Gary Orfield Interview Transcript

     [||d5b23d0b-b6e7-4d94-978c-008eae7b5810||] Legal Defense Fund Oral History Collection 

Gary Orfield, Part 1 

Interviewed by Erica Frankenberg, Genevieve Siegel-Hawley 

Remote Interview 

Length: 01:49:30 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

LDF Archives, Thurgood Marshall Institute, NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc. 



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This transcript has been reviewed by Gary Orfield, and LDF. It has been lightly edited, in 

consultation with Gary Orfield, for readability and clarity. Additions and corrections appear in 

both brackets and footnotes. If viewing corresponding video footage, please refer to this 

transcript for corrected information.    

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



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[START OF INTERVIEW] 

Erica Frankenberg: [00:00:00] So, to start with, I'm Erica Frankenberg. This is Genevieve 

Siegel-Hawley. Today is September 24th, 2025, and we are on Zoom to conduct an oral history 

interview with Gary Orfield for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund Archives. Gary, thank you so 

much for being here and for sharing your story. As you know, we both studied with you, and so 

we, and we've worked with you for two decades now and so we have used some of our own 

experiences to shape the questions we're gonna ask, but of course, there will be lots of people 

listening to this or reading the transcript who don't know you so, we're gonna try to elicit some 

about your background as a way of getting started and we wanted to start by having you 

introduce yourself. 

Gary Orfield: [00:00:58] Well, I'm Gary Orfield, and I am a very lucky person. A Minnesotan, 

who has had many opportunities to teach at great universities and be involved in many historic 

events about racial justice in our society. So, I think I've had great, good fortune. Like most 

Americans at this particular point, I am very worried about our legacy of civil rights justice, 

which seems to be eroding steadily at this moment. Not that it's ever not been a fight, it’s always 

been a fight. This is a particular nadir in that long cycle.  

EF: [00:01:55] I thought maybe we would start at the beginning. You've already referenced that 

you are a proud Minnesotan. I definitely learned a lot about Minnesota when I first started 

working with you. So, I think if my notes are right and I might not be so please feel free to 

correct me. You were born in 1941 in Minneapolis, is that right?  

GO: [00:02:25] Right.  

EF: [00:02:56] And I know that you're the oldest of a number of children, but I don't remember 

how many. 

GO: [00:02:32] Six.  

EF: [00:02:33] Okay. The oldest of six. I wondered if you could tell us a little bit about your 

childhood, your family, and the twin cities of that time. 

GO: [00:02:42] Well, the Twin Cities at that time, from a civil rights perspective, was one of the 

whitest parts of the United States and our civil rights problems were really often more about 



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Native Americans than about Blacks. Black population was small. I grew up in South 

Minneapolis. It was basically an overwhelmingly white middle class neighborhood, and it was in 

the post-war period of major economic expansion. Many, many opportunities. The Twin Cities 

were growing actively. It was a lovely childhood. My parents hadn't been to college, but they 

were very interested and very supportive. I went to a Catholic grade school, followed by [public] 

junior high and high school. The one integrated experience I had was in my junior high, which 

was about one fourth Black students. There was a very small Black community, about four or 

five blocks from where I was a little kid. And my junior high was four blocks from where the 

killing of George Floyd would take place many years later [and walking distance from the 2026 

ICE murders of peaceful protesters.] So, [when I was young] it was a community that was 

middle class, not affluent, but a very secure place to grow up. And I grew up as the baby boom 

was beginning with my younger brothers and sisters. I felt very, very fortunate as my parents 

were dedicated and positive. And I was a shy little boy but was always intensely interested in 

what was going on in the world. When I was in junior high, I think it was, I won a world affairs 

quiz with our local newspaper. I followed what was going on in the South—when the Brown v. 

Board was decided. I was 12 and I followed it very closely. We had Carl Rowan, a wonderful 

Black journalist, writing for the Minneapolis newspaper, and he traveled through the South and 

described what was going on, which completely fascinated me. When I got to college at the 

University of Minnesota, I had a very diverse experience. I immediately got involved in a student 

government, got to know people from every background, and had a wonderful time. Part of 

which was to create a program where students went up and volunteered on [American] Indian 

reservations in Minnesota, which I organized with a young woman [Gail Omvet] from Carlton 

College. Students from all over the country applied and a small number of them were selected to 

go live on [American] Indian reservations for a summer. Which was a life-changing experience. 

[Tribal leaders welcomed us to three reservations and arranged for us to live in the local schools.] 

We did an analysis at the end of the experience of living on the reservations and providing all 

kinds of services for people of different ages. I used to work a lot with the little kids, and they 

would follow me around the reservation, but it gave me a tremendous sense of what it's like to 

live in massive poverty and discrimination, which I have never forgotten. I never got convinced 

by any academic research that suggested it wasn't a problem. It was heartbreaking. We decided at 

the end of the experience that we had not changed the underlying circumstances. We provided 



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some services that were very gratefully received, and we'd done it on such an absolutely limited 

budget that the [American] Indian people felt sorry for us and brought us venison and wild rice 

and other things because they were worried whether we were eating enough. In terms of race 

relations, it was an incredibly strong experience because the kids that we would see, the little 

kids, were just like any other little kids, like my little brothers and sisters, you know, wanting to 

hear me tell them stories. But by the time they got to be teenagers, they were burned out, and 

they realized where they were in the world, and they had no chances. And they started doing 

incredibly reckless, dangerous things, driving around on the reservation on dirt roads with no 

lights in the middle of the night, drinking too much. And the older people would come up to us 

and basically apologize for being drunks. There was 95% unemployment, and we would run 

powwows and the people were very grateful [but] apologetic for their lives, basically. Which was 

another thing that I really got from that experience that people blame themselves for what [are] 

really incredibly brutal structural situations, especially in the border communities around 

[American] Indian reservations. It was also a good example for me of segregation. People were 

really isolated. Their only connection with the outside world was television. And you would see 

little tar paper shacks where people were living in terrible conditions and 20 degrees below 

[zero] in the middle of the winter, and you'd have a television aerial sticking out and a culture 

destroyed, basically. Almost nobody on the reservation I lived in still knew the Chippewa 

language, for example. What you get replacing it is what the Spindler anthropologists would 

write about reservation culture, which was like ghetto culture in many respects. But that really 

set me up for what I'd experience when I went to Chicago and really encountered race in a totally 

massive way in a city that absolutely polarized where I went for my graduate education. 

EF: [00:10:37] I definitely want to ask some questions about Chicago for sure. Can I ask just one 

or two follow-ups?  

GO: [00:10:46] Sure. 

EF: [00:10:47] Gary, when you, you, you said it was a Catholic elementary school. Was it public 

school for junior high and high?  

GO: [00:10:53] Yeah.  

EF: [00:10:55] In the Minneapolis school district or?  



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GO: [00:10:57] Yes, in the Minneapolis school district. And this high school I went to, the junior 

high I went to was where Prince went. 

EF: [00:11:06] [Laughter] 

GO: [00:11:08] Prince was on the basketball team —after my time, but yes, in the same school, 

Bryant Junior High. 

EF: [00:11:18] That's a pretty impressive pedigree for a school that really— 

GO: [00:11:22] My high school was maybe the best high school in the state at the time I went. It 

was a great public high school and had some remarkable teachers and it was a very well-

respected school. It was known to great universities in the country, and they would come and 

recruit there, and there was a strong connection with good, higher education. So, it was a rich 

opportunity. My junior high where I really had a substantial Black student population, was kind 

of a struggling school. Eventually it closed, it's become a community center now. 

EF: [00:12:15] Okay.  

GO: [00:12:17] And it's just four blocks down 38th Street from where George Floyd died. 

EF: [00:12:25] Well, I didn't realize that you had— 

Genevieve Siegel-Hawley: [00:12:27] Can I ask, you know, you gave us your account of 

following the events in the South, then Brown v. Board of Education. I think you said you were 

12, and that I think would've placed you in junior high. Was there any meaning making with your 

fellow students? 

GO: [00:12:47] It really wasn't. Minneapolis really didn't have any conscious policies at the time 

that I was in school. It would've come later you know, in the middle sixties and early seventies, 

most of the Black population in Minneapolis at that time was up in the North side. There was a 

Native American center much closer to where I lived. 

EF: [00:13:21] And then your high school was a little bit less diverse? 

GO: [00:13:25] It was much less diverse. It was extremely white and a very strong high school. 

