: Are you suggesting the emphasis was more--

Farrell: They were still primarily involved in the social-work function. The leadership was coming from men and women at all different levels in our community life. It was clergy people, union members, people who were just working, self-employed people, some people who worked in the public sector, but it was diverse and dynamic. The key role of the folks in organizations like Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company, those independent--those people who were basically business people working for those independent Negro companies that had standing, were still major figures in the community. Golden State and North Carolina Mutual, these were the businessmen. And then as the opportunities opened up in the beverage industry, the people who were hired to represent the brands, Miller, Bud [Budweiser Beer], like that, these people took on a particular role.

Farrell: As I said before, the people who were the liquor store owners, the people who had motels, the real estate folks. Remember, at the time it was difficult for a Negro to become a realtor in California, so a new entity was created. It was called a Realtist, and Negroes were Realtists, and since these folks did not have access to the boards of the regular real estate organizations, they created their own, and that Consolidated Realty Board exists until this day. Its offices are just off the Crenshaw Plaza in an old adobe, a historic structure up there near Crenshaw in the Crenshaw Heights.

Greene: You talked about some of the influential groups of business people. Who were some of the influential clergy members as you recall them at this time?

Greene: H.H. Brookins at First AME [Church], Thomas Kilgore had just come to Second Baptist Church, People's Independent Church [of Christ]. Oh, man, I see that pastor's face, can't remember his name. Anyway, he had a radio broadcasting program during the war years and just after the war. Dr. [PJ] Ellis as pastor of the Morning Star Baptist Church was president of the Baptist Ministers Conference. There was a real cross section of African Americans in union positions, with the UAW [United Auto Workers]. Well, there's a whole cross section of these men who were international reps of Laundry Workers Union, Teamsters. Joe Jones was president of Local 300 Laborers Union [International], and Roger Fisher was one of his proteges who rose to be one of the vice presidents of the Laborers Union International here in the United States. His brother was Roger Fisher, pastor of a church in Compton. I'm going to have to dig some of that information out for you subsequent, but these were the people. T[imothy]. M. Chambers, Sr., as well as T.M. Chambers, Jr.. Dr. E.V. Hill had just come to Los Angeles at Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church from Texas.

Farrell: The Catholic parishes at Transfiguration, Holy Name, and St. Brigid [Catholic Church] were becoming stalwart places for Creole folks who were up from New Orleans and other places in Louisiana, some from Houston. One could find one's state roots in Baptist Church of Louisiana, Baptist Mississippi Baptist, and Baptists out of Texas and Oklahoma. You could have a real close correlation of people and place at that time, because we were still in an expansion of our social life post-World War II, where we had been hemmed in by racially restrictive covenants and all the restrictions on our involvement in the World War II defense industries. But as that stuff was opening up, the Korean War was still on, so it wasn't a matter of people losing all those jobs post-World War II, but basically they were in jobs that were kind of evolving into aerospace, and there was still a lot of work going on.

Greene: The union connection that you describe, was that a new development in the early sixties? What had been the relationship between organized labor and--

Farrell: Segregation. The Musicians Union had a hall on Central Avenue in the area that was taken out by the 10 Freeway, but Sigmond Arywitz was the head of the County Federation of Labor, a Jewish fellow who was very much in support of this new dynamic. So the challenge was to use the good offices of Sig Arywitz to talk to other local union presidents, to deal with openings and advancement for Negroes.

Greene: And was it his support that helped open up unions to black membership?

Farrell: Well, he took a leadership role in advocating that. Whether people did or didn't was a function of what went on in local unions. Some were, some did, some didn't. And it's fascinating that so many of those industrial unions, where there was an effort to integrate--industrial unions simply don't exist anymore.

Greene: So amidst all of the things that you're laying out, there were a number of electoral campaigns that were underway to get, as you mentioned, representation on everything from the city council to the school boards?

Farrell: These were issues of discussion at that time, '61, '62. Eddie [Edward] Atkinson had run for council in the Tenth District and had been defeated. The Tenth District in the west was where the dynamic was kind of building up for a Negro to run for a seat on the city council. The Ninth District was still held by Ed Roybal, who was a progressive. His campaigns were integrated, whites, Jews, Latinos, blacks from the beginning, end of the Second World War when Roybal came back. And that seat went to Gilbert Lindsay in 1963 as Roybal was elected to Congress. He and Gus Hawkins went to Congress at the same time in 1962. And in that collection of 1963, Gil Lindsay was appointed, Tom Bradley went through that recall process and prevailed in the Tenth District, and Billy Mills won in an open election in the Eighth District. Kenneth Hahn's brother, Gordon [Hahn], had succeeded him, Kenny, as the Eighth Council District representative, and rather than run and be defeated, Gordon just stepped down and Mills won.

Greene: Let's stop there.[End of interview]

1.5. Session 5 (October 14, 2008)

Greene: This is Sean Greene interviewing Mr. Robert Farrell on Tuesday, October 14 [2008], in his office. Good afternoon, Mr. Farrell.

Farrell: Good afternoon.

Greene: I wanted to backtrack a little bit to a couple of things that you talked about previously. One was your experiences when you went on the Freedom Ride with CORE [Congress on Racial Equality] to Texas. You described that experience, and I wanted to capture on the recorder the discussion about how you were treated when you and the group of activists you were with were arrested, and how that may have differed from the experiences of some of the other activists. Could you talk some about what happened when you got arrested, and how did that happen?

Farrell: Sure. Ours was an integrated group leaving Los Angeles by train to Houston, Texas. We went to Houston and we ultimately get to the point of arrest, which was a coffee shop, and we go in and we sit down. We're joined by others from Houston who were members of the Progressive Youth Association, all of whom are African American in the process of, in fact, doing the sit-in, and, in fact, being arrested. We're taken to Harris County Jail and are processed, and the CORE, all of us are sorted out, male-female, white-Negro. We find out later that the expectation was that we were going to get a little taste of what Houston's Harris County Jail was like, because of what happened to white males who had been segregated.

Farrell: I think we were in jail about, say, eight, ten, eleven days, and we're all taken out. We're all taken out because in the white holding area, the white Freedom Riders, Steve[n] McNichols, Bob [Robert] Kaufman, other Steve [Sanfield] and our young buddy were beaten. Apparently, the race theme was incited, and they had taken the four whites and laid them out on mattresses thrown on the floor, and wet towels and knotted the towels and beat them with these wet towels, and kicked them. And they beat them pretty bad. I'll get these names in a moment. But the youngest of the group was eighteen years old. He tended to--he somehow was on the bottom, and the other fellows fell on top of him. Steve McNichols got a damaged neck and upper spine. Robert Kaufman got a big gash in his head, and subsequently, a couple of years later, Robert Kaufman dies as a result of the intensity of the beating that he'd suffered in Houston. If you were to see Steve McNichols today, he still has a certain stiffness in his upper body as he turns his head. His whole body must turn before he can just get his neck, because that was a result of that beating.

Farrell: In the white women's area, the ladies got lip, but they didn't get beat up. In the black areas, the black women were okay, because they were hometown heroes, I mean, hometown heroines, and we were likewise treated as heroes in the black male section. We understood later that there was an effort to encourage the black folks who were in jail in the county jail to in like manner beat us the way they had beat the white males, but there was an enlightened brother who was running up there. I can't remember the gentleman's name, but rather than go to prison, his jail sentence was to be served in the Harris County Jail.

Greene: So he was an inmate.

Farrell: Yes, he was an inmate. He was behind the bars with us. But he was clearly a privileged person, because he had foodstuffs in his cell, he had the end cell, which had access to the windows. He was treated with a kind of deference by the guards. Who knows? This guy could have been the biggest thug in Negro Houston, but he was our protector. I remember that at one point we were in just a large area inside this jail. There was a holding area with just the concrete floor and mats, and then there was a bank of cells. We came in, and when the gentleman found out that we were Freedom Riders, he just sort of spoke the word and several folks volunteered to give up their bunks for the Freedom Riders, and they were there on the floor, and we had bunks. Speaking to his control of the space, as well as his sense of social responsibility given the bigger issue, that was there. We were just not other people coming in because we were going to be spending time. So our period of incarceration--it was still incarceration. Incarceration is not fun and games. It's a difficult state of being. You're locked up.

Farrell: And aside from FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] people coming to interview each of us who were Freedom Riders--one of my schoolmates, her name is Joyce Raab, R-a-a-b, was in Houston, and she said she was my sister, to just get up and say, "Bob, how you doing?" Said, "We're doing fine in here." I mean, that was my one personal visit there. I haven't seen Joyce in years, but I'm so pleased that she came by. It was just good to be able to see someone, because you're locked in. You don't know what's going on outside.

Farrell: But we were there with the young men from the Progressive Youth Association. I think the leader's name at that time was Eldrewey Stearns]. I never found out what happened to Sterns after that in Houston. But that basically is what happened. Once our lawyers found out about the beating of the white males, all of us were taken out. We were housed in the community until our trial, and after the trial and our plea of no lo contendere, we returned to Los Angeles.

Greene: About how long were you there in Harris County?

Farrell: I think in total we were about three weeks in Houston.

Greene: And skipping ahead a little bit, at least in our conversations, you mentioned in passing the last time that your experiences at UCLA and in particular working with the Young Arab Organization, that it prepared you in ways that you can see in retrospect for some of the work you did with the Bradley campaign and with Bradley's coalition, and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about some of the things you learned.

Farrell: Well, it was an extension of what I'd learned on campus at UCLA. Prior to being there--I guess the UCLA experience was the most broad expanse at a single time, other than being in the service, in the Navy, that I had basically seen "the other," men and women who were different from me, who were different backgrounds, different races, different religions, different majors, and it was just fascinating to see this. And because of my major and my interest in the region and the culture, for me to see these various distinctions of what Arabs were and how they had a shared view of the world, and this was also part of my social world on campus, I began to just see how things fit together in our diversity. We do share things in common, our ideas about how the world should be, our reality as students on campus and people obliged to maintain our grade-point averages, people who have a sense of what they want to do once they're finished school, sharing personal goals and dreams. That tied in with the evolution of our politics, because as I had said before, the leadership model was an integrated leadership model. It was Negroes, it was whites, it was Jews, it was Mexican Americans, it was people who were of a similar point of mind, wanting to have a different kind of city and a different kind of politic. So having done these things in college made it easy for me to move into this other area, where people of these different kinds of backgrounds and traditions and expectations and understandings were coming together around certain issues of common purpose.

Farrell: Representation, somebody on the school board. How do we get ready to deal with politics? How do we deal with the Democratic Party? And these were spirited and really dynamic kinds of meetings with people who were spirited and dynamic individuals.

Greene: In your UCLA days, what were some of the distinctions among the students that you were working with and spending your time with, that you learned or became sensitive to?

Farrell: The relatively few Negro students on campus. Engaging other students, majority white, in just establishing acquaintanceship as classmates and just being students on campus, because those of us who were Negroes did still carry with us the reality that we couldn't live in the housing off campus right there unless one happened to find someone who would make a room available to a Negro male. But generally, you go out looking for an apartment and the apartment is rented, with the exception of the co-op, the men's co-op up on Landfair, and for the girls, Negro girls could go to Hershey Hall, and then there was Stevens House over by Santa Monica. And all the rest of us were commuters, and that was just about a feeling that there were folks who lived on campus who were different from the folks who commuted.

Farrell: There were still many, many veterans on campus, because this was post-World War II. The Korean thing was just winding down, so you not only had traditional students coming in as freshmen or as graduate students, you still had a lot of veterans there, older students who were in this mix. So it was just that kind of a dynamic place, and all these different themes were there. I mean, the Bruins were football champions. It's this kind of a new freedom. We were just on the verge of the rise of the Beatniks. It was happening in Venice and Santa Monica and out towards Malibu. This openness in terms of being able to relate to graduate students and to professors was just a totally new experience, and I found that that kind of mixing and processing at the same time--one was obliged to go to school and stay up with studies--really invigorating. Plus the fact of still growing up in Negro South Los Angeles was in itself interesting, and to be a college student full-time, given the dynamics of what was going on in the mid and late 1950s just in South L.A., as my mother and others were still struggling for places to live, to get an apartment, to rent a house, and these things were still going on in the background of what was going on in my life on campus.

Greene: And in terms of some people being commuters, some people not and things like that, did you notice similar distinctions among the Arab students? Or I should say, what were some of the differences you noticed among the Arab students?

Farrell: I think the majority were sponsored students, sponsored by their governments, or sponsored by programs of one type or another that had them coming to school, so they had their scholarships.

Greene: And where were they from? Where were they coming from, if you can recall?

Farrell: From Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon, Iraq, Aden, Algeria. I even met some Pakistani fellows who were friends, fellow Muslims with some of my friends from Sudan. I mean, in essence you had the whole Arab world there, not so many from North Africa, just Algeria. But Egypt, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, that was the bulk.

Greene: And the more you got to know folks, from the way you described it, the more you got to know folks, the more you began to understand some of the cultural nuances between folks from different places?

Farrell: And the differences.

Greene: Can you think of what some of those were?

Farrell: Sure. To understand what the Sunni were, because there were students, I remember, who were Shia, and there was one fellow who was Yazdi, not Muslim, another traditional religion you find as a minority in Iraq. I met a number of Shia who were Muslims from Iran, who were familiar with the Arab students because of their shared faith. In the American context, they're all Muslims together, even so the Sunnis and Shia and like that. Out of Syria and Lebanon, the presence of Sunni Muslims and Christians, and especially out of Lebanon the Christians and the Armenians, as well as some Muslims, and the Christians being Maronites or Greek Catholics, and in a couple of instances with Palestinian Arabs, a couple of them were Protestants, basically Anglican. But Anglicans tie in well with, what, Presbyterians? Anyway, however that piece goes. But that kind of a mix.

Farrell: So it was just fascinating to see these variations on the Arab theme, because in the Young Arab Organization at those times we related to Nasser and his call for the Arab nation, and we supported the whole piece about the freedom for Algerians and their struggle with the French for independence. There was the sentiment that was anti-Zionist, and I had a really unique experience of being with people who viewed the other, the Jews, the Zionists, in a way that I didn't, and was fascinated to see them. It was also fascinating to be able to share the experience of campus with Jewish youth and my unique experience at Camp Hess-Kramer, which was a camp sponsored by Wilshire Boulevard Temple. That relationship out of that with a rabbi lasted through my years on the city council.

Farrell: But just to get to know the context of Jewish experience in my American life, my experiences in the Freedom Movement, less with the NAACP but much more with CORE, was to be around Jewish people or people who were of Jewish heritage but were secular folk, and I came to have an appreciation for their sense of purpose and their contribution to things that were important to me. When my mother and I moved to Newark, New Jersey, we moved into a community that was changing from Jewish to Negro, so my early experiences of Newark, New Jersey, and new things was to be in a world where there was a deli. There were two delis on the corner, Friedman's and Newman's, Jewish fellows, with different kinds of foods that I hadn't seen before. Bagels and rolls, and there was a pickle factory up the street, where these people literally put cucumbers into barrels, and over time they turned to pickles. There was a guy who had the fruit stand, and he sold fruits and vegetables, and all these guys were Jewish guys, and they welcomed us.

Farrell: I mean, it was like I also got exposed to, what is this soda, creme soda, creme soda, soft drinks. So a really crazy thing that happened in Newark was you'd get a creme soda and you'd get a roll, slice it, put mustard on it and put on some Swiss cheese or some American cheese. The experience in New Orleans in having little sandwiches like that was to be at a little Italian market on the corner, have French bread, slice it, put some mustard on it, and have some slices of bologna on there for a nickel. Interesting. The Italians were Catholic in New Orleans. The guys who do this thing in Newark are Jewish. In New Orleans they do bologna. Up here they don't do bologna. They do other meats, and they do cheese, and they had this other food called pastrami, and they do another thing with the carved-up fish called salmon. I developed a taste for salmon in Newark that I have until today. In this new culture, the young man who befriended me and let me hang out over at the candy store, which was basically a small soda fountain, lots of candy, cigarettes, magazines and newspapers and one pinball machine, where I got introduced to--through Sol Jarnell, helping him put together Sunday newspapers, I was introduced to one of my first real jobs, working for the "Newark Star Ledger" delivering newspapers. But that was it.

Farrell: I remember that we were in Newark just as Israel establishes itself as a nation, and one of the first LPs that I remember having around was an LP which basically "Hatikvah" always sort of comes back. So it was a mixture of all this stuff that I was just absorbing, and the fact of the Young Arab Organization is kind of tied in with what I was doing academically, and it was the first time that I'd had that experience, to be reading about people and reading about a language and reading about a culture, and then experiencing it with living, breathing human beings you can touch and feel and get to know and socialize with, so it was a very integrative moment of all this stuff coming together.

Greene: And so as we move forward in time, and you're working as a journalist and becoming deeper and deeper enmeshed in black community politics in L.A., you were beginning to tell me a few minutes ago, before we began recording, you were beginning to tell me sort of how your role as a civil rights activist and advocate kind of meshed with your experiences working for the newspapers, for "The Sentinel" and for "The Eagle." Would you like to talk about that a little bit?

Greene: Well, keep in mind, many times we use definitions and terms today that weren't necessarily the working definitions then. If one worked for the Negro press, one was by definition you're an advocate for change, for betterment of people, most certainly Negroes, but Negroes and others. It wasn't just focusing on doing the newspaper business and just deal with the facts. The facts are nothing but the facts, by definition. That kind of way of dealing with objectivity did not reflect the reality of our world, because there were differences as to where one worked and what one earned, the expectations that one had and of most certainly where one lived. It was still a time of racially restrictive covenants, I mean, that foul practice of people denying the sale or rental of property to one based on race or religion. It's just a repulsive thing. If it was all about if you're going to be in the commerce, it's about making money and making sure you get good tenants, regardless of who they are. So it was just experiencing relations as a young guy, with people who had been around this as part of their civic activity and their chosen life struggle for so many years, to just have that wash over one, simply by showing up and being there.

Greene: Can you think of some example of how this new role of advocate and journalist kind of played out in your day-to-day experiences at the time, maybe in some of the things that you covered or some of the conversations that you were in?

Farrell: I first met Malcolm X when he came to the "California Eagle" office to talk to Loren Miller, the publisher, about representing Muslims who had been beaten and shot by LAPD at Temple #27 on Broadway. One of the people who was killed in that fracas was a fellow by the name of Ronald Stokes/Ronald X. Ronald Stokes was a Kappa, and as I was pledging Kappa at the time, I befriended Ronald Stokes, who came by a couple of times, because Ronald Stokes had heard that I was studying Arabic, and he was wondering, "Why are you taking Arabic?" I told him the reason why, and I found out that he was a Muslim and whatever, and it was an acquaintance with those men that I've maintained till today. From time to time, I will go to gatherings of Muslims and I will see some of those men as we've all aged.

Farrell: Other times it was coverage, and the matter was to look at it from the perspective of what does it mean to Negroes? Sometimes things had meaning, sometimes they didn't. We tended to be very critical of the police, because we had not yet seen a police department that had its police officers be deployed other than in Newton Division [of the LAPD].

Greene: What was Newton Division like? How did it operate?

Farrell: Down by Central Avenue is where Negroes were. That's where the Negro officers and detectives were, and the rule of thumb was that they had Negroes to supervise Negroes. Negroes did not supervise white officers. So it was while I was a young guy coming along that there was a tremendous breakthrough. Tom Bradley was assigned as a police lieutenant to Wilshire Division.

Greene: It was rare for a black person to be a lieutenant or an officer?

Farrell: It was the first time. Well, right, you didn't get higher than lieutenant. That was why Tom Bradley left the police department. [Chief William H.] Bill Parker told him that that was it, there wasn't going to be advancement beyond that. And Tom Bradley maintained his integrity, worked, finished law school, said goodbye, established his practice, and a minute later he was involved in the politics of the city.

Greene: When did you first become aware of Bradley? Was he somebody that you had known or known of?

Farrell: First time I was still at UCLA. It must have been about--I'd have to check with Robert Singleton on this. It was 1958, 1959. There was an activity with the Western Student Movement--or did this come later--the Western Student Movement, to reach out to help Negroes do better in junior high school and high school. One of the places from which this activity was done, with the support of the Avalon Carver Community Center--Opal Jones was the executive director there. She was also one of the influential people in the organization and running of the YWCA on Hilgard and the co-op there, which was a women's residential hall on sorority row which was a co-op. It allowed men to come in to be involved in the social activities and the shared work and the cooking and maintenance and like that, and I had participated in that co-op for a while. But Opal Jones was in charge, and Bradley was one of her board members, so it was in the context of Avalon Carver that I first met Tom Bradley and also first met Ed Roybal. As I began to get a sense of what was going on in the city, he was our council person, and, of course, Kenneth Hahn on the board of supervisors.

Greene: What was your sense of some of the other important issues that were emerging or that were evident at the time? You mentioned police brutality was something that folks paid a lot of [unclear].

Farrell: Housing. Jobs. What's new? Education. What's new?

Greene: The ones that we continue to have.

Farrell: What's new? I mean, that's part of this kind of sickness that you find in America, especially in its cities, the concept of the problem as being intractable, not easily resolved. It's easy for people of my generation to look back and say, "Look. We've seen this thing all our lives. It's a spin-off from the days of segregation. Can't you see that? Don't you understand that?" How could these particular things just be so pervasive and so persistent through the years?

Greene: What was it about housing, education, or jobs that got folks fired up, or that in probably each of those cases led folks to kind of challenge the system as it was?

Farrell: Post-World War II was comparable to what you see now in South L.A., a lot of people crowded into spaces that were available, except that they're Negroes, and the only way to go is south. Why? Racially restrictive covenants are heavy to the west. East side is pretty much going through its own kind of a crowding situation, and the suburbs are being built. So, of course, we don't move to the new suburbs, because white folks.

Greene: And suburbs would have been like Compton at the time?

Farrell: Lakewood was being built, Compton, yes, Inglewood, Torrance, Gardena, like that. So the place of the pressure building up for us was moving south along an axis of Main Street, Central Avenue, Avalon, like that, moving south. And there was resistance. Block busting was going on. We had the reality that if you were Negro, you could not be a realtor. There was a creation of another business classification called realtist, and these were Negroes, and they did real estate business. They were members of the Consolidated Realty Board, which still exists in the Crenshaw area, but the regular realty boards did not necessarily allow cross listing of properties, all that kind of good stuff going on. We had people with money in their pockets, because the rise of the post-World War II black press and Johnson Publishing Company, a sense of awareness of the fact that we were becoming a consumer market. I mean, we were beginning to have things, own stuff, and it was obvious.

Farrell: And we had different kinds of expectations about where to live, and those small houses of South L.A. were desirable places, pushing south, so that's where the conflict came around housing. The conflict with law enforcement, was L.A. that different from any other place in the United States as it related to its Negro population? They had a segregated police force, as I mentioned before. Newton Division did have police officers commanded by Negroes, ultimately commanded by whites, maintained order. The tradition in LAPD was always to have fewer police officers, as opposed to using the model that you find back East. Like in New York, officers were all over the place.

Greene: Was that tradition or because of a shortage? It was just the way it was set up?

Farrell: [Police Chief] Bill Parker set up a police force that had fewer people that were paid well, to offset the challenges of vice and organized crime and stuff like that. The system held up very well until, what, the eighties? You started to have narcotics come in and a lot of money on the table, where guys would bust folks and then people start to do stuff. But up until that point, L.A. County Sheriff's Department and L.A. Police Department was relatively clean. You didn't have that. You did have tensions about the employment of minority police officers. The stereotype was the tall Anglo. If you want to think about a sense of the times in the police department, think of "Dragnet. We are professionals. We are the law." [sings theme notes] And that was pretty much a sense of our reality. It was a big deal when the first woman Negro officer started to make it.

Greene: This was in the sixties, or later?

Farrell: This was in the sixties, the early sixties, Vivian Strange. Her partner in doing community relations work was Jesse Brewer, who later became an assistant chief of police during the [Tom] Bradley administration.

Greene: I guess I have two questions that may lead in slightly different directions. One is, what were some of the kind of organized responses within the black community to some of the issues which you're cataloging for me here? What groups were working on those things?

Farrell: The whole issue of fair housing came up. Most of the fair housing groups that exist until this day had their start at that time. Part of the agenda of CORE was basically checking on fair housing issues, go do a sit-in at places that would not show property or sell property to Negroes in Monterrey Park and even here in Carson, off of University Avenue back out here. A builder out of Torrance by the name of Don Wilson put together a couple of tracts. One was a white tract and one was a Negro tract here in Carson--came to engage that. But the CORE discipline was always picketing and sit-ins and sing songs and bear witness. It's easy to just sort of say that, it rolls off the tongue so easily. But it was more than that, because they had other groups that had different points of view. We were one of many groups that were there--NAACP. I can't remember just at the moment some of the other groups that were out there, but please be certain that there were others. There were others. They weren't neighborhood efforts. They were efforts that were led by different kinds of people who were inspired to leadership to do things.

Greene: And around this time, you mentioned that the restrictive covenants begin to be eroded and folks begin to shift. But the other thing that you mentioned in our last discussion was that more black people started getting put into elected office. Were these issues some of the things that propelled some new folks into elected office?

Farrell: Right. We always had an elected official. Gus Hawkins was the assemblyman from the 1930s to 1962, when he went to Congress, and prior to that, the gentleman's name was Fred Roberts, from roughly 1920 till 1932. Roberts was Republican. When the politic changed in California among our people, Gus Hawkins moved in on that and replaced Roberts in Sacramento.

Greene: When you say when the politics changed, you mean when the Republican Party became less prominent?

Farrell: No, no, no, no, no. With the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt in the mid-thirties, that's when the change came for Negroes.

Greene: People began to become Democratic.

Farrell: Who shifted to Democrats. Remember, prior to that they were Republicans.

Greene: Party of Lincoln.

Farrell: Right, right. But Democrats began to put other things on the table.

Greene: Like what? Oh, you mean after the New Deal?

Farrell: Yes. And even though the New Deal came with its programs, they were still segregated, but it was more than we were getting before.

Greene: So at this time, what did the Democratic Party's relationship to black politics as you describe them in L.A., what was that relationship like at this particular point?

Farrell: Well, the process was beginning to open up. We were in an era of Negro firsts. First Negro to be a registered nurse working at County Hospital--I forget the name, but this was almost like the stuff of "Ebony" and "Jet." The first Negro to do this, the first Negro to do that, and things were beginning to open up. And likewise, the politics was beginning to open up. We had this fellow, Jesse Unruh, come on the scene, who not only had the support of Negroes, but throughout his whole career he had Negroes in his opportunity. People like Willard Murray [unclear] introduce you to, and Willard becomes one of the persons who were out there organizing Democratic clubs that were more in the Unruh orbit than were Negroes who were in the tradition of supporting Jimmy Roosevelt, the traditional liberal piece, and California Democratic Council with Alan Cranston, so you began to see as factions were shaping up in the Democratic Party, they were reflected in our community, too.

Farrell: And what were they driven by? More than anything else, personality.

Greene: Is that right?

Farrell: Yes.

Greene: So how did the factions sort of shape out within the community?

Farrell: Well, oversimplified, Tom Bradley living in the Tenth District, kind of like over on the West side, was where you still had more of a Jewish population that was Roosevelt folk and Cranston folks, like that. And down here where people were moving into previously white areas where whites were choosing to leave--they could have stayed, as folks did on the West side, and allow for us to integrate among them, and they chose to leave in large numbers. This was the area that sort of fell under this domain of Jesse Unruh, based in Inglewood, who did his winning in part with Negro votes, and he began to relate in a more moderate way, whatever that means. But it was different from the CDC [California Democratic Council], and as the pressures began in the party, in terms of contention in L.A. County and up and down the state, there was a faction of people around Jesse Unruh who made the most of the opportunity as this demographic shift took place.

Farrell: There was more of an exodus in South L.A. than on the West side, so into this absence, into this void we stepped, and it was Jesse and Willard and the ever opportunistic Mervyn Dymally and Billy Mills, and a little later after that, me, on one foot over here with Bradley's folks, but over here working with Willard Murray and others, and these things changed in a relatively short period of time, the early 1960s. 1963 [snaps fingers] was magical. Three people on the city council from nothing before. Why three? Well, Tom Bradley and the folks in the Tenth District had--I should say, folks in the Tenth District had made an effort to support Negroes for city council. Eddie Atkinson, but Eddie Atkinson didn't make it.

Greene: He lost.

Farrell: Tom Bradley was the next guy up, Community Convention that I referenced to you. Bradley gets the nod and Bradley winds up doing the election process in '63 in the Tenth District. In the Eighth District, Kenny Hahn's old district, where he was succeeded by his brother, that brother, Gordon Hahn, chose not to run, because it was clear that the demographics are changing, there's going to be a Negro in the Eighth District. No need to have a loss on the Hahn name. So it was an open seat, and the expected winner there was going to be Leon Harrison, because he was Harrison & Ross Mortuary, so he had all the preachers and whatever, whatever, whatever. And then in the Ninth District, as Ed Roybal had been elected to Congress, there was a vacancy, and there was an expectation that an appointment would be made, and the thought was that it was going to be one of Roybal's deputies at city hall that was going to get the nod.

Farrell: But before that could happen, Kenny Hahn pulled off one and put his deputy in instead of Roybal's deputy, called Gilbert Lindsay, so it was like in a magical moment in 1963, we went from nothing to [snaps fingers] three people on city council, like that.

Greene: Lindsay, Bradley--

Farrell: Lindsay appointed, Bradley elected, Mills elected.

Greene: Tell me what you knew of those gentlemen at the time.

Farrell: For me it was Bradley. Met Billy Mills through Willard Murray.

Greene: Okay, so you already knew Willard Murray at that time. And how did you know him?

Farrell: Well, Willard saw me at events and we struck up a relationship. As he would do campaigns, he invited me to come on to just do some of the media-related work, writing press releases, but basically because I was going [unclear] what's going on, talk about, being part of the mix. There was competition from among people who were my peers. There was a fellow by the name of Don Taylor, who was the political editor over at "The Sentinel," a young guy at the time, a couple of years older than me, who'd come from back East and who had a heck of a lot more political experience than I had. As we had this in-migration of people, there was a kind of political churning, and people brought their ideas with them, so that when you saw people cluster around to build the New Frontier Democratic Club and some of the other Democratic clubs, they brought their ideas and methodologies from Indiana and Ohio and Illinois and attempted to put those things in place here.

Farrell: But the politic here has always been an open kind of politic, so there were other places that you could go to try to build your relationships. The idea back East is if you're a committeeman, you basically run a neighborhood. We didn't have that tradition here. Neighborhoods were still in the process of being developed, and it wasn't political guys who were building these neighborhoods and providing services. It was coming out of this mix of city activists and block club people and the folks around the newspaper and the unions and all the rest of it, so it was really kind of a new turf where there were several political experiments going on at the same time.

Farrell: As I mentioned before, the collegial kind of decision making that came out of the civil rights days, pre-civil-rights days in L.A. was giving way to another kind of more factional leadership who would say, "Hey, resolution of this thing? Let's just see what the election is going to say." And this is brand new. There were people in the wings who were the traditional leadership here in Los Angeles, who I expect thought that they would be the next round of political leaders in Los Angeles, just as Tom Bradley was, because they, too, had roots in L.A. They had gone to local schools. They represented the business leadership of our community.

Farrell: Elbert Hudson, the son of H. Claude Hudson, was one of those who was considered one of the people who was supposed to viewed as perhaps the first Negro to represent in the Ninth District. You had the brothers whose father was among the founders of Golden State Mutual, Ivan Houston and Norman [B.] Houston, Jr. Ivan, I think, was a Democrat, but Norman Sr. was Republican, his son [Norman Jr.] was Republican. His son subsequently worked, I think, in either the Nixon or the Reagan administration in Washington, D.C. But these guys were basically there. But I think there were just people who were a bit more hungry, and I was part of that crowd. And you found that even after I was in office, the rise of Maxine Waters from St. Louis, just a hungry, aggressive, knowledgeable person. This community's politics have always been open.

Farrell: I think now you find, because of the importance of money, that the opportunity to do what we did in the sixties and seventies doesn't exist anymore, because of these kinds of structural things. I mean, where do you go to earn your bones and develop your resume? Who's going to give you a shot? Well, if you're not going to get a shot, you jump out there. How many places do you have to jump out and start doing something? Well, I'm going to be doing it with young people. Well, the last election we're looking to young people. The election before that, we looked to young people for the answer, whatever that means. But as that continues to play as a theme that excites people, let's see what's going to happen right now. Now there's [Barack Hussein] Obama with young people and you know where, and I hope that that's true, but I have an expectation it's going to be somewhat akin to what's happened in the past. People will do whatever their first vote is, and they'll do a great thing in November, and then they may or may not be around for the municipal elections in the spring.

Farrell: So that was the difference between those who were evolving as the political folks who began to not only attempt to go out there and encourage people to register and vote and get candidates out there, but then afterwards who would track the results and pay attention to the results, to get ready for the next election. So I think it was a time, place, the nature of the change that was going on, the rise of new technology. Phone banks and mailers were in the process of evolving. The computer was not yet around. You could still fall back on getting people to go walk door to door. You could still do things by having coffee klatches and little teas and local meetings and, of course, going to the churches and the rest, not the way you see people do now. In the last couple of weeks you want to go to the ministers' conference and go wave your hands at the church, but now to go and do work with whatever the churches were doing, and really get to know the pastors and become part of that melding of civic life and church life and the mixing and mingling. Those things are pretty much different now.

