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Dispute Resolution Magazine

September 2024

The History of Community Mediation Uncovered: The Department of Justice’s Community Relations Service

Grande Hamilton Lum

Summary

  • The 1964 Civil Rights Act created the Community Relations Service (CRS), marking the beginning of the U.S. community mediation movement, focusing on resolving racial conflicts.
  • CRS has been involved in many significant civil rights conflicts, from the 1965 Selma march to the aftermath of George Floyd's death in 2020, helping mediate and prevent violence.
  • Over the decades, CRS has played a pioneering role in civil rights and dispute resolution, working across various sectors, including schools, law enforcement, and minority communities.
The History of Community Mediation Uncovered: The Department of Justice’s Community Relations Service
Tony Shi Photography via Getty Images

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Did you know that the 1964 Civil Rights Act, widely considered the most important 20th century legislation in the United States, marked the beginning of the community mediation movement in the United States? It created the first federal agency whose jurisdiction was to provide assistance to communities resolving conflicts based on racial discrimination. The 1960s civil rights protests and growing demand for community-based conflict resolution services led to the Community Relations Service (“CRS”)—a government agency borne from a social movement that sought to merge community empowerment, justice, and peace.

From the March from Selma during the 1960s; to Boston Public Schools desegregation in the 1970s; to the return of Ohlone remains from Stanford University to the Ohlone people in the 1980s; to the dispute over Elian Gonzalez in the 1990s; to the 9/11 backlash against Muslims, Sikhs, and South Asians in the 2000s; to Sanford, Florida after the killing of Trayvon Martin in the 2010s; to Minneapolis after the killing of George Floyd in the 2020s, and in thousands more conflicts that received much less attention, CRS has engaged and conciliated in communities across the country towards civil rights progress. This article highlights the arc of CRS’s pioneering role in dispute resolution and civil rights in preventing, managing, and resolving conflict.

The birth of CRS

Title X of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, creating CRS and initiating community dispute resolution, would not have come to reality but for the 36th US President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Johnson hatched the concept as a Senator, arm twisted for CRS’s insertion in the 1964 Civil Rights Act as Vice President, and micromanaged its creation and commanded its insertion as President. Why did Johnson spend so much political capital on this? The answer lies in his story as a White Southerner, as a working-class Texan who saw systemic poverty and racism, and as a generational leader seizing the moment after President Kennedy was assassinated at the height of the 1960s Civil Rights movement. The answer is embodied by his saying “Let us reason together,” a saying he came back to repeatedly in his career. CRS reflected that political philosophy as a way forward in the thorny issues of race relations.

Lyndon Baines Johnson was born in 1908 in Stonewall, Texas. He grew up poor, became a teacher, and entered politics at a young age. When he was 20, Johnson taught Mexican-American children and witnessed how extreme poverty shut off any opportunity to go to college. He later remarked, “And I think it was then I made up my mind that this nation could never rest while the door to knowledge remained closed to any American.”

Johnson first conceived of a federal agency to mediate racial conflict based on the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, which mediated labor management collective bargaining disputes. Renowned labor lawyer and later Supreme Court Justice, Arthur Goldberg, helped draft legislative language to create this agency. Johnson advocated for the legislation unsuccessfully over several years until 1963, when, as Vice-President, he lobbied for its inclusion in the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Black congressional members argued that “mediation” and “conciliation” not be in the agency’s title, reflecting a longtime wariness that the function of dispute resolution is as a vehicle for maintaining the status quo rather than for change. Indeed, throughout its history, CRS has had to navigate concerns around perceived bias. For example, in 2013, right wing broadcasters Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Bill O’Reilly criticized CRS on their shows for helping organize protests to pressure authorities to prosecute George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin. As our nation’s politics today descend further into polarization, CRS will have to ensure its credibility to continue serving as effective conciliators.

Ironically, before Johnson became president civil rights leaders viewed Johnson as the enemy. As a House of Representatives member elected in 1939 and then as a US Senator, Johnson voted against every federal civil rights bill. That all began to change in 1963 when then-Vice President Johnson encouraged civil rights leaders to take further action. Joseph Rauh Jr., general counsel to the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, stated that he asked Johnson whether he could work with him to strengthen the civil rights bill when attorney general Robert Kennedy did not want to do so for fear of the bill not passing. Johnson responded, “’…It never hurts for us to have pressure from the left.’” Rauh recounted that Johnson had become “free of all the constraints of Texas politics. He now was going to the left of the administration and saying that we could work for those additions. And of course we did get them.”