It's, of course, been through generations of change. My sister lives across the street from it, and 

there's a lot of Somali women there now. Minneapolis became a center for refugee populations. 



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So, there's a huge Somali population, a huge Hmong population, and much diversity than the 

[Catholic] church that I went to as a child is also now known as Sagrada Familia. It's full of 

people from Mexico with [the large church packed] for Spanish masses. 

EF: [00:14:07] So, that segues into another question we wanted to ask you. You certainly have 

spoken about the Catholic church, and we wondered if you would talk a little bit about the role 

that the church and your faith played in your life, both growing up and ultimately in the work 

you've done.  

GO: [00:14:29] I was always pretty serious about religion. I was an altar boy. I prayed a lot. Still 

do. You know, it seemed to be perfectly clear that [discrimination]was wrong. Segregation, 

unequal treatment was wrong. There were some changes in my school, in my parish. There had 

been a little Black parish in the small Black community that was about a mile away called St. 

Leonard’s. They merged them in the 1950s, in part because of civil rights changes in my school. 

They would have minstrel shows [in my grade school]. The Black community protested, and 

they eliminated those things. They brought the Boy Scout teams together, you know, so there 

were these minor changes going on as race consciousness developed. I spent one year when I 

was in grade school [when my family moved briefly to] the suburbs in a public school named the 

Robert E. Lee School. 

GSH: [00:15:47] In Minneapolis?  

GO: [00:15:49] It was outside, it was in a suburb of Minneapolis. There was a Robert E. Lee 

Boulevard. 

EF: [00:15:55] Hmm. Wow.  

GO: [00:15:57] At that time, you know, that was the aftermath of the reconciliation with the 

South and the post-Reconstruction. Robert E. Lee was kind of a common name for places that 

were honored. I never heard any discussion about Robert E. Lee. I was only there for fifth grade 

until we moved back to the city. The Robert E. Lee school later shut down and became a senior 

citizen home. 

EF: [00:16:34] Wait, you attended Robert E. Lee Elementary School? 

GO: [00:16:35] I did for one year.  



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GSH: [00:16:38] For one year.  

EF: [00:16:39] Wow.  

GO: [00:16:40] I was so well prepared in my Catholic school which had classes of 50 students 

but had this dedicated core of nuns who were formidable women, who really whipped everybody 

into shape [laughter]. You know, they could control huge classrooms. So, I was very well 

prepared when I went to the suburbs, and we were all very glad to come back to the city. 

GSH: [00:17:12] When did you go? 

GO: [00:17:14] My parents bought a pink [suburban] rambler. It was the 1950s.  

GSH: [00:17:19] [Laughter] 

GO: [00:17:23] [Laughter] That was what was happening. None of us [in the family] liked it. 

And we moved back to the city. 

EF: [00:17:33] Well, short stay in the suburbs then, okay. 

GO: [00:17:35] I had a life living on a bicycle, you know, biking around the lakes in 

Minneapolis. Eventually as a teenager, my dad and I got a little sailboat and taught ourselves 

how to sail. And you know we could go out sailing any night or afternoon in Minneapolis. It's a 

beautiful city and it was in good shape, flourishing during that period. 

GSH: [00:18:04] Mm-hmm. 

EF: [00:18:07] And this would've been before any of the refugee migration would've come to 

Minneapolis, right?  

GO: [00:18:12] We had in our school refugees from World War 2, from Eastern Europe 

especially. Some people who were working were working there were from Eastern European 

countries that had come over as refugees. So, there was a kind of a refugee tradition, and the 

Minnesota churches were very active in that—throughout these different periods. In my 

community, everybody was Protestant [or] Catholic, they were basically Lutheran or Catholic.1 

EF: [00:18:55] That fits with Minnesota. 

 
 



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GSH: [00:18:56] Yep.  

EF: [00:18:59] Gen, do you have any more questions you want to ask? Or should we go on to 

college? 

GSH: [00:19:04] Are we missing anything, Gary? For like, with your early life? You've brought 

up your parents a couple times, and I wondered if faith played a role in shaping your value 

system. 

GO: [00:19:19] Yeah, definitely. My parents were not involved the civil rights directly. As 

Hubert Humphrey said about his mother—Hubert Humphrey was asked one time—he grew up in 

South Dakota. He said, “How did he possibly become so deeply involved in the civil rights? He 

said, “My mother taught me. Everybody was created equal.” 

GSH: [00:19:49] Mm-hmm. 

GO: [00:19:50] I had that message at home as well.  

EF: [00:19:57] Did either of your parents work? And if so, what did they do? 

GO: [00:20:01] My father was an insurance agent. He sold life insurance and he was a champion 

salesperson. I listened to his pitch on the phone maybe thousands of times. He also had a lot of 

automobile insurance. So, I would take messages about auto accidents, things like that at home. 

People would call, he had a pretty big practice and did very well and supported our family well. 

And I started working when I was like 15. I worked at a big grocery store before I went to 

college. It was an experience. At this store, for example, we had a line that took carts out to 

outlying areas [in Minnesota’s freezing winters.] This was in the first indoor shopping center in 

the world. 

EF: [00:21:01] Wow.  

GO: [00:21:03] Southdale outside of Minneapolis. Logical place for an indoor shopping center, 

because it’s so cold in the winter. We would have cars drive up and we would load their 

purchases. And we'd go in and out from 15, 20 [degrees] below zero in January and February 

into 70 degrees, hundreds of times during the day. It was a very exhausting job. It was good. But 

it was a good experience, 'cause I worked hard, it was a union shop. I got to know people of very 



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different backgrounds, which was healthy. It was typical adolescent male culture from that 

period. 

EF: [00:22:12] This has been really fascinating to learn a little bit more about your background. 

So, I know that you are very proud University of Minnesota graduate. 

GO: [00:22:23] Yeah.  

EF: [00:22:24] I'm curious to know, given what you said about your high school and its 

connections to different universities, why did you decide to go to the University of Minnesota?  

GO: [00:22:38] Well, the assumption was that everybody would go to University [of Minnesota] 

unless they were going out to Ivy League or something like that. My family did not feel that they 

were gonna be able to support high tuition, so I just applied to Harvard and to University of 

Minnesota, and I got admitted to Harvard. I was a National Merit semi-finalist, so I could pretty 

well get admitted any place. So, Harvard admitted me and gave me a little financial aid. My 

father looked at it and he said, “You know, you've got five brothers and sisters.” So, I sent the 

form back and said, “Sorry, can't come”. I didn't realize I would be going back there as a tenured 

full professor someday, but I went to the University of Minnesota and I had a fabulous 

experience. Just a wonderful experience. Starting very early, I got into student government in the 

liberal arts college in my first weeks on the campus. I started in an [National Science 

Foundation] program in chemistry. 'Cause I was a very good science student and had extremely 

high scores, so everybody wanted me in their classes. And I got exempted from basically my 

entire freshman year and started taking advanced classes instantly. One of my first classes was 

with Arnold Rose, who was one of the co-authors of, Gunnar Myrdahl’s classic study, An 

American Dilemma. I had a lot of wonderful, wonderful teachers at the university, and I 

discovered many important things very fast. One of which was you could get into any class just 

by going and talking to the professor and telling them how interested you were in their work. I 

got into many wonderful classes. My freshman year. I had a class in advanced writing from a 

very experienced journalist. He made us write major pieces every week and tore them apart. One 

of the best classes that I could have had at that time. Many good things happened to me there. I 

was deeply involved in student politics, not just at the university, but also in National Student 

Association and other kinds of things that were going on, on a national level. So, a lot of changes 

were happening very fast. And when I got to the university, my first year, I used to work at the 



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State Democratic headquarters in Minnesota. It's called the Democratic Farmer Labor Party, the 

DFL. I worked there and coming in all the time, were Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale, a 

young attorney, and Eugene McCarthy, who led the anti-war campaign. So, I was very plugged 

into national figures just as a freshman. I was the person who ran the university part of a 

congressional campaign. This campaign actually knocked out the Congressman who had been 

the keynoter of the Republican National Convention. We don't know how we did it. None of us 

thought we were gonna win, but on election night, we won. So, I had some very, very fascinating 

experiences almost instantly when I got to the university. 

EF: [00:26:45] Sorry, Gary, what year did you start at Minnesota? 

GO: [00:26:48] 1959.  

EF: [00:26:50] Okay. 