Greene: Yes. You mentioned that Gilbert Lindsay was in essence put on by Kenny Hahn.

Farrell: Yes. He was a part of that operation, as was post-Gilbert Lindsay, Nate Holden. If you're familiar with Nate in a way, Nate--that was just a particular faction that won elections.

Greene: How did Bradley's name get put forward? How did that happen?

Farrell: At a community convention.

Greene: Okay. Tell me about it.

Farrell: I describe that, and I'll have some notes a little later, because I was at that meeting, just as I was at the one for Jim Jones for Board of Education in that United Civil Rights Committee. New clergyman in town, H. Hartford Brookins, AME, First AME Church is moved from over at 8th and Towne to its present location. The rallying of this new preacher from Kansas to the potentials in the leadership of Tom Bradley, and the dynamic in the Tenth District was a number of candidates went for the position, wanted to run. Well, how do we distinguish and get people to line up around a single candidate to win? Some very skilled people said, "The way we should do this is through a community convention," and as I noted in my minutes as it relates to Jim Jones for Board of Education, same kind of issues come up. "Well, who are you all to put together a convention? Whose idea was that? I don't necessarily agree that we should have conventions," but there were enough people who got together and said, "We're going to have the convention," to make it stick.

Farrell: And, of course, the agreement going into the convention is that you bind yourself to the decision of the convention. And then we have the weighting of the delegates and what number of votes they're going to have as folks register to come in, as you have to be representative of something. And basically at the end of the day when all the votes are counted, Tom Bradley is the nominee of the convention. So he took that momentum and the mobilization of the clergy and civil leadership with H.H. Brookins forward to victory in the tent.

Greene: Now, was Bradley the expected--was he the favored candidate? Was it clear that he was going to emerge on the other side of the convention as the person that was going to be put forward or endorsed?

Farrell: It was competitive, because people basically said, "Well, Tom Bradley's a former cop. I mean, what are you going to have, a cop on the city council? We need somebody because we have problems with the police department." But let's just say Tom Bradley was a favorite of some of the folks in leadership positions, because he had had relationships. He was a police officer. He was kind of a squeaky clean guy. He had good relations with the Jews. He had good relations with Asians. He had good relations in our community. Was he the most personable of the candidates? No. But he was the kind of guy who would win, because it was still a matter of putting up a Negro candidate in a district that still had a lot of white folks. They were not a black district, okay? It wasn't like the Eighth District. Eight District, black district. Tenth District was not that way, and once again, the reason the Eighth District wound up being a black district was that the exodus of whites was just that great. There was a big sucking sound as they moved out and we moved in. They took away the Chambers of Commerce. The community newspapers that they had, left. The community churches that they had pretty much were gone. In the early 1960s they'd turned over and become ours.

Farrell: I mean, that's one of the sad things, I believe, about what happened in South L.A. It was as though the people who were living there didn't even give us a chance to move south of Slauson to get to know us as neighbors, they'd left so quickly. White flight. Why did they run? But anyway, that's a whole nother story for a whole bunch of other people. But as we moved into that vacuum, there was no other political apparatus there. For a while in the Assembly, the gentleman who was out of Lynwood who was the assemblyman was able to hold on for a while, because South L.A. was split between his district and the Unruh district. But then after a while he had to move, because a candidate was put up against him called Reverend F. Douglas Ferrell, pastor of Tabernacle of Faith Baptist Church in Watts, and we took out [Assemblyman] Kilpatrick.

Farrell: So then it was Jesse's district [claps] and the Kilpatrick district. Merv Dymally was in the Gus Hawkins district. That's when we got our two. And then when Unruh left, that became a black district, three. And then the one in the Tenth District, four districts. And we picked up the Senate district in South L.A., the Senate district over on that side, our two senators. Gus was there in the congressional district that overlay the Senate district and the two Assembly districts, okay, and then Julian Dixon came in [claps], overlaying kind of like the Tenth District and back over here towards Inglewood, the Baldwin Hills area, and then with a demographic shift in the way the boundaries--it's kind of twisted there--Maxine [Waters] replaces Gus. Diane Watson replaces Julian, and because of this South L.A. piece that included Carson and Compton, we had young Walter Tucker, who was mayor of Compton, to pick up that piece, the Glen Anderson congressional district, followed by Juanita Millender McDonald, followed by Laura Richardson. That's how we got the three congressional pieces.

Greene: And all of this happened in a relatively short amount of time, no? What you're describing is probably a window of what, ten years?

Farrell: Between the sixties--twenty years, which is a relatively short period of time. There are people alive who've seen all of that come into play and who were participants in all of it.

Greene: So talk to me some about the uprising, about the Watts riot. You made mention of the fact that all of this played out even before the uprising happens, and some shifts kind of come with that. What was the lead up to the riot as best you can remember, given that you're sort of moving in these spaces and involved in these conversations?

Farrell: That whole rebellion thing, from my perspective, was an accident. Yes, there had been the discussions out in South L.A. There had been the incidents. But a fellow by the name of John Buggs had had a series of meetings. John Buggs had been appointed the executive director of this new thing called the County Commission on Human Relations, and there was a real belief once again emanating from the kind of people who we were and the way that we were attempting to do things, constitutional, that by the creation of human relations commissions we would be able to work out kind of problems we were having as it relates to race. And he as a professional staffer had come out to South L.A. to conduct some meetings to lower the tensions that were here, and I'm going real fast through this.

Farrell: And for whatever reasons, the police hesitated in clamping down. It's an assertion that I also have about what happened with that second round of riots. Darryl Gates hesitated in shutting down, for whatever reasons. His commander out here in the South Bureau and the guys over at 77th Street let that stuff go on too long over there on Normandie and Century, I mean, to the place where you can get a helicopter shoot down, and you can see people breaking in and stuff like that. That would never happen today. If something like that happened [claps], mobilize, [claps] people will shut the damn place down. They don't want this stuff to get out of hand.

Farrell: [Police Chief] Parker, to me and given the meetings that I was in, because I was in a meeting with Parker representing Mills, and I have notes about that someplace in here, and I haven't pulled them out. I have notes of the delegation that went from city hall over to Glen Anderson's office in the old State Building, because [Governor] Pat Brown was out of the country, and Glen Anderson, the lieutenant governor, was the acting governor. It was a meeting in his office, and I was kind of a fly on the wall while that went on, and I took some notes. But Glen Anderson also tarried and did not act. So you had these two great moments where social control could have been maintained by an extraordinary step being taken by LAPD, or Glen Anderson taking an extraordinary step and calling out the militia, but those things had never been done before. So whatever was going on was going on. Police had been pulled back and the streets were open, and just shit began to happen, just as it did in '92. And when you have that kind of stuff going on, your traditional civic leaders, political leaders step back. That's not an area in which we do well.

Farrell: As Bradley did in '92, attempting to get people together over at FAME [First A.M.E.] to talk about whatever, it was an effort, but that's not the way one reestablishes civic control of the streets. You do what you ultimately have to do anyway, just you wait a little longer, and that is you bring in force and you declare a curfew. But that burning and that devastation was just a shocker, and the consequences to that were a change in the local business climate and the beginning of a different federal look at what was going on in inner cities in a whole range of programs. But it was almost after August and the Watts riots that we had a rise in a different kind of a Negro business group called liquor store owners, because the Jewish business people began to sell out. I mean, who wants to go do business in South L.A.? Same thing with the guys who owned motels; turnover.

Farrell: And why do I remember those two things? Because once again, these were some people that I was around, and I remember them doing that. There had been efforts by African Americans who were Teamsters to get jobs on the trucks that delivered soft drinks and alcoholic beverages to liquor stores in South L.A., because it was still being done by whites. So, I mean, there was a group of guys who put that thing together to win their civil rights victory and bring jobs to the community. I mean, sometimes they seemed to be just that small, but they were significant. There was a whole issue of a campaign to get black drivers on Greyhound buses, and that was a big deal, but guys put it together and they won the victories. So it was like a lot of little things happening with different groups of people being involved in it, and there was this cumulative thing that comes together in what we think about as the victories that were headed by the folks whose names have higher visibility today. But there were these little victories all over the place, where people who had been involved in the struggle for long periods of time won things, achieved things that were moving the race ahead.

Greene: Stop there.[End of interview]

1.6. Session 6 (October 16, 1008)

Greene: This is Thursday, October 16 [2008], Sean Greene interviewing Mr. Robert Farrell in his office. Good afternoon, Mr. Farrell.

Farrell: Good afternoon, Sean.

Greene: I want to pick up where we left off before and ask you about the connections between some of the activism you were both involved in at the community level in South L.A. and saw, and some of the newly elected black officials that you began to tell me about the last time we spoke. What did you see as the relationship between, say, the United Civil Rights Committee and some of the folks that began to be put forward as leadership, political elected leadership of South L.A. residents?

Farrell: If you were to look at the leadership model just prior to the sixties, you'd have noted the role of Gus Hawkins [Assemblyman turned Congressman] and some of Gus Hawkins's staff, and I want to reference Bill Williams. Bill ran for Secretary of State later on and for a while he was an instructor of political science over at USC [University of Southern California]. But the model that they were following was one of just the traditional community leader. Hawkins had been in office since 1934.

Farrell: An interesting sidebar, I think. Gus came in with the weight of the End Poverty in California Campaign on his side, EPIC, if you remember that. But anyway, it was a more traditional kind of political leadership, based on people and relationships and institutions that had just been here for a while, especially through the war [World War II] and where appropriate, I guess, for a community prior to the war, but began to change under the stress of in-migration of people and what was happening in the economy, and what was happening in the community post-World War II, the rise of the suburbs, the pressure to move out of the area centered around Central Avenue in the center of it all and, say, Jefferson [Boulevard], to push south of Slauson [Boulevard] and west of Main Street, to integrate the previously white communities of South Los Angeles that got to be the way they were primarily as the result of racially restrictive covenants that were still being enforced in law and in business practice.

Farrell: So when you saw new people come in, like the rise of the Mervyn Dymallys, like the rise of the people who were among the founders of the New Frontier Democratic Club, Herb Carter, Julian Dixon and others, these were young people, new people who had just different ideas about what could possibly happen through politics. As I mentioned, the usual way of being sponsored and coming through clubs and organizational structures was pretty much bypassed by the young Mervyn Dymally. He carved out a role for himself as a Democratic Party organizer in the '60 campaign, basically to put him in place to ultimately be a successor to Gus Hawkins in the election of 1962, succeeding Gus as assemblyman when Gus moved on to Congress.

Farrell: It was a different kind of a more aggressive style of going out on the street and talking to people, talking up the Democratic Party, being part of that heightened expectation that came with the New Frontier and the [John F.] Kennedy administration. I'm trying to remember the name of the gentleman who was the African American press aide to the president at the time [Andrew "Andy" Hatcher]. He was Pierre Salinger's deputy, and he also served as a conduit for black political players to provide input to the office of the presidency. Can't remember his name. But anyway, that particular sense of new things coming.

Farrell: Merv Dymally, his friend and supporter and subsequent elected official, Bill Greene, was there. Bill Greene was also involved with Freedom Rides. He had been working in Louisiana with CORE [Congress on Racial Equality] in the 1950s. The fact that Merv Dymally and Bill Greene, also including Willard Murray and subsequent to that Billy Mills, doing their work in South L.A. along the corridor of Broadway to Central Avenue, with a focal point down around Manchester, was a fascinating shift, because in that direction there was less of traditional African American leadership and leadership structures. As the progression of the Negro community moved with the Second World War and afterwards, it was as though one drew a line along Jefferson Boulevard going west from Central Avenue, and along Washington Boulevard going west from Central Avenue, the area which has now been taken over by the 10 Freeway. There was an area of good housing stock that whites began to abandon. They were the larger homes that were built around the turn of the century, the teens and the twenties, what came to be known as Sugar Hill and like that. That's when you had the move of folks who, to me, represented traditional community leadership. They were moving west in a direction that was taking them over towards the Baldwin Hills.

Farrell: That was part of that move that had Tom Bradley, the police officer, and his wife Ethel, using the double escrow to buy in up on Weland off of Coliseum, living in a community that also included Japanese east of the Crenshaw Corridor, just off so west of it, kind of centered on Coliseum School, which was one of the areas where Japanese came back post-internment, to reestablish themselves and their lives, and also along Jefferson Boulevard there were still remnants of Japanese who were living in the area as small business people and also as gardeners. I think the credit union that those Japanese gardeners established on Jefferson Boulevard is still there. In fact, when they expanded their property and built a parking lot, the structure that was taken out to provide space for the parking lot for the credit union was [Leon] Aubrey's Barber Shop. It was Leon Aubrey's shop that was one of the hubs of the New Orleans community, because as things had developed, there had developed a kind of a New Orleans community, a Creole community along Jefferson Boulevard, from about Tenth Avenue, say, roughly down to Western [Avenue], centered on Holy Name Church. Holy Name Catholic Church, Transfiguration Catholic Church, these were parishes that had so many Louisiana people in them that when people would talk about folks getting married, it was like in the Catholic tradition, people would announce the banns. As people would be betrothed and then married, you'd see the tie in with parishes in New Orleans in these two parishes in Los Angeles.

Farrell: So in that area and back towards Crenshaw, you saw the rise of Julian Dixon and Herb Carter and the cadre of mostly men and some women who formed not only the New Frontier Democratic Club, but in their own professional growth and development they were lawyers and teachers and administrators, and they gave a quality and dimension to the New Frontier Democratic Club that really established it as a viable political place. But they were not the only ones out there. We had the, to me, great [Judge] Vaino Spencer, who grew up on the--

Greene: Vaino?

Farrell: Vaino Spencer. She just retired as a justice of the California Court of Appeals. She was active with a Democratic club with the late Warren Hollier, who was a close friend of mine, and who was a contractor, and who was also one of the key lieutenants to Tom Bradley. During the Bradley administration, Warren was a deputy, and he also came to serve on the [Topeka, Kansas] Board of Public Works, where for a period of time he was the chair of the L.A. City Board of Public Works. But these were the people who established this club activity and began to embrace and be involved in the Democratic Party, and who gave some substance and structure to the kinds of factions that were developing in the Democratic Party in L.A. County here. And as I described before, the Alan Cranston people tended to be over to the left, West side, and Jesse Unruh's people were further south and most certainly included at the time; Merv Dymally and Bill Greene and Billy Mills and Willard Murray.

Greene: At the same time, the national Civil Rights Movement was unfolding. In your position, sort of in these different conversations that were going on and given your previous ties to CORE, what perceptions did you have of the national Civil Rights Movement and how it linked to what you were seeing and describing to me just now in L.A.?

Farrell: When I came off of campus and out of the Freedom Ride experience, as one who was active with CORE, we were CORE people, and I think you could find this out in conversations with Bob Singleton, who was our real team leader and champion from the campus days to afterwards, is that the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] had a structure where the activity of branches was monitored and directed from the center. It was as though, in a way, in hindsight, this most democratic of national organizations of ours, that had this very, very fertile base of chapters around the country--there was also perceived by Roy Wilkins and others a need to be on top of that. So there was a sense that we had that there were constraints, so many constraints to what one could do with NAACP that we'd shifted from being campus chapter members of NAACP, to go to a new organization, CORE, with its sense of viewing the positive possibilities of direct action, the acceptance of the discipline and consideration of nonviolence, the conversations about submission via one's participation in a group, to go through orientation and think through these positions before we would go on a picket line, and a more, to us, I believe, democratic way of assessing what it is that we wanted to do.

Farrell: It wasn't just something that was coming down as a policy from above. It was something that we were involved in melding and molding ourselves, and our leader was Earl Walters. Earl Walters was a professional social worker in the [Los Angeles County] Department of Public Social Services and its successor in L.A. County, and his wife Mildred was a school teacher, I think. She's still alive. He passed. She's a writer of children's books. She now lives in Denver. But in coming into the community with this new organization, we younger people who had the experience out of CORE, especially in stepping away from that integrated style of doing our work with CORE, and for me, coming into a traditional Negro community structure, to be involved close by leadership through this choice of wanting to go off and to be involved with the Negro press and that opportunity I had to start that experience by being at "The California Eagle" and being part of Loren Miller's staff, certain other things came to mind.

Farrell: One was the capacity and the real influence that the NAACP had. When you think about the stories you hear about Brown v. the [Los Angeles] Board of Education and how Thurgood Marshall and Dean Houston and the folks at Howard [University] had put together this national network of volunteer lawyers and others to help in dealing with school segregation and separate-but-not-equal kinds of issues, Loren Miller was one of those people, because as Loren was practicing his law, he was involved with civil rights stuff, with the late A.L. Wirin, who was involved with the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union], a couple of other men whose names I forget, but these were whites.

Farrell: Loren was also involved with some of the cases that came regarding the Japanese Americans who had been relocated during World War II, as they were coming back into the community. In fact, one of the fascinating things about being at the "Eagle" in 1961 was to be introduced to the Japanese American Citizens League. I would read their materials as they would come across the desk at the newspaper office, and I'll always value that internal structure. I've always valued this about black newspapers, and as I shared with you before, I really never had the opportunity to see how it was just with the general press. Things would basically come into the office. You had the separation out of the items that were news, and you have just the stuff that's P.R., and then people send newsletters and newspapers, and the personally addressed stuff goes to the publisher, the managing editor, and then the rest of it is in this vast box. And sometimes as that material gets scanned, it immediately goes into the round file, or some things are kept because of reference to other stories that you're working on, or other things that are of interest.

Farrell: And I happened to be kind of like the low man on the totem pole in watching this information, and I sat in a little corner when I was initially at the "Eagle." So I was part of the paper flow, and I sort of intercepted it before it went into the trash.

Greene: What was the Japanese American Citizens League?

Farrell: The Japanese American Citizens League was a civil rights organization that was put in place to protect the rights or address the rights of American citizens of Japanese heritage, who had been displaced during the war and sent to American concentration camps, and who had a variety of problems that were based on their ethnicity in the State of California, also elsewhere, as post-World War II they reasserted themselves coming back to their homes, attempting to come back to their properties, finding that they didn't have access to jobs, and this is where there's a tremendous story that is being told now, I understand, about Japanese Americans as they came back. Why were there so many Japanese gardeners? It was because those Japanese, regardless of their background, their training, their education, that's all that they could find to do, because in the minds of many people they were just other Japs, and we'd just come off of a war, and we beat the damn Japs.

Farrell: I remember being around conversations when this was explained to me, and how unfair that was, how un-American that was, and to find that these men, who had these different kinds of backgrounds and experiences, were reduced to literally going out, I mean, the way we see people today, doing labor markets on the corner, going around doing something that was part of a cultural thing that's a stereotype with Japanese--they like gardens. I mean, for whatever reason they had an affinity with fixing up gardens so they looked good and cut grass, but there is a generation of folks of my age and younger who got their starts because their parents, other members of their family, came back from those camps and they went to work doing this, cutting grass and the rest of it, to keep family together and to pay for the ongoing education of their own young and they're pulling their lives back together.

Farrell: And Loren Miller was among those people who did make the distinction between people who were Americans of Japanese heritage and an enemy overseas who were Japanese nationals, what that was about, and he viewed them as being in the same kind of boat as we were as Negroes, in a way, unlike Germans or Italians, who may have gone to internment camps because of whatever was there for a minute, but there weren't that many white people interned in the United States because of World War II stuff. But there were certainly very, very large numbers of people of Japanese heritage.

Farrell: So I was in an environment where that was going on, and some of the people I met through that experience ultimately became supporters of mine. One is Betty Kozasa, K-o-z-a-s-a. She and her husband [Ken] were very, very active in the Japanese community and dealing with the dynamics of what that Nisei generation went through and how they were adapting to the change. They had lived in South L.A. Ultimately, they moved out, too, and moved to places like Gardena and Torrance and the rest of it. But South L.A. was beginning to change in a variety of ways, and we can come back to that later. But this was a dynamic where around Loren Miller there were these issues that were being addressed, and once again showed you the photos that showed his political inclination and his ties. So we had a lot of people who came through, and I saw the influence of the Left.

Farrell: But also, at that newspaper I met Medgar Evers. I met [Frank Lee Robinson "Fred"] Shuttlesworth. I mean, there were just so many of these folks who as they would come from the South, especially those who had ties with the NAACP, they would stop by to see Loren, and they'd either catch him at his law office, or in the evenings you'd catch him over at the "Eagle." So these people came in and lo and behold, there I was a young guy having a chance to meet them, and, wow, how wonderful.

Farrell: I told you, I think, the last time about the anecdote with Malcolm X, and the guy is coming by because Loren was available to be a lawyer for the Muslims who were killed and wounded in the police assault on Temple #27 down on Broadway. But that was the environment in which I was having my introduction to the community and beginning to see how it was structured and who the players were. How do you know who the players are? Well, one of the functions in newspapers is to identify leadership, and what you do internally in the nature of your business is you stratify your community. Who are the top people in town to talk to? Which are the major organizations? As that was kind of an NAACP environment, which were the people who were involved with the NAACP? You know what I mean? So it was there that I began to see how the pecking order was established and how people related.

Farrell: Something that reinforced that was because as I was at the paper in my first job out of college, I was making, I think, ten dollars a week. Loren Miller wrote me the checks, so I was investing in my own future. I would go out with Abie Robinson, who was in charge of circulation and sports and sometimes society and, well, a whole range of other things, and when we would go out to cover these events, invariably we'd have a chance to meet people. So for me it was like going out and when the Medical-Dental-Pharmaceutical Association would have the big ball we'd go there, because for "The Sentinel" and the "Eagle" the leadership would have pictures taken. Remember, part of the role of the black press, the Negro newspaper, was to record the ongoings of social life and activities within the community. So as I would go to these places my job would be to work with Abie Robinson, and I met the great photographers like the late Harry Adams, whose works are over at Cal State Northridge in an archive. Can we hold for a minute?

Farrell: So that's where and that was the context of my meeting people like Dr. D. Overstreet Gray, who became my dentist for the rest of his life. Dr. Gray was among one of those socially active medical professionals who led in the development, I think, of the New Frontier Democratic Club and was one of those persons who was active in the discussion over the future of our community politics. He lived up in the Baldwin Hills area, and he's an important figure. I want to reference him. I didn't spend that much time working with him, because as I told you, I was out in South L.A. on the flatlands. There were other people that we dealt with.

Farrell: Another one is Dr. Christopher Taylor, who was head of the L.A. chapter of the NAACP during this period, and it was Chris Taylor and others who were major players in the Community Convention process, both for Tom Bradley and the campaign of James Jones, and I have the notes to reference that for later. But it was a process of meeting also Leslie Shaw, who was in Watts within one of the black S&Ls, Watts Savings and Loans. As you know, Leslie Shaw subsequently became postmaster in the City of Los Angeles, with an appointment coming from the Kennedy administration. And as a sidebar, that whole story of Les Shaw and his relationship to Gene Wyman, who was the Democratic national committeeman from California at the time is another aspect of black aspiration and black accomplishment in Democratic politics here.

Farrell: His wife Ann Shaw is still alive. His daughter is a current member of the Board of Public Works in the Villaraigosa administration. But I was in the process of meeting these people as I would go out representing "The California Eagle," getting to know Celes King and his family better, who's a Republican. They were very, very good Republicans.

Greene: Talk about the King family, Celes King's family.

Farrell: Celes King and his wife Anita [King] were always registered Republicans. They were Republicans out of the tradition of the then-governor Goodwin Knight, who was a Republican in the context of moderate Republican leaders, such as Earl Warren and people like that, the kind of folks who were pretty much obliterated in the rise of the conservative wing within the Republican Party and its domination of the party apparatus. But it's important to note that those guys were here and they were active and they had influence, and their decisions were important decisions. They were important decision makers on behalf of our community and the growth of politics here and the practice of politics here.

Greene: You talked about there being a shift. You mentioned Maulana Karenga [Ronald McKinley Everett]. You mentioned the rise of a kind of black consciousness that came about.[NOTE: Audio goes in and out for quite a while during this interview. Very low levels at times, like now.]

Farrell: Post-Watts, in 1965, 1966. I'm still talking about 1961 and maybe 1962. That comes later. Maulana Karenga at this time was still Ronald Everett. We had met when he came on campus at UCLA, because in discussions about things like Africa and doing that, he was interested in that, and I found him to be an interesting person, because he taught Swahili. He had that kind of an interest in it at that time, and I guess I gravitated towards him because when I would talk to people about the fact that I was taking Arabic and the rest of it, it was always just pooh-poohed to me and initially put down. "Why are you studying that? I mean, how are you going to use it? Are you going to be a lawyer with that?"

Farrell: I would often talk with my peers in the way that you usually talk to them. "How you doing? What's your major?" that conversation, one of those screening questions to sort of see how you might fit in with them, and I'd always find that there was--I tended to find that there was a marginalizing of that, and in a way I felt a kindred soul to Ron Everett, because he was committed to build something. He was talking about Africa in a different way, and was going through the dynamics of learning a language. When you learn a language you get into a mindset, into a philosophy, an understanding of culture in a way that you don't get it if you only are exposed to things through English, and then on top of that American English, which is one of the exciting things I also found out at UCLA, was that in the nature of the books that I read that related to major was that there were few written by Americans and a lot by Britons. So in a way, when I was getting my insights in history and observation of Arab and Muslim culture, it was from a British perspective, because it was their colonial empire.

Greene: Absolutely.

Farrell: And they were writing the books, and it was their chapters that wound up being assigned reading over here as this was just developing. And I think I had shared with you earlier about the importance I believe until this day that when we began to engage as Americans different groupings of people from around the world, it's in our national interest to develop our own people as the folks who have the scholarly interests and the insight in learning the language and the culture, so that from an American perspective we can apply that and input to the development of a public policy that represents America. I mean, in an easy way I still believe that so much of what we do is related to Africa, is a function of having African guys come to talk to us, whether these are Ph.D. pluses and political refugees, or people who just choose to become Americans from wherever on the continent, their presence and their thinking dominates us, as opposed to they being the intellectual and cultural resources through which the people who are homegrown Americans learn about Africa and its many countries and its many people and their many languages and their many cultures, so that when the time comes for the great debate on American public policy, it is Americans who take the lead in discussing that an infusing that public policy perspective with views that are rooted in the American experience.

Farrell: Not to say that you disregard what people may be talking about in the great socialist perspective in the sky, but to be so centered so that you understand what the great socialist perspective is in the sky as an American going in. The socialist collective comes out of what happened with the rise of communism, the way that countries developed in Europe, things of that type, so that you can see, ah, it makes sense that folks who would be involved in the colonies would get a tremendous dose of this particular kind of socialist perspective. And if you want another cut on that, most of the guys who come out of the French perspective in dealing with socialism, you go to Paris, and what you read there is the same thing they were reading in French being taught there, so you can get a piece of where they are there.

Farrell: The guys who were in the English-speaking piece, when you see how they approach socialists, you go back to the English writing and, man, you can go back and see the Irish guys, Bernard Shaw, all these guys, how they get off into literature. And you see especially guys out of the Caribbean, sometimes when they start to talk about their own political philosophy, these guys sound more British than the British. So to me, that was an exciting experience to see in being able to differentiate, so that if I'm going to buy in with Castro and Che [Guevara] and the guys, I know deliberately how I'm going to get there. I'm going to go there because this, this, this, this makes sense, this, this, this, this, this, okay. And when the time comes for African liberation, they happen to like the American point of view. I support what these people are doing. What? We are supporting civilians and these people? Wow. Damn, that's bad. But you know what? The guys are going to call on the Cubans to go fight there. What? Do you mean the Cubans, given all the shit that they've got to do on their island, would deploy their military and send their guys from Cuba via Brazil to go over there to fight against civilians and all those other damn South African front guys over there? Damn. I didn't know the Cubans would do that.

Farrell: Well, you've got to keep in mind that Castro and the guys got this thing about solidarity. Oh, really? And there's another way to look at this. Notwithstanding all this other kind of stuff, there's something magical that's taken place in the Cuban revolution in the dynamic between Castro and this extraordinary guy called Che Guevara that I want to look at, and it allows me to look at it in the context of what I understand is going on around Cuba and American policy and all this kind of stuff separate and apart from all this kind of other stuff once quite often I found folks were just kind of lumping together. They're just all a bunch of fuckin "Reds."

Greene: You're saying that this is the kind of intellectual orientation that you saw yourself and Ron Everett developing?

Farrell: Well, it came up at about the same time. It was coming up about the same time. In a way, for me it was before the real rise of black consciousness, because what came out of this mix was realizing that some of these people as they came together in places like London would have these kind of debates and discussions about the role of black people. And, of course, when we start to talk about Black Star shipping and lying and this Jamaican guy who was pulling together all these folks talking black, and he has people organized in the United States and Central America and all of the rest--

Greene: Marcus Garvey.

Farrell: Then the Garveyite Movement is not just another radical black guy coming to the United States to incite Negroes, but it gives me an opportunity to say, "Ah! This is how America was functioning, and into this environment of segregation and extraordinary pressures from the end of the nineteenth century through the whole of the twentieth century, those fifty years in which I was born and coming along, the suppression did not lock out of spirit in our people of wanting to associate with something else." And Garvey was able to come in because he had these great speaking skills, he offered structure, and somehow the segregated structures that were here that were allowed, the things that had us with the Elks and the Masons and the Taboreans and the rest of it, also were the grounds on which the Garveyites built their communities within the framework of this spread-out Negro community across the United States, where we could go behind closed doors and celebrate our visions and accept social structures and put ourselves in the marching units. Do you know much about black organizations, the history and stuff?

Farrell: Okay. So as you get into that, when you talk about the Garveyites organizing the men in marching groups, you associate that with the Elks and the Masons and the fact that you know how fellows will have the sabers, and the offices meant something, and when you talk about the Antlered Guard in the Elks, you weren't just talking about the men who would get over there and just go drill up and down inside the Elks Hall on Central Avenue wearing the military garb just for the hell of it. It came out of a tradition of that's ultimately self-defense. We're going to defend our place and we're going to defend our people, stuff that showed up with the Deacons for Justice in Mississippi in the early sixties, where the Masons came together and said, "We will do these things if they mess with our churches. We'll respond." I'm telling you all of this was damned exciting, all coming at all the same time.

Farrell: And at that base at the "Eagle" and subsequently at "The Sentinel," I had a chance to see vestiges of these people who were still alive in L.A. at the time, who had done these several kinds of things. They were really here. They really were. No kidding. No kidding, this is what these folks did. And once again, the role of the Negro newspaper, a kind of place where you saw a repository of our history and a keeping tabs on who's who and what's what over a period of time, so that you could put things into perspective as to who we were and what we were about. The value of the editorial board in the Negro newspaper was the people who had these different kinds of assignments talking about people and what they were doing.

Farrell: When I got over to "The Sentinel," to be totally impressed by the work of Jesse Mae Brown Beavers, who was the social editor. Jesse Mae knew all of the women's organizations and the children's organizations, the Jack and Jills, the ministers' wives, the AME, the CME, the Baptist church, God in Christ, all these kinds, because these are the people who put pictures in the paper, in the social section of the paper. Who's getting married? Who died? And there she was, the arbiter of this particular kind of a function. So to me, to see all this integrated into a functioning thing called the black press was to at once be in a place where it was like the center of the world, with all the information coming in, where you could see all the stuff that was going on that was important to us, in one spot, and there it was, 24/7. It was wrapped up in a series of weekly publications that represented our life.

Farrell: So it was a good place to be to see this stuff going on, so that as you saw the picture with the extended Loren Miller family and Leon Washington family, because they were cousins, and you see Rita Walters sitting there, you basically see this is part of that Kansas faction of people who came to L.A., and they made contributions at a particular level, all of them college-educated plus, like that, and you see some of the folks who were the Creoles coming out of New Orleans post-World War II, all those folks who went to Xavier University and came out either being pharmacists or came out being teachers, and the dynamic of race and culture that that meant. So, oh, my gosh, look at the brain drain.

Farrell: I mean, there's a sidebar. When I went to New Orleans and I went down to the Seventh Ward, the traditional home of the Creole population in New Orleans, nobody there. Moved out, that's my understanding. They're all gone. The folks of her [aunt Mildred Robertson] generation, because she's in her nineties, have died out. That whole cultural phenomena of people who were skilled craftspeople post-World War II to the early eighties, they moved. They came to California, around L.A., around Oakland. They moved out of that segregated thing and they were getting better lives, but the men and women who got their degrees out of Xavier, those pharmacists, those teachers, the folks who left Dillard, the folks who came out of Southern, they never looked back. Shouldn't say never looked back. They look back in terms of remembrance of their faith, the Catholic ones. The ties as I told you with the marriage banns at Holy Name and Transfiguration and Corpus Christi Church down in New Orleans, which was at the time the dominant Roman Catholic church. The dominant church today is [unclear]. But that kind of thing acted out and you actually saw these pieces in place, and it was a mosaic to really be charted out [unclear] put down the names and make the line connections, and you'll see this tremendous web of influence and activity that was our community. And then on the dynamic changes that took place. Post-'65, things began to shift.

Greene: In what ways?