A second factor that led to the inclusion of the Community Relations Service in the 1964 Civil Rights Act was the effective use of federal mediation in community conflicts in the early 1960s. This was dramatically demonstrated by Justice Department litigators in resolving the Birmingham conflict. Black Birmingham residents staged a massive direct-action campaign, including boycotts, sit-ins, and marches in what is now remembered as a high point for the civil rights movement’s use of Black economic empowerment. Television broadcasts of law enforcement unleashing fire hoses and dogs on protesters outraged the nation. Civil Rights Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall tirelessly mediated between African-American community leaders and White business leaders to create a settlement. Marshall later recalled, “…I spent a lot of time myself, in Birmingham, doing something that had nothing to do with my job--just to try to bring some racial understanding within the administration that that kind of work needed to be done. The only question was whether it should be institutionalized. I was in favor of institutionalizing it because it was a burden on my own time in addition to all the litigation work.” President John F. Kennedy noted the Birmingham mediation work when Kennedy conveyed the civil rights legislation to Congress and said that CRS “can play a major role in peaceful progress in civil rights.”

The third factor was that mediators were needed to prevent and reduce violent conflict arising from widespread resistance to public accommodation desegregation. After eighty-three days, the longest Senate filibuster in history was broken and the Civil Rights Act was signed into law on July 2, 1964. The law would fundamentally alter nearly every aspect of American society by desegregating all public accommodations, outlawing racial job discrimination, and creating the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission. Strikingly, Johnson spoke little on the groundbreaking details on the day the Act passed. However, Johnson did talk in detail about the Community Relations Service as he focused on reconciliation and voluntary compliance.

In an effort to maximize the agency’s effectiveness, Johnson nominated LeRoy Collins, a liberal White former Southern governor, to be the first director of CRS. South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who had led the fight to stymie the bill’s passage, was a nemesis of Collins. Thurmond continued his obstruction by refusing to enter the room to prevent a quorum for the Senate subcommittee to vote on Collins’s nomination. Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough tried to yank Thurmond’s arm to enter the room and the two wrestled until another senator demanded they break it up. Collins later joked, “I’ve been hoping for support from the Senate floor, but I was not expecting that kind of support from that kind of floor.”

CRS was originally housed in the Department of Commerce, as Johnson was concerned the Department of Justice was viewed negatively by many in the South. Former North Carolina Governor Luther Hodges, a white Southerner, was Secretary of Commerce, which Johnson saw as beneficial “to help the medicine go down.” While Collins and Burke Marshall thought it better to stay in Commerce, Attorney General Nicolas Katzenbach wanted the federal government’s entire civil rights agenda to be under the Justice Department, and President Johnson made it so in 1966.

CRS in the civil rights era

In its 60-year history, CRS has been engaging in civil rights conflicts and playing a community dispute resolution role. Initially, CRS mediators fanned across the South providing conciliation services primarily in public accommodation cases. Since there was no formal dispute resolution training or field at the time, the first conciliators had varied backgrounds, from law to labor arbitration to journalism to human relations commissions to business, and most were White. For example, a typical early case might involve the failure of local authorities to a provide regular police patrols when an African-American family moved into a White neighborhood and faced vandalism and abuse. A CRS conciliator would call local law enforcement to take action, and because the conciliator was a federal official, a local Southern sheriff may have felt more compelled to act. If that did not work, the CRS conciliator would call the governor’s office to get that regular patrol to happen.

