 You're watching FJTN, the Federal Judicial Television Network. Oral history projects are one of the most popular activities of federal court historical programs. They're an excellent way for a program to involve judges and other members of the court family in its activities, and a modest project is within the means of all but the smallest program. This video illustrates some of the unique contributions oral history can make to the history of the judicial branch. It also offers practical suggestions to court staff and members of court historical programs seeking to establish, expand, or improve oral history projects. There are three basic steps to establishing a court related oral history project. First, the goals or goals of the project need to be defined. Common goals include providing biographical information about the men and women who have served on or appeared before a particular court. And offering insights into events in which the court played a central role. Defining the project's goals will help in deciding whom to interview. Second, the project must determine who will conduct its oral history interviews and what skills and experience they need. Though it may be preferable to use professional historians, a project may, for financial or other reasons, rely instead upon volunteers from the local bar association or former law clerks, for example, and provide them with a short training session on the craft of oral history. Third, the project must decide how and under what conditions to make its oral histories available to researchers. What type of releases will it need to obtain from interviewers and interviewees? What medium will it use to record the interviews it conducts? Where will it deposit interview tapes and transcripts? Will it post transcripts on the internet? These are just a few of the questions that we'll consider today. Judges are by far the most popular subjects of court-related history projects, local clerks, marshals, lawyers, and litigants are all excellent sources of information about the third branch. Senior judges or those who serve for long periods of time are particularly well suited to shedding light on some of the more interesting and otherwise neglected aspects of judicial history. Consider, for example, the reflections of retired US Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmon on his drafting of the court's majority opinion in a 1971 case, recognizing the right of major league baseball players to become free agents. Well, many times if I'm given to speak somewhere particularly to young people, some youngster will say, is it any fun writing opinions? Have you ever had any fun and which case did you enjoy working on most? And I always say it's blood against coon because it was the baseball case. And their eyes light up right away. They seem to know about the baseball case and I was always interested in baseball and it gave me a chance to indulge in a sentimental journey in part one of the opinion where I tried to cover the history of baseball from the time the New York Knickerbockers played in the Elysian fields on down to a point of some years ago. And I remember Potter Stewart calling up and he said, I like that history of baseball that you have in there, but why didn't you name Eppa Rixie? And I said with embarrassment, didn't I name Eppa Rixie? And he said, no, and you know what a famous player he was for the Cincinnati Reds. If you will add him, I'll join your opinion. Another historical oddity of that case was that Justice Arthur Goldberg argued for Kurt Flood and you were occupying his seat now, at least twice removed. Do you remember anything about that argument? It presented a little bit of a problem for the court. How do we address Mr. Justice Goldberg? Do we call him Mr. Justice? And if we do, is that an act of disfavor to the people on the other side because it gives him a title? Or we can't call him Arthur, although among ourselves, we're always on a first name basis. So I think we all ended up being rather neuter and spoke only of addressing him as counsel or something like this, which didn't answer anything. But I think it was a difficult argument for him as it would be, I think, for anyone in arguing to a court of which he had been a member. Do you have any sense of why you were chosen to write the opinion? Only because I probably talked off too much baseball during the discussion. I was glad I caught it. I never asked for it. I never asked for any case, but it was fun writing it. This clip gives a sense of the lighthearted negotiations that shape one part of a well-known Supreme Court opinion. It also provides an interesting aside about former Justice Goldberg's appearance before the court. This glimpse is only a brief excerpt from Justice Blackman's oral history, however, which comprises 17 interviews totaling 38 hours. They were conducted between 1994 and 1999. As you can imagine, there is a wealth of information contained in these interviews, which in accordance with the provisions of the justice, were made available to researchers in March 2004. In today's program, three experienced practitioners of oral history, especially of federal judges, share some thoughts about the craft and about designing and executing such projects. Professor Jack Bass of the College of Charleston is a journalist turned historian. He's written several books that incorporate oral history interviews he conducted with judges who were involved in some of the great civil rights cases of the last half of the 20th century. We'll hear an