Farrell: Not only did we have the more intrusive and to many people's feeling affirmative involvement of government in programs that were designed to improve the quality of life in our community--

Greene: This was federal government?

Farrell: Coming off the federal legislation, driving it, of course, the state. The city followed, but it was primarily federal dollars coming in that provided these opportunities. Plus the breakdown in racial segregation. That meant that there was a dispersal of the community as people moved out of the contained South L.A., because South L.A. was not there and contained because we chose to live like that. There were constraints on moving elsewhere to live, based on income or interest, and in later years better choice of school district, different quality of like, the opening of suburban life in the Inland Empire, North Los Angeles County. If one was to look at the center of Creole life today in New Orleans, one would go to Saint Bernadette's Church at the base of the Baldwin Hills, and then one would go up to a community called Acton, California, because a lot of Creole folks just moved out that way. Why? Parents and grandparents were here, and as they died off, children just moved there, and then take the older people with you, and then lo and behold, their children into different schools out there and the traditional ones here.

Greene: And when you were working at the newspaper, for example, where did you live? What part of town did you--

Farrell: I'm a young guy, single, just out of college. CORE had a house over on, I think, 21st Street. For a minute I lived in CORE house, I mean, in a room there, and I had a little apartment over here, then I had an apartment over there, because I was free and single and I may not have much money, but I had a little bit of charm, so I mean--

Greene: Ready to mingle.

Farrell: --I was out mixing and mingling, a few months here, a few months there. Someone invites you to just come share an apartment for a minute. I'd get the opportunity to do little things like that. I mean, it was an exciting time if one was young.

Greene: I'm thinking about the photograph that you showed me. Are we around the time when you met your first wife?

Farrell: I met my first wife at a rally for Freedom Riders at Municipal Auditorium in Houston, Texas. She had turned out with her family to see the Freedom Riders and be supportive, and we made a connection in '61 and it sort of just followed through.

Greene: Okay. What was her name?

Farrell: Willie Mae Reese, Willie Mae. Interesting thing. Short names of Negro males and females from the fifties, sixties to date. You see some interesting changes.

Greene: Is that right?

Farrell: Yes. Peggy Ann, Peggy Sue, and Willie Mae, Precious, Diamond, it was like hokey names, Annie Pearl, Pearlie Mae. It reflected where that generation was coming from.

Greene: Yes, it was generational in that sense.

Farrell: Yes.

Greene: And so help me understand, you sort of brought us up to this moment where the tentacles of the federal government are sort of, at least as you describe--

Farrell: Well, something begins to open up, and you have Gus [Augustus] Hawkins, the congressman, doing what Congress people do. He had a role as it relates to federal dollars coming in. But at the same time, you had Mervyn Dymally in Sacramento, and then subsequently Bill Green as Merv Dymally moved up to the Senate, and F. Douglas Farrell moved into the second Assembly seat, further out south, based on Watts/Lynwood, okay? Gus' district was more just South L.A. This is further out south. Well, then there's state money coming in so that there was the opportunity for the state guys to dabble.

Farrell: And then, of course, as some of those monies did not directly go to the communities, but part of the great compromise with the War on Poverty was that it went through municipal administrations, and there at City Hall were Tom Bradley, Billy Mills, Gilbert Lindsay, so we began to see the interplay of how federal money, depending on whether it was direct from the federal government or whether it came via the state and state programs, or via city hall and the apportioning that took place at city hall, you began to see the matrix and the calculus of what must have been there for places like South L.A. "How do I get my guys covered? If I don't get my guys covered, if I can't get it to my organizations, well, we've got a problem with that."

Greene: Now, as I understand it, those federal dollars were tied up, at least through the War on Poverty, were tied up for a minute, weren't they? There was some controversy as I recall in reading that--obviously, I wasn't there--but the mayor, was it [Sam] Yorty at the time, was not trying to release those dollars or even pull them down in a way that would benefit communities?

Farrell: Well, and this is another interesting conversation to have with Willard Murray, because Willard Murray was one of the first black executive kinds of people that went with Sam Yorty. He also had an African American lady--Yorty came out of the Valley. He had a lady from Pacoima by the name of Ethel Bryant, who was with Yorty, and also a fellow by the name of Richard Jones was Yorty's guy on the street in South L.A. Richard Jones also happened to be at Second Baptist Church, which was [Rev.] Kilgore's church, so even though Kilgore and the church was out here, and we were out here with Bradley and all the rest of it, it still had its finger through Richard Jones into the Yorty administration.

Greene: I see.

Farrell: You get to see how these pieces come together. So if you were Sam Yorty and you'd just come off of a situation where you're elected off defeating James Roosevelt, and you see this nascent stuff coming up in the black community--did he really hold it up, or was he really just evaluating his options to make sure that the people were best served?

Greene: Is that how it was framed?

Farrell: I'm just sort of giving you a hypothesis, because, of course, the man's a public servant and he also wants to be reelected, like anybody else. So why should he and his administration allow for the free flow of federal monies that pass through city hall to go to finance the efforts of people who were anti-Bill Parker, the police chief, who most certainly in their prior work and in their civil rights activity were more aligned with the Jimmy Roosevelt kind of constituency--

Greene: Jimmy Roosevelt having been his opponent in the election?

Farrell: Yes, yes, Democrat, liberal, West Side, all that kind of good stuff, okay? So you began to see that, well, it wasn't that it was just racist Yorty, it was just Yorty was a more conservative person, and he didn't see that it was in his interest to just easily facilitate this. I mean, the money went elsewhere. That money went to the Valley. The money went to a Latino community that was still in the process of developing whatever it did. There were places for the money to go. I mean, even though the concentration of poverty was in South L.A., it wasn't that there wasn't poverty all over. I mean, even during the Bradley time and my time, when anti-poverty money and special-needs money came to the City of L.A., it went to fifteen districts. Well, how does it go to fifteen districts? Well, I remember my friend Marvin Braude, who represented back out by Pacific Palisades, "Well, we all have seniors and low-income people in our community. I mean, how do we--?" He's a vote. He's one of fifteen. So astute people in the Bradley administration, and me when I had my committee responsibilities, I understood that.

Farrell: And there is a Felicia Mahood [Senior] Center on Santa Monica Boulevard. It was in Marvin Braude's district. He had seniors and low-income people; that senior center got it. It was a senior center. It got funded from monies that were available to deal with the poor.

Greene: So you're suggesting that by a certain political calculus, constituencies in South L.A. weren't necessarily high on the mayor's priority list, because that's the way it kind of--

Farrell: No, they were high. It was just that they were put in perspective. This is money, it's a War on Poverty, and what we are doing is we're identifying poverty as being--

Greene: City-wide.

Farrell: --broadly based, and we're going to address it in a city-wide context, as opposed to focusing on pockets.

Greene: Got it.

Farrell: I mean, that's the way people did. The federal guys wanted to have the money concentrated in whatever. We said, "What? You really don't understand how things are set up in the West." I mean, in back East areas, the way the older [unclear] structures are, you know it's concentrated and it's in this ward, period. And it's dense. So you can easily target it and say, "But out here it's kind of softer. The census tracts are spread out. We're not up high." So all these things were part of the calculus, too, in terms of how you concentrated money. That's why when the Model Cities Plan came out, there were areas in the city that got designated for the use of certain monies. Well, what's the purpose of an area but to give you a mass of people to meet the criteria of the funding source. "We want these to be a level of funding for this special money is you've got to be in groupings of at least 20,000 people." Great for the folks back East, but out here? Okay, we'll work it out.

Greene: But it's not just an accident of geography as you describe it. It's both the geography of the city--

Farrell: Public policy is never about geography only, or about the massing of people only.

Greene: It's preferences?

Farrell: What comes in public policy is a general definition of a problem, an allocation of funds, and a way so that there could be some flexibility by people who wind up being recipients of funds and administrators of programs in how those funds are allocated to meet needs. Because the test ultimately is, are you meeting the needs of poor people? In the Yorty administration, yes, they were. They were the administration's view of poor people who met the criteria. Now, if you were the decision maker, you might view the criteria differently and structure your programs and outreach to address different populations, but they'd still meet the criteria. No one says that you have to do it. And that's why local government is so different. Let us have the money and the programs, and we will adapt to our needs, because we are different in our structures, our philosophy, our politics, so if this is going to be effective, you've got to give us this flexibility at the local level. And that also is an integral part of the way feds do things. They want accountability to make sure the money is not stolen. They want accountability to see, "Are there results as this money is spent?" "Yes. We moved from here to here." "Good. That's a wonderful demonstration project."

Farrell: "Well, are you guys going to continue to fund?" "No, no, no. It was a demonstration project. We told you it was a three-year demonstration project, or a two-year demonstration project," or, and one that's really even good through the Clinton administration, "I'm going to give you 10,000 additional cops in L.A. I'm going to fund them for the first two years. Now, see, I'm doing something to get more police in L.A." The guys in L.A. say, "You've got to be kidding." "Why? Are you rejecting the money?" "No. It's just, President Clinton, that as you give us the money, you know there's a string on it. We're going to take your money for two years, and then guys in the LAPD like to stick around thirty years, and then we've got them for the next twenty-eight years that we've got to pay for out of the general fund. If we could afford them, we'd put them there ourselves." "Oh, well, I offered. I came out here and I offered money for police to the guys, and they chose not to use it. Well, they'll just use it someplace else." "Can I use it for equipment?" "No, no, no. You must use this for people."

Farrell: You might say to yourself, "President Clinton, keep your money. There's no way I can in good faith do this, because what you're doing--," and this was the intent of some people as they were doing things--this is how I get a particular policy goal achieved, by putting money on the table, and as you pull it in, bingo. It's almost like saying, "I got you, because if you accept our money this way, you do oblige yourself to do this." And this is not just a contractual relationship, but your city council votes as it accepts this money. We have not only the signing off by the administrators, but we have the mayor submitting this to his council. His council votes on that.

Greene: You're suggesting there are hidden costs in those instances.

Farrell: Well, yes. I mean, that's getting to the core of what federalism is all about. You influence what happens in state and local government by providing these federal incentives, and the way that you make sure that the federal standards are adhered to is that there's continuity of funding, and based on the continuity of funding and the way the law and regulations are laid out, the states structure their programs. They supplement it with monies, based on some kind of a formula between the federal government and the state, and as the state puts its thing in place, so do the local governments, a formula and then their contributions. Or if you're a big city like L.A., you can go directly to Washington, D.C., and get a set-aside special grant which comes in, but it still has matching funds and other kinds of considerations to keep it, and term of the contract. So, I mean, it gets into this calculus of what public administration is about.

Greene: Got it.

Farrell: So bottom line is the Yorty people had one kind of a formula, and a lot of people said, "Well, the Yorty administration is sort of--," whatever it is. You have to be able to just discern those distinctions. I mean, what we can say is, for the record, "Yeah, the Yorty administration wasn't doing black people in South L.A. that much good, because they used other kinds of priorities." So you can just take it from there and say, "Ergo, they're anti-black." Ergo, the Yorty administration was not about to fund the development of its political opposition. No political structure does that.

Greene: Who's served by painting the Yorty administration as anti-black under a scenario like that?

Farrell: Congressmen and all the rest of us, because that means stuff isn't coming to our organization to be used for what we interpret the language of the legislation to be. I mean, we can interpret whatever we want. I mean, the Congress wrote whatever they wrote, and it's modified and they got it passed. But once it goes through this intergovernmental apparatus, the rules say the guys at city hall determine. So let's just put it this way. In many instance, Gus' guys didn't get into positions to use the money. A bunch of Mervyn's guys got in. A bunch of Tom's guys got in, and depending on the district, Eight, Nine, or Ten, [Councilman] Billy Mills' people, Gilbert Lindsay's people, Tom Bradley's people, because that's the way our system is set up.

Greene: Now, by '69 you come onboard to work for Mills, am I right?

Farrell: [19]64.

Greene: By '64, okay. All right. How did that come about?

Farrell: Willard Murray was a deputy to Billy Mills, and he invited me aboard. Back in the day, there was only one deputy for each councilman, and Willard initiated the process of there being two. Willard also initiated the process of council persons having district offices. That's why I tell you, Willard Murray was--

Greene: An architect of sorts.

Farrell: --really a very skilled guy in his politics and his analysis, and he really has not been appreciated for what he, in fact, accomplished.

Greene: Now, at that time his role was he was heading up folks' campaign? What role was he playing?

Farrell: Those things went like this. I mean, what does a deputy at city hall do? It's exempt. I had a political career at city hall, and I really never measured up to any specification. What do I mean by that? Because I was an exempt employee. What does that mean? It meant that I served at the pleasure of either the councilman as a boss, the mayor as a boss, and then I was elected by the people. So who are you accountable to, and for what? Rules say when you're an aide, you're basically at the pleasure of the council person or mayor to tell you exactly what to do, when to do it. The usual rules that apply to Civil Service employees don't apply to you. You're not represented in the union or anything. Your pay is a function of what they want to give you. Your responsibilities are the function of what they want to give you. I mean, that system pretty much exists to today, but it's been changed quite a bit. The council office staff today may be as many as twenty people with certain specialties--planning, economic development deputy, like that, administrative, administrative coordinator at the district office, senior program coordinator, youth person coordinator, anti-gang coordinator, like that.

Farrell: And then as a member of the city council, your tasks are be at the council every day at ten o'clock. Council at that time met five days a week, ten a.m., and you serve on committees. [unclear] President of the United States and the Constitution, thirty-five, natural citizen of the United States, been living here twelve years. What is this qualification? And more than that, what's this thing about qualifications of the vice president? [unclear] Once the nominee gets the slot by winning the party's nomination, it is that person's choice who the vice president is.

Greene: You're suggesting it's analogous to how deputies are constituted? Okay.

Farrell: Or today, the deputy to the Latinos. Well, what's the significant thing there? You must speak Spanish [unclear]. I don't know. Jan Perry may speak Spanish, but most of the African Americans in South L.A. don't speak any. This is the twenty-first century. How can they think of political careers and not speak Spanish? And in a way, hiring the Spanish-speaking deputy is almost akin to back in the early days that I'm talking about, hiring the Negro.

Greene: As someone who can negotiate these communities?

Farrell: The community is predominantly Mexican, so it means a work opportunity for a Mexican lady or a Mexican male. Or if you have folks from El Salvador, that shows that you're sensitive to the distinction, Latinos. And as I said earlier, you mean at this point in the twenty-first century, as part of a political agenda in a community like this, there's no priority among African American leadership to make sure that we encourage our people, people of African heritage, whether in a tradition of Barack [Obama], African, because we do have people from Africa who live among us now--

Greene: Absolutely.

Farrell: --or out of the slave tradition, to basically say, "We need people in our community who speak Spanish." Why? Because it's the world in which we live. There's competition on the jobs. In fact, there's a premium that you get paid in Civil Service jobs if you happen to be bilingual, so why should that be a code for hiring Latinos as opposed to hiring you? It says that one must be bilingual. How do you get to be certified bilingual? You go take a course at a community college or at a state college, and get a certificate that says, "I speak the language." Or you demonstrate your own competence, and we have people at city hall who specialize in doing that in human resources. "Oh, you want to qualify for this in the City of L.A.? Habla conmigo. Mira." That's something that I still don't think that our side appreciates or enjoys or makes a priority in those who kind of make up our political elites and our political class.

Greene: So take it back for me. Willard Murray--

Farrell: Willard Murray facilitates yours truly in getting a job as deputy, because of my writing skills, I presented well, I think because I was a likable guy, because I was out there with the fellows doing an organization of the Democratic clubs, working in the campaigns. I mean, what else does it take? I mean, how do you get a job? Given till today, a lot of it is personality. "I've got your resume. I already told you that this job doesn't have anything to do with resumes."

Greene: You said you'd worked with campaigns?

Farrell: I had started doing that around CORE, the civil rights piece.

Greene: Of course, yes.

Farrell: What were we doing? Talk about "No on [Proposition] 14," the mobilization to fight these propositions that are on the ballot that are against the interests of Negroes. Of course, the CORE delegation is going to be part of that. Of course CORE was going to be part of that coalition working with the NAACP and others. And for me it was a matter of, hey, I don't understand this thing fully, but because I'm working in a coalition with these people, they're bringing me along, they'll make sure that I learn about it. So it was a tremendous amount of mentoring that was going on back in the day, and if in a way you just kind of showed out of your interest or by persistence in being there, you were welcomed into this discussion and debate about the struggle.

Farrell: So on the one hand you had the guys like myself, everybody wants to pat you on the back. At the same time, the process was sufficiently [unclear] that there were other people who some people just viewed as being obnoxious. But our stuff allowed for that. By that I mean, some of the fellows who were--as you said, you were familiar with Negro organizations. In the Elks and Masons and the Taboreans, there was a tradition of debate. [unclear] A member would stand up and the fellows would just stand forth presenting their views on the nature of the world, what the order should be doing, and what they thought about this, that. That tradition also came out into these community affairs. So you'll see someone who is a distinguished member of the Elks, and a trustee and rather important in a Baptist church, as we talk about civil rights stuff in L.A., putting forth and pontificating. I mean, that's the style and leadership style and speaking style. And you sit there and you almost want to go to sleep on the gentleman and say, "Okay, we debated it. Call for the question." And that's in the same kind of a group where you have young folks like myself, who come out of this thing called CORE, folks who are traditional NAACP, folks from the new community as we're finding allies in the Democratic Party, Jewish community people who think alike in terms of their visions of what should be for people, and all of this is part of that amalgam.

Farrell: And what tends to happen is over time, as people do their committee work and move on, what tends to happen is he's the good brother, understanding exactly what he's talking about, but somebody gets eased and gets marginalized. That happens in just group dynamics anyway. Or you would see when the guys who were in unions, through the early years of the Bradley administration, when your unions were strongest, they were men and women who were international representatives of groups like the Teamsters and the laborers and United Auto & Aerospace Workers Unions, the library workers, the guys who were working in the rubber plants, the tire companies down here in South L.A., and they were part of the mix.

Farrell: And then you had a cadre of black labor activists who viewed themselves as rank and filers. Well, what's the difference between a rank and filer and these other guys who were the international reps? International rep is someone who participates in and rises to the hierarchy within a union itself. A rank and filer is just a guy who's working out there, who has a point of view, who wants to say something about what's going on in his community. So on the one hand, you want to draw on the resources of the fellows who represent the unions, these international reps, because based on the decisions that they and their leadership make, there may be money to come out and hire people, money to come out to do voter registration, money for special programs and things like that.

Farrell: On the other hand, the rank and filers represented another kind of spirit, was more aggressive and dynamic and, "The hell with what those guys think. I'm going to say it because this is what I believe about what we need to do in our community," and you get another kind of a passion coming out. So there's room for that, too, most of the time, and sometimes that's pushed to the side. And one begins, in my experience, to see the relative influence of what one has to say in what one represents, because as you put together the organizational framework to speak on behalf of a movement or in behalf of a community, there's a need to have people who represent the structural interests that can bring to bear their resources at a particular time to influence the politics or the public policy. And yet you want to do it in such a way that you don't close out those guys who had that spirit of rank and file, because it's the rank and filers that us CORE people also like, because the rank and file were the guy who'd say, "I'm going to be down there with you on Saturday. I'm going to carry the picket sign. Let's go together."

Farrell: I mean, it's an anecdote, but there's a fellow in Compton by the name of Maxey Filer, and when Maxey Filer talks about his relationship with me he'll say, "Yeah, I remember Bobby Farrell when he was just a little boy, when he would be out there with us and we would be on the picket line at Kress and McCrory." I'm out of college, but to Maxey and some of these guys who were bigger than life--Maxey was a much larger man. I mean, Maxey Filer has a reputation on his own. Maxey Filer is now a lawyer, but Maxey Filer must have taken the bar exam thirty-five or forty times before he passed it, and when he did, folks gave him a big, big reception, because no one ever has shown such dedication to the law in studying and catching that much rejection. Maxey's son is a judge in Compton. Kevin grew up, went through high school, college, and law school, and got his degree before his dad. But his dad represented that kind of grassroots rank and file NAACP committed person that was also part of this leadership structure, and there was a place them at that time.

Farrell: And as you said, it still brings back moments of emotion and feeling for me, because that was part of the internal discussion that was going on in our community in these years prior to, as a point of departure, 1965 in Watts, because what came after was a greater mobilization of resources for a broad rise of intergovernmental relations and programs and foundations finding us, or us finding foundations, whatever that's about. Am I still on track?

Greene: We're still on track.

Farrell: Okay. What's next in terms of what you have to hit? All of my relationship with newspapers, "The Sentinel" and the "Eagle," in allowing me a platform to be able to access and be around these people with some sense of continuity, because they were working, they did what they did. It was part of a way that the newspaper and that work gave me an opportunity to be at these places while I was working. I mean, it was an ideal situation to always be there, because they had their careers and by being on the paper I had an opportunity to get a piece of all these different slices, and then just to see it as it came together again and how it would just dissipate and go out, and these things would expand and contract and grow, and then some would just fade off the scene and new ones would come, and to just be there and note this kind of stuff.

Greene: So how did those experiences inform your work with Billy Mills' office?

Farrell: Part of the role assigned to deputy is be in touch with what's going on in the district. Okay. So I just told you what I was doing as the newspaper guy, right? So what happened with me when I was with Billy Mills as his deputy? Went out doing the same thing. "I'm not with the paper anymore. I represent Billy Mills." And then, "By the way, you got a problem at city hall? Let me see what I can do to help you." There was a greater development of, "I'm from city hall and I'm here to help you," in my future doing work and building relationships, but as I came on the job, it was switching from one horse to another, because it wasn't a matter of Willard saying, "Now, talk to me about where you're going to go." "Just stay out there this time, and just let people know you're working for Billy," because I was already out there. I was already on these committees.

Greene: So part of your role was to have a presence, or to continue to have a presence, but to have a presence--

Farrell: Keep doing what you're doing and just, you represent Billy Mills.

Greene: What were some of the things that you--I'm trying to figure out if you heard anything different now that you were listening with city hall-sanctioned ears. Does that make sense? What kinds of stuff did you--

Farrell: They're not city hall-sanctioned ears. They're Billy Mills' sanctioned ears.

Greene: Excuse me.

Farrell: Remember that one of the things that we found was you go to city hall, you're elected as a councilman, that's it. Your relationship with the mayor is going to be a function of the mayor's going to propose things in his budget, and he's going to want his things, and you've got a vote now. Everything's negotiable. So I had Billy Mills' ears, because Tom Bradley's guy has Tom Bradley's ears, and Gil Lindsay's guy has Gil Lindsay's ears plus [Councilman Kenneth] Kenny Hahn's ears, because Gil and Kenny Hahn were tight that way.

Greene: So tell me about Billy Mills' district.

Farrell: The Eighth District.

Greene: The Eighth District at that time.

Farrell: It was a smaller district, roughly from USC in the north down to Manchester and Vermont, roughly going over east of the freeway down to Broadway and 2nd Streets.

Greene: East of the 110?

Farrell: No, no, not that far, but kind of like in a diagonal way, mostly residential tracts of places that had been integrated. The shopping center areas were the areas where most of the whites had left, so we had this mix of Jewish business people still there and some black small-business people coming in. The supermarkets that were there before were still there, and we did not have room to have the kind of growth or expansion that existed in either Gil Lindsay's Ninth District, with the rise of the highrise and the new profile of corporate L.A., Bunker Hill Project, or in the Tenth District as that area began to expand out and fill in, and there was a better quality of housing in the way of apartments, the duplexes, the tri-plexes, things that you'll see if you go along the Pico Boulevard corridor, or the Olympic Boulevard corridor, or Washington Boulevard. You go west, you see a different kind of structure than you do when you come south.

Farrell: So our thrust went into refining the concept of the coffee klatches and teas and little social gatherings for political purposes, to the evolution into neighborhood clubs. Billy Mills' sister-in-law was a lady by the name of Ferdia Harris, and she was one of the leaders in the development of the block-club movement, which evolved to become the Council of Community Clubs. Ferdia Harris, F-e-r-d-i-a. So I was tasked to work with those clubs and to work with community activists to build their capacities to do that kind of work, and I developed a sense of pride in how one does one's work. If you do your work well as an organizer, you will go out and encourage and assist in the development of people as leaders, and at the end of the day they will see themselves as having it done by themselves. And I took that as being a wonderful way to address one's work, to so work with others and to encourage their development such that they could see each step of the way that they are doing it themselves.

Farrell: And I guess one of my most prized collaborations was with a lady by the name of Estelle Van Meter, 82nd Street Block Club. But that was just my way of working, conversations, suggestions, encouragement. Still had the power to pick up the call and say, "Farrell, Mills' office, this is what I want." But by going through another kind of a conversation and showing one how to do it, I guess it was just putting into practice the axiom, "You feed a person with a fish, they eat for a day. Teach them how to fish, they'll be able to eat always." And I applied that to my work. I think that was kind of the mindset that led to my being able to work easily with clergy leadership and the affection that was established with me and many of the men who are still alive today--

Greene: Who were some of those clergy leaders, can you recall, that you worked most closely with?

Farrell: Dr. E.V. [Edward Victor] Hill. Another is at Praises of Zion, Dr. Joe B. Hardwick. Reverend Eugene Thomas, the Love of God Missionary Baptist Church. I worked with [Rev.] Tom Kilgore, Second Baptist Church, and his predecessor, Raymond Henderson, with [Rev.] Brookins at First A.M.E. Church, and [Rev.] Chip Murray, who was his successor at F.A.M.E., and there's just a whole range of others.

Greene: E.V.?

Farrell: Edward Victor Hill, Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church. E.V. Hill was one of the clergy leadership who was Republican. He had a position in the Yorty administration. He was fire commissioner.

Greene: Was that way of working with community members and community residents, would you say that was something that--that leadership style of yours, of kind of developing leaders and allowing them to take ownership of the work that was going on--is that something that came from your experiences with CORE? It strikes me as a very democratic approach to--

Farrell: CORE and just things I had learned on campus in terms of leadership groups where peers are involved. That particular way of using suasion and shared insights and perspectives I found was more effective than, "Hey, I just got elected chair of the campus NAACP. Now this is what we do." "Hey, man, I'm carrying sixteen units," just like me or some of the folks. Our guys in the late fifties were in some ways different, carrying sixteen units, some people carrying twenty units--in terms of the folks that you would see would really be bright people. I don't mean to minimize this thing, man, because it's a different era, but I guess we all had in the back of our mind, we're at UCLA, we've made it to a premier university, so that means we're premier students.

Farrell: Because I played with this for a moment. What would it be like growing up, getting into myself, what would it be like to just take twelve units at UCLA? What would it be like to go on and do something and be like these white boys, sort of coast around? [unclear] No, man, if I do this, I can still get a B in it, and experimenting with these kinds of feelings, and at the same time being around folks who said, "Look. I got to UCLA, and I worked too hard to be here. I'd love to be with you guys, but I've got to study. I've got to get my A. I've got a scholarship here." To just be able to empathize and work with people that understand different motivations and what people need for their own fulfillment as they do what they do.

Farrell: So if Bob Farrell is in a situation where he will go along with Bob Singleton and we will go do a picket-line situation, that does not mean putting down anybody else on campus who will just tell you honestly, "I've got to study for a test," or, "I can't cut that class," or whatever reasons they could not be there, as long as we knew that in their hearts that they were there with you. I mean, that meant a lot to be able to step out there and know that you're not--well, you are by yourself. You're alone, but you're not by yourself. But I guess to me, that's what led to the development of this kind of a situation of working with people, to take time and to have a sense of when someone's got it and pull back, and when to stick around and stay there.

Greene: Did you ever run into any trouble going about your work in the field that way?

Farrell: Not really. There would be points when I was involved in activities with folks when we would have city reps to come out to talk about street maintenance, or most certainly with the police, and to basically be there with the block club folks when some of these police persons--this is just as community relations were beginning to pick up as an important part of police work, involving all the officers, not just the CROs [Community Relations Officer] assigned to 77th or Southwest, but at that time it still was the CROs are the people who take care of this [unclear] cop. And to be there was to represent the fact that, "If this thing goes sideways, I'll call the chief of police and tell him that you, sergeant, came out here and you're an ass, and we don't like you coming out in our district talking to people that way. Understand. You see the council office there? Make believe you're talking to the councilman. I'll pull your chain."

Farrell: So what came out of that--because the way it opened up was developing a relationship with the chiefs, with the guys like Darryl Gates and others, and then through him with the feedback down to the guys who were the asses, as well as their immediate superiors, to just back off and just relax, get to know the neighbors. A funny thing was this big critic of the police department, Estel Van Meter, became one of the people that the police officers rallied around the most. She was an elderly woman from Mississippi. She and I connected on that level. But Estel Van Meter they came to know would not do anything that was not what your job was, it's just that Estel Van Meter just talked to you as though you were one of her children. That means sometimes being stern. "You know, you haven't been doing the job out there. I called you guys and nobody came," or, "I told you what was happening over here. Now, we don't see anything on that. What's wrong with you? I mean, if you don't get it done I'm coming to call the chief. I'm going to just tell him you just are not doing your job." And after a while, that initial response to criticism became, that's good feedback coming from a concerned citizen. It was just great to be there during the development of her as a leader and some others as people just beginning to feel that they could make those calls and have someone pay attention to them.

Farrell: Remember, this was still the time when you could get jacked up. Billy Mills himself will tell the story, and it was an interesting anecdote, because the motor officer who pulled him over for a short period of time before his retirement was one of the Sergeant at Arms at the L.A. City Council chamber. We had black Buicks at the time, and this motor officer, traditional white guy, six-foot plus, that was the image [sings notes from "Dragnet", da, da, dunt, dun] police in that area. So this Negro is driving this city car, going down Western driving rapidly. Police pull him over. "What you doing?" "Councilman Billy Mills." "Councilman who? What do you mean Councilman Mills?" and gave him a hard time. Billy Mills makes a phone call, because we had phones, we had radio communications in our cars with a central call unit, and that matter got worked out, and that officer gave a big apology to the councilman, who he didn't recognize, didn't recognize the councilman. Bottom line, it was a black guy driving in a Buick with this city license plate on it. Now, he had to have stolen the damn thing, because, you know, that's what they do in South L.A.

Greene: That was the assumption.

Farrell: So that was still a part of the times. You could still be jacked up if, say, you're a graduate student and you're with one of your white peers. That might be accepted around USC, but go over on Jefferson or go back out about Slauson or Manchester, you find a black person and a white person in a car together, they'll be pulled over. Don't have to be a black man and a white woman. Just pulled over. This kind of stuff is still going on in the early sixties? Yes. So it's into that kind of environment that we do this. It was still the situation where we were going through this syndrome of the first Negro. As the Negro officers were beginning to come up in rank, you began to see, "Oh, that's a Negro officer. Oh, we have some Negro sergeants. Oh, we've got a Negro lieutenant."

Farrell: This was the era as Bernard Parks came in, and Bernard Parks had the opportunity to be so sharp to being noted by a chief of police, Ed Davis, such that Bernard Parks became one of the golden boys, just as Darryl Gates had been identified as one of the golden boys for Bill Parker. So into this dynamic of change that was institutional, we also had a dynamic and change in the way that law enforcement began to look at citizen participation as an adjunct to their policing, the community resident as an eyes-and-ears in dealing with crime in the community, a resource, a source of information and support.

Greene: And the block club structure was a part of that? Is that what you're suggesting?

Farrell: Yes. Those people were organizing to keep their communities up. They note the guys who are dumping. They know where the gang bangers are, or as narcotics came in they knew where the dope houses were. Why was this important to the police? Well, police officers are union employees. They don't live in communities 24/7. They may work 24/7 or whatever their shifts are, but they live someplace else. So unless they're really conscientious people assigned for the long haul in a particular area, they don't know the nuances of it. So where do you go to get the nuances? To people who reside there. And as confidence is developed, patterns of information are shared that helps maintain the quality of a community. I mean, it's kind of oversimplified and simple, but that was something that was an earned result, but it came down from the top, came from many of these officers being welcomed into people's homes, not only for the first time as people would welcome police officers into their homes, but for many of them, the first time of welcoming white people into their homes.

Farrell: So these were interesting things to see taking place, and I was just fascinated to be part of this while on the staff of Billy Mills, where my presence, I believe, was helpful in causing some of that to be done. The local guys would see you, I mean, what kind of a political guy are you going to be? "What's he going to do?" I mean, you're not going to harass Bob Farrell. Custom is that deputies walk in, come to roll calls, stuff like that. Well, if Bob comes in representing Billy Mills, are we going to let him in? Are we going to let the Negroes in? Of course you will. You let the deputies in. Every now and then we had to do those kinds of things, and as it got to the place where it relates to street maintenance and refuse collection, as there were more and more African Americans doing that particular function in public works, we began to be from the place where if the phone call is for street sweeping and alley cleaning, [unclear] effectively, we call the brothers in the union, and the brothers in the union talk to the guys who are doing dispatching, who lived in the community, and lo and behold were able to deal with little spot problems that came up with people showing up. "Ooh, Councilman Mills got that done. You know, Bob Farrell made that phone call for us."