GO: [00:26:52] And so, the next year, of course, was the Kennedy campaign, which I was 

deeply involved with it—at the state headquarters, sending out literature to all the different 

counties. At that time, we had a major religious issue. Southern Minnesota is heavily Catholic, 

and Northern Minnesota is almost all Scandinavian. And there were places that had always voted 

Democratic, who we didn't wanna vote for a Catholic. And then there were Catholic counties 

where we landed, John F. Kennedy, and thousands of people turned out. It was a campaign of—

thank God—ended a lot of the religious prejudice in the country. Something like 4 million votes 

changed on religious grounds in that campaign. It was fascinating. I had a lot of amazing 

experiences and got to know a lot. Minnesota had and still has a huge foreign student population. 

So, I got in touch with a lot of those people and was asked early on to help bring [American] 

Indian students into our campus. There were only 12 Native American students in the entire 

University of Minnesota campus at that time.  

EF: [00:28:23] Wow.  

GO: [00:28:24] Campuses including one campus that had once been an [American] Indian 

training school. So, we were working hard to actually change that.  

GSH: [00:28:36] Gary, when was the summer that you spent on the reservation? What year was 

that for you?  



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GO: [00:28:43] That was the summer of my sophomore year, and the reservation was called Nett 

Lake. And just a few miles from the Canadian border, so very, very northern. And the lake was 

covered with wild rice.  

EF: [00:29:10] Gary, what did you major in at college?  

GO: [00:29:14] You know, I started out, I think as a chemistry major. But I changed in my 

freshman year into political science.  

EF: [00:29:26] Okay.  

GO: [00:29:27] I was deeply influenced by taking an ancient history class or sequence of 

classes, which was one of the things that I studied in that year since I had a lot of space, since I 

had many credits before I came. So, I read Greek history especially and read Thucydides. I 

discovered that I was much more interested in why civilizations decay than why people got sore 

throats.  

GSH: [00:30:04] [Laughter] 

GO: [00:30:06] I liked my science classes a lot. They were easy for me in terms of 

understanding. I did not like the labs, and I did not like the dissections. You know, I could do 

them, but I thought, “Why am I doing this?” I know what the results are gonna be. They know 

what the results are gonna be. This is like a cooking class. It's not really very interesting. I got 

interested in other things. And I got a case of mononucleosis that made me very sick for a 

quarter, and I had to choose dropping some courses and keeping some. And that precipitated me 

into recognizing what was happening to my interests. By the time I was a sophomore, the civil 

rights movement was beginning to emerge. One of my friends and colleagues in student 

government became one of the people who went down on the Freedom Rides and was thrown 

into prison and was charged with criminal anarchy in Georgia and thrown into Parchman prison 

[Mississippi State Penitentiary] in Mississippi with a group of Freedom riders. So, we were 

connecting with the outside world. The effect of the movement, of course, came right onto our 

campus. Everything that happened in Minnesota came onto our campus. People from the East 

Coast and those who go to elite schools don't understand how public universities function as 

central foci of state government, especially when they're in the Capitol. And everything 



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happened, went through our campus. One time the governor came over and I got a bunch of 

posters, and we had staged a little demonstration, and he was thrilled. 

EF: [00:32:22] Now, in prepping for this interview, I was reading some old articles about you, 

Gary.  

GO: [00:32:30] Yeah. 

EF: [00:32:31] And one said, when you were in college, you helped to organize a campaign 

opposing an increase in student fees.  

GO: [00:32:39] Yes.  

EF: [00:32:41] Can you tell us a little bit about that?  

GO: [00:32:44] Well, we were running, I was running the student government in the liberal arts 

college, which was a separate student government and tended to get really, really good students 

to serve. So, I saw that they were gonna make a tuition increase. I had never done a survey, but I 

went over to the [University] survey research office to learn how to do it. We sent out a survey to 

students and got hundreds of responses and had a reasonable sample. The survey showed that a 

lot of the students—two thirds of whom were commuters—the university's located right in the 

middle of the Twin Cities. For most of my college career, and for most students at the university, 

it was a commuter experience. I found out that a large sector of the students said that they would 

have to drop out if the tuition went up. So, we wrote a little report on the data, which was pretty 

good data, and I sent it to the state legislature, and the Democratic caucus picked it up and voted 

down the tuition increase.  

EF: [00:34:06] Wow. 

GO: [00:34:07] It was an empowering experience; the university administration did not like me.  

EF: [00:34:15] [Laughter] 

GO: [00:34:18] We knocked out the whole tuition increase, which was trivial compared to 

current times. 

GSH: [00:34:23] Mm-hmm.  

GO: [00:34:24] But it was my first survey and research enterprise.  



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EF: [00:34:29] And seeing research that affected policy. 

GO: [00:34:37] They came to me and said, “You know, we're gonna threaten the library.” And I 

said, “We can't threaten the library.” So, we supported a like $1 or $2 month quarterly fee for the 

library, and we won that too. 

GSH: [00:34:54] Wow.  

GO: [00:34:57] Yeah. I think libraries are sacred, in my view of the world.  

EF: [00:35:01] Yes, yes. So, it sounds like you've had a lot of really fascinating experiences. I 

wanna go back to the American Indian reservation just for a second. 

GO: [00:35:14] Yeah.  

EF: [00:35:15] I mean, it certainly seems like there are lots of different things going on between 

state politics, certainly the burgeoning civil rights movement in the South. What made you 

decide to do the work on the American Indian reservation? 

GO: [00:35:34] Well, when I discovered what our data looked like, I organized a trip of students 

up to the experience, up to the reservation, several reservations to just see what was going on and 

what we could do. And we went up there and we were shocked. And that made me decide to 

organize something. I didn't know how to organize it but we decided to try to create a student 

volunteer project. And it was a precursor of the [AmeriCorps] VISTA. I was called to 

Washington actually to help them think about what to do. They didn't do anything I 

recommended. So, we used the National Student Association as a place to organize it. We got 

volunteers from all over the country. For raising the money, I had to learn how to raise a little 

money. And so, I went around the city and gathered small amounts of money from many, many 

people in groups. One of the groups that supported it was a Black group in Minneapolis, Black 

women who, most of whom said that they had [American] Indian ancestors, and some of whom 

brought their jewelry to the tea where I got some checks. I also went to a rich woman, and she 

sent a letter to a hundred of her friends and money began to come in, in small amounts.  

EF: [00:37:31] Wow.  

GO: [00:37:33] We never had very much money. We were so poorly funded that the [American] 

Indians felt sorry for us.  



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EF: [00:37:39] Mmhmm.  

GO: [00:37:40] But it was an experience. We did launch on three different reservations and we 

had people living in the schools and working with the tribes. We learned a lot and we didn't do 

much harm and we changed ourselves. But it was very appreciated what we did. A lot of the 

things that we were providing like little libraries, weren't available normally there in the 

summertime, and people needed them and liked them. 

GSH: [00:38:25] Because you were living in the schools, but you were also keeping them open 

year-round. Was that part of it?  

GO: [00:38:31] Well, the school wasn't really open very much. We had some events there, but 

the tribe just gave us the right to live in the school because we didn't have any other place to live.  

GSH: [00:38:42] I see.  

GO: [00:38:47] It was a good experience. But at that time, I was really getting very interested in, 

and of course, the Southern movements as friends were going down there and things were 

happening. And that's when I met Martin Luther King [Jr.], who came to give a speech at our 

campus. And as a student leader, I got a chance to meet him and shake his hand and listen to his 

talk.  

EF: [00:39:12] Do you have any sense what year that would've been, Gary?  

GO: [00:39:15] I think that probably would've been 1962.  

EF: [00:39:18] Okay.  

GO: [00:39:19] There actually is a record of it in the Minnesota Archives.  

EF: [00:39:23] Sure.  

GO: [00:39:24] It was interesting to me because it was a very academic speech that he gave. 

There was a lot of serious theology in it. It didn't stir people up the way that he often would do in 

the South. I think he was kind of tired, but I did meet him and shake his hand, and that was the 

first encounter I had with him. I would have some others later on.  

EF: [00:39:52] Will you tell us a little bit more about your burgeoning interest in the Civil 

Rights Movement then, at that time?  



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GO: [00:39:58] Well, I was following it very carefully, and then I wrote my senior paper in 

political science on the presidential handling of the Little Rock and Oxford, Mississippi crises. 