CRS’s first high profile conflict was in Selma, Alabama, in 1965. Activists had been protesting Jim Crow laws that had prevented Blacks from voting in segregated Alabama. On March 7, about 600 marchers were attacked by Alabama State Troopers in what came to be known as Bloody Sunday. Seventeen marchers were hospitalized, including student leader and future Congressman John Lewis, who suffered a fractured skull. Johnson dispatched LeRoy Collins to prevent a future bloodbath. Collins and the CRS team conducted shuttle diplomacy between the protestors and the Alabama State Troopers prior to the second march, which allowed for a safe protest with Martin Luther King turning the delegation back at the Edmund Pettis Bridge to avoid violence. King would later remark to CRS Director Roger Wilkins that CRS was the only agency in the federal government he could trust. In the third march, Collins personally accompanied King in finally marching from Selma to Montgomery as originally planned. A picture of King and Collins together in that march would be used by his Republican rival in a later Florida Senate campaign as evidence that Collins was too liberal. Collins lost that race.

In addition to real-time intervention, CRS was engaged in a series of national support programs to address racial conflicts, including the underlying social problems. Johnson and Collins viewed CRS as leading the charge on creating a national climate of racial harmony, and a major initiative was the National Citizens Committee for Community Relations (NCC), comprising 450 of the country’s most influential individuals personally recruited by Johnson. They included CEOs, presidents, and board chairs of companies such as Holiday Inn, Neiman Marcus, Hilton, Westinghouse Broadcasting Networks, and prominent Black-owned businesses. NCC members undertook numerous initiatives including trying to increase civil rights coverage and getting businesses to issue pro-civil rights statements. CRS’s second director, Roger Wilkens, the highest-ranking Black official in the Johnson administration (and civil rights leader Roy Wilken’s nephew), accelerated programs that focused on underlying social problems. All these programs were eliminated during the Nixon administration, and the agency has focused more squarely on dispute resolution since.

CRS’s work in public school desegregation is particularly noteworthy, given both the crisis management and prevention work required. Silke Hansen, an early CRS pioneer, played a key role in maintaining peace during the tense Boston Public Schools desegregation in the 1970s. The federal court-mandated desegregation was marked by huge resistance in many White neighborhoods and violence in schools. At South Boston High, violence appeared inevitable and Hansen found herself stepping in to reason with a group of angry White students so that a targeted Black student would not be attacked. The CRS team helped design and supervise a volunteer monitoring program, organized interracial parent councils, and continued working with the Boston schools for five years. Judge Arthur Garrity, who oversaw the Boston schools desegregation, said of Hansen: “She, more than anyone else, was responsible for the functioning and progress of these (interracial) councils.” Garrity also noted the cost of police overtime at South Boston High School was over ten million dollars, while CRS’s annual budget at the time was six million dollars. CRS then played a significant role in keeping the peace at school districts desegregating throughout the country including Detroit and Dayton, cities that wanted to “avoid another Boston” through learning from the Boston missteps and doing substantial and systematic preparation rather than crisis management work.

A substantial portion of CRS work through the decades has been on law enforcement and community relations. For its entire existence, CRS conciliators worked on improving the relationship between law enforcement and minority communities, particularly Black and Brown ones. CRS hired both civil rights and law enforcement specialists, including police-community relations pioneers. CRS helped usher in a national association of police-community relations officers, convened symposiums to reduce use of force with Black and Latino organizations, worked city by city with stakeholders to change laws and police practice, and partnered to increase minority law enforcement hiring and promotion. In 1980, CRS Director Gilbert Pompa reported that the annual total of killings by police had gone down from 354 to 170 between 1970 to 1979, with the reduction mostly among Blacks and Latinos. Yet the problem continued to plague the country as represented by the beating of Rodney King in 1991 and the killings of Michael Brown in 2014 and George Floyd in 2020. In each of these settings CRS also provided conciliation services. At Sanford following the 2012 death of Trayvon Martin at the hands of a neighborhood watch volunteer, CRS played a significant role. CRS in helped the community heal by working with protestors, clergy, and law enforcement (to ensure both safety and free speech at protests).

Louisiana federal judge E. Gordon West’s 1971 bloated case calendar contained thirty civil rights cases filed by mostly Black prisoners in Angola. CRS’s Robert Greenwald mediated a twenty-eight point agreement between prison authorities and lawyers for the prisoners. This led to more CRS prisoner rights mediations, as well as mediation involving prison racial integration, voting rights, and law enforcement discrimination. In 1970, CRS piloted a mediation education program for the Seventh Circuit. Within a year, twelve judges had referred nineteen cases to CRS mediators. CRS played a pioneering role in court-based mediation while others expanded and institutionalized it significantly as court mediation programs grew and many more mediators entered the ranks.