Farrell: Or, put another way, Bob Farrell suggested a block club person that, "See these organizational books we share with you about how city government is made up? Now, the supervisor in the yard that does street sweeping for this area is right here. Now, you call that person and just say that you represent the block club and tell them what you want to have done, and then if you want to, 'Councilman Mills' deputy Bob Farrell was here, and he's working with us,' however you want to put it, just but do that. But you do it. You call in, I want you to call--." "Well, I called and they say he's not there during the day. He's only in the morning." "Okay. All right. They explained to you that his job has him out in the field and it causes him to be not there sometimes when you call. But notice, whoever answers the phone will tell you that he's there in the morning, so please, would you make your call in the morning, because sometimes with public employees they come in and check in in the morning, and check in in the evening, and they're out in the field. So if that's the way they work, when you call, just because you don't get that person right away doesn't mean that they're putting you down or disrespecting. It means that that's the way they work. But if you listen carefully, call back in the morning or call late in the evening." And lo and behold, people begin to find their way around the process. That was the technique that I used.

Farrell: Other people use other ways of doing things. They get folks together in block clubs and share general information and say, "If you have a problem, then get back in touch with me." But mine was more hands on, because I found that sometimes when you talk to people about, "Here are the rules and regulations of the city," you may find that that person may not be as literate as you are, and given our people at that time, that's not a put down, it's just the way things were. So if you could help facilitate people using something, then please help them facilitate it, and then there's been more empowerment.

Greene: What were some of the issues and initiatives that, if you can recall, emerged out of Councilman Mills' office?

Farrell: The most significant was community improvement. Don't move, improve. Clean up the vacant lots, clean the alleys, paint your house, plant trees, the beginning of putting in street lighting, things that are Neighborhood Politics 101.

Greene: Were there ways in which you as a staffer and Councilman Mills sort of had to maneuver or work to remove obstacles to the kinds of improvements that y'all were promoting in your district?

Farrell: There were times that the councilman had to be involved directly to cause certain things to be put in place, like a clean-up campaign. People are available on Saturday, but ain't no street sweeping going on on Saturdays. I mean, our guys work Monday through Friday. Well, the councilman made a call, "Somebody gonna be there." "That's right. Councilman called." That kind of thing, start to play around with the folks and say, okay, in the Eighth District we will tend to have these things, so how do we work them out, because we will call on you to come out on Saturday now, right? You've got to deal with problems of overtime? I don't want to hear that. I want to hear that you're going to be there, and whatever your problems are we can resolve in the context of the budget. I don't have flexibility and whatever to cause these things to be done. Well, suppose we organize our clean-up activities so that they are seasonal or quarterly, and they don't just come at you ad hoc? Would that make it better in the administration of a clean-up campaign? That can work, huh? Good. Then we'll work together on that.

Farrell: That was where the interface came in departmental activities, and to a certain extent I think you still see the vestiges of that when folks talk about what are the police going to be doing every day. [unclear] asking for these things to be done, and it's always easier to pull things together in a coordinated way. And then to take it another step, if you involve the block club people in the planning of it, so that we have the combined activities of the city and the community, wow, what a win-win for all sides. That kind of stuff.

Greene: I'm wondering what it took, or how you learned to be a good deputy, right? Only because in retrospect, as I hear you describe it, you saw it as an extension of relationships you had already been building, conversations you were already in, so I get that. But I wonder if there was a learning curve at all in some of the day-to-day--

Farrell: Interesting that you would ask that.

Greene: Talk to me about it.

Farrell: Ever the exciting innovator, one Assemblyman Mervyn Dymally saw the benefit in providing the aides to black elected officials with the shared experience of how to get things done. So with the leadership of one of his staff people--Dymally was a teacher. He had a teacher working with him by the name of Theresa Hughes. She eventually becomes a senator after being assemblywoman. But Theresa Hughes puts together a program for aides to black elected officials so that we could share insights on how we did these things. The program was at Cal State L.A., and I think I may still have among my certificates something back in the early sixties of attending this.

Farrell: Picking up that certificate, well, that was the way that early on we began our collaborations to share information and insights on how to get it done. Okay? People brought their different kinds of skills to bear, and I say with Merv, Merv always the organizational guy looking for innovative ways to be of assistance to the cadre, because, of course, it was open for all aides to black elected officials. But most of those aides came from the staff of Mills, Lindsay, Bill Greene, Merv Dymally. I mean, it was like a factional piece, but everybody was still invited. So we had some Bradley people to come, too. And I think it was out of this kind of a developmental piece that I was able to move easily with the Bradley folks as well as with the Mills' folks, as well as the Lindsay folks.

Farrell: Did I tell you the anecdote of my mother and I when we first arrived, we went to the Elks hall. We presented the traveling card. The exalted ruler at the time was Gilbert Lindsay, so in a way I knew Gilbert Lindsay before I met any of these other kind of these other guys, because he was an exalted ruler in the Elks, and at the time I was a member of the junior herd, traveling with my mother, who was a member of the Elks, a sister or a daughter Elk, who presented her traveling card, so that there was an ease of access to the three offices at city hall for me in a way that sometimes things got testy with the men themselves.

Greene: I see.

Farrell: There was Gil and Billy, because they were Masons together, not that Tom Bradley wasn't, but he was not as invested with those organizations the way Gil Lindsay and Billy Mills were. Billy Mills was active in his lodge work as a councilman, up to his 33rd degree. I mean, he was a practicing Mason, as was Lindsay practicing Mason, practicing Elk, like that. But Tom Bradley did it a little differently. He was a cop. He was a lawyer. I mean, Billy Mills was a lawyer, too, but Billy Mills was a young lawyer. He'd come out of UCLA and come back to the community. But it was just a different dynamic in the nature of the men and how they developed.

Farrell: Lindsay, you had Gilbert Lindsay ultimately was known as the emperor of the great Ninth District. Well, what is this man doing? I mean, that's really presumptuous. Well, if you look at Gil Lindsay, who worked his way up from being a janitor at city hall back in the days when at city hall the only people who worked in visible positions were the colored girls who ran the elevators, you got a sense of who this guy was. I mean, a gregarious person who got to know all the leaders of his time, Mulholland, the engineer, all these folks. It got to the place that he was such a regular and interesting person that guys when they would talk politics about what was going on with the coloreds, guess who they would talk to? Gilbert Lindsay. And Gilbert played it for all it was worth, so that Gilbert Lindsay was the only janitor to have his own office downstairs in city hall. He had his closet. It was Gil's office, and Gil would sit in there and Gil would do these deals at city hall. At times people would want to find Gil Lindsay. They knew his name, because Gil Lindsay was a contact.

Greene: So he was kind of a go-to guy?

Farrell: He was the guy you would go to as it relates to Negroes. I mean, based on everyday life, when did these movers and shakers have any interface with Negroes other than maybe the ones who worked for them or in their houses? Civil service didn't have that status position for us. I mean, as I said, the colored girls ran the elevators. Those civil service positions were not that open. In the police department, the few Negro police officers worked over in Newton. In the fire department, the few Negroes there worked down in Central Avenue, so who's at city hall? I mean, janitors' jobs were not Negro jobs. They were city jobs, and Gilbert happened to have one.

Farrell: So I think it was in dealing with some of the bond issues and things like that, Gilbert Lindsay was there to chat with people and let them know that he had the organization ties to have Negroes come out and vote for those kinds of issues. "Oh, Gilbert Lindsay?" Fascinating how his story, and that's another one I hope you have someplace, some kind of oral history on Gilbert Lindsay. I hope that one's not overlooked or forgotten. In like manner, an oral history on Billy Mills. But that was the colorful Gilbert Lindsay, and Gilbert Lindsay was so important that it was about '48, '49, I understand, that when Kenneth Hahn was thinking about running for office--he was an instructor of government over at Pepperdine--that he was advised to look up this influential Negro, Gilbert Lindsay, and he, Gilbert Lindsay and Gilbert Lindsay's wife Theresa struck up a friendship that lasted until their deaths. There was nothing that Gilbert Lindsay and Theresa Lindsay would ask of Kenneth Hahn that he could not get, and there was nothing that they would want for that Kenny Hahn would not do.

Farrell: When he ran for--well, most certainly when Kenny Hahn was at city hall, he interfaced with Gil Lindsay, because Gil had been an advisor and instrumental in his running for and winning in the Eighth District in the Negro precincts. But when he went to the Board of Supervisors, when Hahn went to the Board of Supervisors, he took Gil Lindsay with him as his first deputy, black deputy, first Negro to have that job. So you can imagine what it was like for Gilbert Lindsay to be a Negro deputy. As I was just describing you my experiences when you're dealing with people and you are a deputy, you are deferred to. So he had one of the special keys to get up to the fifth floor over at the Hall of Administration, and, yes, he drove around with Kenny Hahn, but when the time came, Gilbert Lindsay had his car. So given the nature of the times, these were incremental things, but it showed the relative clout that came out of relationships of men and their aides and how those things develop.

Farrell: So that when the time came for that vacancy in the Ninth District, when Ed [Edward R.] Roybal had been elected to Congress, I assume that Ed Roybal--and that would be another place to find out just what Roybal had in mind for his succession at city hall. But one thing was sure. Kenny Hahn did what Kenny Hahn did best, and lo and behold, Gilbert Lindsay wound up being appointed to city council. Upset people, and I think I may have referenced that before, that there were people who expected other Negroes to maybe be considered for the Ninth District if it was going to be a Negro for the Ninth District, because that was a Mexican American seat, and I'm sure the people east of the river had their own claims to that seat. Gil got it. Then he was there until his death at age ninety. And it was during his watch that in collaboration with Tom Bradley, downtown as you see it today was built, all those highrises, all of those major buildings, great Ninth District.

Greene: All right.

Farrell: Chinatown was in the district. Little Tokyo was in the district. So you can imagine how Gil was accepted in those communities. I hope sometime someone will go over and ask. But I'd like to believe that as in those cultures there's a deference to age that Gil Lindsay just fit the role what they were used to looking to in a leader, and Gil, as colorful as ever, "My community, what do you want? Come here, sweetie." I mean, Gilbert Lindsay, bless his heart, was always looking at the pretty girls. He was a short man, so he'd have to look up and say, "Oh, what a pretty girl. Let's take a picture." I mean, he was--in some ways it was like corny, corny, corny, corny. But it was something that enamored him with people. I mean, that was just his way. He loved his wife Theresa, and the way that you got to be close to people in Gilbert Lindsay's camp was to be supportive of the Women's Sunday Morning Breakfast Club, which was Theresa Lindsay's women's organization. The Women's Sunday Morning Breakfast Club met at eight a.m., and what they would do is have breakfast for ladies. Then they'd have a program, and people would go after that to church, eleven o'clock service. They would raise money. They had a parade on Central Avenue, and Gil Lindsay and his wife each year bought at least four or five life memberships for the NAACP and did stuff like that. So people began to see the way you really get to be in a good relationship with the councilman is Sunday Morning Breakfast Club. So the Sunday Morning Breakfast Club was never wanting of anything. There were two male members, Dr. Leroy Weekes and Dr. Claude Hudson.

Greene: Medical doctors?

Farrell: Dr. Hudson was a dentist, and he an NAACP stalwart. And Dr. Weekes is one of the medical professionals, physician, surgeon that--no, I think he was OB/GYN--that when you look at the role of African Americans in healthcare delivery, Dr. Hudson the dentist and Dr. Weekes, the physician, are two names that you just see all the way through. Dr. Hudson's family is still active. One of the things he was involved with was the founding of Broadway Federal S&L, Broadway Federal Bank. His son Elbert is the emeritus chairman of the board. His grandson Paul is now the active chair, and I think for the first time they have now a non-Hudson in as president of the bank. Dr. Weekes had two daughters and a son. I think his son Leroy is still involved in real estate. One daughter became a physician, OB/GYN like her dad. The other daughter is in Atlanta [Georgia]. She's a corporate executive, and she's on the foundation of some major corporation. I can't think of it right now. That's how those pieces kind of came together.

Farrell: Anyone who had moved from the East Side west had relationships with Theresa and Gil, because of those relationships on the East Side, or their church relationships on the East Side, or whatever. Any relationship with Gilbert Lindsay to me on Washington over at the center of--Leon Washington's great relationship with Gilbert Lindsay, Kenneth Hahn and then Pat Brown, because a conversation with Halvor [Miller], I heard again his comments that, "Remember that Leon was influential in encouraging Pat Brown to run for lieutenant governor." Pat Brown was the district attorney in San Francisco, and Leon Washington was a friend to Pat Brown, the first Governor Brown, and that relationship lasted a lifetime, because whenever Pat Brown would come around--another thing about being over at "The Sentinel," the governor could walk in. Governor Brown comes in, or the supervisor walks in. Why? Because they knew Leon.

Farrell: Once again, to just remind you of how heady it was to be on a newspaper staff when that was the ambiance, plus all the black athletes coming in, and Brad Pye was the sports editor, and he had these people coming. I recall Abie Robinson talking about the singer who made her reputation in Paris as a singer-dancer in the thirties. Oh, man, what is that lady's name [Josephine Baker]? I can see her face just performing. How could I not remember that? Our great dancers were dancing with the--when she came to South L.A. on Central Avenue, she'd go by "The Sentinel," she'd go by the "Eagle." And Billie Holiday and those folks who were on Central Avenue back in the day when it was black and tan--and once again, Halvor reminded me that all that stuff on Central Avenue was not just a black spot.

Greene: Josephine?

Farrell: Josephine Baker! Josephine Baker, right. Josephine Baker would come by. Lena Horne would come by. All those musicians would come by. Jackie Robinson would come by. I mean, the black newspaper office was the hub where all this stuff came together. I wonder why those names just sort of popped up, but they did. Then, of course, as I'd earlier mentioned, there was a tendency for the civil rights, NAACP movers and shakers to be over at the "Eagle" first, because of the role of Loren Miller as the lawyer involved in a lot of that stuff with Thurgood Marshall. But sometimes these people also came by "The Sentinel." But that was the distinction between "The Sentinel" and the "Eagle." The "Eagle" was more on the intellectual side, substantial issues side, than was "The Sentinel," which was more populist and pretty much like a Leon Washington, flamboyant kind of a guy enjoying life, as opposed to the more austere and lawyer-y legal fellow that Loren Miller was. I mean, just like those pictures you saw, I mean, a straight, but as the Kappas talk about achievement-achievement, Loren Miller was right in there on that. That's a good point to stop today.

Greene: Okay.

Farrell: Because you've got a whole bunch of other things coming back. I hope I hit the particular things that you wanted.[End of interview]

1.7. Session 7 (November 6, 2008)

Greene: This is Sean Greene interviewing Mr. Bob Farrell on Thursday, November 6 [2008], in his office. Good afternoon, Mr. Farrell.

Farrell: Good afternoon.

Greene: I wanted to start by acknowledging Senator Barack Obama's recent election on Tuesday, and ask what your thoughts are, what you make of Senator Obama's election and its meaning for the country, for the Democratic Party, for black folks in Los Angeles and beyond.

Farrell: My initial response was feeling a real sense of calm. I was at a watch party that night, and as the other folks just were so excited when the time--it was eight p.m. on the West Coast and the polls were closed and the announcement was made, "Obama is the next president." And the kind of calm that I felt was, number one, I felt that I wanted to go to church. Number two, I thought of the Negro National Anthem. I thought of James Weldon Johnson and his brother writing the lyrics and the melody of a tune that gave us a sense of solidarity and optimism and hope at a time when segregation was so harsh, and then to see approximately one hundred years later that we have someone of our tradition elected president of the United States, the optimism validated, the commitment to staying the course here in the United States as Americans validated, and it was just something that I wanted to take a moment to just--a prayer of acknowledgement and thanks.

Farrell: I thought of my colleagues who were involved with the Freedom Riding. I thought of the others who were involved in the [Civil Rights] Movement who chose not necessarily to go on a Freedom Ride, but who were involved in demonstrations, people who put themselves at risk out of those moments in time when we had to take a stand, and I just saw this vision come back of what it felt like and a connection to what it felt like back then when we were singing our songs and building our sense of group cohesion to go out to engage these vestiges and realities of Jim Crow as they existed in the late fifties and early sixties here and elsewhere. So in a way, it was more a moment of personal reflection and sense of accomplishment and appreciation.

Farrell: On the other hand, it was great to see that someone had figured out how to get around a partisan structure which up until this campaign cycle I viewed as all we had, which was the structure of the Democratic Party. For whatever reasons, third parties haven't worked for us. Our participation in the Democratic Party has. But from my earliest beginning, it's always been a kind of hyphenated participation in the party. I'm a Democrat, but I'm in the Negro part of it. I do work as a Democratic Party activist and a technician who's affiliated with Democrats, but with black Democrats, not the whole thing being a Democrat working as a Democrat technician, but a black technician in the Democratic Party. The Obama win just caused that whole structure to dissipate, and I believe that it's going to force a revolutionary change within the Democratic Party, because I believe that the Obama operation, from the early development of the campaign through its partisan win and most certainly as the team of the standard bearer from the national convention through the election, and as we go into the next phase called transition, it's the Obama operation that dominates, not the party.

Farrell: So I'm just looking forward to the dynamic of what's going to happen as those who are the Clintonites and the party regulars begin a process of accommodation with the winning Obama team and how that's going to be handled. I'm as interested in how that shows up as I am interested in what's going to happen in transition as as of today, Rahm Emmanuel out of Illinois has been tapped to be the chief of staff, so that over the next several days we're going to be seeing the cabinet come together and take advantage of the transition process for these people to get up to speed to deal with the several kinds of crises that we have facing us as a nation, where this executive is going to have this extraordinary moment to do it.

Farrell: I mean, the Constitution says that we have these three equal parts in this governance of the United States, the judiciary, the [United States] Congress, and the executive, and they're supposed to have some sense of check and balance on each other. The exciting thing is that Obama takes over at a time when it is clear that there is an imperial presidency, that the executive leadership is clear, the Congress and the Supreme Court are subordinate, so what an ideal and opportune time for our first person to come along to go in and take a shot at being the top person in the United States and by extension the leader of the democratic world. I think this is fantastic.

Greene: You mentioned imperial presidency. I wonder, do you see any contradictions between a person of African descent taking office at this time, given where the presidency is, and America's current role and perception in world affairs?

Farrell: Well, that's part of the excitement and something to look towards, because in a way, Obama going in with this extraordinary development of the executive, in a situation where he's dealing with partisan peers in the Senate and the House, but they're not Obama people, they're Democrats--how is that going to influence the decisions that the executive takes in terms of dealing with a Democratic-led Congress, based on some of the things that he said. We will find out which promises are promises that are to be kept, and which promises were part of the campaign rhetoric to win the presidency. And then to be able to just use the power of the executive in a domestic way through the use of executive order to run the government, as well as to use the power of the Commander in Chief and the president in dealing with foreign affairs, it's as though the table is cleared for him, especially where we're in a situation where most of the work of the [George W.] Bush administration has been so publicly negatively perceived and shows up in terms of its reception as being a negative.

Farrell: The reality is that maybe there are going to be some areas like the economy and some of the calls in foreign affairs that may be perceived as negative. But the way there's institutional transition in the United States, all of it isn't negative. There's a lot of substantial stuff we're going to find out about the Bush years that are going to make sense in their continuity, whether driven by policy or driven by financial considerations and the shortcomings of year-to-year financing in the budget process, all of this exciting stuff is going to be up for discussion and conversation, and I hope that this is going to invite more active and direct participation by African Americans in communicating with the executive and representatives of the executive, and look to that place as much as we looked to the Congress in the past. And I think that Obama's people would miss it if they are not preparing themselves for the expectation that people are going to look to the executive for an effective use of executive power to address some of our aspirations and some of the concerns that, as I said before, have tended to be watered down as our Democratic leaders have told us that, well, we have to take in mind that there are other constituencies in the United States, and more often than not, "You got yours with the Civil Rights Act, and you got yours with the Voting Rights Act, so the pie is kind of narrow."

Farrell: Well, I believe, as I've shared with you before, that the pie is open for redistribution each time we go through these electoral cycles and we talk about what the priorities are, and there's nothing that is immutable about how one deals with the demands and the needs of people as you perceive them around the country.

Greene: What's your sense of what some of the priorities should be? And then we'll go back to where we left off in our last interview. But while we're on the subject, what do you think some of the priorities need to be?

Farrell: I think that the issue of affirmative action is going to have to be grappled early on. I think that we're going to have a good discussion and debate about whether race-based or class-based solutions are going to be the more appropriate way to move forward for a sense of equity and justice in the United States. I think it's going to be a difficult discussion, but I think it's one that is necessary for a sense of national unity and the way that we approach this concept of social justice. Otherwise, we're going to face another kind of polarization. Our issues are going to get consumed in a break between people who view things as being liberal or view things as being conservative. I don't think we need to hold to those paradigms. In fact, the election results here in California will cause some people to wake up and realize that African Americans are not liberal people across the board. The defeat of Proposition 8 has been attributed in part to the extraordinarily high turnout of African Americans and Latinos voting for Obama and voting for a very important social issue.

Greene: You said defeating with the passage of--you meant the approval of?

Farrell: This is the definition of marriage. I say this to just make an emphatic point, not to put these in parallel. The same way that some people were surprised to hear the rhetoric of Reverend [Jeremiah] Wright from his pulpit, a surprise to find out that many African Americans who are strong in their faith feel that marriage is something that should be between a man and a woman. They misunderstand our commitment to Protestant ideals, at the same time they forget that in our church is the only place where we have been consistently free to express ourselves. Since the end of the terrorism of Reconstruction, we have developed points of view, and sometimes if you're not really cognizant of who we are and what we're about, you can get frightened by that. But the bottom line is that we are loyal Americans. We are as committed to the American ideal as any other group of people in this land. It's just that we have developed differently, so that if you can't put our rhetoric and understand the points of view that our traditional leaders, clergy leaders are articulating, you'll get a distorted view of what America is all about.

Farrell: Can we have those kinds of views? Absolutely. Because I am sure that there are people who are Caucasian who are not willing to accept in some parts of these United States that it was their great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents who were the terrorists who just blew us apart because we came out of the slave experience, and were not willing to accept us as fellow citizens. I mean, we had to go through the whole situation of amendments to the Constitution to clarify that, those Reconstruction Amendments, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth. That's what that was about, and we were not accepted. Not only was Reconstruction destroyed by the terrorists; on top of that we have separate but equal and the beginnings of Jim Crow in formal segregation. So for the whole of the twentieth century it's been a struggle to catch up, to become and earn and show people that we have a right to be Americans. I think that's for fertile discussion as we come to this Barack moment, not that we look to him for all the answers, but he represents a shift in paradigm which I believe is going to allow this discussion to take place.

Greene: And how would you characterize that shift? You suggest that it's a shift toward a different type of political leadership?

Farrell: A different kind of political discussion.

Greene: Okay, all right. Got it.

Farrell: How can I with a straight face say that? I'm an American. I believe in American ideals. If you tell me as a white person that you're out of a Mississippi tradition, like [Senator] John McCain, and not have me have certain lingering doubts about a John McCain, but at the same time that I reference McCain, in his statement of concession I had never heard a southern white man talk like that before, a public elected official to talk that way. So I mean, many people say, "That's McCain out of Arizona." No, that's McCain out of Mississippi. The McCain plantation is still down there in Mississippi. So I think that we've reached a point in the United States where it's going to be open to have that conversation, without an expectation that we can't have a discussion.

Farrell: Even though [Martin Luther] King [Jr.] set the tone [unclear] the sons of slaves and slave owners sitting down, well, those who lynched and terrified us, we could still sit down with their descendants and still talk about the common good in these United States for us as American citizens and persons who are living here.

Greene: What do you make of the proposition that I guess McCain put forward in his concession speech, and others including Obama on some occasions have echoed, that Obama's election represents kind of the withering of racism in the United States?

Farrell: I'd like to suggest that that's an acknowledgement that there's been a paradigm shift, and we will see if the withering can take place. I take the use of the verb withering to just acknowledge that there is some moving and shaking going on, but I don't see the withering as something that's going to necessarily end with something falling apart. To me it just suggests an acknowledgement that there's been a shift, and what happens when there's a shift is things shake a lot.

Greene: But not necessarily disappear?

Farrell: No. No. In fact, they appear. Paradigm shift also means stuff shows up. The ground shakes and it may wither a little bit as the volcano pushes its way up on the plates down below. It's a dynamic moment.

Greene: Makes sense.

Farrell: I'm optimistic.

Greene: Okay, all right. Let's go back in time a bit, shall we, and pick up where we left off before, where you were describing your experiences working as then Councilman Billy Mills' deputy. I wonder if you could talk some more about the kinds of things you were encountering as you were moving around in Councilman Mills' district and as you were going about your daily work. What kind of constituencies did you encounter? What kind of groups of folks did you sort of interact with while you were doing your work as deputy?

Farrell: Once again I'd like to acknowledge the central role of Willard Murray, who is a friend, a mentor, a guide. He's currently on the Water Replenishment District board, but he has been a member of the California legislature. He's been an assemblyman himself, as perhaps one of the least known and least recognized of the brilliant politicians of our community post-World War II. When I met Willard I was writing for the "California Eagle," then the "L.A. Sentinel," and then part of the political operation that Willard was in the process of developing along with Merv [Mervyn] Dymally and basically being affiliated with the Jesse Unruh faction in the Democratic Party.

Farrell: When the opportunity presented itself for there to be a second deputy at city hall, Willard recommended me to Billy Mills. At the time, the councilperson at city hall had an executive assistant and a secretary and a field deputy. When Willard came aboard as the field deputy for Billy Mills, he got together with Mills to talk about enhancing the status of offices and the creation of a district office, which would warrant another staff person or two, and another deputy, and it was in that context that I got tapped to be the deputy to come to work for Billy Mills. That was at city hall and also in the new district office that was established at 8514 South Broadway in South L.A.

Farrell: So the work was on the one hand as an exempt employee, as all field deputies still are, I think, to the councilperson, but to work on matters as assigned, plus everything that was being done in the city. It was kind of learning curve. Well, what do you do as a deputy? Well, what does a councilman do, in addition to the charter required be at city hall and go to meetings. What are you interested in? What are the specific needs of constituents? It's obviously not in the Eighth District that you see elsewhere that the city provides that needs to be provided to our constituents. And then more than that, who are the people out here in the Eighth District, and how do we serve them?

Farrell: Well, because the Mills campaign had been built on the back of doing outreach in the community to block clubs and neighborhood associations and clusters of people through an organizing device called coffee klatches, having coffees in people's homes, coffees in church auditoriums, that neighborhood association block club became the medium of organization in the Eighth District. I'd referenced earlier that in a partisan way the organization of Democratic clubs, of substance and as well as paper clubs, was part of the dynamic that was going on between Alan Cranston's people in the CDC and Jesse Unruh's people in the DVC, the Democratic Volunteer Clubs. So we had two levels of organization that were what was going on in South L.A., the Democratic clubs and then the block clubs.

Farrell: What evolved around the Billy Mills office and the dynamic of Billy Mills was the development of these nonpartisan community-based clusters of people, primarily around their specific block on a specific street, as a way to deliver the maintenance services, street lighting services, personal attention in dealing with whatever the considerations people had about their living conditions. So it was something that became part of just the distinction that was the Eighth District as opposed to any other district, even until today. What started off with those little coffee klatches under the Billy Mills time, through mine and through up until Mark Ridley-Thomas, it grew and developed in an advisory phase, and Ridley-Thomas took that to the next step in developing the Empowerment Congress and another kind of a structure.

Farrell: But until that point, the organizing rationale was to establish a personal rapport with individual group leaders, clergy leadership, in relationship to the councilperson and his aides, in terms of handling their concerns and getting out in front of them and looking at broader patterns of what city services were and then putting them in place. The device that was really best developed during the Mills administration was the concept of the clean-up campaign, cleaning up alleys and cleaning the streets, having special rubbish collections, things of that type that got a lot of people involved in doing specific things in their neighborhoods.

Greene: And in your recollection, was the district very homogeneous in terms of ethnically speaking was it primarily African American, or was it mixed?

Farrell: The Eighth District at that time had just gone through the dynamic of the end of the racially restrictive covenant, so that you basically had an exodus of whites. People left South L.A., and we had African Americans moving in and some Latinos moving in, mostly Mexican. But what you found in South L.A. was little pockets where there had just been traditional neighborhoods of Mexicans in St. Michael's Parish, roughly Vermont and Manchester [unclear] Gil [Gilbert] Lindsay's district. It was more of that in Gil Lindsay's district, but there were little pockets along Florence, as opposed to Manchester, and some along Slauson going west towards Inglewood. North of the University of Southern California at approximately Vermont and 26th, 27th, 28th Streets, between the freeway and University of California and that area, those were the largest ones that I recall that were contiguous blocks. We had a lot of people. And the rest were basically people who were then in the process of moving in as whites moved to the suburbs.

Greene: You mentioned there was a bit of a Caribbean presence as well?

Farrell: Yes. About '69, '70, we began to see numbers of people coming up from Belize. They were in part over by Main Street, Main and about 60th Street, in that area, and then over in the Leimert Park area in the apartments over there. There had been an interesting kind of, I'd use the term Caribbean brain drain, because there were Guyanese lawyers, Jamaican lawyers, Guyanese physicians, Jamaican physicians, had some guys from Trinidad who basically had come out West. In like manner you had a number of businesspeople, a number of people with technical backgrounds who'd come out of aerospace and like that, and there was an increasing number of people who primarily came to the U.S. to go to colleges and universities and who stayed, who went to law school about my time, like retired Judge Alban Niles from St. Vincent and a few other guys like that, who came here and stayed.

Farrell: Lennox Miller is a dentist, and he was a sprinter from TT [Trinidad and Tobago] who went to USC, and he later moved down to San Diego for his medical practice. But this was the kind of in-migration of people who were college-educated plus. A lot of businesspeople came. It was like saying people coming out of New York, but only there were fewer of them who chose to come across country. After that you began to see the vestiges of Caribbean life show up, restaurants and the like. There were some others before, but then there's Coley's [Restaurant] that's still around in Inglewood, but there was a Coley's on Crenshaw for a while. Then you had the beginning of the Belizeans coming in and little Belizean restaurants popping up along a corridor of Western and Vernon over towards Slauson, Jefferson. That Jefferson corridor was kind of like a Louisiana place, with folks who basically tied into Holy Name Parish and Transfiguration Parish, and a bit later St. Bridget's, all about the same time. But these are the way the pockets were developing, and that held for the end of the Second World War up until the early seventies, when as more people began to do well there was the beginning of the dispersal of people from here out.

Farrell: We began to see the positive aspects of society opening up, because at the same time folks were coming into South L.A., there was beginning to be the churn of people leaving South L.A. to move elsewhere. Jobs, enhanced economic opportunity, housing choice, so that was going on at the same time. But the rate of in-migration, the volume of our people was greater than it was people were moving out at that time.

Greene: How did you come to work for the 1969 Bradley mayoral campaign?

Farrell: I described the distinctions with the CDC, Tom Bradley, people on the West Side, i.e. the Tenth District and the dynamic of community organization and the selection process of community leaders there and the way that they did their more communal work.

Greene: For the record, CDC is?

Farrell: The California Democratic Councils, and we're tied in with the Unruh operation, a different style of work. We had a newer community as people came in. There was not yet an established tradition or pattern of African American political participation in the southern part of the City of L.A. as it was evolving in the Tenth District and had been existing in the Ninth District for years. The Ninth District was the base at the same time of Assemblyman Gus Hawkins' seat. It was the seat for a long time of the first black elected official in Sacramento, Fred Roberts. Gus Hawkins took Fred Roberts out in the election of '34, so that had been it further north in South L.A. So basically the Eighth District was part of this community that you describe as south of Slauson, where you had block busting with the realtors and realtists in collaboration to have the whites sell and the Negroes buy and all that kind of crazy stuff as we saw the dynamic of change come. And it was into this kind of a mix, that was real alive and present in people's minds, that our political operations began to establish themselves.

Greene: And so the Bradley mayoral campaign?

Farrell: Because I'd had the experience in this dynamic in the southern part of L.A., Maury Weiner, who was Tom Bradley's chief deputy, advisor, friend, invited me out to lunch to talk about the fact that Tom Bradley was going to go and would I be interested in doing the work? And as kind of like a custom, Willard and Billy and Murray, all of us had been in campaigns anyway, that for me it was an opportunity to say, "Sure." That wasn't necessarily where Mills or Murray or the other guys were going. That was one of those choices that I made, just differentiating me from some other people, and I caught a little heat.

Greene: Did you?

Farrell: Yes.

Greene: Because?

Farrell: I'm part of a team with Willard Murray and my boss is Billy Mills. Billy Mills was not initially supporting Tom Bradley for mayor, that he would be a staffer there, so in many ways I believe that just out of my own zeal and just testing the waters, I may have inadvertently embarrassed Billy Mills--

Greene: Interesting.

Farrell: --by stepping out to do something. I mean, like Bob Farrell had his civil rights identification, but his greater identification was as a deputy for Billy Mills.

Greene: And you took that risk because it felt like an opportunity for you? Or were you that excited about Bradley?

Farrell: It was an opportunity for me, and I knew Tom Bradley, and the kinds of experiences that I had on campus at UCLA had me open to a kind of collaboration with folks Tenth District and west that wasn't necessarily present in opportunities in South L.A. It was a more integrated kind of an environment, and it was like an extension of my civil rights community in a way that South L.A. was not.