So, in doing that, I got into all of the archives and reading all the newspapers of the communities 

and getting very deeply involved and got a [summa cum laude for the senior paper.] I got really 

enmeshed in those stories and thinking about how they were managed and what could be done 

and what the situation was. So, by the time I went to graduate school, I had read very widely 

already in terms of, particularly, Southern civil rights.  

EF: [00:41:05] And so then, did you graduate from University of Minnesota in [19]’63?  

GO: [00:41:12] [19]’63, yes.  

EF: [00:41:13] Okay. And then did you go right to Chicago for graduate school? Did you take a 

break?  

GO: [00:41:18] No, I went to Washington [D.C] for the summer.  

EF: [00:41:21] Oh, okay.  

GO: [00:41:23] And before graduate school. And I worked at the A.I.D [Agency for 

International Development subsequently re-branded as USAID] actually, studying how to make 

our loans to Africa more efficient. That summer I had an interview at the University of 

Minnesota with a team [from Washington] who were recruiting future federal executives. I 

passed this interview and I started getting offered jobs by different departments in Washington, 

but I wanted to go to graduate school, and I've been admitted to all of the great graduate schools 

in political science. But for the summer, I was in Washington, and it was the course, the summer, 

the peak of the Civil Rights Movement. I heard [Vice] President [Lyndon B.] Johnson speak, 

Bobby [Robert F.] Kennedy—many, many speakers. I went to [pay respects] to Medgar Evers 

when his body was brought to lay in state in the church in Washington. Then I was there at the 

end of the summer, just a few days before I went off to graduate school I was in the March on 

Washington [for Jobs and Freedom].  

EF: [00:42:42] Mm-hmm.  

GO: [00:42:43] Which was a fabulous experience. And you know, a blessing. It was incredible 

to see. In my experience at the State Department and in other places, there was a tremendous fear 



17 
 

of what was gonna happen. And of course, when we came in on the morning of the march, there 

were troops all over downtown Washington waiting for the riots and so forth. And there were all 

these people just pouring in from everywhere. And it was a very thrilling experience.  

GSH: [00:43:27] Was there a group of you at A.I.D that went? 

GO: [00:43:34] Well, there were three of us who were chosen for these special internships at 

A.I.D. One of whom was Robert [D.] Putnam, who wrote “Bowling Alone”.  

GSH: [00:43:47] “Bowling Alone”!  

GO: [00:43:48] The other one was a, a man named Robert [S.] Pelcyger, who became a famous 

[American] Indian Rights Attorney. We were looking at how to manage A.I.D loans to different 

countries. For me, it was newly independent African countries. And actually, a lot of the 

recommendations I made were adopted.  

EF: [00:44:14] Gary, what do you remember from the March on Washington, like that day?  

GO: [00:44:19] Well, the main experience was, I mean, it was very hot and sweaty and 

unpleasant in lots of ways. But the main thrilling experience was to be coming in this tide of 

people from everywhere in the country and just see it pouring into the [National] Mall, and the 

peacefulness and the joyfulness of it. And there were famous people everywhere, you know, 

singing, Peter Paul and Mary were singing at one place that I came in, you know, it was lovely. 

But at the same time, it was, it was really hot, And it was a Washington summer. Anybody who 

knows a Washington summer knows that it was kind of a mistake to build Washington on a 

swamp. 

GSH: [00:45:13] Mm-hmm. 

GO: [00:45:18] It was a great experience, a wonderful way to go off to grad school. Two or three 

days after the Washington March, getting into a U-Haul. I had been married at the beginning of 

that summer. 

EF: [00:45:40] Wow.  

GO: [00:45:41] I was only 21. So, I was still a kid in lots of ways.  

EF: [00:45:53] Mm-hmm. It's a lot, lot of change.  



18 
 

GO: [00:45:57] Yeah. Yeah. 

GSH: [00:45:59] How'd you know Gary? How'd you know you wanted to go to graduate school 

instead of be a federal executive? 

GO: [00:46:08] Well, I actually went around and interviewed people at Harvard and Princeton 

and other places that were offering me scholarships. I was figuring out what to do. Like 

[Harvard] Kennedy School offered me awards and so forth. And I decided, I wanted to be 

someone who thought about the nature of collapse or of the gaps in our society. I had experience 

from my little State department experience and so forth and of course, from my readings in 

political science, [I knew a bit about the] kind of what life was like within the government or 

within a what we would call a policy subsystem and so forth. And I decided I'd be wanting to be 

outside. And my goal was to have a life that was half academic and half activism. And I always 

thought, you know, I could do the research when things were grim in Washington and then work 

in Washington on implementing major reforms. We were in the middle of, when I was in grad 

school, huge reforms going on in the country. My dissertation was about one of the very 

largest—I thought there were gonna be more reforms in my life. I didn't realize that it was the 

high point of the next 50 years. And that we wouldn't have another surge like that, and we would 

actually be facing a couple of major conservative surges. So, I came into the academic world, 

thinking that that history was gonna evolve in a way that gave me more options, and that I could 

move in and out. Unfortunately, there's never been a government that has been as liberal as I was 

personally since that time. Nothing even close. The Johnson administration was close. Did some 

amazing things, but I was even critical of them. So, I thought I could have be inside and out. 

Turned out I was gonna be out more and more, on the periphery of things. Although during some 

periods, like the Carter administration, I got much more involved in government. 

EF: [00:48:59] And Gary, I'm really fascinated by that goal that you said that you wanted to be: 

half an academic and half activism. 

GO: [00:49:08] Yeah. 

EF: [00:49:10] Do you remember how that goal came about? 

GO: [00:49:14] Well, it was my spirit, basically. Everyone in my graduate training discouraged 

that kind of idea. We were supposed to be value free. 



19 
 

EF: [00:49:29] Which means no activism, right? 

GO: [00:49:31] Yeah. Fortunately, I had some wonderful courses at the University of Minnesota, 

including a course by a famous philosopher named May Brodbeck about the logic of the social 

sciences. I realized, she came from a logical positivist background, but the philosophers—I had 

almost a major in philosophy as an undergrad—they recognized that there are different 

dimensions, and it's true that you can't say scientifically that something is true if you can't 

measure it, which is the whole insight of the logical positivists. But that doesn't mean that it's not 

true, which is what they, what social scientists often miss. Things that you can't measure still do 

exist, and you can recognize them. The other thing I came to understand was there's this 

substantial difference between choosing your subject and abiding by [scientific] methods. So, 

there was no reason I couldn't choose subjects that were of intrinsic interest to me and that  

reflected my belief[s]so long as I abided by social science methods, in other words, looked at 

other explanations [critically], collected and used data carefully, all of the things that social 

science needs to do. So, most social scientists get their subjects from the annual conventions and 

journals of their discipline, and they do incremental things on the edges of those issues. That's 

how you make a really fast career in social science, doing that really well. I was not interested in 

most of the things that political scientists were writing about. I was interested in different things 

altogether. So, I had to prove myself by being careful and accurate as a social scientist in terms 

of the middle of this process. In other words, looking at the issue I thought was important 

scientifically. And in terms of the end, I did something that was not approved of, which was I 

took positions right after I learned something. I didn't budge the data. I tried to live with it. I 

came to believe that if you won a civil rights case and it didn't actually work, you hadn't won 

anything. You'd spent somebody's rights on something that would actually be a failure. So, I 

never got into the pure activist side because when I was in, at college and when I was in graduate 

school, I worked actively with a lot of activists. But I figured out how to create an understanding, 

a mutual understanding, which was, I will try to answer your questions, which I believe are 

important, but I won't do it to reach your conclusions, which you've already made. I will look at 

it critically as a researcher, and I will give you my best advice. And you can take it or leave it, 

but basically it doesn't help you if you win what you're fighting for, if it really doesn't work. So 

that's been a constant tension and relationship determiner throughout my career. Oftentimes they 

would call me when they either didn't have a plan or when they knew their plan was gonna lose 



20 
 

and they needed a better explanation. But I often found [that] activism tends to be about things 

that are already decided as the goal and the real contribution somebody like me can make is 

thinking about whether the goal is right. Thinking if there's a better way to reach it and figuring 

out whether or not it's working. So I've always had this kind of half in and half out situation, but 

people, come to understand and value and brought into a lot of big things because they realized 

they were gonna lose and they didn't have much credibility in terms of asserting what they 

wanted. Other times, just because I was able to lend credentials to something that activists 

already knew but could not get believed. One Black congressman in Chicago once told me, when 

we did a study of a job training program, for example, he said, “I know this, I see these people in 

my office every day, but if I stand up in, on Capitol Hill in the house and I say something about 

it, they'll just say, oh, that's that Black congressman from Chicago, we can dismiss him.” But if I 

say, “The University of Chicago research says such and such, they will have to listen.” 

