Text size:

Transcript of full David Diamond interview

BY JENNIFER BARRIOS | jennifer.barrios@newsday.com

My name is David Diamond, I'm 70 years old. I was born in New York City.

What did you do that led to your being called an activist?

Well, I've done a number of things in my life. I don't really think of myself as an activist. I'm very cerebral, I'm more intellectual, but I've done a number of things. I got involved because it seemed to me there were gross unfairnesses in our society.

I've always been concerned with repressive regimes, be they large governmental regimes or smaller institutions. I think of myself as more of a person concerned with process and due process and fair treatment, more than a social activist. But sometimes things are just so big that you really feel you have to be a part of it in some way.

So my I suppose the first big thing I got involved with was 1964, the Freedom Summer in Mississippi, COFO Summer it was called, the Council of Federated Organizations, where a lot of people of various sorts, including lawyers, went down to Mississippi.

And that was really a critical part of the civil-rights movement, I think, and that was my part of the civil-rights movement. I'm not an activist in that I didn't go on Freedom Rides and I didn't go down and live some place and I didn't organize people. I'm a lawyer, and it's a certain kind of skill, and we thought this was a place where that skill could be used, and I went down to try to help.

The one thing I did which is really activist, I suppose, was go to Mississippi in the summer of 1964. That was the summer in which Goodman, Cheney and Schwerner had been killed. It was shortly after they were killed. And I have lived, had lived, still have lived, a very sheltered and naive life. And I had never been in a place like the Mississippi that I saw. And much of it was really, even as a lawyer, quite terrifying.

I would go and meet people, and the people I met, the people for whom I was working, were almost always black or often black, anyway, not always, because there were a lot of poor tenant farmers who were white and I worked with them also.

But I would meet with a black person in some little town and then I would leave, and there would be cars following me with white people in it, and as I said people had just been killed there and we weren't sure that more people weren't going to be killed. And you really get picked out. You're, it's easy to see you're one of the outside agitators. I was an outside agitator, and they didn't like me. And these were people, some of them who were fairly rough.

I was meeting with a family in a house somewhere and a car drove by and I think there was a noise, a backfire or something. Anyway, there was something that happened and they pushed me down, this family I was visiting, pushed me down onto the floor and the guy, the head of the household, pulled a rifle or a shotgun from under the couch and kneeled behind the couch with his shotgun.

And they plainly thought that anybody might drive by their house and shoot through their window. And I had never lived in an environment like that. So those kinds of things were terrifying. They didn't serve to produce any doubt about the appropriateness of what I was doing.

They accentuated the appropriateness of what I was doing. But the sense of living in a hostile environment where there might be enemies behind every bush, and really violent enemies behind every bush, you developed, I developed anyway, a sense of real fear or terror.

At one point I was driving at night somewhere, and there are huge flat areas in Mississippi, and you could see a car coming from, I don't know, 20 miles away. It would take minutes and minutes and minutes. And you began to think, or I began to think, well, who's in that car?

I'm out here, there's nobody around, and at some point on that trip in the middle of the night, I came to a telephone pole and I stopped and got out of the car and held the telephone pole because it was something, it was just a thing, otherwise on this great open space there was nothing. So all of that is fear.

But I met people I really felt were terribly oppressed by the environment in which they lived. And nothing that happened down there made me think I was doing less than a totally desirable thing.

Now I did have much later in life, and I suppose in a sense having nothing to do with civil rights, I did have an experience that made me have some doubts about what I was doing. A fair number of years later, three or four I guess, I was working for Mobilization for Youth Legal Services Corporation on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

And we were part of the War on Poverty, and we were representing poor people on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. And I was director of the welfare reform unit. And the welfare department was a really oppressive operation. And we represented people who had been oppressed by the welfare department. And they were in terrible shape.

But I often had experiences in that job where I thought, and we sued the welfare department all the time and we almost always won, because they were really doing bad things. But the people against whom we were litigating were not bad people. They were victims too, in a sense. The social workers, the caseworkers, were terribly overworked.

They didn't have the resources. And they weren't volitionally in the business of screwing poor and weaker people. That's what they did because that was the institution in which they found themselves.

So in that sense, I felt I was beating up these people who were themselves helpless. And I had one experience in which a guy came in who had been fired by the post office for I think stealing from the mail. And he had been given his pension. But he wasn't given his pension, he was given his contributions to the pension because he had been fired for cause, so he didn't get the employer's contribution.