Greene: Talk to me--what do you recall about the campaign?

Farrell: Just to put this on this record that's going to be around for a long time, and I hope that someone has done an oral history of Billy Mills. He subsequently has had a stroke, and I don't know if he's recovered fully to speak, but I'd hope that if he's not been made part of this project that his wife would be invited to participate, to tell the Mills story, get it on the record, because, he, too, is a UCLA graduate who has been acknowledged as a UCLA guy, more in passing than in recognition. And that was part of the tension in itself, because in a way at the time all people could see was Tom Bradley. Billy Mills was a councilman, too. So was Gilbert Lindsay. And remember, politics is a very competitive situation.

Farrell: The faction that I'd been part of had a relationship with the [Mayor Sam] Yorty administration. In fact, Willard Murray had gone over to the Yorty administration as an executive assistant.

Greene: Is that right.

Farrell: This is the political world. Opportunities present themselves. Sam Yorty was not Jimmy [James] Roosevelt, who ran for mayor. James Roosevelt was supported by Bradley and folks with the CDC on that part of town. Our operation supported Sam Yorty. So it was in this kind of an environment that in my relationship with Maury, they had a campaign need. Had it not been for those tensions, I don't think I would have been asked or even considered to do the coordinating. I just had a base and I had a pattern of relationships. Usually that request is made of people at different levels. I mean, why didn't Maury Weiner go talk to Billy Mills about supporting Tom Bradley? Well, that wasn't necessarily a conversation for Maury Weiner to have with Billy Mills. That was a conversation for Tom Bradley to have with Billy Mills.

Greene: I see.

Farrell: Both men are Kappas, for example, members of Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity, so you would assume that there were some grounds for the men to talk, and then if that was a decision for Billy Mills, that he would choose to go in that direction. Then Billy Mills' operation goes in that direction. So there was some space there, and in that space I chose to accept the invitation that was extended to me, because it was really a big break.

Greene: Before you get too far from it, I should ask why would your group support Yorty at the time? Was it because he seemed likely to win? Was there some other kind of calculation that went into it?

Farrell: You just have to check that out. From my perspective, I wasn't paying that much attention to the politics of Sam Yorty. I was just enraptured with the opportunity to just go flat out in doing community organization, supporting the block clubs, doing some of the after-hours, of course, partisan work as it relates to our political faction in South L.A. The reason I was there was to be in the field, and that's where I was, so in many ways I missed the nuances of how and why the relationship was struck up, Billy Mills and Willard Murray with Sam Yorty. I think it may have just been the political moment. He was the mayor, and it's important to have relationships with the mayor.

Greene: So you were asked to come onboard as campaign coordinator?

Farrell: Of South L.A.

Greene: Of South L.A. What did that entail?

Farrell: The street operations. I was with Bert Corona, the late Bert Corona, who was one of the real icons in terms of organization of the grassroots Mexican American community. Me and Bert, Dodo Meyers, a lady in the San Fernando Valley, was the daughter of one of the major studio executives in the movie industry who was a longtime supporter of Tom Bradley. Victor Ludwig was a gentleman who was the lead organizer for the West Side of town. Valerie, the judge's wife--I forget Valerie's last name, and we were the people who had the field responsibilities of working under a fellow by the name of Don Rothenberg out of Berkeley. He had been retained to be the campaign manager.

Greene: What kind of campaign did Bradley run?

Farrell: To use today's vernacular, a street operation, working with clubs, churches, neighborhood associations to attempt to build that citywide base, that ultimately came to be known as the Bradley Coalition, liberal values, a lot of effort at grassroots participation. In the context of the times, the campaign apparatus was a heck of a lot more progressive than was the Yorty administration, which was perceived as being much more conservative than our collaboration. But the Yortyites were more moderate to conservative, with a big emphasis on conservative, as the Bradley campaign was more to the progressive and liberal kind of base that you have on the West Side, seeing if it could build a West Side coalition of folks in the [San Fernando] Valley, the East Side, and South L.A., to put together a winning citywide campaign of a particular type that was a bit more populist than the Yorty administration would tend to be, which was tending to be probably the last of the campaigns where you voted for the mayor because he did the traditional kinds of things and basically talked about city services.

Farrell: Those were the days when people used to burn garbage in the backyard. A big campaign issue was to do away with backyard incinerators. That was one of the Yorty things of the day, as I recall. I could be off with some of that, but those are the kinds of distinctions that were there. Plus, remember, we were in the process of becoming a kind of more progressive, dynamic community, as you have still the vestiges of white flight, the impact of civil rights activity. We were still in the throes of the value of Fair Housing Councils and things like that to deal with integrated housing. We were post-Watts, so the decision-making paradigm that had served so well in South L.A. up until that time, as we've referenced this before, was in a process of shifting. But most of those activists had been more focused around Tenth District, that kind of collegial leadership that Tom Bradley represented in a way that us folks out south did not, as I referenced in the materials that I still have from the United Civil Rights Committee, as well as the Jim Jones Campaign for Board of Education. So those were the kinds of distinctions that tended to show up.

Greene: Okay. And then what's your sense of what happened, or the significance--it was an unsuccessful campaign, yes?

Farrell: Yes. It was unsuccessful in the sense that Tom Bradley did not win in his first effort to become mayor of the City of Los Angeles. It was successful in that the framework was put in place for a subsequent victory, which was to come in 1973.

Greene: Tell me more about that framework.

Farrell: This was the first time that a citywide coalition, political coalition, had been put together around the candidacy of a non-white. It was I think in part fueled because of the demographic changes that were coming to Los Angeles. As the suburbs developed, a lot of people who were the traditional Anglo base in the City of Los Angeles were not there anymore, and they were leaving. And there was new development coming in, the development in the Santa Monica Mountains, all this stuff was yet to come, but there was a decided movement of people around, out and in. And there was a new base developing in L.A., and the Bradley campaign was the first time it got reached out to, to pull folks together, and what you saw was a multicultural coalition.

Farrell: And a different kind of leadership. There was the traditional leadership at city hall, which was the "L.A. Times," the guys downtown, Chamber of Commerce, all white and some white women.

Greene: Were there other races at the time that you were attentive to?

Farrell: This was it.

Greene: That was the race.

Farrell: Yes, this was it. What happens in races? As we saw in the Obama campaign, you've got to reach out to the young people. We need the elderly folks with us, because we've come through so much together and they've seen ,and what we've got to do is reach out to people who are not connected, who don't feel a sense of a connection with their city and how great the city can be. Remember, there were indications of the first black mayor and Cleveland, Stokes and all of these other folks, that information was out there. But relative to Los Angeles, these were small cities. I mean, it was like the sense that people in Chicago had around Harold Washington out here in L.A., and a little earlier, that kind of feeling, in a way comparable to Obama. That kind of feeling was on the street, not just a campaign but a real campaign.

Greene: There was a lot of energy behind it.

Farrell: A lot of energy, yes, a lot of energy, a lot of new people getting involved in the campaign.

Greene: Were there things that facilitated groups joining that coalition, like, say, the folks on the West Side? Was your sense that promises were made that made it easier for folks to get onboard?

Farrell: No, it was because there were preexisting relationships.

Greene: I see. Okay.

Farrell: You had people who felt that Sam Yorty was reactionary. Yorty's people viewed some of the folks on the West Side as basically being communist. This was a time when the cold war was still around. Don Rothenberg, the campaign manager, as it hit us the last month or so of the campaign, Don Rothenberg out of Berkeley had a communist past, and that was made a big thing out of that. Plus there were the campaign accusations of Tom Bradley being a Black Power kind of a guy, and they're going to bring Black Power down to city hall. That was used in the San Fernando Valley and other parts of the community where people did not know Tom Bradley, but that was the nature of the times.[End of interview]

1.8. Session 8 (December 4, 2008)

Greene: This is Sean Greene interviewing Mr. Bob Farrell, Robert Farrell, on Thursday, December 4 [2008], at his home. Good afternoon, Mr. Farrell.

Farrell: Good afternoon.

Greene: We're going to pick it up today with where we left off, which was the first [Tom] Bradley campaign and how you came to work with them. As I understand it, around that time you participated in a number of campaigns. Am I right about that? You played a role in John [Varick] Tunney's senatorial campaign, for instance?

Farrell: That followed.

Greene: That followed. Talk to me about the first Bradley campaign if you would, and then we'll move into discussion of the other campaigns you were involved with.

Farrell: Okay. The first Bradley campaign was the breakthrough for me. Maurice Weiner, Maury Weiner, was Tom Bradley's chief of staff and almost as a son to Tom Bradley. We had met during this process of activities in the community following the Community Convention that selected Tom Bradley and Tom Bradley's campaign for council in the Tenth District. I shared with you different perspectives of the factions that were around Tom Bradley and Billy Mills.

Greene: Yes.

Farrell: The California Democratic Council and the "Unruh-ites," the Democratic Volunteer Council, the DVC, the key role of Willard Murray as one of Billy Mills' first--he was Billy Mills' first deputy. He was the fellow who brought me aboard Billy Mills' staff, and in my collaborations with Willard in those days I was kind of a factional functionary, working with Willard, working with Billy Mills for just the development of the infrastructure of that faction in South L.A., the development of Democratic clubs, working with neighborhood clubs and associations that later flourished as part of a Block Club Movement in South L.A.

Farrell: That part of town was going to be essential for a Bradley victory, and Maury had the conversation with me, and asked me if I would be interested in playing a role, and I jumped for it. I independently said, "Yeah, I'd love to do that." I did not consult with my sponsor, Billy Mills, nor with Willard Murray. There was an environment of some tight jaws there for a moment, because I had done it without consulting with them, because I was an integral part of their team, but it turned out to be a good move for our team as events unfolded. Willard Murray had begun a process of establishing contacts and ties with the Mayor's Office. At that time it was the administration of Sam Yorty, and, in fact, Willard had become an executive assistant to Sam Yorty and had moved over to the Mayor's Office. He was there with Ethel Bryant, African American woman who was a close confidante of Mayor Sam Yorty. She was from the Pacoima area in the valley.

Farrell: And Richard Jones was the mayor's chief representative in our community in South L.A. Jones was from someplace back East, Ohio or Indiana. But he was a lay leader at Second Baptist Church, so it was interesting that Second Baptist Church with its new pastor in town, Rev. Tom [Thomas] Kilgore, had a person in the Mayor's Office at the same time that Tom Kilgore in his community role as community leader and activist was very, very close to Tom Bradley, and especially as Tom Kilgore in his past as a Baptist preacher and teacher was a confidante of Martin Luther King, Sr. and a mentor and an advisor to Martin Luther King, Jr. So when Martin Luther King, Jr., came to town, Second Baptist Church was always first on the agenda out of that relationship that had been established of King with Kilgore.

Farrell: So in an interesting way, you saw how the existing structure as it was in the process of being modified by Willard Murray moving into the Yorty operation, was still such that in Kilgore, even though he had one of his own members as part of the Yorty administration staff, was playing that role of civic leader, church leader in our community in a traditional way. That still exists for the pastors of the key Baptist churches in this Los Angeles community.

Farrell: Just once again for context, Jimmy Roosevelt had run for mayor and been defeated by Sam Yorty, so that when you saw the people who lined up pro and con Sam Yorty--I mean, I was just coming on the scene--but that traditional community of people who had been making decisions in civil rights activities and Democratic Party activities in the past had generally supported Jimmy Roosevelt, so that Tom Bradley as councilman came up in the context of that movement to bring about change at city hall that just didn't get there was Jimmy Roosevelt. So in a way, as Tom Bradley came on the scene, he inherited that kind of a dynamic base that was rooted in the Roosevelt piece plus the leadership that he brought, Tom Bradley brought to civic affairs, to evolve as the next liberal challenger to this fellow, the conservative Sam Yorty.

Farrell: There were five of us who had the field responsibilities for the Bradley campaign. I was in South L.A.; Victor Ludwig was in kind of the mid-Wilshire/West Side area; Bert Corona was doing the East Side; Dodo Meyers and Valerie, those two ladies were doing the San Fernando Valley, there were two there. And our responsibilities were basically the integrating of the campaign strategy for get out the vote, neighborhood organization, all the stuff that was the responsibility of the campaign apparatus in these several sections of the city. The campaign manager was a fellow by the name of Don Rothenberg, who'd come down from Berkeley, California, to do that work. And the campaign chair was Sam Williams, a confidante of the mayor, African American. Sam Williams died early, heart attack, but African American lawyer.

Greene: You said he was a confidante of Mayor Yorty's?

Farrell: Mayor Bradley's, excuse me, Mayor Bradley's. Right. So that was basically the apparatus and the team. Maury Weiner was involved in all of that, on the executive committee, in essence. So as I had the responsibilities for doing this work in South L.A., it was building on what I had already done in the civil rights community in South L.A., the civil rights mixed labor community in South L.A., the church community in South L.A., and then that network of block clubs and community organizations of South L.A. that was not already part of what these Bradley folks were doing in the Tenth District. Mine was the Eighth District and the northern part of Fifteenth District, about Watts, back in that area.

Greene: I see. And what kind of reception--what's your sense of the reception that came [unclear] in parts of South L.A. where you were working?

Farrell: It was positive, right. There was some challenge in the active clergy community, but relative to the numbers and the influentials that we lined up for Tom Bradley, it wasn't a real match. The challenge for us in South L.A. was to maximize our vote, to turn out what was there. It's the same kind of challenge that exists until today. You can get an okay voter registration, get people excited about a candidate, but ultimately, to get them to turn out to vote is something else. That's the kind of a challenge that we faced first and foremost, that. So it was a matter not so much of the "strategery" of which issues were making it or anything like that. Bottom line was Bradley going for mayor in 1973.

Farrell: You had a sense of the whole excitement of the Black Power Movement. You had the excitement of all the folks who were involved in these patterns of coalition and all these dreams deferred that got caught up in the persona of Tom Bradley and that campaign in, excuse me, 1969. This is the '69 campaign, where all of that stuff was still hot, so that we had the fever, I mean, the potential of doing well. So the challenge was just to organize it and keep it structured and to be part of the operation in keeping things on point and getting things done on time. It was Political Campaigning 101, just organization and maintenance. It really wasn't involved in any kind of strategic discussions of one thing over another. Identify, register folks to vote, identify them, make sure that as you develop a street operation we're able to turn out those folks that we identify and keep the spirits high, and then just move forward and wait till election day.

Greene: Who did voter turnout, do you recall? Like how did that work?

Farrell: The apparatus was still fragmentary. We had the loan of people from labor who came in to do certain specialized functions such as phone banking and the organization of precinct walking, and most certainly the specific function of get out the vote on election day itself. We had people who basically came in to provide the specialized expertise and leadership around that. But the bulk of it was to feed people that we already knew or we had developed into these existing structures, as it were, so that we could basically do the production of the bodies on election day. This was still before the days of significant organization for GOTV or, excuse me, of absentee ballot voting or anything like that, so it was basically organizing for the get-out-the-vote activity on election day.

Greene: And I think you mentioned--we talked a little bit about that the campaign wasn't a success in one sense, but was in another, right? I believe as we talked about it, Bradley lost that first mayoral race, but you were talking about how the framework that got him into office in '73 was put in place during that election.

Farrell: The election defeat was hard for me and many of the people that I was working with, because ours was a function of identifying our numbers and turning our numbers out. The challenge was out in that San Fernando Valley, where the Yorty campaign was actively talking about Black Power, is a radical, and the message was resonating out there. So Dodo and Valerie and others were concentrating their efforts there, and that was basically where the core white vote in the city was, in those numbers in the San Fernando Valley.

Greene: The valley was certainly growing quickly at that time.

Farrell: Yes, it was still growing. And then the thing that kind of hit us in the way that would, in retrospect, mark our organizational demise was then when it broke that Don Rothenberg, the campaign manager, had communist ties. Rothenberg, out of Berkeley, had those kind of ties, and I think that if--to draw an analogy of what you'd find in New York, he would have been one of those guys who met with the Rosenbergs and all that development of the liberal-progressive-communist whatever that was, and the development of the political apparatus that you find in Manhattan, in Harlem, and like that. But that hit us like a thunderbolt, because Sam Yorty was talking about the radicals and Black Nationalists and the Black Power people and the communists, so that--

Greene: Wow. So they were in your campaign--

Farrell: Yes. They were aiming to take that and manipulate that towards the end for a Yorty victory for mayor. Didn't knock out Tom Bradley, though.

Greene: That's interesting, because my sense of Bradley is that he was nothing like that.

Farrell: No. In fact, he was a conservative guy. I mean, there are anecdotes all over the place about getting Tom Bradley to laugh or tell a joke. Tom Bradley was career LAPD [Los Angeles Police Department]. LAPD developed a particular kind of men and leaders. Tom Bradley till then was like Bernard Parks is today.

Greene: Interesting.

Farrell: You see Bernard Parks and you see a guy who's a good-looking man and all the rest of it, but he's not a guy who will come and pat you on the back and smile and laugh and do anything like that. I mean, he's a reserved person. That's the way you get developed in LAPD. You develop as that kind of a person as you grow, and Tom Bradley was on the growth rate until, as the anecdote goes, William Parker, the legendary chief, told Tom Bradley the highest he was going to go was as a lieutenant. And Tom Bradley took his leave of the police department and went to law school. He started to go to law school, left the department and began to practice law, came back in through politics.

Greene: And when you say that the defeat in that particular race was hard for you--

Farrell: Well, remember. We were in a heady community. We were in the part of the community that in many ways was isolated from discussions of the real dynamics of city politics. I mean, come on, man. This is 1969. The music was good, we're wearing our "fros," [Afros] I mean, we were going the way of--we had Carl Stokes, we thought about. We thought about the victories of Dick Hatcher in Gary, Indiana. I mean, we were moving in L.A. So in a way, the images that we were looking at every day were the images of involvement, the registration, the growth, the turnout of our folks. I mean, the Yorty folks in South L.A. just had a difficult time. At best, they were representative. They would show up at events there, public events. But the mood at those events were clearly Bradley turf, clearly Bradley turf, and in a way, that's where the value of me, I believe, came in, to work well for the South Los Angeles faction, because as I said before, we were [Jesse] Unruh people, and Willard had gone over to the Yorty staff. Billy Mills was just kind of like John Lewis in the recent election. "My people are going with Tom Bradley. I'm with Tom Bradley. I'm a fraternity brother of Tom Bradley's." Okay?

Greene: I see.

Farrell: So Billy had one guy in one campaign, another guy in another campaign, so there we went.

Greene: And what came next for you?

Farrell: Boy. But after that, talk about just feeling bad. But as life goes on, a number of the people I met in the Bradley campaign in 1969 came together around the campaign of a congressman out of the Inland Empire who was running for Senate here in California, and that was John Tunney. So as I'd met some of the fellows in '69, I did the same thing for John Tunney as we were looking to the campaign in 1970. And with the assistance of one of my really great mentors, the late John Cope, who was an NAACP activist, I was retained to do work as black community coordinator for John Tunney.

Greene: Tell me a little more about, you said Hope?

Farrell: John Cope, C-o-p-e, right. John was an activist with the NAACP back in the days of NAACP having branches, and the NAACP being the dominant civil rights group in our community that had a membership base, and that's up and down the state, and Roy Wilkins was still holding on, so that that structure and that institution had deep roots in this Los Angeles community. There's still vestiges of it until today. But John took me by the hand to make sure I had a chance to meet people, and that was the community activists who were the men and women who were the officers in leadership of the NAACP branches not only here in L.A., but throughout the state; the white allies of these folks in these different communities, which was also helpful in getting a sense of what those infrastructures were like. I had established ties with clergy leadership locally, and through them I had access to clergy leadership elsewhere, and I played a key role in taking up an opposite number from Northern California so that we could split things up.

Farrell: So I wound up having the major responsibility in the southern part of the state, and the northern part was left to others, L.A. [Los Angeles], Riverside, San Bernardino, down to San Diego, and that was a heady kind of a thing to do, because the difference in campaign activity doing black community campaign work was a matter of scale. The numbers were very high in Los Angeles County, but then as you got outside of Los Angeles County the numbers dropped off, and it was basically having an opportunity to see Negro California just before it evolved into something else. So there were little pockets of people around Santa Ana, San Bernardino, Riverside, down in San Diego itself, and Oceanside, up around Bakersfield, up around Ventura, places where you could almost do an overlay of blacks in census tracts that you just identified by doing good political research, overlay that with NAACP chapters and NAACP membership information gleaned from some of those people, with an overlay of where black newspapers were either located, established, or were drop-off spots for black newspapers from other places in the state, "L.A. Sentinel," "The Observer," "The Precinct Reporter," the overlay with black churches, especially the Protestant churches, as the fellows who are Baptists have four state conventions in California, plus you had the AMEs, you had the CMEs, you have the AME Zions, and their bishops were helpful in this campaign, because most of those men I'd met out of the L.A. experience and most certainly the Bradley campaign, through Brookins and some of the others, Brookins AME, Kilgore Baptist and there were other Baptists that I had known because of just the dynamics of Billy Mills' electoral victory in 1963 and the fact that that clergy leadership played a role in the Billy Mills win in that 1963 race.

Greene: As far as Tunney was concerned, talk a little bit about how the election turned out and then what happened subsequently with Tunney and the relationship with Tunney.

Farrell: Oh, bottom line. Tunney wins the primary. But there are a lot of anecdotes about the Tunney primary, because running for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate was a fellow by the name of George Brown, who was a very, very close friend and supporter of Tom Bradley's. So Tom Bradley supported George Brown, and I was over here on the other side with John Tunney. There were a lot of young guys who got involved in that Tunney campaign, Nelson Rising, Burt Pines, I mean, fellows who later rose to do other things in the party. Chuck Manatt was just getting his start. He became ultimately one of the chairs of the Democratic National Committee. He's still a big-time lawyer in Washington, D.C., but a lot of these relationships were formed and solidified at that time.

Farrell: Many of these people I'd met when I was starting out with Billy Mills and Willard, doing work with the Unruh faction, because that was the faction from which many of these fellows came initially. So there was the campaign hijinks of the CDC supporting George Brown. In essence, I was with the DVC crowd, as it were, supporting John Tunney. So for me it was a matter of I'm over here for a minute, and I'm over there with you in this campaign, I'm back over here with friends and associates who do political work, but that's the way you develop your skills and develop your relationships in the business.

Farrell: I was even able with John Tunney to tap on the resource of a cousin of mine, the late Dr. Edward Mazique in Washington, D.C., and he was very active in D.C. I told him of my role with this congressperson, that it was some person that he should consider giving a hand to, because he was going to be a senator from California. And my cousin Eddie came through, had a party over at his house in D.C., and Eddie was one of those movers and shakers with the National Medical Association. He was a big man as it relates to Morehouse [College]. He was big in the political apparatus in Washington, D.C. itself. He was one of the mentors of [Rev.] Walter [Edward] Fauntroy, then Reverend Fauntroy. He was a physician to the Fauntroy family. So I was able to bring that into play, too, just sort of reach out and try to stretch my influence and build relationships on behalf of the candidates I worked for.

Greene: Did you ever run into obstacles doing that? Were there sort of minefields you had to kind of get around to move in those various circles, that you can recall?

Farrell: For me, no. Why? Because at the time I was young, and when you're young in the business, you take risks. By that I mean, what will people think of me doing these things? I have an opportunity to do something. I'm going to do it. It was the beginning of doors opening up. Each time I stepped someplace, it was stepping someplace where there were no Negro guys moving at that time. Through my mentor, John Cope, I was finding out that a lot of these opportunities that were showing up for me were opportunities that were not there for the men of his generation, so he and other fellows like him opened up doors for me, because it was in that period of flux and change coming out of the sixties into the early seventies, when a lot of this was breaking open, and I was in the right place at the right time to take advantage of it.

Greene: One of the common denominators between the sort of different relationships that you just described is the Democratic Party. Doe this mean that your relationship to the Democratic Party was changing? Were you getting more embedded within the Democratic Party, more active, becoming more active, I guess, within the Democratic Party?

Farrell: It was marginal. I was a campaign operative. The one who was getting more embedded in the Democratic Party was Willard Murray, as I described before. The contests for county committee positions were as vigorous and dynamic as the contests for public elected official, to be able to go down to the [L.A.] County [Democratic] Committee and be a committee member, and then to get on the committees of the county committee, L.A. County Democratic Committee, these were big things. Same thing with the state party, but my role was marginal. At that point I basically was stepping back and just being there with Willard, because once again, each of these things takes time. To develop the relationship and to develop the skills took a lot of time, and I paid for it in my first marriage. I spent so much time away from home that things just went south. It takes time to go and develop relationships with people in San Bernardino. It takes time to go develop relationships with people in San Diego, and I didn't have air money. I had money for gas. Drive a car. That's why my friend John Cope would ride with me on those kinds of things. It was just very, very time consuming. It wasn't as though today you can go and there's a political workshop on how to use computers and things; didn't do that. Everything was a matter of lists. Well, why do you want to go spend that time with those people in Riverside, San Bernardino? They've got the list. What does that mean? That means people to contact, to ask for support, to ask for money, to ask to put up signs. Well, where's the database for that? Well, we weren't necessarily using terms like database. It was all about getting lists.

Farrell: I mean, we just removed from cutting stencils in doing our political work. I mean, these were the days of [IBM] Selectric typewriters and being able to make a whole bunch of carbon copies, and you know an electric typewriter, it's all even. It wasn't depending on the skill of the typist to make sure that you have good labels done. I mean, that was the nature of the time. Things were just slower, and they required more time. It wasn't a time of cell phones. A lot of coins in the pocket and use a public phone, till the beepers came around. I mean, my god. I mean, beep. But it was just that kind of situation, and I don't mean to put that down. This is how you'd learn your craft. You go out, "Oh, how did you do a meeting with Reverend so-and-so?" Based on the fact that Reverend so-and-so in L.A. asked you to call, had four days to get to him, and by the time I got there the best I could do was so-and-so, and then--well, did we get him for our side or not? No, he's supporting George Brown. He's a friend of Tom Bradley's and stuff like that. But okay, so I spent four days trying to work one guy and don't get him, but at the same time I didn't get this status preacher in Riverside, I met a whole bunch of younger guys who were there, who were getting involved for the first time, and they're interested in doing something, and they've heard something about Tunney. So I'm able to get some other people, even though I'm not able to get number one. I mean, when you're kind of tossed into it, you have a place of reference where you're going to go. But if you don't get that, I mean, you've been in organizing situations. What do you do when you can't get [unclear] A? You go find yourself something. I mean, that was the nature of it.

Farrell: So what is it like to then just be here and say, "Oh, my gosh. Where am I going to go this evening? I've got to find someplace." Go find a barbershop. Go find a beauty shop, because maybe they don't have that many brothers getting their hair cut, but wherever you have clusters of black people, there's somebody fixing black women's hair. Where's that? Go. You know, there's got to be some sister in some church who can introduce you, so it was like that. It was like being on the road cold calling.

Greene: Yes, it was shoe leather.

Farrell: Yes, a lot of cold calling. But once again, that's how you develop your craft, and I did that more with the Tunney campaign, in terms of just being able to go out there and do it. By contrast, the Bradley campaign was familiar turf, where you've already had the campaigns, you've already had local victories, you already know where these people are. We know what these organizations are, we know who the players are. But in that statewide situation it was totally different. We were literally going out to do this for the first time, at least for my generation.

Greene: Sure. And still there was no guidebook for how to go about it necessarily.

Farrell: And I remember so clearly, people had guidebooks for doing community organizing, and I remember joking with the late John Cope by saying, "Then we'll modify it. This is how we go out to do Negro community organizing." And we'd laugh about it. But in essence, what we were doing was basically applying those skills of NAACP chapter organization to political organization, and in some ways they were similar, in many ways they were very, very different, because we were talking about an unknown quantity with many of the people. People were welcoming me because I was there with John Cope. They knew nothing of John Tunney. They were willing to take us in because I had a great personality, or because John Cope had known them for years and I'm there with John Cope. Well, they will give this fellow a chance. Well, we thought that we were doing okay, because often in going head to head with George Brown's people, who were the Bradley people, we had a bunch of just losses out there. There were places we were not able to organize well, but that's like anything else. You find out you can't organize here. The returns from the amount of time that you're investing aren't there. You move on someplace else. So it was that kind of skill development. I mean, I wouldn't swap it for anything else, but paid a high price to get that.

Greene: You once mentioned Pat Russell to me.

Farrell: The situation with Pat Russell was more a matter of what happened--well, let me just go into that. Pat Russell was a civic activist over in the Westchester area, and I'd met her during the context of the Bradley campaign. She was a supporter of Tom, and the council president at the time was in the Sixth [Council] District. I don't recall if he died or whatever. Anyway, in the race to replace him, his chief deputy at city hall attempted to succeed his boss, but there was Pat Russell. So it was a matter of me doing some of my organizational work, once again from that base that was on Mills' staff for, in essence, the Bradley candidate to succeed. This gentleman's name was Timberlake, and what I did was basically have the opportunity to come out of the Eighth District to work on part of the campaign in the district adjacent, which was the Sixth District, where Pat Russell was.

Farrell: At the time, the boundary to the Eighth District was Arlington, so west of Arlington, which is now in the Eighth District, was then in the Sixth District. So as I had some experience in working in the first Bradley campaign, I just applied some of that to be helpful to support the election of Pat Russell in the Sixth District. So once again, it was incrementally picking up more skills and developing more relationships to the west of the Eighth District by campaigning there again on behalf of a superb candidate, and she got to be a really good friend by the time I got on the council, but that was to come later.

Greene: And the McGovern [presidential] campaign?

Farrell: It was through a contact on Pat Russell's staff, Curtis Rossiter, who invited me to come over to Pat's office one day to meet a fellow who was then talking about the McGovern campaign for president, and that fellow was a guy named Yancy Martin. Yancy Martin was the Minority Community Director, put together national campaigns. You have your guys for issues and all this other kind of stuff, and then you have someone to reach out to the minority communities. Usually brothers were the first guys in. So initially you have all the minority communities. What you wind up with ultimately is the black community. And to provide some back up to Yancy at a time when he had the whole ball of wax, he touched bases and extended an invitation for me to consider joining the McGovern campaign for president.

Farrell: I didn't know George McGovern, but I was fascinated about the national campaign. I'd have a chance to see what D.C. was like because of the John Tunney victory. John, given the dynamics of the time, took his one brother back, a fellow by the name of Vern Ashby. He was a basketball player, I think, at USC, who had done well and picked up--I don't think he was a lawyer. I think he was an M.B.A. or something like that. But Vern went back to D.C. as the brother on Tunney's staff, coming from California.

Greene: The brother.

Farrell: Yes. Once again, considering the times, I think I had referenced earlier that progress was a function of--it was still the era of the first Negro, the brother who sat by the door. That book of the times, "The Spook Who Sat by the Door"?, that kind of stuff, so that was the way we were beginning to open up access at the staff levels, the professional staff, the core administrative staff and political staff in offices of public elected officials. And having that opportunity to see what was in D.C., I got the sense of, oh, this is where national campaigns are done. Oh, how do you do that? Well, same thing you did over there, but these guys do this all the time, all from up here. Oh, I see how that goes. That was something that was to come later and recognizing what that was about, once I was a council person myself.

Greene: What did you do for the McGovern campaign? What was your role?

Farrell: Oversimplifying, it was backing up Yancy Martin and pretty much doing whatever Frank Mankiewicz, who was the campaign director, asked of him. Mankiewicz was out of California, and we were scuffling from the beginning. I went on organizing trips to Massachusetts, up around Cambridge and Broxton and some places like that. I went to western Pennsylvania, back up Pittsburgh and back in areas like that, and right about that time I got sent back to California by Mankiewicz, because they needed someone from the national office to help to do some of the coordination with the evolving relationship that the McGovern campaign was having with the Peace Movement here. So I came out here to represent the interests of McGovern, and I met Joe Sedita and some of the people who were involved in antiwar activities in that coordinating role, representing the national office and attempting to assess how this might work out for something to benefit the senator's campaign.

Farrell: And as it was early on, as I said before, the 2 percent, it was nip and tuck. It was a hard sell for McGovern. I mean, once again, here I was. This is anti-Humphrey. Where are most of the guys that I know and most of the guys that I relate to? Well, we were Humphrey-ites, because we came out of Democrats for Johnson. Humphrey is going to be the guy. We're out there dealing with the Humphrey piece, and the way we bypassed that whole range of stuff that was taking place within the dynamics of the Democratic Party, where you had the demonstrations in '68 and stuff like that, and Tom Hayden and the rest--in a way, we were kind of isolated from that in South L.A., because we had something to go for. We had seats that we were contesting. We were in the Assembly. We were in the Senate. We had a congressional seat. It was a matter of making the most of those political opportunities. The War on Poverty had begun. The dynamic of change of broad-based community leadership to state as leadership was in process. There was the development of the nonprofits based on the new federal money coming down, and this new War on Poverty apparatus being put in place.