CRS in recent events

After two commercial jetliners crashed into the World Trade Center Buildings on September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush spoke both of the intent to hold the attackers responsible and maintain respect for those of Muslim faith. Attorney General John Ashcroft directed CRS to prevent backlash violence against Arabs, Muslims, and Sikhs. CRS conciliators worked diligently to reach out to such communities in New York and across the country to address hate crime concerns. CRS Director Sharee Freeman worked with national Arab, Muslim, and Sikh organizations to conduct hate crime training, organize racial dialogue, and establish working groups of state attorney generals and US attorneys to prevent backlash violence. As discussed more fully below, CRS also worked significantly in Wisconsin after a 2012 Oak Creek Wisconsin gurdwara shooting. CRS then worked closely with family members of those killed, DOJ Civil Rights attorneys, and FBI to include Sikhs, as well as those from other religious groups, in the Bureau’s hate crime data for the first time. Outgoing FBI Director Robert Mueller signed the order in one of his last acts.

In 2009, President Barack Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. The Act expanded hate crime laws and CRS jurisdiction to cover gender, sexual orientation, religion, and disability. This enabled CRS to work on responding to and preventing hate crimes and increased the type of conflicts that CRS conciliators could engage in. Given the demographic and societal shifts in America, CRS dispute resolution expertise in race and ethnicity could now be leveraged in these other identity areas.

CRS mediation almost resulted in the return of Elian Gonzales to his father in Cuba. Behind the scenes, CRS conciliators, particularly Regional Director Thomas Battles, worked hard to prevent violence and turn Elian over to his father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez. CRS, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, and New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez crafted a realistic agreement that the family ultimately turned down. Mediation is a voluntary process and this situation demonstrated that the parties are still the decision makers.

While I was Director from 2012 to 2016, CRS responded to an extremist killing of members of the Oak Creek Sikh gurdwara and worked on healing, violence prevention, and changing FBI hate crime reporting to include the Sikh and other religions. Conciliators also helped support the Sanford community in the wake of the tragic killing of Trayvon Martin. On August 9, 2014, after Michael Brown was shot to death by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, CRS was the first federal agency on the ground. President Obama shared with the country that there were “experts from the DOJ’s Community Relations Service, working in Ferguson since days after the shooting to foster conversation among local stakeholders and reduce tensions among the community.” During this time CRS created Law Enforcement and the Transgender Community, the first federal agency video on transgender issues.

Conclusion: Past, present, and future

Title X of the 1964 Civil Rights Act ushered in community-based justice through its work and the growth and development of community mediation centers and human relations commissions throughout the country. The founding of CRS marks the origin for community dispute resolution that is distinguished by its inclusion of community voices often marginalized or left out entirely.

This article describes but a sampling of the cases CRS has engaged in through the decades. CRS played a substantial role: in ending the American Indian Movement takeover at Wounded Knee in 1973; in preventing mass violence when a Nazi group demanded to protest in Skokie, Illinois in 1977; in finding an agreement between Vietnamese and White shrimpers in Galveston, Texas in 1981; in providing conciliation at the Sister Spirit camp, a lesbian organization in 1994; in supporting communities in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005; and in maintaining safety and giving voice to marginalized groups at Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016. CRS conciliators have also prevented innumerable conflicts from devolving into violence.

In addition, CRS staff provided pioneering court-based mediation work. Dick Salem, who played leading conciliation roles in the Skokie, Wounded Knee, and school desegregation conflicts, co-wrote an early mediation text with the Ohio State University’s Nancy Rogers. Leading CRS conciliators like James Laue and Wallace Warfield were first generation conflict resolution academics and key figures in what is today the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University. Both wrote and taught extensively on the intersection of dispute resolution and social justice.

Today, we see much more sophisticated community engagement and partnership when we view community-based conflict resolution. Civil rights and dispute resolution, like justice and peace, are sometimes seen as in tension with the other. The reality is that sustainable peace requires justice. Civil rights and dispute resolution birthed the Community Relations Service, an important testament to engaging the voices of community as a requirement to achieve equitable justice and sustainable peace.

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