EF: [00:55:23] Gary, are there other things from your time at University of Chicago that stand 

out to you in terms of that institution in particular, any professors or classes you had even being 

at, being in graduate school at that time?  

GO: [00:55:40] Yeah. I had a remarkable set of exposures to major scholars in Chicago. Chicago 

was maybe—when I was there, the best place to see multidimensional social science. I took it 

broadly. So, I had a field in contemporary history as well as—and I studied with John Hope 

Franklin in terms of Black history, very powerful experience in terms of thinking about where we 

were and the evolution of civil rights. 'Cause he talked a lot about post-Reconstruction and he 

talked a lot about how basically the white academic world had abandoned civil rights issues 

during the post-Reconstruction period. And had not come back until some, for some people in 

the 1960s. That made a really deep lasting impact on me. And I resolved not to fall into that kind 

of fallacy and I never did. But it was already apparent there in the sixties that there's gonna be a 

lot of resistance after the time of 1965 with the Watts riots in Los Angeles and the beginning of,  

you know, the rise of the George Wallace movement in the South and so forth, it was obvious 

that we were in for a big fight. And that something like the resistance that came after 

Reconstruction was gonna be coming along for a while at least. I didn't figure it was gonna last a 

half century. But the [University of Chicago was] a deep experience. I had a wonderful, 

wonderful courses on urban politics and on urban history that have been extremely valuable to 



21 
 

me. I had a really good course on the history of higher education about the rise and fall of 

universities. That was quite useful. I didn't think I was gonna be researching in that area. But of 

course, I turned out to be doing a lot of that kind of research. It was a good experience. I had 

some good American government folks and I had a research experience running research projects 

out in Los Angeles during my graduate school years one summer, which gave me an introduction 

to the city where I was gonna settle for a long period of my life. And I got to know it really well, 

including hearing Martin Luther King [Jr.] speak in Will Rogers Park, maybe three days before 

the Watts riots. 

EF: [00:58:50] Mm-hmm.  

GO: [00:58:59] Graduate [school] was a rich experience for me. I decided early on that I was 

gonna get involved in Chicago and I did go to the school board meetings regularly 'cause there's 

a huge civil rights fight going on in the Chicago school district. They were basically locking out 

Black kids from available space and much better schools. Putting portable classrooms in their 

recreation areas. There was a huge fight going on, which I followed and got involved in it. And I 

did some poll watching and saw the underside of the machine. 

EF: [00:59:41] Mm-hmm.  

GO: [00:59:42] And got to know that. Which is all very helpful for me because the people in 

Chicago know everything as political and I got a good introduction to that. A lot of people at the 

University of Chicago felt they were above all of that.  

EF: [01:00:03] And did you see—obviously when, um, MLK was assassinated, he had started 

doing some work in Chicago. Did you see him during that time? 

GO: [01:00:19] Yes. I did meet him in his home where he was living in the West side of Chicago 

and I got to see their operation, the Chicago Freedom Movement. One of the great 

demonstrations, I was right behind him when he had a list of demands on the Chicago City 

government. There was Martin obviously a reflection of his idea of Martin Luther King [Jr.], or I 

should say Martin Luther, nailing [his 95 theses] on the door [of the Castle church] in 

Wittenberg, Germany, [starting a huge protestant movement.] So, in Chicago, King came in with 

a list of propositions for Chicago, and we came up to the doors of the Chicago City Hall, and he 

had his hammer and nails, but the doors were glass.  



22 
 

EF: [01:01:22] Ooh.  

GO: [01:01:23] And that made me feel, you know, that was such a symbol of the whole Chicago 

Freedom movement. You had to scotch tape it [your demands] up, and of course, the city took it 

down quickly. The Chicago Freedom Movement was very interesting, and I followed it around a 

lot. I went to hear Martin Luther King talk in many little Black churches on the South side of 

Chicago when he was mobilizing and it was a breathtaking experience. He would come into a 

little church with a lot of tired people who had had a long day, and he would get a sense of them 

and he would pick out a Bible passage from Exodus, often times about Pharaoh, about the walls 

of Jericho, about all of that [struggle] and it had tremendous meaning. And he would weave it 

into the whole politics of Mayor Daley. And Mayor Daley was Pharaoh. Walls of Jericho were 

the walls of segregation. You know, it was amazing. One time I heard him speak over at the 

University, speaking to the people who were doing the health work in the campaign. It was a 

small room, maybe 20 people, and I was there, you know, three or four feet from him just 

watching him. Just hearing how he created his speeches was astonishing. I’ve been to the 

museum down in Atlanta, where they have copies of the notes that he made for some of [his] 

great speeches. And when you look at the little, few little notes and you think about what it was 

like to actually hear him when he got going, it was astonishing. You know when you visit King's 

Home in Atlanta, [you hear that] every day his father would require the kids at the dinner table to 

interpret a passage of the Bible. And I think that, you know, that's part of what became the great 

facility in speaking.  

EF: [01:03:47] Mm-hmm.  

GO: [01:03:48] He knew what was in people's minds, and he knew how to reflect on it. He knew 

how to weave it together and it was astonishing. Nothing like it; I've never experienced it in any 

way. 

EF: [01:04:06] And so, were you in Chicago when he was assassinated?  

GO: [01:04:12] No. I was in Virginia at my first teaching job.  

EF: [01:04:20] Okay.  

GO: [01:04:21] That was in 1968. The Chicago stuff was before that.  



23 
 

EF: [01:04:26] Okay.  

GO: [01:04:27] My first teaching job was at the University of Virginia, and the day he was 

assassinated, we were scheduled to take a group of high school kids from Waynesboro, Virginia 

up to Washington [D.C] the next day. And I told my wife, I said, “Call all the parents and tell 

them something's gonna happen.” You know, [ask] whether they really want their kids to go. So, 

we did, but we took them. And so I was in Washington that day when there were [huge fires] on 

the main streets in Washington. I was at the HUD building and I was gathering some stuff for 

some civil rights research I was doing but also watching over these kids. And the huge plumes of 

fire rose up on Seventh Street and 14th Street in DC where, where I had been living when I was 

doing my dissertation. So, I knew the city well by then. It was shocking. I walked by the White 

House and there were Marines with machine guns out in front of it. There were Marines set up 

on the steps to the US Capitol, which is one of the reasons the Fair Housing Law got passed 

because a member of Congress saw those Marines there and he thought, “Oh my God, we've 

gotta do something.” And he was a Republican. It was pretty astonishing that day and all of the 

things that happened in the following days after the assassination. 

EF: [01:06:15] Yeah. I can't imagine.  

GO: [01:06:16] I was following the development of the Poor People's Movement before that and 

after King was assassinated, I went to Resurrection City a couple of times. I had friends there in 

the [American] Indian community that had been settling in there. And I spent some time going 

around in the mud of Resurrection City and thinking, “This is another symbol of what we're 

facing.” ‘Cause here was this idea, and it was all stuck in the mud. It was really, literally stuck in 

the mud in the center of Washington [D.C].  

GSH: [01:07:03] Gary, I feel like I'm gonna take us back just a little bit to talk about your 

dissertation, but wondered if you needed a break? 

GO: [01:07:14] No. I’m fine.  

GSH: [01:07:15] You're okay?.  

GO: [01:07:16] Yeah.  

GSH: [01:07:18] Will you talk a little bit about how you chose your dissertation topic?  



24 
 

GO: [01:07:24] Well, when the Civil Rights Act passed—I've always been interested in 

Congress; I follow these things closely and later I would write a book on Congress. It was 

astonishing. I followed the whole experience, especially with Title VI and Adam Clayton 

Powell’s initiative [to cut off federal funds for violations] and trying to get something like Title 

VI enacted. And the Kennedy administration, I followed them closely. I mean Kennedy was 

pretty conservative on civil rights before he had the conversion experience in 1963. But I knew 

what was in the Civil Rights Act, and I knew it was revolutionary, and I knew it was gonna have 

huge impact on the South. When I was finishing my exams in my third year of the doctoral 

program in Chicago and thinking about my dissertation, I also had an offer to teach at a Black 

college in Virginia [Virginia State University] from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation at that time. 