Farrell: The development of the Economic and Youth Opportunities Agency in Los Angeles to deal with the money that was coming back to the community--the big argument and fight at that time was that fellows in Washington, D.C., wanted the money to come straight into "communities of need," and the mayors of cities and governors of states interceded to say, "Hey, not on my watch. You may want to do that, but there's a state role, so we want some of it to come through the state, let the state departments and agencies have a piece of that," and then, of course, the mayors in the big cities in particular wanted to have a piece of that. And then, of course, in big Los Angeles County, a subset of the state, you just can't leave the county out, so they wanted some, too. So we had a kind of a calculus dance that was going on that related to all of the mundane things like education, healthcare, job training, all that usual social-service kind of activity that we now associate with the War on Poverty and the alphabet agencies, and we had people to put in place. I mean, it was competition. "Are you going to have so-and-so get that?" "We're going to get so-and-so to do that," these bargains back and forth.

Farrell: And then the calculus of how does it mix. "Well, so-and-so has a program in South L.A., because they're directly funded from Washington, D.C." Well, that's the intervention of [Congressman Augustus] "Gus" Hawkins. But if it's going to function, it's got to have some county tie-ins. That means somebody's going to be talking with Kenneth Hahn, because Kenny's people are going to be involved in it. Well, if it's going to be in the city, then we've got to deal with people in the council's district. That's where Billy Mills would come in and Tom Bradley would come in, John Gibson would come in in the Fifteenth District, so there was an interesting calculus of just once again ongoing busywork that was as much political and social and administrative and governmental as anything else. But it was like, you know, you're on a merry-go-round, not that it was a merry-go-round just going around in a circular way going nowhere. I'm just talking about the pace of activities. It was fast.

Greene: And you mentioned the 2 percent mark.

Farrell: With McGovern, right. Then McGovern hit it big. The primaries, where was it, New Hampshire, or was it Wisconsin? One of those early primaries. The tie with the students and the antiwar piece broke out, and McGovern was moving. At that point--

Greene: You say moving means his campaign had taken off, was gaining momentum?

Farrell: It was beginning to take off, gaining its momentum. And Gary Hart and Mankiewicz--we just experienced an explosion of new demands that were being put on campaign staff, and once again, I was at a distance out here. I was primarily Yancy Martin's backup guy. So they had to come up with some other things to deal with California, and that's when I moved over out of that slot, but I was still involved in the campaign through about June of '72, and things went sideways for me. That was about the time divorce number one came up. My wife and I separated, and that sort of hit me like a ton of bricks. So there was a period there in the spring of 1972 when I was kind of like nonfunctional. All the campaign stuff, on the road all the time, then to have this happen, so I just sort of stepped back off the scene for a moment.

Greene: It was taking a toll on you.

Farrell: Yes, in mid-spring of '72. So I missed out on the convention of '72. I mean, I was just out of it. I was pretty much just marking time, from mid-spring until the fall of '72, when I got another call from Maury [Maurice] Weiner. The '73 campaign was coming up.

Greene: Tom Bradley?

Farrell: Tom Bradley for mayor. I was available, moved right back into that slot that I had before. So it was a matter of then taking the momentum coming out of the '72 campaign and the [Richard M.] Nixon win, to help reconstitute and hold a political operation in South L.A. for Tom Bradley for mayor. Since I'd done it before and I had this other experience in between, it was an easier thing to do in '73, and then there were more people who were getting involved in the process in 1973, so my role over in the office on Wilshire Boulevard was more as an administrative coordinator of stuff that was going on in South L.A., even though I still had a traditional function that I carried out in basically being that political, organizational representative of the campaign in the southern part of the city. And then in 1973, we won.

Greene: How did that come about? Tell me a little bit about what the campaign was like, if you can recall.

Farrell: The second campaign? As before, in South L.A. we were not focusing on issues. Ours was a matter of just organizing, dealing with the voter registration, the integration of labor and other people who had technical skills to support the apparatus, and then just sitting on top of that bureaucratic process and gearing up for GOTV. So in a way, the second campaign was more of a bureaucratic job than it was the first time, because I had less to do in going out, because, remember, from 1969 straight on through to 1973, there are exciting campaigns each year. Odd-numbered years we were dealing with the local races, and even-number years it was congressional races, Assembly, Senate, and presidential. So it was just a matter of refining skills, building skills, reinforcing relationships, seeing the development of some folks that I had brought into the process, strengthening relationships with people who in other capacities were leaders of nonprofit groups that were service providers in the community, of course not doing anything political, but we would have conversations about public policy and issues.

Greene: With policy and issues.

Farrell: Yes. But that meant basically the same thing. Guys were funded. How are we going to do things in this community? Well, how do we make things happen? Once again, the variation on the theme was that in going to places where, as I described earlier, it wasn't a matter of lists of people to meet. It was a matter of being involved in the identification of beneficiaries and then being part of operations that either contacted those beneficiaries, or attempted to influence those beneficiaries, where the nuance came in, or you're not going down to Riverside, California. You're going to deal with ANC Mothers Anonymous, which is a group of welfare mothers who are organized, and they're a subset of the Welfare Rights Organization, and this is where those folks tend to organize and meet, and how do we get in to meet some of those people so that we could talk to them and educate them about the importance of a Bradley victory, etc., etc., etc. "And by the way, what do we have to do to make sure that you guys turn out all you've got? And what can we do to help you make sure you understand how much you've got? And by that I mean, are you registered? Given the nature of the times, are all the adults in your household or wherever you're living, all of them registered? You have any children eighteen or over? You got any grand--whatever you've got, how many can you turn out?"

Farrell: "Well, why is it important that I've got to turn out anybody?" Well, you know, [unclear] this way. "I need to be able in this precinct to hit a number that looks like this. What can I do to help you inform people and then turn people out at this particular level? I'm a friend. You know we're going to be at city hall. We're going to be here for folks. Understand, here's what the Bradley principles and agenda is all about. How do we make it work?" which is another off-the-recording discussion about the mechanics of campaign effectiveness, which is another way of dealing with it. I mean, early on you'd ask people for their loyalty, just straight ahead. "What can I do for you?" And implicit in that promise is, access in case you need something. Sometimes people want something. "What can I do to deal with what you want, and then how do I do that?"

Farrell: Today the rules of campaign finance and things of that type have done away with many of those kinds of practices that were open. Things are done differently within the context of law and administrative procedure. But the commitment me to you, you to me, was the same thing. It was just, "I got this, I want that." Make a note, get that. "I'll take care of that." [claps] "How are you going to show me that you've done this?" "Well, what I'm going to do is I'm going to make sure that you see a summary of the registrations." "Good." "I'm going to tell you how I'm gearing up for GOTV, and I'm going to talk to you about our plan of getting these folks to the polling place, which is located over there." Getting into that kind of minutia of how people are going to be putting things together in the context of the fact that I'm dealing with the Welfare Rights Organization, and these people are recipients, and these people are social workers, and these people are public employees who are administrators with their own kind of union, and how do we all dance in this together so that in this part of town, in terms of people who are registered to vote, our production numbers are up, and I can put something up on the board that I can show numbers that in South L.A. will give us the sense of where that vote's going to be.

Farrell: So it was a matter of going through this kind of stuff. Once again, much simpler today, computer databases, printouts, stuff like that. But at the time it was a matter of you've got a pencil and you've got a pad, and you're talking to someone and you remember things and handshakes. So I was still basically doing that work, refining my craft that I had learned in that way for Tom Bradley, and fortunately in 1973 it was part of something that won. And the effort of the Yorty people to sort of project things as being black folks and all that kind of stuff, no one was buying that anymore, so we won. We won a big victory.

Greene: Wow. Okay. So that translates into a position in the Bradley administration for you.

Farrell: Right. South Los Angeles Coordinator.

Greene: What kinds of things did you do in that position, and what kind of things more importantly did you sort of catch wind of in that position?

Farrell: Well, the important thing was that the Bradley administration, as you know, was perhaps the most open kind of administration the had ever seen. Tom Bradley had town hall meetings that were really town hall meetings. He had meetings at city hall where he would just be sitting there and people could literally walk in and talk with him. The idea was to develop a sense of policy, to serve all the people of L.A. and in essence, to oversimplify, it was taking the field operation that was in the campaign and integrating that into the administration of the Mayor's Office. So basically what I did in the evolution of this administrative assistant position was bring to bear in this new administration, this new bureaucratic structure, what I'd been doing on the streets.

Farrell: In essence, it's an early example of the "perpetual campaign." You know, the campaigns never end? Well, what happened? Where you simply go from your campaign--the campaign stops and you roll over people in the way you're doing things from winning the campaign to running the administration. So what's different in the way that I talk to the same people I was campaigning with? "We're now in. What may I do to be of assistance to you out of the Mayor's Office? Here's the way the mayor is going to be developing some policies to deal with anti-poverty programs in Los Angeles. Talk to me about how you all in the Welfare Rights Organization see that policy from your point of view. This is the way it's going to work. What do you think of it? How can we make it more effective for you?"

Farrell: Well, the guys who were the social workers and some of those union guys, they have a way of expressing their concerns, the administrators the same thing. Ultimately, [snaps fingers] "Is my program going to get funded? And if my program is going to be funded, at what level is it going to be funded? You know, I used a lot of people in this campaign, and we'd really like to be able to expand on what we're doing to do something else to involve young people in programs like this, so is there a way that we may be able to build on what we're already doing in terms of providing services to our peers, to include young people?" "There's something we can do as it relates to care for the members of our organization who are working now as a result of the job training that they had before, and how do we work that into the kind of services that our organization provides, or is there a way that I can get a grant? If I can't get it directly, can I be a subsidiary of somebody else who has been funded to do this kind of technical, specialized work," where we have the Ph.D.'s and the E.D.D.'s working, and what we do is we give them some infrastructure, and we help them with their outreach.

Farrell: So it was the integration of the practical political piece into the requirements of the bureaucracy, driven by the city charter, driven by state law, all these other kinds of programs, to deliver in the name of the Bradley administration to people who were in need and who were our supporters.

Greene: What's your sense of the priorities that emerged in the first Bradley administration? Do you recall?

Farrell: From my perspective based on what I was doing was it was a matter of keeping the faith, be back in touch with people who supported us and ask for their input and their advice, so go out and listen, bring the information back to city hall, figure out what we could do to help people. So for this person it's a letter of recommendation. For that person, these folks want to be involved in getting a particular program funded. Take that information and bring it back to our central operation of the administrative coordinators and staff, and pass it on off to the other people who were departmental reps, departmental liaison executive assistants to work that stuff out, and then we'd meet as an executive committee to sort this kind of activity out so we can, in essence, have an administration that you literally see being organized and put in place as we worked day by day.

Farrell: It was a deputy mayor, assistant mayor who was in charge of that operation, Manuel Aragon, and there were a variety of other people in there to help facilitate to move that along. That was basically how that piece was put together, and it evolved after that. By the second year, '74, it was beginning to become more bureaucratic and so forth and so on. But there was a moment when it was just in a way magical and political in the fact that you could deliver [snaps fingers] like that. But I think that's always the opportunity you have in new situations. Then when you get down to process and performance and procedures, a lot of that gets lost. It was the personal popularity and the prestige and the way that Tom Bradley carried himself that carried on for those five terms that Tom was there, but it was set in that first election win, the way that the operation was put in place and the way it began to function.

Greene: Who were some of the other people that you remember that were part of the administration that you recall having played important roles or significant roles in the way things [unclear]?

Farrell: I'll have to get you the book out of the office over at CAAPEI, because I still have my administrative assistant books.

Greene: Is that right?

Farrell: Yes. Loose-leaf binders by the day, phone calls and notes that I'd love to just sort of share with you, because as I've made some of the statements, it's a resource to go to now to see, oh, when I referenced the fact that we were talking to people about how we could make this administrative stuff work, here's a list of names that are a direct carryover from the work I did doing the political work to the work I did as administrative assistant, talking to some of the same people and applying the obligations of the different organizational structures. Here's a campaign organization focusing on winning a seat. Here's an administrative structure which is part of the bureaucracy of the Mayor's Office now in the process of delivering goods and services to you, the constituents.

Greene: How long did you stay onboard with the Bradley administration?

Farrell: Just about a year, because in 1974 Billy Mills was appointed Superior Court judge, and there was a vacancy, and there was a special election to fill the vacancy, and I ran in that special election, and I prevailed. So I completed the uncompleted term of Billy Mills, which ended in 1975, and in '75 I ran for my first full four-year term.

Greene: Okay. So I have a couple of sets of questions and then we'll leave it off there. One question is about what it was like to be back--well, what it was like to move from Bradley's office to the council when you were finishing out Billy Mills' term.

Farrell: To move downstairs from the twenty-second floor in city hall to the, was it second floor or third floor at the time? I think it was the third floor. Different place to get off the elevator. Initially, I kept the Mills' staff, because I'd worked with the people before. I knew the ladies and men there, so the initial staff remained the same. The only thing that changed was who was behind the desk; easy transition.

Greene: So the transition was easy. You kept some of the same staff. Were there particular issues or things that you had to kind of contend with, that you sort of had to come in in the middle and kind of pick up?

Farrell: Well, that's the nature of being on the city council. The day you're elected, the day you're sworn in and take your seat, is the day that you start voting. But it's really hard to make a bad decision on the L.A. City Council, and I put that in the context of decision making as a function of looking at choices based on information that is quantified and put before you by people who can explain the quantification and discuss the options. The staff supports for decision making were then and are now extraordinary at L.A. City Hall. The way the bureaucracy functions, the pattern of administration and organization, with material coming from the department, from the City Administrative Officer, from the city council's own legislative analyst, plus people who are pro or con, or have insights on any particular issue make it such that--and I want to just speak to an extreme, for example--that if you're like the late Gilbert Lindsay, and you're a savvy guy, street savvy, and you know politics well, you just need to have your advisors talk to you about what your options are. Then you look to your key staff people and say, "Now, what do you think we ought to do?" Because the options are laid out. In a way, if I make it look as though sitting in the seat can be oversimplified as making the best choices, in essence that's it.

Farrell: Well, how do you know if you're making the right choices? Well, whether you sit down as Gilbert Lindsay would do and call in several experts to talk to him about the issue--the CAO [City Administrator's Office] is going to lay it out this way. The department guy is always going to be talking about the department stuff. The CAO's dealing with the budget and making sure that things are always in place for the benefit of the city. CAO talks to you about what's best for the city. The department guys are going to talk about what's best for the department. The legislative analyst is going to talk to you as a council person, what's best for the council and what's best for you. Your own people are there to talk to you about what's the best for you. The labor guys are there to talk to you about what's best for the employees. The affected parties are there with their lobbyists to tell you about what's best for them. And then you choose. Sounds like it's hard to choose, but it's not. And everybody understands.

Greene: Mediating [unclear]?

Farrell: No, not mediating, choosing. Right. If I'm the council person, why should I mediate? The CAO has that person's responsibility on behalf of the whole city and as the city's administrator, in essence, the city manager, even though under our city charter the CAO does not manage. It's an advisor to the mayor and the city council. You know where the guy's coming from. You generally know that when people represent departments, they're there to cover the asses of the people in the department and ask you, "Council, what do you want?" Especially in your own district, "What do you want?" Whether the rest of the department wants it or not, or whether it's in the city's interest or not, they would like to know what you want. And just because they want to know doesn't mean that they're going to give you anything. They just like to know what you want, because based on the pattern of decisions that you make, they begin to get a profile of you. "What kind of a person is this? What does he stand for? What does that person really want? Personal choice? Constituency issues? City-wide issues? Fiscally conservative? Socially active?"

Farrell: These things come out of as much what you say in your broad statements about--today people talk about policy. Well, before people talked in terms of policy, they talked about what they talked about, and policy got inferred to a certain extent. "Why do I want to lay something out as policy?" one might say in the early 1970s. "I start talking about policy, you know what I'm thinking about. You know what's on my mind. I don't necessarily want you to know that." But it comes out anyway. What are Bob Farrell's policy kinds of things? I ask the question, "Where's the black piece? How many black people do you have in your department? Contract--how many black people are going to get those contracts? Contractor--how many black people have you got working for you? Union guy--how many black people in your union? Legislative analyst--you know, I'm concerned, given my constituency. Where are things for black people? We tend not to have things at the same level of other people in other parts of the city. How do I get that?"

Farrell: So after a while you pose those kinds of questions, and what tends to happen is that the representatives of these several interests, who are very, very savvy people, they listen very well. Lo and behold, things show up pretty much the way people perceive your interests. "Oh, my gosh, look at this. The CAO has some African Americans on staff who meet with council people. Isn't that something? Oh, I thought they were just white guys wearing blue suits or gray suits or brown suits, these kind of guys who can just sort of fade into the background. Nothing to make them stand out, just kind of very competent and very professional." "Oh, look at the lobbyists. Who's that person with the lobbyist? Is this that black lady--?" "Oh, yes, she has all these degrees and all these licenses." "So queer that you would bring her here. Tell me, my dear lady, what's your relationship to these folks? Oh, they've just retained you. Oh, I think that's great." "What does that mean?" "It means a guy gets an office a little faster." "Really? Would something as simple as that get someone a little bit more access to your office, Bob Farrell?" "Yes." "Why?" "It's important that I see people who look like me and my constituents involved in the dynamics of city business."

Greene: Okay, I have two questions about that. One is, how [unclear]?

Farrell: Now, I mean, you see I'm making a point, but in essence, it's the way we conducted our work.

Greene: Sure. And I'm trying to figure out--well, my first question is, what would you say was the big difference between how you went about things when you occupied that office, and your sense of how Billy Mills went about things, or what might have been important to him as he listened to the various sides of issues?

Farrell: I'd like to suggest that they were generally the same, but Billy Mills was a lawyer by training. He was a more established man than I was. He was an active Mason, solid family life, really focused on family values, really enjoyed getting out to work with people in the block clubs and the neighborhood associations. But here I was as a single guy, you just had a different kind of a dynamic. I think that I had an edge, given the times, that was different from my predecessor. I mean, I enjoyed my "Fro" [Afro] and my beard. I mean, it was a bit of a generational piece that was there.

Greene: Sure.

Farrell: But I like to say that the kinds of policy that I helped to put in place during Billy Mills' administration were things that I just continued during the time I was in office, because they were basically good for the community, paying attention to the people in neighborhood associations and block clubs; paying attention to clergy's leadership; paying attention to the special needs of the nonprofits in the community, who were funded in whole or in part by War on Poverty funds or foundations, agencies of that type; pushing to make sure that we had our people represented in the ranks of the civil service employees; concerned about the personnel functions at city hall; concerned that there be more of a business presence in South L.A., and that that business presence had people in it who reflected the makeup of the district. Those kinds of things pretty much were laid out by Billy Mills, and those were the kinds of things I tended to have as core office values at the time that I was on the council.

Farrell: The difference was in the personalities and how things got affected. Billy Mills was a person that everyone liked. He's a very, very agreeable kind of a guy. He had personality and a great big smile and a great laugh. I wasn't necessarily like that. In some ways I was a more quiet and reserved person, and then I'd get on my issues and I'd get very passionate about it, and as some might say, at times I wore race on my sleeve, because those were the times, and that's what I did, and at times it was awkward for that, but that's the way that one went.

Greene: That's the way it was.

Farrell: Yes, that's the way it was. Well, what's awkward? For example, in having conversations with people about Bond Council on something that's very important for the City of Los Angeles, and the purpose of some of those sessions was to talk about how we would deal with these financial challenges, and for me it was a matter of tracking and following that, and when my time would come for conversation, I often would skip the policy considerations to ask the question, "Nobody black on your team? Do you have blacks on the team?" and just take the discussion someplace else. And I realize that--at the time I realized, and I realize it now, that often my colleagues would have their moment, because Bob Farrell's going to get into that issue. Well, after a while, people get to know what my issues are, and one of my council colleagues who became the council president, John Ferraro, was very, very helpful in mentoring me in how to handle things like that so guys won't just view me as being some kind of a kook or some kind of a racist in expressing those concerns. "Bob, you don't have to give it to them like that. I mean, when the guys come, there are other ways to do it. Here's a way to think about doing so-and-do, such-and-such." "Thank you, John."

Farrell: And I found that more often than not, the suggestions that came from John Ferraro were very, very helpful in me attaining some of the ends. But that first opening, the opening round was basically like that. "Understand where I am. Do not come to me with these kinds of issues. I'm always available for these kinds of issues. And understand where the danger points are going to be with me. I've got problems with the administration of LAPD. I've got problems with the fact that the dope is down on the streets. I've got problems that there are guns moving in South L.A., and you guys say that you can't deal with them, but yet we have some of these personnel situations, personal situations come up with law-enforcement officers hassling brothers and sisters on the street, and you can't deal with the dope, and you can't deal with the guns. Dope doesn't grow in South L.A. The guns don't grow on trees. And you can't deal with that?" "Yes, we've got problems," and we're back and forth. "It doesn't mean I don't get along with Daryl Gates, but I have my problems. I've got problems with the guys who represent police and intelligence and stuff like that and it doesn't happen."

Farrell: "I have problems with the administrators when, for example, in dealing with the CAO and they talk about, 'Well, we have citywide standards, and we have just this much money, and what we're going to do is we're going to pave fifteen miles of streets in the city this year.' And I say, I notice downtown in Gil Lindsay's district you've already paved ten miles, so am I going to get any? 'No.' [unclear] aren't going to get any? 'Well, you have to consider, downtown we have the business district and this.' How am I going to get mine? 'Well, you have to bring in a motion to get some additional money.' I don't believe that's fair." Well, okay, that's behind closed doors. And then after a while, given some insights from my friend Ferraro and some others, next time the gentleman comes to talk about things, "I want to talk to you." "Excuse me, councilman?" "I want to talk to you. And I'm not going to vote for any of that." "What do you mean you're not going to vote for any?" "You know, when you show me that I'm going to specifically have things show up in my district, I'll vote for them. In the meantime, I will not vote. And by the way, as you're here talking to me about the file, give me the file." "Excuse me, councilman?" "Give me the file."

Farrell: There's only one official file for doing city business, and one of things that's a perk of a councilman is, "I'd like to have the file." "Well, councilman, here's a report." "No, I want the file." The file is a legal document with the blue back and papers all attached to it, and usually you deal with abstracts or you'll deal with a portion of a file, but the file can be kind of bulky. "Just leave it with me. I'll be back in touch with you." And then what you do is you put the file in a drawer. He can't move without that file. The file is required for him to move his product. "Why are you holding the file?"

Greene: So you can effectively sit on it.

Farrell: "I don't have to talk to anybody. You're not an elected official. I don't have to say anything to you. Conversation's over." Basically, the rule is that if a councilmember has a file and there's a problem, people involved have to go to the president of the city council, because the council can demand that files be produced, because you can't hold up the work of the city and like that. But then with the support of your president, and if you don't abuse the privilege, your president will often say to a department head, "I just don't understand why you have a problem with Councilman Farrell. What is it that is his problem? He's obviously doing some kind of council--you see, he and his staff must be reviewing the file for some reason. Can you understand what his reasons are?" Which is a thing that has people understand how and why the council functions the way it does. These guys are fifteen princes in their districts. This system that has the council evolving as an entity with its own sense of purpose and its own rules and its own ways of doing things, its own customs--because at the time, the city council was the governing body of the city. The charter has been changed so that the mayor is now the CEO of the city, but at the time, the council was the governing body of the city. We ran it.

Farrell: Tom Bradley was sufficiently cool with the members of the council, because he had come from the council, plus he had relationships that Tom Bradley always had his eight or nine votes or ten votes for what he needed, okay? But I'm just talking about a process of growth and development and how I developed some political insights and some skills that I believe were helpful for me and my constituents, and this isn't the stuff you necessarily find with a press release or a headline or a reference in the "L.A. Times" or anything like that, but it's a part of understanding how things get done, especially when you see bureaucrats lever their superior knowledge and expertise around numbers, budget figures, things of that type, and somehow you can feel that. Either your council is going to have to really stretch to keep up with you, or if you are a player as a general manager, you can really mess it up for a moment by projecting or not even referencing things that are implicit in the numbers that undergird the program pieces that you put forward, so that for a minute, part of what I was able to do, and my colleague David Cunningham in like manner, was to keep the guys off balance, because it was something that the bureaucrats at the time simply weren't prepared to handle. Those men at that time were not used to having guys like us talk to them that way.

Farrell: Gilbert Lindsay would do it differently. Gilbert Lindsay just closed the door and--I've told you the stories about Gil Lindsay, the former janitor who made it to the top. He basically talked to the guys and said, "Hey, this is what I want, and if you don't give it to me, I ain't going to vote for it." I mean, Gil was just straightforward like that. Dave and I tended to cover ours in different ways. We were going to the same ends, but we presented differently. "O'Melveny & Meyers is our Bond Council." "Why?" "Well, they've always been our Bond Council," this, that, the other. "No black guys." "Excuse me?" "No black guys." This ranking department guy is in a bind. What is he supposed to say? "What's this about no black guys? What is he talking about?" O'Melveny's guys look at him. Is this man crazy? What's he talking about? [whispers] No [unclear], you going to hire somebody.

Farrell: "Councilman, the guys say that they don't have any partners on staff over there." "Okay, then how do we get them?" "What, you mean we say to them that they should get partners?" "No, I'm just saying this is the city doing business. How do we get some?" "Of course, you've talked to someone else, a legislative analyst or someone who just helps you understand what the language means. 'Go get them' doesn't mean that they have to be on your staff. Sometimes when you have specialized knowledge and you need someone who has some other kind of skills, you bring them in as subcontractors, you do joint ventures. I mean, here's another whole range of things to be applied to the way that you're thinking, Bob Farrell." "Oh, great. Good. Then let's share with them. [unclear] do a joint venture on this, subcontract that." Not that we would say that. We'd just have our concern, and as the staff would get to understand where you're coming from, they would share with the other guys. "You know, when the time comes to go in to see Bob Farrell, this is what you ought to do." "He doesn't want to see this?" "No." "Bob Farrell play golf?" "No." "Do tennis?" "No." "What does he do?" "He does this South L.A. thing." And then, "That's all he does?" "Mm-hmm, that's just what he does. And he goes around to all these churches." "That all he does?" "Yeah, that's what he does."

Farrell: So, you see, sometimes when guys go down to city hall to work the council, they have this group go over here, "This is for this councilman, and this is here for this councilman, this is here for this councilman." I mean, right. And as the fellows are putting together the strategies, advising council, advising clients on how to best deal with council, they'll say, "You know, when you go to Councilman X, you do this. You go to Councilman Y, you do that." Once again, tongue in cheek, "The way you really impress Councilman Gilbert Lindsay is have a very attractive young woman as part of your team." Because why? Gil Lindsay just loves to say, "Hello, sweet. I just love good-looking women." And you know, Gil Lindsay was elected when he was sixty-nine or something like that, so you know it's just preference, right, charm, just like that. But I'm not the guy to charm. I'm the one who just, "You got a bean counter on race? That's the person to send over here to see to Bob Farrell." That kind of stuff. But it was heady, because it was an opportunity to find out just where the power lay in the use of the office, and there's no one to tell you what that is, because each of us who were the honorables has such a different range of options and concerns that it's how you choose to use the seat.

Farrell: The point is that the constraint on you is your own sense of vision and your own common sense, because ultimately these guys are not going to say no. [unclear] tell you no and risk a no vote? I mean, that's just not done. Yes, they can do it, but they won't do that in a straight conversation with you. They go share that with their consultants, and some other things are put together. Like the strategy right now on the elephants out at the zoo. Tom LaBonge wants this, this other guy, Cardenas, says, "I'm concerned about the well-being of the animals," and somehow there's a council thing that says, "Well, look. We're not going to kill it." "We've got a financial problem in the city. Let's just put it off for six months. We'll work out something." But you've got two polarized views and the other guys, led probably by the president of the city council, worked out a solution that got everybody feeling okay. "It wasn't killed, so we're going to come back and deal with it." "I didn't [unclear] it all this time, but we've got this financial problem, where we're going to deal with the animal so everybody comes out okay."

Farrell: But once again, that's another kind of a management function that the presidents of the city council have to exercise on behalf of their members. It was in the period '73 to '75 that I really got to understand what the potentials are for any person, in any seat I'd like to assert, as an honorable, in terms of being able to use that pulpit to drive for issues of a much broader concern. The risk is in are you willing to make the requests? Are you willing to articulate it? Are you willing to put yourself in a place where at some point someone is going to tell you no? I guess it goes back to, well, hey, if you think you're a charming fellow and there's the good-looking girl standing over there, are you going to go over and say hello, or are you going to say, "Oh, I don't think I'm going to go over there, because all she's going to do is say no to me." It's going to be a function of, well, if you don't ask, you will never know. "Well, I don't know. I mean, I'm not dressed. I'm not tall enough," whatever, "I don't have a letter shirt, a letter jacket," like high school letter jacket or college--

Greene: Oh, yes, the varsity.

Farrell: "I don't have any of that, so I just know that she's going to turn me down." Hey, you ask the question. The guys on the other side are obliged to respond to you. They cannot shine you on. That's heady, because if you handle it well, you can just do all kinds of interesting things like for me getting off into Third World stuff, anti-apartheid stuff. Keep the South African Consulate out of Los Angeles. What does that have to do with what I do on the city council? The opportunity to address it, and I said it, and my colleagues said, "Well, that's Bobby." As each time we do things on the council, from time to time the other council members have their particular things they want to talk about. And besides, on the issues that I was speaking up on, it was educating my council colleagues, and the bottom line was most of them tended to support me. They wouldn't talk about it themselves, but it was okay for me to speak about it, and they were not about to shut me up. That kind of a thing. Okay.[End of interview]

1.9. Session 9 (January 13, 2009)

Greene: This is Sean Greene interviewing Mr. Robert Farrell on January 13th [2009] at his home. Good afternoon, Mr. Farrell.

Farrell: Good afternoon.

Greene: I wanted to pick up where we left off some weeks ago. You were talking a lot about the mechanics of some of the campaigns with which you were involved, and you had begun to talk about your experiences as, first, a staffer for Councilman Mills and then subsequently as you came into your role as city councilman in your own right. I wanted to pick up there, because you mentioned in passing a couple of issues that were front and center for you during that time. One was this notion of racial equity and inclusion in things that were coming through city hall. You mentioned asking repeatedly about representation of black folks, whether it was in contracts, whether it was in sort of piece-of-the-pie type discussions, and you also mentioned later involvement in some things about South Africa and apartheid. So I wondered, what were some of your pet issues in the time that you were on the city council, and could you talk about some of the ways they came up and how you kind of advocated around them?

Farrell: Okay. And early on I have to acknowledge my colleague at the time, David Cunningham in Tenth District, the successor to [Mayor] Tom Bradley on the city council, for helping me to get some insights into our process. Now, keep in mind that in municipal government you don't have your agenda as well laid out as though one were a member of the legislature, where you have an agenda, you have ten goals that you see yourself seeking to address, and then that winds up being proposed legislation, and then if you're fortunate to have legislation passed with your name on it. The moment that you're elected and seated, at the time as the council was at that moment the governing body of the municipal corporation, the City of Los Angeles, you were involved in decision making on the whole budget. Everything that was involved in city business was part of your domain, all of it.

Farrell: That's what you voted on every day, because at the time the council met five days a week, Monday through Friday, except for holidays. That was the L.A. tradition. So it was a matter of having an idea of what you would like to accomplish, pretty much following the lead of the Bradley administration and then taking advantage of those files as they would move across the desk, as they were before the city council, to see what might be there of benefit to you and your constituency and to the opportunity you would have in developing plans or looking to the futures of those municipal departments of the City of Los Angeles, how you might influence those plans and those proposals to incorporate and reflect some of the things that were your concern. Same thing that pretty much goes on today.

Greene: For example?

Farrell: For example, as I represented the Eighth District, which was known as the predominantly black constituency in the City of L.A., my issue in those days happened to be, how do we make things equitable? I want to have for the Eighth District what people have in other districts. I'd like to see the same standards and quality of service in my district as you would find in any other part of the city. And the realities are that department by department, there are disparities. If you look at the organization of the city, administrative organization does not follow lines of council district boundaries. There are administrative subdivisions of Rec[reation] and Parks, for example, that deal with the southern part of the city. In Street Maintenance and Refuse Collection you might have a couple or maybe three districts in the southern part of the city. The Police department you have their divisions, and in the Eighth District there were three divisions that overlapped the political constituency.

Farrell: So it was a constant juggling to find out what was available and what was being provided and how you could get at least a sense of equity or parity or in some instances go beyond, because you had a greater need than some other parts of the city. That showed up particularly in the days of the anti-poverty programs, where you had designated constituencies identified in the federal legislation, and by the time it comes to city hall, almost by definition the bulk of it is going to South and East L.A. [Los Angeles]. But then there, of course, was the reality of L.A. politics. There are people in need in all fifteen districts, so how do we make sure that people of need in all fifteen districts get something, even though a large share, a larger share goes to South and East L.A.? And that was a very interesting dance.

Greene: Surely some of the things that came before you spoke to you more, or you felt were more relevant to your constituency, right? What were examples of some of those types of things? You mentioned the War on Poverty as one thing. What were some others?

Farrell: Yes. Basic issues of city employment. There were practices that were part of the city personnel process that allowed for distinctions in where people worked, how people could get certain kinds of jobs and rise in the bureaucracy. The driving force there was, of course, Mayor Tom Bradley and getting to the place where the issue of how one becomes a general manager became quite contentious, because the way the civil service rules were, lists were prepared, people take tests, you draw from the top of the list. And then sometimes lists would no longer be used. They would be dated and you'd come up with another test. And some of us believed that there were patterns where African American men and women would be in strong position on a list, where the lists would be dismissed and tests given. If an African American was at the top of the list, top of the list didn't mean you were going to get a job. It meant that the job was going to be there to be offered when there was an opening. Sometimes openings didn't happen.

