Washington, D.C. - Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to draw the attention of the House to a significant event in civil rights history which took place in this very chamber on March 15, forty years ago. It was on that evening, that President Lyndon Johnson addressed a joint session of the Congress to seek the enactment of the 1965 voting rights bill he was about to submit. It was the first time in nineteen years that a president had addressed a joint session to request domestic legislation.

Tumultuous events taking place in Selma, Alabama, had influenced the timing of the President's request. In one of the most stirring appeals of his Presidency, Johnson said:

At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord ..... So it was last week in Selma, Alabama ..... What happened at Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every state and section of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. ..... Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.

And we shall--overcome!

Those exalted words drawn from the freedom hymn of the civil rights movement, spoken by the President of the United States, to the resounding ovation of the Congress, carried by television around the nation and around the world, marked the crossing of a watershed of civil rights history. It was a clear affirmation that the heart and soul of American leadership was at last committed to the fight for unqualified freedom for all Americans.

Among those seated in the Presidential box that evening of the joint session was LeRoy Collins, the former Governor of Florida, who, with his wife, had been guests of the President and Mrs. Johnson at dinner that evening. This distinction was the President's way of acknowledging the special service rendered by Collins and the little known Federal agency he headed--the Community Relations Service--which had played an important behind-the-scenes role in Selma, helping to advance the civil rights goals of the protesters, and, at the same time, working to restrain the violence of resistance.

Just nine months earlier Congress had created the Community Relations Service as a part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title Ten of that act called into being a special agency composed of civil rights peace-makers--mediators who would go into troubled communities to conciliate racial conflict and promote voluntary compliance with civil rights laws. Such legislation had first been proposed by Senator Lyndon Johnson seven years earlier.

In the years since Selma, the Community Relation Service, ``CRS'', has helped every major city and thousands of smaller communities, to resolve tens of thousands of confrontations involving school desegregation, police-minority relations, church burnings, urban violence and countless acts and allegations of racial and ethnic discrimination.

Nevertheless, because this division of the Department of Justice relies on quiet persuasion and skillful negotiation it takes special effort to avoid the limelight. As a result the American public has had little opportunity to know of its extraordinary achievements. In effect, the work of the Community Relations Service has been a missing chapter in America's civil rights history.

I am pleased to report, however, that this oversight has at last been rectified thanks to the efforts of Bertram Levine, a long-time resident of my district, whose history of the Community Relations Service has just been published by the University of Missouri Press. The book is entitled, Resolving Racial Conflict: The Community Relations Service and Civil Rights (1964-1989).[From the 2004 Fall-Winter Catalogue of the University of Missouri Press]
RESOLVING RACIAL CONFLICT: THE COMMUNITY RELATIONS SERVICE AND CIVIL RIGHTS (1964-1989)
(By Bertram Levine)

In 1964, when the Civil Rights Act was passed, Congress wisely created an agency based in the U.S. Department of Justice to help forestall or resolve racial or ethnic disputes evolving from the act. Mandated by law and by its own methodology to shun publicity, the Community Relations Service developed self-effacement to a fine art. Thus the accomplishments, as well as the shortcomings, of this federal venture into conflict resolution are barely known in official Washington, and even less so by the American public. This first written history of the Community Relations Service uses the experiences of the men and women who sought to resolve the most volatile issues of the day to tell the fascinating story of this unfamiliar agency. This multiracial cadre of conciliation and mediation specialists worked behind the scenes in more than 20,000 confrontations involving racial and ethnic minorities.

From Selma to Montgomery, at the encampment of the Poor Peoples' Campaign in Resurrection City, to the urban riots of the sixties, seventies, and eighties, from the school desegregation battles north and south, at the siege of Wounded Knee, and during the Texas Gulf Coast fishing wars between Southeast Asian refugees and Anglos, these federal peacemakers lessened the atmosphere of racial violence in every major U.S. city and thousands of small towns. These confrontations ranged from disputes that attracted worldwide attention to the everyday affronts, assaults, and upheavals that marked the nation's adjustment to wider power sharing within an increasingly diverse population. While Resolving Racial Conflict examines some of the celebrated breakthroughs that made change possible, it also delves deeply into the countless behind-the-scenes local efforts that converted possibility to reality.

Among the many themes in this book that provide new perspective for understanding racial conflict in America are the effects of protest and conflict in engineering social change; the variety of civil rights views and experiences of African Americans, Native Americans, Asians, and Hispanics; the role of police in minority relations; and the development and refinement of techniques for community conflict resolution from seat-of-the-pants intervention to sophisticated professional practice. Resolving Racial Conflict will appeal to students of civil rights and American history in both the general and academic communities, as well as students of alternative dispute resolution and peace and conflict studies.