And I had said I was going to come. It was in Petersburg.  

GSH: [01:08:58] Virginia State.  

GO: [01:08:59] And my department at the University of Chicago had nominated me for the 

Brookings Fellowship. Brookings gave basically one fellowship each year for a [political 

science] doctoral dissertation in Washington. And [Chicago] nominated me and they didn't even 

tell me. And so, I had a week to create a dissertation proposal and I did. I sent it in. I didn't think 

anything much would happen. And they called me and say, “We've awarded you the dissertation 

[fellowship.]”  And so, I said, “Well, I've already got this job.” So, I called the president of the 

Black college and I said to him, “You know, I have committed to come down there and I am 

perfectly willing to honor my commitment, but I've just been given this offer and I thought I’d let 

you know.” And he said, “Hell—” he said, “White doctoral students are a dime of dozen around 

here.” [Laughter]  

GSH: [01:10:11] [Laughter] 

GO: [01:10:13] He said, “Take the fellowship.” So, that's what brought me to Washington to 

write my dissertation what became my first book. But Brookings was a great place to do it 

because Brookings is connected to everything in Washington and at Brookings, when you're on 

the staff there, you have delivery service from the Library of Congress. This is the only place I 

know of that has that. And you could get any kind of research materials you needed, and you 

could get access to any congressional office. They all knew [what] Brookings [was]. So, it was a 

great place to do this research. I figured that figuring out how the Civil Rights Act was gonna 



25 
 

change the South was about as good a topic as you could have. Even though, frankly, my 

political science professors didn't understand it very well. 

GSH: [01:11:15] Mm-hmm.  

GO: [01:11:16] Or anything about the South. And they didn't know much about constitutional 

law, which was one of my fields of study too. They didn't understand how big the change was 

gonna be. So, I had a lot of arguments with them. But I had tremendous access in Washington 

because I did understand, and people wanted to talk about it. They were going through an 

incredible experience of actually changing a whole region of the country in a few months, which 

they actually did in that period. And they gave me great access. The head of the—what became 

the Office for Civil Rights—had been a graduate student in theology, was a very nice man and 

said, “We'll show you whatever you wanna see.” He showed me what was in his desk. He said, 

“Do you wanna see any of this stuff?” 

GSH: [01:12:16] [Laughter] 

GO: [01:12:19] I said, “Of course I do.” And I would go interview him at his home. And it was 

incredible. And then I really had a chance to talk to everybody in Washington in the middle of 

this process going on. And it gave me a unique access when the LBJ [Lyndon B. Johnson 

Presidential] Library was organized, they were doing a history of the different departments and 

programs that were really important. And they were going to do something about the Office for 

Civil Rights. And they just decided to make my book the official history. 

GSH: [01:13:05] That's amazing.  

GO: [01:13:08] I don't know if they ever stated that officially, but that's what they told me. It 

was an incredible experience and I could see the whole process in many ways. And part of what I 

had included in my dissertation was a chapter on Virginia, which had been, of course, the 

epicenter of the massive resistance to school integration. I'd gotten into trouble with them early 

on in my experience as an Assistant Professor at [the University of] Virginia. I would get in in 

trouble with them, but I was traveling around the state so I could see it in operation as well as in 

the politics and the legal processes in Washington, which gave me a wonderful understanding of 

the possibilities and limitations of massive change through major civil rights reform. Which was 

about as fascinating as anything you could look at in terms of social history.  



26 
 

EF: [01:14:21] So, Gary, you talked a little bit about how Brookings gave you access to OCR 

[Office of Civil Rights].  

GO: [01:14:27] Yeah.  

EF: [01:14:28] And then the Office of Education—I think it was at the time 'cause it wasn't a 

department.  

GO: [01:14:32] Yeah.  

EF: [01:14:35] Did you choose Virginia ‘cause it was close by? And then so your dissertation 

and then book have a focus on cases in Virginia and Chicago.  

GO: [01:14:46] Right, right.  

EF: [01:14:48] How did you choose those?  

GO: [01:14:49] From my experience in Chicago. 

EF: [01:14:50] Right. 

GO: [01:14:51] And Chicago of course was the decisive case for the failure of the federal 

government to extend the Civil Rights Act effectively to the North. Virginia was important 

because it was nearby and feasible, but also because it had had this historic role of leading an 

opposition to school integration.  

EF: [01:15:14] Mm-hmm.  

GO: [01:15:15] There was a Governor in Virginia at that time who was shutting down entire 

school districts if one Black student got in, he said, “Letting one Black student into a school was 

like letting cancer into your body.”  

EF: [01:15:30] Wow.  

GO: [01:15:34] Yeah.  

EF: [01:15:35] What's the name of this Governor? 

GO: [01:15:37] Governor Mills Godwin. He was— 

GSH: [01:15:41] You know we have a high school named after him.  



27 
 

GO: [01:15:43] He's a complete segregationist.  

EF: [01:15:46] Got it.  

GO: [01:15:47] He was followed by a progressive Republican, [Linwood Holton] who was the 

father of the wife of Senator Kaine. A really decent man. If the Republican party had chosen his 

path we'd be so much better off. But yeah, Virginia was a really good place to look at this, 

because also inside of Virginia, you have the Northern suburbs, which are, you know, basically 

border state [territory] more like Maryland. And then you have the center, you have the 

Shenandoah Valley, which is old fashioned, predominantly white area that had not really been on 

the Confederate side in the Civil War. And you have the Norfolk area, [the port area] which is 

interesting in its own respect. Then you have the South side, which is like Alabama. You have 

like 30 counties, predominantly Black, where the Nat Turner Rebellion took place. So, Virginia 

gives you a really good chance to look at a wide range of different social realities. When I was 

teaching at [University of] Virginia, I used to recognize what county people came from by their 

accent.  

EF: [01:17:30] So, this may feel like almost a question that Gen wouldn't even know why I'm 

asking, because she is a graduate of UVA. So, I don't mean any disrespect to your alma mater 

Gen, but Gary, you took your first job as a professor at UVA.  

GO: [01:17:51] Right. 

EF: [01:17:53] I assume you would've had a lot of different options. Why did you choose this as 

your first job out of grad school?  

GO: [01:18:02] Well, I didn't have a lot of options because what I was doing was not really 

mainstream political science at the time. So, there was one day I was turned down by three great 

universities when I was on the job market. I was called to many places because Chicago was a 

very dominant place in the political science market. But I think I lost a job at Stanford and a 

couple other places on one day. So, I was late in the academic year and I didn't have a job, so I 

started writing letters to members of Congress telling them I like to work for them. But I did get 

some really interesting offers, including one from, eventually from Bobby Kennedy. But late in 

the year, Virginia had a vacancy develop, and they came to me and they offered me the job. And 

so, I took it. I thought it was a great start of an academic career, and it was before I'd been 



28 
 

offered some of these other things. I took it because it was a very good university and I was 

interested in the South. And I'd been studying Virginia especially. And it's close enough to 

Washington, so you can do national research as well as Virginia research. It was a good job. And 

it was interesting for me, although my first assignment was to teach mid-career federal 

executives a course in public administration. These were people who were coming back after 20 

years of service. And I had never even had a course on public administration, a formal course.  

GSH: [01:19:59] [Laughter] 

GO: [01:20:02] So, although my dissertation was about administration and my master's thesis 

was about the Bureau of Indian Affairs, so I studied some agencies, yeah. I wrote a master's 

thesis that eventually got involved in huge litigation and won an [American Indian] tribe, 

millions of dollars and things like that. But, my dissertation work made me very interested in 

Virginia. So, in Virginia I was educating these mid-career federal executives, and I discovered 

most of them hadn't really written much except memos for the last 15 years. So, I could teach 

them how to write for different audiences. And of course, being a University of Chicago 

graduate, I knew all of the theory of everything. [Laughter] You know, I had them read some 

Max Weber on bureaucracy and things like that. And eventually we taught each other a lot and it 

turned out to be quite a fascinating experience. But I did get involved almost instantly in civil 

rights in Virginia.  

GSH: [01:21:25] I think assumed your Virginia chapter came during your time at UVA, but if it 

was part of your dissertation, it was while you were Brookings.  

GO: [01:21:38] Right.  