Farrell: You'd take a test for a designated position and in the next go round, rather than people fill their vacancies from an existing list that was established around the criteria of a specific position, you'd find that changing needs have caused the positions to be redefined and restructured, so we have to have a test for that. And that raises the question of, are you going to draw from the old list? No, I'm going to create a new list. Well, what about the guys at the top? Well, no, everybody--we don't have that list anymore. New list. And sometimes would feel that they were arbitrary in that.

Farrell: Ultimately, Tom Bradley got things to the place where we brought about a change, and I'm very pleased that I was a supporter of the council for this, where the mayor would be given a choice of the top three persons from which the mayor would select a top manager, which made it possible for a lot of African American men and women to rise in the bureaucracy, men and women who had a lot of years of experience and expertise that certainly couldn't make it through the examination process. Examination process--taking a test, skill or whatever, written, and then the dreaded oral exam, whatever oral exam means. So given the fact that these were civil service rules, you had to dance with that. But it was just a good feeling to be at the end of that process, when Tom Bradley ultimately did have the situation where the general manager was a person who made it through a process which gave the mayor a choice of three, and then the mayor made the selection in the best interest of the people of L.A., which meant more African Americans and Latinos rose to the top. You had more women being able to make it up to the top tier.

Greene: Partly because the process had changed, but also partly because the people that were put in place because the process changed were folks that were sensitive to that? Is that what you're implying?

Farrell: No. We're talking about political leadership at city hall at the mayor's level. At the general manger's level, it was the call of the mayor or the mayor's commissioners. The mayor chose the commissioners. Commissioners always speak with the mayor's staff on matters of departmental hierarchy and leadership and things of that type, so it was a rather active process in the political management of the City of L.A.'s bureaucratic hierarchy. A lot of pressures, too, came out of that. But the point was, that's the way it worked. Nowadays, it's as though no big deal, but some of these things were hard fought back in the day.

Greene: Interesting. You mentioned David Cunningham. Is he someone that you often worked closely with?

Farrell: We were seatmates. Right. He was the first of the Bradley council people; I was the second.

Greene: Got it. Okay. Who were some of the other folks, say, that were on the council with whom you collaborated often or at decisive moments around things for your district?

Farrell: Pat Russell, another one of the Bradley council persons, who ultimately became a president of the council, and then on my own, striking up a good relationship with John Ferraro, who was a seatmate. Cunningham on one side, Ferraro on the other side.

Greene: Tell me a little about each of them and your working relationship with each of them that you can recall. You could begin with Pat Russell or David Cunningham, either.

Farrell: Well, with David, because we're age peers, and as the Bradley election provided the opportunity for him in the Tenth District to be Tom's successor, the opportunity was presented for me to be Tom's successor in a way in the Eighth District, even though it was a Billy Mills' seat. As I told you in the past, the political dynamic in the Tenth District was more akin to the kind of liberal Democratic politics that Tom Bradley was noted for, the area of his great strength. The Eighth District was out of that [Jesse] Unruh tradition, and yet from that base I was able to win, given my proclivities to the Bradley kind of agenda, as it were. So there was Pat Russell. Then, of course, as I said, I developed a relationship with John Ferraro, my seatmate.

Farrell: Ferraro because USC [University of Southern California] was his pride and joy. John as an undergraduate was an all-America lineman from USC. I'd met him before he was a councilman, when he was a police commissioner, just prior to and at the time of the Watts riots. I don't know if I had mentioned this before, but as the days of that activity, that rebellion activity took place, there were a couple of meetings, and I happened to be present at two of them representing Billy Mills. One was in the office of [Police] Chief Parker with some of the council persons, commissioners and others, I think on day two. Then there was another meeting over in the state building which was across the street from city hall and across the street from the "L.A. Times,"--it's a big vacant lot now--where a delegation of City of L.A. people went to see then Lieutenant Governor Glen Anderson, because Governor Pat Brown was out of the country. I was in that meeting. I'm sure I took notes and they're somewhere around, because I took notes on just about everything. You've seen my style of writing, a little summary of who was there plus some of the comments.

Farrell: It was the first time that I had seen the man in political authority, significant political authority, be uncertain in his actions. That was when the request was being made of Glen Anderson to provide state assistance by bringing in the National Guard, and he balked. He chose not to do that, because the governor was out of the state. I was like, my god, he is the acting governor. Why wouldn't he call out the Guard? Because in hindsight, some believe that physical damage to the city and a certain level of loss of life could have been reduced if the state had acted in a more rapid manner, because there was a period there of about four days, three, four, five days with things just wide open. The police basically had pulled back, and it was just delay, and this was the time some believe when people began to roam around and spread out some of the damage and destruction.

Farrell: With the absence of law enforcement there was also the absence of the firefighters, because what you needed was law enforcement and firefighters to move together, firefighters going out with police protection to fight the fires, because with the sniping that was going on, people were just shooting at authority figures in uniform. So I'd met John Ferraro in that particular context. John was also a friend with some of the county officials, including the gentleman who was the department head for whom my mother worked, so that was another way of connecting. That man's name was Baldo Kristovich. His roots were here in San Pedro, but he had responsibilities for handling property that was defaulted to the county or came to the county as people would die without wills--section, property disposition. And she worked as the administrative secretary. In that office she worked from clerk typist all the way up to executive secretary, so that was one of those kinds of stories that happened to be my mom. I was very proud of that, and John was, too.

Farrell: I shared with John that I was Catholic as a kid, and we kind of clicked on that, because John was an observant Catholic, and on his trips to the Vatican--John went over to visit with at least two popes. Each time, he'd bring me back a rosary for my mother, so it was just a personal relationship that I developed with Ferraro, beyond anything having to do with politics or council or anything. Eventually, Ferraro became [city] council president after the defeat of Pat Russell, [unclear] hard pressed to call him and grab an ally. Once he took a shot for mayor and didn't make it, he became a close ally for the good of the city in his working relationships with the mayor.

Farrell: John was also a mentor in terms of things that related to business, the civic world, and some of the things I've given you as insights as to how I was able to establish rapport with other members of the council once I got away from just being the Eighth District councilman. John was one of those who was there just to urge me to keep in mind that I was a member of the City Council of Los Angeles, a member of the governing body of the whole city, which was a real wonderful learning curve for me, to really get to understand the city, to see the whole city, to see how the entity was held together by the charter and the dynamics of the council and its committees and the role of the mayor, weak mayor, strong council form, and to keep the role of the bureaucrats in making this whole thing fit together and work.

Greene: So it sounds like you at this particular moment were developing yet another perspective on L.A., because you talked to me in the past about the kind of continuity between your experiences as a student, as an activist, as a journalist, and as a political staffer, right, in essence, and how the conversations that each of those roles sort of put you in sort of shaped your evolving understanding of the city in a sense, right? What would you say that your experience as a city council member kind of brought into focus for you that you may not have perceived as clearly before that?

Farrell: The important role of the private sector, of business and commerce in making the whole apparatus work. When you come from a base that is anchored in ethnicity and region of the city, you don't necessarily get a broad view of what this great city is about, what it takes to run the city or how the pieces fit together. That was my learning curve on the council, to see how all that fit together and then to become part of that working majority on the council, to do things which I believed during that period of time were good decisions for the benefit of the city.

Greene: Who were some of the folks who were on the council at the time, that you can recall anyway?

Farrell: Well, there was Ernie, Ernani Bernardi from the Valley. Bernardi was a sax player in the Big Band era, and he got involved in business development and contracting in the Valley, and then that turned into civic interest and he was elected from the Valley. Anti-urban renewal. Given the mayor's plans for the use of the redevelopment process and the CRA to develop downtown, Ernie was constantly there against it, especially the mechanisms that drew and retained taxation for redevelopment areas and kept them in the redevelopment areas to be used by the Redevelopment Agency for upgrading that area, as opposed to those funds going into the general fund for the council to make the decision on how best to use those funds to deal with the whole of the city administration.

Farrell: Marvin Braude was I think the first real millionaire that I served with. Bernardi was the Seventh District. Marvin Braude represented the Fourth District, the Santa Monica Mountains, Brentwood, that area, as the constituency went across the Santa Monica Mountains. Braude was an academic, an investor, environmentalist in those pre-environmental-issues days. Ed Edelman, who subsequently became a member of the board of supervisors. Of course Gilbert Lindsay in the Ninth District, that Exalted Ruler of the Elks that I mentioned early on that my mother and I met on our first day in Los Angeles, who represented the downtown area, plus [unclear] Central Avenue.[NOTE: Audio is poor through following sections, sometimes loud, sometimes barely audible.]

Farrell: [Councilman] Donald Lorenzen was a mortician from the Valley, a very conservative guy. He wise-cracked a lot, but he was a mortician and a businessman, and then I just got more insights about a business person's perspective. I got to the city council on a more populist base to be elected. He was on the city council from that kind of civic organization, business organization that had a political cultural reality. [Councilman] Art Snyder, [Councilman] Joel Wachs, Joel, who I met at UCLA. I was involved in his first campaign. My first political campaign was his campaign for student body president at UCLA in 1960.

Greene: I'm surprised you didn't mention that.

Farrell: Then, of course, was Zev Yaroslavsky, a very radical brother who represented the Fifth District. He developed a strong grassroots kind of reputation. He represented a Zionist organization that was supportive of Assistance for Soviet Jewry at a time when change was coming to the Soviet Union. Who have I missed? Bernardi, Braude, Cunningham, Edelman, Farrell, Ferraro, oh, the council president. He was John Gibson from this district, Fifteenth District, and I met him early on when he was still a councilman, had not yet become president of the council, because the Fifteenth District was adjacent to the Eighth District the way it is now, and because the number of deputies were few, all the councilmen knew the deputies and the aides to the other council people.

Farrell: When I arrived, I was the second deputy. My friend, the fellow who brought me aboard through recommendation to Billy Mills was Willard Murray, and Willard got together with some other folks down here and made the argument that a council person should have second deputies, so he was involved in the leadership of that, and as a result of his putting an idea out there and some organized activities, each of the fifteen members got an additional aide or two. So that's how some of these other things got put in place, because at the time, the universe was small, and the deputies were basically there doing work to be helpful to the council members or being out in the field. But as we would come in--there were only thirty of us, fifteen councilmen, your major deputy and your field deputy, forty-five people.

Farrell: But it was out of the mix when I got the most out of it, was just how complex and exciting and what a fascinating business structure the City of L.A. and the municipal corporation really was. You get a sense of how corporate structure facilitated this, how it's undergird by the charter and state law. Notice I'm saying the decisions of fifteen people as the governing body of the city, and the mayor, and, of course, the city attorney and the controller. But it was the council members and the mayor, so just seeing how all that fit. The several pieces that went into the budget process; it's more than just the budget. [unclear] personnel authorities, some other things having to do with capital expenditures, all coming together comprised a budget, a budget process which was an ongoing thing. And at one point I thought that--before coming to city hall I thought of a budget as something that you develop and then turn it over to an administrator and just do that, the budget carries you through. No.

Farrell: Los Angeles City Hall was, as you live under this budget you are preparing for the next budget and you were evaluating what happened from the last budget. [unclear] it's a process, you've got to understand the budget is just a slice in time, that everything has to match up on the first of July. But that was an ongoing process. You're constantly adjusting personnel authorities, [unclear]. The development of regulations, or the non-development of regulations, especially around [unclear] and how important that was to a pro-development community in a pro-development city, and how these things worked. And seeing work that public employees did or did not do. And at times, equity wasn't always getting. Equity at sometimes was not getting. Sometimes it didn't make sense.

Greene: You mention development. It strikes me that this--I mean, over the course of the time that you were working for and then on the city council, developers are becoming a much stronger force in Los Angeles?

Farrell: You see that during his watch, Tom Bradley made this a headquarters city. Those highrise buildings came up. The Redevelopment Agency developed and exercised its, to me, its best days. The development of the Santa Monica Mountains. I mean, it was a time when all these things were churning and coming together for the development of the city, and for me, who had no significant private-sector experience at all, this was opening up a window to a whole different world. This was getting to see how Los Angeles, California, United States really works.

Greene: Can you give me some sense of what that process looked like? Because the city is changing at this point, and by leaps and bounds in some ways.

Farrell: Go to lunch with me. What do you do? Man let's me know he's in arbitrage. Get back to the office, and what do guys do in this business who do arbitrage? What? You mean this man has built this enterprise by just doing this with stocks and bonds? That's arbitrage? Really? Never heard of that before. A whole bunch of people like that doing things in town. Hmm, really. What else is there like that? Well, you see people come in to do development. I've seen contractors in South L.A. These are contractors. These guys [unclear]. That's the architect. That's so-and-so. Like Paul Williams? Yes, but more so, because Paul Williams did these kinds of things and he did residential, but these guys are doing it now, and they have arranged so much in the way of millions and access to billions of dollars to cause this to be built. Really? How's that going to happen? Well, they're proposing to get assistance from the city in acquiring this land, help with the CRA, and what they're going to do is clear the land and then they're going to be bringing their plans down to city hall [unclear], and what they want us to do is be involved in certain things that relate to zoning and changes in the code to allow for certain kinds of construction to go up, and this and that and the other.

Farrell: Learning curve. So the ultimate thing was, where do I fall back to see what I can do about this? Go back to why I'm at city hall 101. Who's going to work? Oh, right. The labor guys are going to be building these things and whatever. Okay. I'll get some jobs. Well, no, this is going to be skilled labor, going to be going through the unions. [unclear] Well, we'll have so-and-so come by and talk with you. William Robertson, head of the [L.A.] County Federation of Labor, chat with him. Jim Wood, who was active in labor, I met him back in the campaign first time around, really great fellow. Happened to be chair of the Community Redevelopment Agency, and he was an executive of the County Federation of Labor, so it was guaranteed that we were going to have work. So the conversation was, how do we get in?

Farrell: And part of the resolution of my concerns was the development of apprenticeship programs.

Greene: As an entry way for folks?

Farrell: Right, because then you have to deal with the issues of seniority and the rest. And rather than get into arguments with labor guys, there was more to be gained in being supportive of union-designed apprenticeship programs. And as the mayor's goals called for this to be done, went along with that. But it was difficult saying, you know, these craft unions have been--the AFL unions were still in the process of adjusting to the fact that these were white guys' jobs. Well, how do blacks and Latinos get in? We've got to go into some apprenticeship program? For what? It delays entrance. Ultimately going to get there. Well, this is the way we work out so that--come on. Apprentice program. Do apprenticeship programs work? Even until this administration with [Mayor Antonio] Villaraigosa, we're talking about apprenticeship programs and local hire activities, to make sure that we have minorities working on city contracts.

Greene: Does that mean that they didn't work so well, or that they'll always be needed? Which is it?

Farrell: Let's be very generous and say the dynamics of the union-dominated workforce will always be requiring apprenticeship programs for minority employment, especially African American employment.

Greene: So did you ever--

Farrell: And you can note by my gesture that, not that there weren't conversations about that, but given the political coalition that existed at the time, there was a community-leadership buy in of shared goals and vision with labor-movement leadership, so that that was satisfactory for the time, about the best we could get.

Greene: Roughly what years are we talking about? Is this in the mid-to-late seventies at this point?

Farrell: We're talking about mid-seventies. The building boom was starting and there's still the construction of highrises going on in L.A. And I'm sure that as you would go through to look, you would find some African Americans spread throughout the workforce on different levels of skill and expertise and years of service, but today the overwhelming volume of people in the workforce are Latino, however that came about. Labor unions or sometimes people come in as contractors, and they wouldn't have 100 percent labor people. They would have others working. But the pressure was once you start on these construction projects, you want to move to get them finished as quickly as possible because of the large amounts of money that were involved. There's just a development pressure that comes in once things get set up. The way things are financed today, you see, organizes the inspection process to be with those who bring forward the plans for the plan review and the inspection as projects go through to ultimate issuance of a certificate of occupancy.

Greene: Did you ever have a sense that the development projects that had been slated--the issue of sort of creating employment possibilities for folks in your district and other minorities as well, notwithstanding--did you ever have a sense that they were sort of at odds with what development needs might look like, or even some type of vision for development might look like in South L.A.?

Farrell: I think I mentioned to you before that as I developed relationships with people to talk about and to get to understand what the market for construction was in Los Angeles, I had developed relationships to the place where I would speak specifically to some developers about what I thought could be done in South L.A., my visions and the rest of it. There were some tests of relationship, and it got to the place where I was strong enough to have somebody who I'd developed an acquaintanceship with tell me the reasons why he'd never develop in South L.A., and it had to do with the market. The market wasn't there. "Oh, but you know, if you were to do this, then the market would come." "Bobby, it's not going to happen. Central business district, in the Valley, on the West Side, that's all I do."

Greene: What drives that?

Farrell: What is the market? Is the market a function of such subsidies as the inclusion of a project in a redevelopment area, or the strategic placement of a redevelopment area to be an incentive to pull folks in? Oh. The market was described to me as the Central business district--you want to talk about South L.A.--and there's Watts. "My colleagues and I put our money in the Central business district. We're not putting our money in Watts." "Oh, but you know you should." "Bobby, there's not a market." "But, you know, if--." "Bobby, there's not a market." Talk to you about what a market is, talk about market, a whole range of elements and good insights as to what a market is about and what leads a guy to want to develop there, based on his vision of return on his investment after a couple of decades, how they were having a project up and getting the project filled with tenants, prime tenants paying these kind of rents. "Bobby, I know what you want. Be supportive whatever I can do to help with that, but I ain't putting my money down." Even with the Redevelopment Agency. [whispers] "I'm not putting my money there."

Greene: Hmm. What makes that different from red-lining?

Farrell: I guess the value you want to associate with words. Is the market something that should happen, or is the market something that is happening in fact?

Greene: I see.

Farrell: In its wisdom, the Housing Authority put four projects in the four corners of Watts, and when they did that in an era pre-World War II, post-World War II, to deal with affordable housing, great idea.

Greene: You mean Nickerson Gardens, Jordan Downs?

Farrell: Yes. But given the dynamics of what happened in the Los Angeles area post-World War II, the opening of the suburbs, the fact that the suburbs opened up in the traditional segregated American models and themes that shifted from providing more housing to integrating the housing, there were some other dynamics that took place, because when the projects were established, they were not permanent residency for low-income, low SES people. They were just low-income people. SES is not a function of just income, it's a function of--

Greene: SES?

Farrell: Socio-economic status--a bunch of other things. A whole bunch of people come up from Louisiana, a New Orleans exodus, skilled people, high school, college-educated plus, coming out of a segregated society. For a minute, live in the projects. For a minute, till you finish up your education, do something on the G.I. Bill, and then you go on.

Greene: Because projects, as it were, were also different than--

Farrell: Yes, public housing. So you can see that the mix of people in the projects was different.

Greene: Yes.

Farrell: So over the years projects evolved to be places that are the residual for folks who can't find another place, generally, or find themselves in a different kind of a social situation, a whole bunch of dependency stuff that evolved.

Greene: But as you describe it, it was very transient at that point. Transitory might be a better word.

Farrell: Right. Public housing was not permanent housing for folks. It was transitional housing until you got your education, things broke for you, a change in the economy. Then you got out of the marketplace and you would go in a rented apartment or you'd buy a house.

Greene: And that's one of the things that's perceived as not good market conditions?

Farrell: That changed. So for the kind of people that I was talking to, that was not the kind of development.

Greene: That wasn't on their minds.

Farrell: And for the guys who wanted to do development in Watts, they didn't necessarily have the contacts with the bankers, the other kind of relationships with people who were involved in the trade at the business level, so that when the special programs come up. So part of my frustration was having to accept that reality. I'm sitting on a planning committee and in the process of going through this review that the planning committee was doing, I'm getting to learn about how projects are put together with the finance, the technical requirements, what that's going to mean in terms of supplies and suppliers, what that's going to mean in terms of labor force, what that's going to mean in terms of disruption of this space in the city at that period of time as these things get phased in, and who's working and who is financing, and how the city's role of monitoring and checking, making sure that things are going in according to code, and how from time to time plans change and you need to change an ordinance to facilitate something, this whole dynamic of real-time management of these processes, where everything is fitting together, the labor guys, the finance guys, all those people. You see them spread out in front of you attending these committee meetings.

Farrell: Here are the guys from the bankers, or here are the lawyers for the developer, the lawyers for the investors, the labor guys, some of the other key people who were involved with the process, property-owner groups, and you sit on the council and you're involved in [unclear] stuff to the council for approval. Hell of a learning experience. But it's not going to happen in your district. So I used to sit and watch that process, downtown L.A., the Valley, the West Side, [unclear] housing development in the Santa Monica Mountains. And the extraordinary things we attempted to do even to just get stuff in the Crenshaw Shopping District, the extraordinary things that we wound up doing to try to get Vons or Ralph's to just stay in South L.A. a little bit longer, because their demographics were changing. They were not marketing well in these communities.

Farrell: In hindsight, we look at some of these people who were successful that you meet, and you assume because they're in business and they're successful, they really know. Hindsight, what they really know is they know their business at that moment in time. The rise of the Latino population in South L.A. and East L.A.--Vons and Ralph's don't want to be here? That's fine. Leave. The other supermarkets will come in. Where do they come from? People develop the skills and they invest in them and build supermarkets. Or the money comes out of Mexico. Oh, really? I never heard of a Mexican supermarket chain. Is that so strange? Have you ever been to Mexico? How do you think people get their food in Mexico City, Tijuana? Same way they get it here. Yes, we have these little side things, farmers market. For real things you want to go to the supermarket. They've got a supermarket.

Farrell: So as you look in South L.A. today you see a variety of supermarkets, independents, guys from other parts of the world. You don't see Vons.

Greene: Just because there was a vacuum to be filled.

Farrell: Yes. And remember that at the same time in the paradigm of looking at white-dominant structures, one can still say, "You know, when we look at issues of food security, you need to deal with food security in the inner-city, because people aren't getting the right kind of foods." We need to have a Whole Foods Market in Watts. We need to have a Whole Foods Market for South L.A. Okay. I think that the Whole Foods Market crowd, the Trader Joe's guys, they'd love to do it. All they're looking for is the right kind of demographic fit and they'll come down. Or to put it another way, you get someone who can help make a market like a Magic Johnson, then Starbucks will even come to South L.A. Starbucks? Yes. These guys will come in with their three-, four-, five-dollar coffee and offset the little donut shops with dollar coffee? Yes, they are. They're coming in. Surprise. But people make a choice that way.

Farrell: Then you say, "Okay, wait a minute. Back away, let's think about it. Think about the guys with the donut shops." It's a franchise world. You need capital to do things. You have to have location. You have to have product quality control. You have to have staff a particular way. You have to do advertising. The best way to advertise is you do your regional advertising plus local advertising. The little independent guy doesn't have the capacity or the resources to do that, so, of course, the small guy is still there. But Central business district, the Valley, West Side, Santa Monica Mountains, different kind of an SES, different kind of a market reality. The market reality for the Eighth District is driven by something else.

Farrell: The current councilwoman of the Ninth District has made a stab at it by basically saying, "You know, we need to put a moratorium on fast-food restaurants in my districts--,"

Greene: [Councilwoman] Jan Perry.

Farrell: --because, you know, you've got to watch people come in with the muffin look, and you say, is that really on us to do that, in restricting the kinds of restaurants and franchises to go in? Remember, a minute ago we were fighting these franchise guys to make sure that we had franchises in black areas, because we wanted to make sure that the franchises in black areas at least would go to black guys and ladies who would be interested in doing a franchise business, because unless they come to a special area like this where there may be some incentives for them to come in as franchisers, they ain't going to never come to places like South L.A. Are you aware that when you have people come in with these fried-chicken franchises and hamburger franchises, are you aware that that's not the quality of food that's best for people? And there's the big contradiction.

Farrell: My mandate is pro-health, but to the point of saying if a market exists I should inhibit the franchisees coming in, especially when the franchisers will come and say to me, "You guys been beating on me to make sure that some minority guys and ladies have this. Let me show you the franchisee. He's a bright young guy, got an M.B.A. found his money, prepared to do something in your district." You say, "Welcome to the franchise." Not going to be involved in a public-health issue of, "I don't eat McDonald's and fries. That's greasy stuff." "Man, you can't talk about McDonald's and grease that you don't talk about M & M's [Restaurant], and Councilman, at least once a week you go over there to M & M's, and if I watched what you eat, what you eat at M & M's has less health value than what's coming out of my franchise operation." "Well, now, wait a minute. We don't need to go there." But I'm just saying, this was the kind of stuff that to me was stuff of discussion and stuff of my concern. So how do you reconcile that? Sometimes you just stand back and you don't.

Farrell: What can I do to help you make your franchise business work? Can I help expedite something through the process? Is there some city program that may make funds available to you to make your entry into the market a bit more desirable? Because I'm glad that you're there, but I want to draw other people, too.

Greene: To stimulate other kinds of investment.

Farrell: Right. And what I understood was that what tends to happen with these guys when they do their real estate decisions about where to locate franchises--McDonald's is the best in the business. They do all the research, and they go on this corner. Some of the other guys may not have as much money for resources and they say, "Ah, but if a McDonald's is there, I want to be across the street from the McDonald's." They piggyback on someone else's stratification of the market. They've got similar products.

Greene: Interesting.

Farrell: To me it's bringing something new in, because I don't have anything else, and I don't want to have just auto repair shops popping up all over the place.

Greene: That's kind of the over-saturation argument, right? That it sort of tilts the balance so that development for this area ends up looking like only one thing, but the opportunities to stimulate other kinds--

Farrell: Right. And the reality is if you have commercial property, commercial property will be used. If you don't have a specific plan that restricts certain kinds of things, what you will tend to have is a whole range of auto-related things, batteries, tires, mechanics, body shops, all this kind of stuff. Why? Because individuals can put together a small business, get stuff done, and with the new populations coming in, people had different cultural ways of doing things, especially woodwork. Once upon a time, the woodworking operations were west of Western along a corridor on Gage, going back over towards Van Ness. But for some people who come as immigrant business people, they have skills in doing work in wood, and what's the fastest way to make some money if you're a skilled person? Get a space, go buy some wood. You know people are moving into these apartments. When you move into an apartment there's that old furniture. I'll make you a bed, and I'll make you drawers, a dresser, and some of those guys started off doing that kind of stuff. So all of a sudden you had that coming in as part of the mix, people doing furniture and doing mattresses and the kind of stuff that people do in everyday life.[End of interview]

1.10. Session 10 (January 15, 2009)

Greene: This is Sean Greene interviewing Mr. Robert Farrell on January 15 [2009], at his home. Good afternoon, Mr. Farrell.

Farrell: Hello.

Greene: I thought we'd pick up today where we left off. You were talking some about, as you put it, your learning curve and how you came into your position and were mentored into your position as council person. You mentioned working closely and consulting with John Ferraro.

Farrell: John Ferraro and other members of the [Los Angeles] city council.

Greene: And other members of the city council. When we last spoke, you talked some about learning to understand how the development process in the city went, and how develop decisions played out as you tried to sort of make sense of the workings of development and tried to figure out how best to represent your district. I wonder if there was anything else you wanted to add to that particular part of the story, or did you want to move on to talk about other ways in which you sort of like adapted to being in the city council seat that you occupied?

Farrell: Well, once again, let me just refer to the council district boundaries at that time.

Greene: Sure.

Farrell: North, roughly the Santa Monica Freeway; south was roughly 120th Street. The western boundary was roughly Arlington/Van Ness. In the eastern boundary was initially the Harbor Freeway down to about 85th Street, then over to Central Avenue and down Central Avenue to roughly 120th Street. It goes in and out around Willowbrook, and that area was predominantly residential. The areas of commercial activity where there could be commercial development were Manchester/Vermont, Manchester/Broadway, then adjacent to the University of Southern California [USC]. That's all I had. There was no extensive open space in the Eighth District, and the older industrial areas were still economically viable when I came in.

Farrell: So I had ideas of what I'd like to see happen, and even until this day the driving force of economic revitalization at Manchester and Vermont is a big county building that was put there. But I'd always assert that my major contribution to economic-social community development at that approximate location was when I had the opportunity to influence the disposition of the former Pepperdine University property and its ultimate disposition being Crenshaw Christian Center. Broadway and Manchester is still not there.[Interruption]

Farrell: On the east side of Central Avenue down around 108th Street was one of the properties of the Watts Labor Community Action Committee [WLCAC], and I was very pleased to be able to deliver a senior facility on the east side of the street, to be part of that WLCAC operation. Facility was used for a senior nutrition and activity center. The point was I didn't have land available based on the needs and interests of developers in the city as I had come to know them. My involvement with a major developer in the district was with Ray Watt and Charles Chastain in a creative deal that had the University of Southern California join with me in having some 300 units of housing built on a number of sites in South L.A.

Farrell: The opportunity arose because at a particular moment in time, some housing that was ready for occupancy north of the university on Jefferson Boulevard at Hoover was just in line with what the university needed at that time for student housing. And I had gone through such a--just like at Crenshaw Christian Center and the Pepperdine site, I had gone through such a process to see that community housing come in that it was just going to be community housing right up to the edge of the university. Then the little birdie of insight tweeted, and I posed the question to Jack Hubbard, who was the president of the university [USC] at the time, and the question went like this. "Suppose these units of housing would be made available to the university. What would you guys give us in the community in return?"

Farrell: It's 150 units of housing, and my comment was, "Suppose we would make those 150 units available to you all for student housing now. Would you assist me in getting replacement housing at some multiple locations elsewhere in the Eighth District?" And that began a real-world experience for me with one of the developers that I had met, two of the developers that I had met, Watt and Chastain, with whom I developed a friendship, especially with Chastain, who became a mentor in this describing of, "Well, now you have something where a major developer wants to do something in your district. If you can stand the heat, because the university would like to get those houses now, and the promise would be that they will make an effort to get replacement housing for you." And they added a kicker. "Well, that's community housing. It's subsidized. University, will you get me Section 8 housing for each unit of replacement housing?"

Farrell: Well, that got put into the mix. And do you know, it was at a time when some University of Southern California people had ties with the President of the United States, towards the end of the [Richard M.] Nixon era. And what happened was they got a bunch of Section 8s from the Nixon administration. I'd hoped to be able to get 450 units for the 150 I was giving up, but as we went through the negotiation process it came out to be double, 300 units with Section 8s attached. I caught a bunch of flak for that, because there were community expectations that the housing would be for community people, but some minds got together to make sure that the housing was for community people, and the first segment of that housing was named after my predecessor, Billy Mills Manor, and it was on Vermont just across the street from the university, on the west side of the university.

Farrell: The second component of it was named after one of my former colleagues who died. His name was Rolland ["Speedy"] Curtis, this little section of units there for Roland Curtis on 38th Place, which had its name changed to be Roland Curtis Drive. A third portion of it was on the back of the Pepperdine University property, approximately 83rd to 85th Street, on the east side of Normandie. The next piece of units was at the intersection of Florence and Western, and the last component was units down at 85th Street and Western, just north of Manchester and Western.

Farrell: The way I had set this discussion up was that it was going to be up to them to find and acquire the property, build it to the same standards of the housing that was being built for the students, and Watt and Chastain kept their word, and that was the biggest mass of housing that I was able to get in the district during my whole tenure. It was done through the facility of the Community Redevelopment Agency [CRA] and the Hoover Urban Renewal Project, because the units were coming in north of the campus in urban-renewal property. The Mills units on Vermont were also within the boundaries of the Urban Renewal Project, so in a way we maintained a sense of context of just switching housing from one part of the CRA area to another one.

Farrell: Remember, I told you I learned some things from what was happening downtown in the way that the Community Redevelopment Agency functioned in massing land and using tax increment to doing things. Then I collaborated with the developers in the Community Redevelopment Agency and others in finding these other sites, which were acquired and the housing put together. But it was in that process that I learned--and I also did some other things. I had mentioned earlier that I'd begged the question about African Americans working, and as I had phrased that question so many times before, why did Chastain one time when they had me out at the site introduce me to a young man who was going to be a project manager? Made me feel good. Fellow's name is Dell Walker. He's still active in the business, and last time I saw him a couple of years ago we shared some insights, and he thanked me for providing that great opportunity for him to have a major role with a major construction company, with him having some real responsibilities, which was what part of the agenda was, but I wasn't able to get. But when the time came for the fellows to do that in my district [laughs], they found someone. And subsequently he went on to do other things with Watt and those folks, but it was an opener for him, and he's subsequently done other things. He's on the board of the Watts Community Federal Credit Union now.

Farrell: But as it relates to other kinds of community commercial development, the name of the game at the time was to see what one could do to retain or keep major supermarkets in the district.

Greene: Is that because a number of supermarkets were pulling out of the area? Or not opening stores in the area?

Farrell: They were not opening new stores, and they were not staying in inner-city areas.

Greene: Okay. They were moving further over.

Farrell: Yes. As I told you, my great disappointment was that as my predecessor came in, Billy Mills, and then most certainly while I was there, the whites who had established businesses in the area, just as the whites who were living in the area, as we came into office more things were opening up in the suburbs, and they left us. They left us before they even got to know who we were and what we were about.

