Country:
U.S.A.

Language:
English

For more than 35 years, CRS mediators and conciliators have been responding to volatile civil rights disputes, including virtually every major racial and ethnic conflict in the USA. CRS mediators were present at the famous civil rights march in Selma, Alabama and in Memphis, Tennessee when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. They responded to every major racial riot in the country; more than a score of mediators and conciliators were in Los Angeles helping to mitigate tensions during the rioting that followed the Rodney King beating by police. They worked virtually every court-ordered school desegregation case in the nation, in numerous prisons faced with racial conflicts, and in hundreds of communities racked by volatile and often violent police-community conflicts. They worked on dozens of Native American reservations and a team of mediators was present throughout the 73-day takeover of the Village of Wounded Knee at Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. They worked in the fields of California during the grape boycott led by Hispanic migrant workers and they responded to Haitian, Asian American and Cuban refugee crises.

Virtually all of the cases to which CRS mediators responded entailed high levels of racial polarization, tension and anger. CRS was almost always present when there were signs that the anger might turn to violence. Many of the conflicts to which the agency responded could be classified as intractable. Yet the CRS response often led to mediated agreements that mitigated tensions, opened communications and resulted in substantive changes and improved relations. Often, when CRS mediators finally departed from the scene, they left behind local, inter-group structures that were able to monitor the mediated agreement and continue working for improved community relations and racial justice.

At the outset, there were no models of negotiation or mediation to guide CRS in its work. Collective bargaining of labor contracts was the only sector in which mediation had been institutionalized. CRS mediators learned to mediate volatile community conflicts through trial and error. They compiled a largely unrecorded body knowledge, at times shared it and discussed it with their colleagues, and built on that knowledge to develop techniques and strategies that have proved consistently effective.

Yet, little has been written about their work and the professional literature is virtually barren of the experiences of CRS mediators and the techniques and strategies they developed and effectively used to help communities in conflict address their differences without resorting to either violence or lengthy and expensive litigation.

In 1999 the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation funded Conflict Management Initiatives and the Conflict Resolution Consortium at the University of Colorado in Boulder to conduct a pilot project that would utilize oral histories focussing on the work of CRS mediators to elicit relevant data and make them available on the Internet for practitioners, researchers, educators and students. The project, which is based on interviews with 17 mediators, is scheduled for completion by the end of 2000. This summary discusses the work of CRS and the information being gathered in the Hewlett-funded project.

When CRS was established, it was staffed with a small corps of conciliators who responded to the volatile and often violent street protests and demonstrations that were prevalent in the 1960's. CRS conciliators would work behind the scenes trying to reduce tensions by opening communications between the parties, helping each understand the other's issues and positions, encouraging the parties to meet to begin working out their differences. The conciliators would identify resources in the community that could have a positive impact on the conflict and they also provided technical assistance to demonstrators, police and other public officials in an effort to help prevent conflicts from escalating into violence.

As protest activity moved increasingly from the streets to the tables, CRS
conciliators soon found themselves being asked to facilitate negotiations. In the early 1970's, the agency began providing its staff with mediation training, drawing largely on the collective bargaining model and a community model that was being established by labor mediators affiliated with the American Arbitration Association under a grant from the Ford Foundation. The AAA-Ford project was short-lived, but mediation soon took its place along side of conciliation and technical assistance as a CRS responses to community conflict.

While little has been said or written about CRS' work, studies of other emerging fields of mediation have been voluminous. There is no shortage of literature about the mediation of family, commercial, small claims court, neighborhood, church-related or international mediation. There are a number of reasons why so little is known and less has been written about the mediation activity of CRS. Nonetheless, it is remarkable that until now researchers and educators in peace studies and conflict resolution have virtually ignored a vast body of knowledge that has been compiled by a federal agency that responded to literally thousands of volatile racial and ethnic conflicts over a period of nearly four decades.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 includes a confidentiality clause that precludes the agency's staff from revealing any information received in confidence during the course of its work. This has encouraged most CRS mediators to avoid the press whenever possible and to say little of substance when confronted by the media. This policy has worked to the mediators' advantage since they often can work most effectively when they have a low visibility. Not only are they unencumbered by the demands of newspaper and television reporters as they go about their work, but they also are not perceived as usurping valuable media space from the disputants who are competing to put their cases before the public. Perpetual budget problems and other priorities have also contributed to CRS management decisions - - unlike most other agencies and organizations -- to minimize its public information or research activities. The confidentiality clause has made it extremely difficult for researchers to delve into CRS files and discouraged those interested in the agency from studying it. Often, administrators or managers at CRS were lax in setting or enforcing reporting requirements for the mediators, so case reports were often skimpy and did not include the data that researchers needed for meaningful analysis.

Hence, CRS remains an enigma to most of the mediation community. The Hewlett-funded project is an attempt to draw out from senior CRS mediators - - many of them retired - - how they went about their work and were often able to bring parties to agreement in the most polarized community conflicts. The interviews cover more than 100 questions about the mediators, their cases and how they went about their work. Some of the more interesting categories of information being compiled are being drawn from questions about the techniques and strategies the mediators used for the following purposes:

· to overcome suspicions and gain the trust of the parties;
· to deal with parties who oppose the mediation process;
· to bring parties with histories of mistrust and hostility to the table;
· to identify the community leaders and other stakeholders to bring to the table;
· to deal with power imbalances and create a level playing field;
· to draw significant outcomes from seemingly intractable conflicts;
· to identifying underlying issues;
· to diffuse violence;
· to involve the parties in a search for creative solutions, and
· to institutionalize conflict management systems.

Other issues covered include:

· criteria used for determining when a case is ripe for mediation;
· addressing the fairness of the settlement;
· maintaining impartiality;
· dealing with cultural differences, and
· the most important attributes and skills of an effective civil rights mediator.

The interviews were completed and were being coded and entered in the database at the time this paper was prepared for congress participants. Some of the preliminary findings of the study will be presented at the congress.

Richard A. Salem is president of Conflict Management Initiatives (CMI) in Evanston, Illinois, USA, and project manager of the research project reported in this paper.

Greta Salem, Ph. D., is a professor emerita of political science at Alverno College, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA, and an officer of CMI.