GSH: [01:21:40] Was that a draw for UVA as they were hiring?  

GO: [01:21:43] Yes. Yeah. I knew quite a bit about Virginia.  

GSH: [01:21:49] Did they— 

GO: [01:21:50] I basically finished the last page of my dissertation the day before we [moved] to 

the university. But of course, there were a lot of revisions.  

GSH: [01:22:03] That's crazy. Was there any pushback from UVA on your research focus?  



29 
 

GO: [01:22:10] You know, I did not get any pushback from UVA, which I thought was, was 

remarkable. After I’d been at UVA for a few weeks, I had published something in the Washington 

Post about George Wallace, and I began to get death threats and things like that. But UVA didn't 

say anything and the student newspaper published some parts of my Virginia chapter in the 

student newspaper while I was there. I didn't get any pushback. In fact, they were talking about 

giving me tenure after a couple years. 'Cause I did get a book contract almost instantly when I 

got to UVA. No, they didn't. They were very conservative, but I did not think that they would 

stoop to violating freedom of speech or anything of that sort. UVA was such an elite institution 

that they stood above a lot of the politics of Virginia in an important way. And of course, they 

had all of the children of many influential people and it was all male of course, when I went 

there. It was a very interesting experience to teach there. Very bright students from very limited 

backgrounds.  

EF: [01:23:49] And you said you got involved in civil rights when you got there? How?  

GO: [01:23:54] Yeah. I already knew people from my dissertation research. So, I knew the 

people who did the NAACP related litigation in Richmond, especially Henry Marsh [III], who 

would later become Mayor of Richmond. And they were doing the Green v. New Kent County 

case. And I wrote a memo to them about one of the arguments they could make. And Henry 

Marsh [III] they didn't put it in the brief, but [Marsh] said they did use it in the oral argument in 

the case, in the Supreme Court, which was a very nice experience for a first-year professor.  

EF: [01:24:43] Wow. Do you remember what the argument was Gary?  

GSH: [01:24:46] Yeah, don’t leave us hanging! 

GO: [01:24:48] The argument was about administrative costs of running two separate school 

systems and busing the kids past each other and things like that. You know New Kent County 

was about basically two schools [where they bused students past each other to segregate students 

in an area without severe residential segregation.]  

EF: [01:25:03] Mm-hmm. 

GO: [01:25:05] It was basically about the inefficiency and costs of administering a school 

district that way. And I did not save a copy of it and I don't know whether they actually used it, 



30 
 

but Henry said that they did. But I did get to know the people. You know, there was a firm of 

civil rights lawyers in Richmond that was very influential in the history of Virginia coming out 

of the massive resistance period and I knew those folks. I did a lot of things that nobody from 

UVA had really done. Like I organized a recruiting trip to Black colleges in Virginia for the 

graduate programs at UVA and a couple of the places I went, they said they'd never seen anybody 

from UVA before.  

EF: [01:26:10] Yeah.  

GO: [01:26:13] Virginia had historically— if a student wanted to go to graduate school, a Black 

student wanted to go to graduate school, they'd give them a bus fare and pay tuition at Columbia 

[University] or someplace like that and keep him out of the state.  

GSH: [01:26:28] Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.  

EF: [01:26:33] How long were you at UVA? Gary?  

GO: [01:26:36] Just there for a couple years.  

EF: [01:26:38] Okay. 

GO: [01:26:41] But they were very interesting years. And I did get around the state a lot. Then I 

got recruited by Princeton.  

EF: [01:26:49] So you went to Princeton after UVA?  

GO: [01:26:52] Yeah.  

EF: [01:26:53] What was that like? How did it shape your work?  

GO: [01:26:58] You know, UVA thinks of itself as the Princeton of the South, and Princeton 

thinks of itself as the Virginia of the North, basically. They're very similar in some ways, very 

elitist. So, Princeton's, the one place I lived at I didn't really like. It's too elitist. But at Princeton, 

I was divided between what was then the Woodrow Wilson School, the public affairs school, and 

the politics department, the traditional political science department. I got very involved in a lot of 

big issues at Princeton. Princeton gave me a sense of what the Ivy League has to offer and what 

power it has. People would call me up and say, I'm the editor of Time Magazine, class of [19]’38, 

things like that. People are kind of hysterically connected to their undergraduate experience. The 



31 
 

interesting thing about teaching at Princeton was all of the senior faculty sections of 

undergraduate classes. I don't know if they still do it, but at that time they did. And you could 

have your section be something special. So, there was some kind of local government class that I 

created, something about the South. And one of the students, his father ran the NAACP in 

Arkansas. Another one came from Richmond and he'd been with Justice Powell recently. You 

know, they all knew, it was perfect elite. I had them read a book about the Southern elite in my 

introductory political science class.  And one day I was coming out of class, and one of the 

students said to another, “Do you suppose my town is like that?” And the other one said, “If mine 

was, I don't wanna know.” 

EF: [01:29:10] [Laughter] 

GSH: [01:29:11] [Laughter] 

GO: [01:29:13] But it was all about the elite in Atlanta. UVA was a very good place in terms of 

being involved around the state and around access to Washington. Princeton gave you national 

access. I got involved in the Supreme Court fights very actively while I was at Princeton.  

EF: [01:29:42] And which cases would those have been?  

GO: [01:29:44] That was the nomination of Clement Haynsworth for the Supreme Court, the 

nomination of G. Harrold Carswell and the nomination of William Rehnquist. I testified in all of 

them as a young assistant professor.  

EF: [01:30:01] Wow.  

GO: [01:30:02] It was a very interesting experience. I testified about them because for the first 

two, I knew the cases in the South. I knew the cases that Carswell had decided, and I knew about 

Rehnquist. Haynesworth had been the big advocate the decision that said, “You don't have to 

actually desegregate, you can just do freedom of choice in the Southern schools.” So, he had 

been very involved in that and the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. So those had led me to 

become involved—turned out nobody else who actually knew those cases turned up to testify.  

GSH: [01:31:00] How did you prepare? And what did you say?  

GO: [01:31:03] Well, it is all in the [Senate Judiciary Committee] record of those hearings. I 

basically prepared for Haynesworth by really talking about two things. One of them is the kind 



32 
 

of decisions that he had affirmed and what their effect would be on Southern school opportunity. 

And the other part was about the fact that members of the Senate should make a judgment about 

these kinds of things. It's basically— especially the Democrats in that time and for years 

afterwards — they really didn't look at the political background of justice nominees. They didn't 

think it was very legitimate [to check]. They thought if they were smart people, they would 

improve. The Republicans were getting very organized to take over the court and push it far to 

the right. Especially Rehnquist was a major, major example of that.  

EF: [01:32:14] So how did you get tapped into testifying? Was there an organization that knew 

your expertise and asked you to testify?  

GO: [01:32:23] No, I just did it.  

EF: [01:32:25] Okay.  

GO: [01:32:26] I wrote to the chairman of the committee saying, “I wanna testify.” And at that 

time, there weren't organized battles over the Supreme Court.  

EF: [01:32:34] Mm-hmm. Okay.  

GO: [01:32:35] So, if you asked to testify, you could testify. People didn't know that, but I just 

wrote to the chairman, and one of them, [James O.] Eastland was chairman at one time. Sam 

Ervin of North Carolina was one of the ranking members. So, I just asked the right to testify and 

wrote testimony and went down there and testified.  

EF: [01:33:03] Okay.  

GO: [01:33:05] By the time of Rehnquist, of course, it was becoming a major fight. And you had 

to sit for a long time, and they tried to stop you. Senator Strom Thurmond tried to stop me from 

testifying, and they tried to wait us out. They knew all the witnesses that had come down there 

for the day and weren't really set equipped to stay. So, they just made us stay for another two or 

three days before we could testify. I sat next to Marian Wright Edelman in the Rehnquist 

hearings. It was a very interesting experience and the part that I did on Haynesworth and 

Carswell was used quite a bit in the debates. For the Rehnquist as well. The Rehnquist [effort] 

was not successful. A lot of the Democratic offices said that, “He was such a good student at 



33 
 

Stanford.” He would certainly learn something as the Justice. I did not think that that would 

happen. And of course it did not.  

GSH: [01:34:22] I think when we talk again on Friday, Gary, we haven't talked about the cases 

that you were involved in.  

GO: [01:34:32] Yeah.  

GO: [01:34:33] And the meaning you're making of the current moment. So that is all to come. 