Greene: So how does one try to retain a supermarket?

Farrell: So in the dynamic of being exposed to civic leadership, especially through the L.A. Chamber of Commerce, when the elected officials go off on retreats with the leadership and several segments of the business community--and I had a chance to meet Byron Allenbaugh, who was the president of Ralph's [Supermarkets]. And once again, as I had by now developed the kind of reputation, because people talk, and as they were organizing to come to be with us members of the city council, [Councilman] John Ferraro talked with us about we were going to be meeting with these folks to talk about business and stuff like that, I know John must have just said to the guys, "Look. Bobby's going--," introducing his members to the leadership before the conference, letting folks know what to expect, the same way we were being advised as to, "Here are the people who are going to be coming. Now, here's Byron Allenbaugh, he's got Ralph's. Here's so-and-so, they do this." So basically, we're going to do something with this weekend together.

Farrell: So Allenbaugh had been just told by Ferraro and others that he should be candid with me when I asked these questions about--so Allenbaugh was. He said, "It's not economically feasible for us to stay. Dynamics have changed coming on in the industry." They had their own kind of pressures. So I got a 411 in what supermarket economics were about, service areas, the location of a supermarket, the mix of products that they had. That was about the time when people were saying that, "Supermarkets in inner-city areas carry old meat and old vegetables. We don't get the same quality of fresh fruits." So I had my community assertions and myths to bring to the table. But I got to see what a supermarket operation was. Allenbaugh and his guys kind of pulled me in close to give me some insights as to what their challenges were in the supermarket business.

Farrell: And just about this time, scanners were about to come in, the scanners that you see at checkout stands that are just part of everyday technology, but they weren't in yet. I happened to be sitting in on a committee--Byron Allenbaugh's there. "Oh, hi, Byron, how you doing? What are you here for?" "Well, got a real problem. We in the supermarket industry want to have scanners," and there was a major labor mobilization, primarily driven by the retail clerks, to ban scanners in L.A. Labor and those clerks, clerks as part of labor had been supporters, and a little bird tweeted again, and in essence I asked how important the introduction of the scanners was. I also talked about how important it was that major supermarkets come into South L.A. come into my district, or at least the ones that are there stay there. I mean, I don't know. Out of a dynamic that just came up on that committee, I either put forward, but I most certainly was consistent in supporting a pilot project for the scanners, which was big for the supermarkets, because in essence they were on the verge of getting nothing, and when that issue came up of a test, it was an important moment, because not how politics goes sometimes. You know once you get the scanners out there for the tests, the efficiencies are going to be there, and you're going to be hard pressed to let guys in the industry bring in technology.

Farrell: I mean, in local government at times you do see people attempt to stop it. "No Wal-Marts." Except in South L.A. and Crenshaw. Why? Because my predecessor did what I would have done if the Eighth District boundary had gone over that far. I can't get nobody to go in the Crenshaw Shopping Center where this national chain pulled out. I found somebody to come into that location. It's Wal-Mart. Now, I realize a lot of people don't like Wal-Mart, but you know what? I'm going to have that place filled up. The market's not working. I've got to do the best I can, so I just have to ask my friends to understand what I'm doing for my constituents. Scanner tests moved forward, and I'd like to believe that that's why the Ralph's Market at Manchester and Western and properly one other stayed open in South L.A. a little longer, in understanding of changing dynamics, technology coming into use that's of benefit to a segment of the business community and something coming back to my constituency. I probably paid a price for that someplace else, but the Ralph's Markets didn't close while I was a council person.

Farrell: It was another Ralph's Market that did come in at the corner of Vermont and Adams, just to the northwest of the University of Southern California. So I took a deep breath on that. It's kind of an extension of the Hoover Urban Renewal Project area going north from Jefferson and Vermont towards Adams and Vermont and ultimately to the freeway. It was in a project area. But it just seems as though I wanted more and I couldn't get it. It seems as though so much just showed up as, "The market's not there." I attempted to get whatever else I could out of the location of the University of Southern California. There wasn't anything else I could do. Land wasn't there. I'd already gone through a tremendous dynamic with the Community Redevelopment Agency and the community, who did not want me to do that exchange of the housing, and that really hurt when people were saying, "I was going to be able to live over here. Now I've got to wait until there's other housing, and look, there go those students in the housing. They're using it right now." And the best I can say is, "I spread it out the district. I got twice as much than was up here. I called the shot." The supermarkets--I really didn't get that much that wasn't associated with the market. The market was coming in north of the University of Southern California. It was legitimately there. I don't know that the other locations were going to be able to sustain themselves if I had not had someone in the upper reaches of Ralph's saying, "Let's just wait a little while on this store." Because ultimately, change was coming.

Farrell: So the political piece was as I learned these insights about what's going on in the city, that whatever I'm going to do to benefit is going to be a function of working with the neighborhood improvement associations and the block clubs and churches, but there wasn't going to be any major development. So I'm talking with fellows, and it's like having access just at a totally different level of scale. At the same time, I met people who later would be involved in nonprofit housing, but at the time that we're discussing, those concepts of subsidizing housing, creation of community redevelopment project areas was not yet that refined. So it was having that access and then having no way to use the capital that I was earning out of this relationship, no way to use the applied knowledge.

Farrell: So what came out of that insight and learning about market in L.A., I began to pay attention to the region. I gravitated towards Pat Russell and some of the work that she was doing with SCAG, the Southern California Association of Governments, so I got involved with SCAG, and the year I left office was the year that would have been me as president of SCAG. I was the first vice president.

Greene: What did SCAG do?

Farrell: The Southern California Association of Governments is the regional planning agency for transportation. Ventura [County], L.A. [County], Orange [County], Riverside [County], San Bernardino Counties. The development of the regional transportation programs, that whole interface with local governments, that was one of the areas of my strength that I developed an expertise as I sat on the city council. Another aspect of it was being involved with the National League of Cities as one of the city reps. It required travel, but it was a place I could apply my energies and skills, and I rose through that structure within the National League of Cities to become a member of the board. I sat on a variety of committees and special working groups, and within the National League of Cities was this National Black Caucus Local Elected Officials. The goal of that organization was to influence policies through the National League of Cities, which was an advocate on behalf of urban America in dealing with federal policy.

Farrell: So I wound up being the president for a period in the late 1980s. That was also the locus of the place where I made my own party contribution, as I shared with you, noting that the nonpartisan and partisan local elected officials had no status within the Democratic National Committee structure. Big city mayors did, county officials did, state officials did, the congressional folks, the House of Representatives and Senate did. So I took on a six-year campaign to get established the Democratic Municipal Officials Conference of the Democratic National Committee and used my resources. You've heard me mention Percy Pinkney, and Loretta Avent, A-v-e-n-t, was hired in D.C. on a personal services contract with me to work that through, and we got it. Started off under the administration of [Charles] Chuck Manatt, head of the DNC, and finally got it done under the administration of Ron Brown. So that was satisfying, but it was once again energies going someplace else.

Farrell: And it was while I was in the D.C. area that I had a chance to meet Randall Robinson, and as I would go back to do business representing the city, of course, or representing SCAG, I would also work with Randall's--eventually on his board [TransAfrica]--in dealing with this issue area called Africa and Africa policy development, a subset in the Caribbean, because I had some of these ties developing here and through Merv[yn] Dymally. I was relating to similar constituencies, national constituencies here locally, and once I went to D.C. I had a chance to see some of the people who were active on a national level. And as the anti-apartheid program was evolving, got to be part of that. And then as that program moved into high gear, I was involved with the arrest of the [South African] consulate in D.C., involved in the mobilizations here in L.A., the efforts to cause the consulate to leave from Los Angeles and reestablished itself in Beverly Hills and good stuff like that.

Farrell: Along the way I had an opportunity to go to one session of the African American Institute in Khartoum in the Sudan. I met some of the folks who were involved in a liberation movement, and I hosted one of the leaders of the time, Josiah Chinamano from Zimbabwe here at Ward A.M.E. church. I traveled with Jesse Jackson over to Nigeria, Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Egypt.

Greene: What were some of your impressions of those places?

Farrell: Just exciting to go in that particular context with Jesse and to see the folks who were involved with the liberation struggle, especially in Mozambique.

Greene: And this would have been in the late or mid-eighties?

Farrell: This is late eighties.

Greene: I wonder if you can help me understand how you came to turn your attention to, as you just narrated it, regional and national then--

Farrell: In the international stuff?

Greene: Yes. How did you come to focus your attention and your energies there?

Farrell: As I got a clear sense of what the several markets were in Los Angeles and how I had been privy to conversations with people who were the movers and shakers, who explained to me honestly why they would not invest the money, why they wouldn't come, I just said, I've got to do something else. Because what was I going to do? Was I going to just beat up on these guys and call them racists because they weren't going to come, after they shared with me what the considerations were of what they did and at what scale? At the time, subsidies were not available as subsidies are available today.

Farrell: There was one fellow--he's dead now--his name is Jack Needleman. His family is still a major property owner in the Ninth District in the fashion area, N-Jack Properties. They own a lot of the buildings where the garment industry is functioning. And Jack Needleman had a thought that in some of the areas where the older commercial-manufacturing-zoned properties were beginning to fade out, that perhaps we could do something concerted and collective to bring the garment industry further south. He would have been prepared to do some of the literally acquisition of property. Couldn't put it together, because he was in the Ninth District where he is right now, downtown in that fashion area, and here we are in my part of the Eighth District, where the old manufacturing areas were--too big a gap.

Farrell: One of the things I learned from Jack is that when you're in an area where you have established industry and it's expanding, it doesn't leap. It goes incrementally, especially as these guys were doing it, they're playing with their own money. When you have government money, the subsidies, you might say, "Well, we're going to create a project area, and we'll put an emphasis on this and whatever," and you pump it up with subsidies, and you're real clear about that. You give people density, you give them dollars, you give them tax credits to come in. But when people are using their own money, they stay pretty close to where they are. Jack was willing to come down as far as the University of Southern California, but that was still in my colleague Gilbert Lindsay's district. But at least Jack took me through a sense of what the market was for someone who's involved as a property owner in providing space to the needle trades. Even today, you come further south in L.A., you might find one or two places where you have people with these sewing shops and the rest of it, but the bulk of it has come almost down to [Martin Luther] King Boulevard now, with most of the large commercial activities being in some way or another related to the garment trade.

Farrell: So it was just out of that realization that based on my skills and my insight I understand the market and it's not there for me. I made a deliberate decision that I was going to be a full-time political person. I was going to live off of my salary. There were a number of extraordinary opportunities that came up out of these conversations, and had I been another kind of a person, I could have done very, very well in real estate, because as I told you, learning about the market and how the market is going and getting to know people. Some other people may be in--well, just talking about myself. There were a lot of opportunities to be involved in the acquisition of properties one way or another, but that was not part of my scenario. My goal was to be involved in the empowerment of other people, like Dell Walker, as I told you before, the fellow who had the opportunity to be project manager in putting together this housing with Watt and Chastain.

Farrell: So as I made a decision to be more involved in things that were essentially intergovernmental, municipal, others were going to Sacramento. I took the piece about D.C. Why? Long trips. I had gone through marriage number one. I was a single guy. It wasn't any sweat off of my back to take the long trips to catch the red eyes, because at least I'm making a contribution. I'm showing up as an extension of not only L.A., but Tom Bradley's L.A., which was enhancing the penetration of L.A. into that apparatus. I'm the kind of guy that once I have the committee responsibilities, I show up, so I began to suck up an opportunity to serve in, as I said, a variety of committees at the National League of Cities, and to move up in NBCLEO, and then to take on this other thing of developing a partisan piece, because I had the interest and I was legitimately there on city business. That took away from some of the time in South L.A. And in South L.A. it was still a matter of primarily service, the neighborhood associations, the block clubs and clergy leadership, and that was basically it.

Farrell: Married a second time. Mid-eighties it was clear that that was not working out. Felt it was time for me to move on. Maxine Waters went out of the Assembly, and I took a shot at succeeding her.

Greene: This was what year?

Farrell: This was the election year of '90, so this was in 1989, and I got involved in the campaign to do that. Her candidate was Marguerite Archie Hudson, and I should not have been in that race.

Greene: Why do you say that?

Farrell: In December of 1989, both my mother and my father died. My mother died on the seventh of December. My father died on the twenty-eighth, twenty-ninth. I don't even remember the spring and the campaign. But my heart wasn't in it. I was going through my own kind of despair. Bottom line, it was just poor campaigning. I was not there as a good candidate. I had the appropriate supports, but I wasn't there. I had remarried in 1989, Windy [Barnes], wife number three, and that, too, was something, trying to put that together at the same time I had the deaths, at the same time I was working, at the same time I was doing the campaign, so that in December '90 I called my friend at the time, Mark Ridley Thomas, and told him, "Hey, man, get ready, because I'm not going to be running for reelection in the spring."

Greene: And you came to that decision because of all the things that you had going on in your life at the time? Because of some of the roadblocks that you'd run into?

Farrell: No, it was just a mix of just being tired and then the double whammy of the deaths. I didn't think that they would have affected me that way, but they did, and I was simply not there. So in the spring of 1991, I mean, that was the year I was fifty-five, and I just opted for early retirement. My wife was singing with Stevie Wonder and she had her own career on the road, and in a way she was pleased, because that spring she was on the road, and when she came back and I was no longer on the council, she was thinking about we'll move. We eventually came down here--

Greene: To San Pedro?

Farrell: Yes, in '92, '93. And what I did right after leaving office was I went on a tour with her. She had been singing with Michael Bolton, and she got a call to be considered for Julio Iglesias. She got in with Julio and the following spring I went on my first tour with her and went to Spain, so it was like just fading off the scene and beginning this cycle of what I'm doing now. I took another shot at office when Marguerite had termed out and they put forward Rod Wright as her successor, and I attempted to come back, but the gap was there, and once again it was like, what am I doing taking a shot at this? I mean, I've been away, I'm traveling in the world. What's this about? So with that lack of focus and determination, didn't do well in that primary, and that was it. And that was it.

Greene: For elected office?

Farrell: Yes. I did some minor things in consulting, playing around with the evolving market of telephone cards, a seafood venture, tuna, dealing with tuna.

Greene: Were you dabbling? Is that how you would describe it, like trying things that you had wanted to try to do? Or were they things that you stumbled into accidentally?

Farrell: No, they were things that sort of showed up on the horizon. I took advantage of them, given the marketing scenario, and I found out a variety of other things, the importance of capital, the importance of having sufficient infrastructure, things of that type. I did some consulting. Harvey Englander, who's one of the political pros in town, invited me to come down and be a consultant. I worked with Harv for a few moments, but my heart wasn't in it. To be a really good political consultant, you've got to have a passion for your clients. I didn't have that passion. I guess I was so much into feeling about having a sense of what's good for community, I had to be reminded that folks were paying a couple of hundred dollars an hour for your skills and expertise, want you to help them to get their job done, not evaluate what they're doing and its impact on the community and what the community is going to think like that necessarily, but to address the needs of clients, and that wasn't satisfying to me.

Greene: So this is [unclear] has said from the kinds of things that occupied your time--

Farrell: Right, because I was inspired by a vision and serving the community and serving people and influencing organizations to shift their policies and programs to meet the needs of people. I was not a good fit for doing that for the paying customers. Not to put that down. It's a great way to serve for someone who has that kind of disposition. I did not.

Greene: You went on to participate on a number of boards in the years subsequent to your leaving elected office.

Farrell: The Weingart WMCA board. I had assisted them in getting a pretty helpful grant at a time when that facility was being built at Vermont and Century, and as I came down here I was on the board of the Harbor Free Clinic. I did some consulting work with my friend Bishop L. Daniel Williams, the president of the Baptist Ministers Conference, and until I began to spend more time in matters academic, I would spend my Mondays at the conference, just being available to him as a friend and confidante, and also to the other members of the conference who would have a need for my kind of service or just conversation. That's what I really enjoy doing, working with the men.

Greene: You continue your connection with TransAfrica as well?

Farrell: No. Because Randall [Robinson] changed. After the South Africa success, he began to focus on Haiti, and the dynamic shifted. So it wasn't the same African liberation issue. It became more state specific, and I was out by that time. I was there for the more broad approach. I'd been involved in both Jesse Jackson [presidential] campaigns, so I felt that I had once again done my part to move forward our kind of candidacy concerns and efforts to influence the Democratic Party, plus I had made my institutional contribution by the creation of the Democratic Municipal Officials Conference and changing the by-laws to cause that to be done, and that was done in great part because my party base, in addition to some of the individuals I knew, was off of my status as a Jackson delegate, twice.

Greene: Talk to me more about your role in the Jackson campaigns and what you saw as the significance of Jackson's campaigns.

Farrell: In part that was kind of the racial vision. When is the time going to come when our candidate is going to show up? I'd been there for the Bradley campaigns, I'd been there for Billy Mills, I'd been there for our faction within the Democratic Party here in Los Angeles County. It was about seeking to assure African American representation, because our candidates were as good an any other candidates out there. Tom Bradley for governor twice. And once again, I think I had shared with you what saddened me was this perspective of the Bradley effect, that you get an African American on the ballot and lo and behold, what happens is people, out of their racism, turn out to vote against the black candidate, and I thought that that was so wrong. I also thought it was so wrong when people said, "Well, you folks in the black community, if you all had turned out, Bradley could have had it." Mm-hmm, that's true, if you looked at our slice of voter turnout. But there are other segments of the California voter base that if you would have sort of looked at them you could have made similar statements. "You know, if the guys in these counties would have just done that, we would have been able to get it. You would have been able to get it."

Farrell: To me, the fundamental reason why the Bradley campaign didn't work were two pieces. Number one, some of our liberal friends chose that time to put an issue on the ballot relating to gun control, so if there was anything that was going to start to skew people turning out, it was going to be that issue, because maybe Tom Bradley would have had that image going around the state that here's a guy not to be feared, because, hey, he is a former cop. He was a lieutenant in LAPD. That was the highest African Americans could go at the time, and that was Tom Bradley. He's ramrod, like that. And it was something that was driven by liberal Democrats wanting to just deal with gun control, and they put that on. And I'm sure there were conversations about the impact that it would have on the Bradley campaign, but it was still on the ballot.

Farrell: Second piece was that the technology of campaigns was changing. At that time, part of the evolving dealing with the voter databases, because computers were still in the process of coming in, was dealing with absentee voters. I think the Republicans just did a better job of absentee voter identification and mobilization than did the Democrats, because, in essence Tom Bradley won based on votes that were cast on election day. It was in that area of absentees that the problem came. So I even used that one, once we get into the discussion about the different segments of the voter base and what happened in different years. The big thing was the absentee piece. Democrats did not have a comparable campaign based on available technology, and Republicans did.

Greene: You were on Pacifica's board for a couple of terms as well?

Farrell: Yes. I got involved with the Pacifica Foundation, first as a member of the local area board, and then being selected as a local area board rep to the national board, and then the crazy dynamics began. There was a sense that people were threatened by board leadership--Mary Frances Berry--and a board that the way things happen was majority black. There was the development of what was called a Pacifica campaign, and these folks were out to save Pacifica from a corporate takeover. What corporate takeover?

Greene: Help me understand. Who were some of the other figures of note that were on the board, and who represented the supposed corporate takeover?

Farrell: Mary Frances Berry.

Greene: Oh, she represented the corporate takeover, okay.

Farrell: Yes. Mary had some insights that there may be, as I recall, there may be some FM licenses that were going to be available in the South, and that Pacifica--I think this is oversimplifying, but Pacifica should look at its resources to acquire those signals to stations in the South. There was some opposition to that. And as you know Mary Frances Berry, she's part of this evolving leadership among Democrats in the several factions, and, man, as that campaign went on, it seems as though feminists came down on Mary. For some of the people who were employed back East, the folks in this campaign were demonstrating in front of their workplaces in Washington, D.C. I mean, it was just a horrible kind of a situation.

Farrell: They were talking about saving Pacifica from the corporate interests. What are you talking about, saving? If anything, when you looked at the stations, the so-called democracy at the local area boards was tantamount in some places to anarchy, and Mary was applying some leadership and management skills that were going to correct that. And the core constituencies of Pacifica did not want that done. Among things that I supported that she wanted to do was to move the national office from Berkeley [California] to Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C., aside from New York, the center of the American political world, and as it relates to things international, everybody involved in the politics of the world is there. Man, that was like the third rail. Move Pacifica out of Berkeley? Well, Berkeley is a particular kind of place. Some would say that it is the last place you would want to have a national office that reflects concerns of a progressive leadership in America. It's very isolated and narrow relative to the progressive constituencies in the United States, especially, I believe, for African Americans.

Farrell: Anyway, things just began to go sideways. Mary resigned. I went aboard as the board chair after some contention. We were involved in a variety of suits that were really, really beginning to draw down the resources of Pacifica. Even till today, Pacifica is financially weak, nationally.

Greene: What would make you take on the chairmanship?

Farrell: The board chair?

Greene: What would make you take that on?

Farrell: Because I believed that I could resolve the issue at hand, and I did. I mean, I worked out what I thought--I took the lead in working out what I thought was a solution among the contending parties, so that the monies that were being expended for legal expenses by the national office, really draining the funds of the organization, could just stop the hemorrhaging, stop the hemorrhaging, and then be prepared to turn that over to the folks on the other side. I mean, bottom line, it was clear to me where Pacifica was going to be going short of being prepared to put one of the signals up for sale so that there would be sufficient monies to come back into the organizational structure. And I was saying, I don't want to do that one on my watch. But what I do want to do is stop the internal bloodletting, which will cause this thing to just fall apart, because it wasn't just on ideology or belief or vision. It was getting very, very personal and very, very nasty.

Farrell: So as board chair, I was involved in a series of negotiations in San Francisco, or was it Oakland? The case was in Oakland, but some negotiations in San Francisco to work out a resolution of the problem, so we can basically take the resolution to court and just get this thing over with. I was successful in doing that, and once I did that I left, because as I looked at the Pacifica structure I said, whatever I have to offer in this environment is not really going to work without a significant contribution of time and resources, and I didn't want to be in that kind of a fight, because I noticed the way the guys came after Mary Frances Berry and other people. And I know that there are some ways that you can counter that, but in looking at what the consequences might have been to countering that, which is to basically confront people and say, "This isn't about corporate takeover of Pacifica. This is about the fact that Amy Goodman, who has "Democracy Now," has basically hijacked a program which was a Pacifica program," which essentially had three parties at one time being involved as hosts of "Democracy Now," and it's about control of not only the funds at the five stations, but access to the airwaves.

Farrell: I mean, there are some programs that are done very, very well. There are some other programs that are there simply because they have established constituencies. And one of the more interesting things that happened was on the time I was on the board, Mary attempted to have some just basic auditing done. At the several stations at these several time slots, what are people listening to? There was a fight over that. "No, we don't want to have that kind of an audit," which is basically saying, "Let's just use a market device to see how we're faring relative to other stations, and also given our setup, let's just see what our setup is, in fact, getting in the marketplace." That was not an acceptable goal.

Farrell: So what happened was, in essence, I was involved in stopping the bloodletting, because once that case was over, other folks had a chance at taking it over. At least on my watch we stopped some extraordinary funds that were going out to lawyers and others, and I think had that not been done, given other financial problems that Pacifica has had even up until today, it would have pushed Pacifica over the edge, because the volumes of money that were going out far outstripped the volumes of money that were coming in that Pacifica could allocate to resources to deal with the challenge.

Greene: So it was a turbulent stint on that board. Sounds like it was a lot of conflicts.

Farrell: Yes. And the problems of Pacifica are still there. With the Pacifica station here in Los Angeles, the fund drives are running longer, which means that dough is hard to get in, and before the change in the economy it was harder to reach the financial goals for the station on a whole. Some programs, they generate their resources. But it's the resources of the station as a whole that you look at at the end of the day, and that's where you're having problems.

Greene: Maybe you could talk a little bit about your changing relationship to the Democratic Party. In the years after you left elected office, did you stay involved in party activities?

Farrell: No. I'd always felt that for me the honor that I had was, number one, being a public elected official, so that it wasn't a matter of seeking all these different party positions and honorary chairs and co-chairs, because there are other men and women who work very hard in their partisan participation, and all they have are those slots, to being on a state committee or county committee. They work very hard to be chairs of caucuses and to be honorary chairs and co-chairs, and my heart was not in spending the time on the party bureaucracy. I had done mine. I had been a delegate to two conventions, [Jesse] Jackson delegate. I had made my own contribution at the national level by the creation of this Democratic Municipal Officials Conference, and serving as that person. I had my own independent resources to do that, that I described before. And I had a chance to travel to the conventions, to the DNC meetings, to be on the executive committee of the party and hear all that kind of good stuff go down, and that was wonderful.

Farrell: It was just that on my cycle it was the time of Mondale and Dukakis, as opposed to Clinton and Obama. But, hey, that's the way those things fall sometimes.

Greene: You watched this year's Democratic National Convention with some interest. You watched it pretty closely.

Farrell: Really excited because of the success of the Obama campaign, but more excited by the success of the Obama campaign, its discipline, its use of technology, its use of strategy, because in essence what it did was it beat the party regulars, and in essence if you look at what exists now, the Obama operation did not fold its resources into the DNC. It still exists, and they're still keeping their money. So when you look at this gentleman who's the former governor of Virginia who's been tapped to head the DNC [Democratic National Committee], you sort of say, well, now, what you going to do? Because in a way, the next challenge for Obama is to declare himself as a party leader.

Farrell: Now, who's going to control the DNC and all that apparatus? Obama nominally is going to get it, but is Obama going to invest his money? Obama has his websites up. He's got the best in the world, I mean, relative to American politics. His fundraising apparatus is better than the DNC, and that was one of the great surprises to come out of this campaign, that someone would actually, in fact, put it together in a way that surpasses anything the party could do or would do. Okay? Plus he's the president. So what is the future of the party going to be? Obama is going to not only be in a position to talk about party leadership and get ready for the next round of elections, where he deals with loyal Democrats, but he's in a position to say, "I'll let the party apparatus select its own. I have an Obama operation out here with all these people doing all this good stuff, advising me and raising funds and staying in contact through the Obama website. Let's see how we're going to restructure the party."

Farrell: Well, the Democratic Party, as you see some of the blogs where people are upset with Obama, Code Pink, the Huffington [Post] blog, all these folks who assert that they have a role to play in the party, he might say, "Good. You go relate to the party." "Well, what are you going to do?" "I've got my Obama operation. I've got my Obama money, so whatever you all want to do, please influence the party, and then, of course, here's the way you influence my base. You send in your insights and your concerns the same way anybody else out there in my public does. You send it in on my e-site, and my folks will review it," and all like that. "No, no, no. We already have our thing. We're demanding the following things." Obama's in a position to basically say if he chooses, "Well, remember, we talked about change. Part of the change is if you want to do things through the party structure, you take it through the party structure, you take it to the caucuses. Let's have that discussion of the Democratic Party platform, all the rest of it; Obama platform over here."

Farrell: Now, for whatever reasons, that's not surfaced yet, but it's very clear to me that that's what we're going to have. We have a popularly elected president, one who came up from nowhere, put together with some superb staff people who are loyal to him an operation that is still up and running, a fundraising operation that is still up and running. People still want to make that connection, primarily using technology, and we're yet to see. We see the demise of the Republican Party. You listen to Rush Limbaugh and the fellow that seemed as though conservatives are rallying around their conservative principles, and who knows what's going to happen with the Republican Party. Same thing with the Democratic Party. Obama won. Yes, the party--this is about Obama. As Joe Biden said, he's a real clean-cut and well-spoken Negro. I'm paraphrasing and I'm playing on it--

Greene: Certainly, certainly.

Farrell: --but you know, Obama is a person who won the presidency, who happened to be a Democrat by party affiliation, but he's not of the party apparatus. And as he's putting his team together, this isn't a consideration of consultation with the Democrat movers and shakers. Obama seems to be making decisions with his advisors, some of whom are Democrat regulars. Oh, my gosh, he's putting these folks from the Clinton campaign. What's that about? Well, putting some other people in. Strategy. Is he really that smart that he can think through those things? Perhaps he is. Suppose he is. Suppose he is the brightest Democrat that we're seeing in seventy-five years. Already he's comparable to [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt. What do you mean he's comparable to Roosevelt? Well, look at the magnitude of what's there for him to take on just as he's entering office. What do you think he's going to do once he's the president? He's still not the president. We're still in transition and notice the surprises. I expect comparable surprises once we get past the twentieth.

Greene: Shifting a little bit, what are the constituencies and neighborhoods that you spent much of your life working in, in South L.A.? How have you seen them change? What have become some of the important issues confronting residents of South Los Angeles?

Farrell: They're pretty much the same, with the exception of the decline of the public school system and the rise of gang-based crime around guns and narcotics. Many of the people who were the leadership that I worked with are older than me, so most of those people have passed on. Many of their children and grandchildren still live in South L.A. Most, though, have moved out--Inglewood, Ladera [Heights], Baldwin Hills, outside of L.A. County down to Riverside, San Bernardino, and the infill has been a mix of Latinos--Mexico, Central America, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras. There's still enough of a presence that you can see it.

Greene: What is CAAPEI?

Farrell: California African American Political & Economic Institute is a heritage piece of [Congressman] Merv[yn] Dymally's. It's a piece of legislation. It derives its base from a piece of legislation that Merv Dymally worked on and had introduced by Tom Hayden. It was paired with an institute having to do with Central American Studies. Both of them were established on the campus of Cal State Northridge. Dr. David Horne was Dymally's choice to head the institute, and that was worked out. But apparently, one of the presidents at Cal State Northridge was not in sync with some of the goals of CAAPEI, so David Horne began the process to have it relocated on the campus of Cal State Dominguez Hills, and it is from that base that he's begun to put together programs and activities that relate to the economic and political situation of African Americans in this state. His challenge is resources and the fact that he's tenured at Cal State Northridge, and he's teaching in the L.A. Community College District, and the CAAPEI office is located on the campus at Dominguez Hills. So it's kind of an administrative challenge to him.

Farrell: In addition, it's great being around David right now, because he's been doing some outreach as part of this Sixth Region of the African Union and the mobilization of the African Diaspora throughout the world. So he's been spending the last couple of years on the road doing that organization in North America, the Caribbean, Central America, South America, and in Europe, U.K. [United Kingdom], France, Belgium.

Greene: What's your connection to the institute?

Farrell: I think I've carved out a potential role for the institute as it looks to its futures, in tapping the resource that former elected officials, African American elected officials can be viewed as resources to help carry out the mission of CAAPEI and who use CAAPEI as an opportunity to cycle their insights and expertise back into this community of academic interests, and still serving that California constituency of African Americans in matters political and economic. For me it's been a matter of taking some courses that relate to community college teaching, teaching some courses there, and then centering myself in an interesting way on what was important in my life, which is showing up as being important again, that is in sync with one of his major goals, which is dealing with the African Union, and that is developing some language skills, going back over some things I did as an undergraduate and graduate fifty years ago, to just put into play over the next several years, to just pull some names together and make some connections so that we who are English-language bound can begin to break out of that constraint and open ourselves to that universality of the world of African heritage speaking Spanish, the world of people of African heritage speaking French and of Arabic, the four languages, in essence, of the African Union, so that twenty to forty years down the road there will be Americans who are born and raised here, who by their academic and professional choice will pick up language skills and have cultural experiences in the New World that can be of some advantage in the interactions that are going to develop through the African Union as a bureaucracy, and in activities with those several African states in relating to us here in North America.

Greene: And you're doing some teaching?

Farrell: Yes. Constitutional law and business law to high school students through the Jump Start Program at West Los Angeles [Community] College.

Greene: And the students come from?

Farrell: Generally out of South L.A. Well, South L.A. at Crenshaw [High School], and in Venice it was for young people in that high school attendance area.

Greene: Anything else you'd like to add about your experience teaching?

Farrell: No. I'm still in the process of coming to grips with that. I'm really fascinated with the role of the community college, given its mandate to deal with remedial education, to be in a situation to assist those who would come for the first two years and then transfer to college and university, and for others who come for skill training, as an institution that is probably going to get a real input from South L.A. in years to come, the graduates or the dropouts from the LAUSD [Los Angeles Unified School District] system, as well as given our difficult times, a lot of people going in for skills training and skills enhancement to deal with changing technologies. So being around community colleges is going to be really important to just see what happens to our populations in transition.

Farrell: Community colleges more than universities and state colleges, because of the short-term classes that tend to be at community colleges, skills-training programs that may run a semester or two, and then most certainly the opportunity to deal with the two-year degree for an Associate in Science or Associate in Arts. To me it's an exciting place to be as it still evolves. Okay.[End of interview]

A TEI Project

Interview of Robert Farrell

Contents

1. Transcript

1.1. Session 1 (September 2, 2008)

1.2. Session 2 (September 5, 2008)

1.3. Session 3 (September 9, 2008)

1.4. Session 4 (September 23, 2008)

1.5. Session 5 (October 14, 2008)

1.6. Session 6 (October 16, 1008)

1.7. Session 7 (November 6, 2008)

1.8. Session 8 (December 4, 2008)

1.9. Session 9 (January 13, 2009)

1.10. Session 10 (January 15, 2009)