But I wonder in the last few minutes today, if you might at least start some thoughts on— you're 

at these different universities, you're half activist, half researcher. How did you think about 

training students around research and civil rights?  

GO: [01:35:01] Well, students everywhere that I’ve been, have been interested. There are always 

groups of students who are interested. In Virginia, I taught a little training program on 

[American] Indian issues. I did not have any seminars that were appropriate at Virginia, I don't 

think, as I recall. At Princeton, I was deeply involved with a lot of stuff, and I had a lot of 

students who were helping out. Every time there would be a name surface from the White House 

about a possible Supreme Court nominee, we would send a lot of students out to read their entire 

record. I think we knocked out two or three when it never even got nominated. Not sure that it 

was the best thing in terms of who actually did get nominated in the long run. There were a lot of 

students involved. Of course, at Princeton I was very involved in the anti-war movement too. We 

organized a group called the Movement for a New Congress that at the peak of the Cambodian 

Incursion, we had 400 colleges involved in the congressional elections that year and we did 

actually have some impact on some of the primaries, the Democratic primaries especially, which 

was a very interesting experience. In terms of civil rights, a lot of people got involved in the 

Supreme Court fights at Princeton. I wasn't involved in any big case at that time, but I did have a 

lot of students whose work I supervised, some of whom were very remarkable. A lot of elite 

southerners go to Princeton. They figure it's the safest of the Ivy Leagues.  

GSH: [01:37:17] Mm-hmm.  

GO: [01:37:19] Since it’s so traditional. It wasn't really until I got to Chicago that I figured out 

how to organize students and at a more systematic level and figured out it was my only real 

option since nobody on the faculty was interested in what I was doing. I just decided that 



34 
 

students were gonna be my colleagues. And that proved to be a wonderful experience because it 

changed from being isolated to being in the middle of the next generation. It was a very good, a 

very good experience. A lot of this is about how you conceptualize it and how you conceptualize 

your world. I was never in a department before I went to Harvard Ed School [Harvard Graduate 

School of Education] where there were any significant number of people who were interested in 

or understood what I was doing but there were students that were very interested, especially 

students of color. So, once I went to Chicago and I figured out students were my colleagues and I 

began to get grants, and I told them I would use field research classes to launch big 

investigations [and publish reports] on big issues in the city. And I just told this group of students 

that work on them that they had to work with me really for two quarters at least, but sometimes 

three quarters. We would just pretend that we had a big research grant and we would give 

ourselves a big name and we would start issuing reports. It turned out to be very influential, very 

well publicized. We did things that made major impacts on the city. So, we'll probably get into 

that a little later, but I did eventually figure out how to use students really positively and to work 

with students in a way that was transformative and was powerful for their experience and for 

mine. I think that was one of the best things I discovered. Basically, almost all academics feel 

isolated in one way or another. It’s not so bad in ed schools because ed schools have a common 

ethos of pro education. That's not true in the normal social science departments which is where I 

spent most of my time until I came to Harvard, which was pretty late. So, if you're gonna find 

people who want to do value-oriented work, you're not [often] gonna find them on the faculty. 

And of course, students often come with deep values [which they are often told are 

unprofessional]. One year at Chicago, we had our number one candidate was this Princeton 

student who was just finishing, and she came to see me and she said, “You know, I'm a religious 

person. I have values, I think that they may be ruined if I come to a PhD program.” [Laughter] I 

said to her, “Shut the door.”  I said, “I can figure out how to connect you to a lot of people who 

are thinking about religious and ethical values in Chicago. There's a lot of work to be done here. 

Don't worry about it. If you come here, we'll figure it out.” And she did. You know, it's a shame. 

Nobody really discovered that I had a strong religious background until we did the big seminar at 

the Harvard Divinity School, which produced this book called “Religion, Race, and Justice in a 

Changing America.” Once the students of color understood that I had this religious background 

that was strong, they all started telling me different stories about their lives. 'Cause they, most of 



35 
 

them were very religious, and it was an integral part of their lives that they couldn't talk about it 

with faculty. But it was tremendously meaningful. It was an enriching experience, but, you know, 

it's fascinating how the academic world honors certain values and dishonors other values in ways 

that are not very constructive. But that doesn't suppress the existence of those values. It's really 

how you think about these roles. And I think the fact that I had this distinction in my mind 

between methods of proof and choices about work was very important. I never chose to do any 

work that I didn't think had some potential usefulness.  

EF: [01:43:10] I remember you giving me that advice as a doctoral student, Gary. 

GSH: [01:43:15] Yeah. I give it to my students now too. 

GO: [01:43:19] Yeah. Nobody will stop you from choosing a really important subject if you 

show them that you're gonna do it in a very authentic way that meets the standards of the 

academic discipline. When we started the Civil Rights Project, a lot of people advised us that 

people didn't want it to be called civil rights or to be visible as if you were actually supporting 

something. But of course, we discovered many people that as long as they understood that we 

were gonna understand their requirements as researchers in their field and honor them they really 

did wanna do something that would make a difference. And they knew most of their work 

wouldn't.  

EF: [01:44:22] Can I circle back to just make sure I get the chronology down here? So, I think 

you were at UVA maybe [19]67 to [19]70ish. Does that sound—? 

GO: [01:44:34] I think until [19]71 probably. And then I was at Princeton for four years. 

Princeton and I did not get along well. It's the only job that I really have ever lost, and we had a 

mutual [dislike]. Well, I created an absolute uproar, especially in the anti-war campaign. They 

appreciated it while it was going on because it was—the students were going out and doing 

congressional campaigns and things like that rather than burning buildings, But once it was over 

they wanted to bring everything under control and they produced a lot of interesting issues. Like 

at one point, the University Provost called me in and said, “You know people are threatening, the 

Nixon administration is threatening to remove Princeton's tax exemption because of political 

activism on the campus.” And I said, “You know, I'm meeting all my classes. I'm doing all my 

academic work. It's not your business what I'm doing in terms of private work on politics.” And 



36 
 

they had a bunch of Wall Street lawyers there in the meeting who were worried about Princeton's 

tax status. The next morning, the Provost called me and apologized. 

EF: [01:46:07] Wow.  

GO: [01:46:08] Because they were trying to get me to take a leave without pay. And I said, “It’s 

my academic freedom to talk about politics, issues because I am meeting all my classes and 

following all my responsibilities and you have no business to interfere with this.” And the next 

day they apologized.  

EF: [01:46:36] Good. 

GO: [01:46:39] It was intimidating.  

EF: [01:46:41] Yeah. You were an assistant professor then, right?  

GO: [01:46:44] Yes. 

EF: [01:46:45] Wow. 

GSH: [01:46:46] It feels of today's moment, too. Gary, what connections did you draw between 

your anti-war activism and your civil rights activism? 

GO: [01:47:00] Well, the civil rights were always primary. And in fact, in the anti-war group that 

I organized, The Movement for Congress. The civil rights was part of the organizing principle. 

And we did work with a lot of candidates. Anti-war was never my basic thing, but I just thought 

when the war started expanding to additional countries, and we started having the new Kent 

[State] killings and so forth, things had just gotten completely outta hand. And so that's why I got 

involved in that. It was not my long-term focus. But I knew how to organize, and I happened to 

be there the day that all of this stuff exploded on the campus. I was there [at the mass meeting] It 

was approved and students just poured in.  

EF: [01:48:00] I know in the last year of his life, Martin Luther King [Jr.] spoke a lot about the 

intertwining of the anti-war and the civil rights movements.  

GO: [01:48:12] Yeah. 

EF: [01:48:14] Did you ever hear him speak about that?  



37 
 

GO: [01:48:15] I respect that greatly. And I do believe most of the people who work on civil 

rights are basically peace lovers in deep ways. And I think they are connected, and I respect how 

Dr. King saw it, but it is never, the international dimension of it was never fundamental to my 

work. Although a lot of our civil rights work did begin to have international ripple effects and 

that was fascinating to me. It wasn't my basic goal, but it did land more effectively in some other 

parts of the world sometimes than it did in the USA. I thought the USA is a big enough field of 

action. Yeah. And it's what's fighting about, I often say I am a member of two incredible 

organizations that are always infuriating and extremely powerful, which are the Catholic Church 

and the United States of America. 

[END OF INTERVIEW] [||d5b23d0b-b6e7-4d94-978c-008eae7b5810||]