interesting excerpt from Professor Bass' interview with one of those judges, Frank Johnson, who spent a quarter of a century on the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama before being elevated to the U.S. Court of Appeals in 1979. Sarah Wilson, a former Supreme Court Fellow at the Federal Judicial Center, documented the experiences of women federal judges through the medium of oral history. We'll play a brief clip from one of her interviews. First, however, we'll hear from Attorney Stephen Pollock, Director of the D.C. Circuit Historical Society's Oral History Project. Currently, the project has completed 44 oral histories and has another 31 in progress. Here are his reflections on the society's decision to embark upon such an ambitious undertaking. We asked ourselves, well, what does an oral history add to the history of a judge who's written a whole volumes of opinions and who speaks and writes articles over the time they've been on the bench? And the answer is that the life of the judge, the formation of the person who became the judge is really not revealed in that body of work. The operations that create opinions that a judge goes through aren't known. The focus on the crafting of opinions is not explicated. The views the judge may have of the court process, of the members of the bench, of the bar, of the ethics, of the changing of the practice of law, of the efficiency and integrity of the administration of justice, of legal ethics. Those are not explicated, generally. And in addition, judges generally don't look back on their opinions and comment on the process that led to the conclusions that they reached. As we heard in the clip from Justice Blackman's interview, oral history can offer details about the judicial process that aren't available in the documentary record. Our experts provide their own examples of the unique contribution oral history can make. First, let's listen to a short passage from Professor Bass's interview with Judge Johnson whose decisions enforcing the Supreme Court's order to desegregate public schools, angered segregationists in Alabama and elsewhere. The judge's comments on how public criticism affected him reveal an aspect of his personality that is not disclosed by his judicial opinions or court records. Then, Professor Bass recounts an anecdote evoked during his interview with another judge whose decisions furthered civil rights in the South. Judge Albert Tuttle of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth and then Eleventh Circuit. The story adds to our understanding of the forces that helped shape judicial decision-making during an important era in U.S. history. What would you have said ten years ago if someone said, ten years you'll be in the Alabama, which is the Academy of Honor? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I'd say, man, you must be smoking thoughts. Well, you suffered a great deal of abuse during that period. Well, that's not about right. I was subjected to a great deal of abuse, but suffering's not the right word. I wasn't as vulnerable to abuse as people that social things are important to. Judge Reeves, for instance, he was a lifetime member of the Fenechine Presidency and Church, and it really hurt when he walked down the street with his friends and his children. I wasn't vulnerable. I was a kind of a hillbilly that came in and moved in here, I've said it a lot of times that I'd rather be fishing for speckled trout than chewing the bucker and maybe drinking a beer than being at the Phantom Bowl. It's a matter of values. It's hard to ostracize a fellow that does his own ostracizing, and that's what it must do. And I didn't do that just because I was a federal judge. I was subjected to a lot of criticism. I did that when I practiced law. I'm the only lawyer from the North Alabama that ever resigned from the rotary club. Judge told us a wonderful story. He was five years old, and at the time his father had a job in Washington, D.C. and he was just sitting in the house with his mother on the porch. And across the street was a streetcar stop. And an African American woman was waiting there and the first streetcar just didn't stop, just went right past her. The next streetcar came by, same thing. So his mother, without saying a word, put on her hat, walked over to the streetcar, stood there beside the woman. The next streetcar stopped, the woman got on and his mother came back to the house. And it made a real impression on him, though. She never said a word. And I think that really helped shape his views as a judge, just that childhood experience. It helped shape his character, I think. The revealing story is told by the first generation of women federal judges about their job search after law school underscore how oral history can illuminate experiences that aren't contained in official records. Sarah Wilson comments on what she learned, followed by an excerpt from her 1995 interview with U.S. District Judge Ellen Burns of the District of Connecticut, who graduated from Yale Law School in 1947. Most of them had a really good time in law school and excelled academically. And it was only when they went out into the workforce and started to look for jobs in various avenues of legal profession that gender discrimination hit them like a cold bucket of water or a wall of bricks. And I found that interesting that they didn't seem to be aware that discrimination would be a big issue while they were in law school and felt that it was pretty much a meritocratic environment. But when they looked for a job, the reality hit them and they ended up invariably having to seek employment outside of the private legal community. When you graduated from law school, were you interested in a particular area of law? What I had wanted to be really was a general practitioner. But I didn't find that there was very much opportunity for that when I was graduating from law school. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? Well, the law school, I regret to say, was not particularly helpful in finding openings for you. I recall they sent me someplace that didn't even have a position open. So it was more or less a struggle on one's own. I can even remember some time later after I had already taken my first position that a friend of mine had asked me if I wouldn't want to be interviewed by the then Attorney General of the State of Connecticut. And I went for an interview with him. And he was very pleasant, very polite, and what he said was that he would be just delighted to have me on his staff. But he was pretty certain that the men would find it too difficult to work with a woman. And did you experience that kind of treatment at private firms as well? Not less, or I should say, not as overt as that, but I think it was there. And when you say that Yale was not particularly helpful, the law school was not particularly helpful in? Well, they had a placement. Was that for all the students? No, I can't speak for all of the students. And I can't even speak for the other women students. I can only speak for my own experience that in seeking their assistance, I didn't feel that I got very much help. But my first job was with a special commission revising the Connecticut statute. Oral histories can also shed light on unknown aspects of the politics behind judicial nominations. I think the oral history interviews also offer important historical information about the judicial selection process. What role presidents play, what role senators play, what role members of the community play in the judicial selection process, which of course has become quite a controversial subject. And I think that most of the interviews with women judges that I did offer interesting stories about how it is that they got on the bench. The goal of an oral history interview is to have the subjects speak as freely as possible about their life experiences and opinions on various issues. This isn't always easy, and there are particular challenges when the person being interviewed is a judge, as Sarah Wilson notes in the following comments. Then Professor Bass discusses some techniques he's found effective. People tend to sort of freeze up and sort of worry if they feel that something they're saying is going to be recorded for posterity. With judges, that difficulty is compounded because judges obviously are restricted by ethical canons. They can't, for example, talk freely about cases that are in the middle of deciding. And therefore, I think it was extra challenging to get the judges to be spontaneous and be free in their recollections and under discussions of many of the issues. I tried to come as close to the line of propriety as I possibly could and found that some judges were refreshingly candid about certain aspects of cases that had been decided long ago. For example, whether a particular case might have affected the support of a particular group or individual for their nomination to a court in the future. I was concerned that they might not want to speak freely. And yet I found somewhat to my surprise that they were fairly candid. And one of the ways that I laid any concerns that they might have is giving them the ability to embargo, hold back from public consumption or publication any part of their transcript of their interview. That rapport is important in any kind of interviews, I think. And so that's why it's good to ask sort of background easy, non-threatening questions initially just to help establish that rapport. And to learn to sit, usually roughly about three feet, about a yard apart. Just to get much closer than that, you're getting somebody invading their space. I found out when people told me something I thought was less than a full answer or perhaps a bit misleading, I would just sort of look at them and not say anything. And usually after five or ten seconds they'd say, well, there's also this that happened or whatever, so they would begin talking. Identifying the right people to conduct, transcribe and index the interviews and finding the resources to pay for these services are also challenges. Hiring a historian or a professional transcription service can be an expensive proposition. Steve Pollock explains that an ambitious oral history project can be run on a minimal budget. Our interviewers, our volunteers, the transcribers of the tapes that take the oral history are volunteers mostly from the law firms. And in the end, the out-of-pocket expenses that we're paying are primarily for the indexing of the oral histories, which we have to purchase from a professional indexer, and the binding, which here to fore has been provided by the federal court but we are turning to a hardback book-like binding and we have to purchase that at about ten dollars a book. We thought some about approaching persons trained as historians, but in the main we had to reject that idea because we had no general access to such persons and we had no budget in place and still don't to hire anybody. So there is a great tradition in the District of Columbia Bar of lawyers volunteering their time for public service and we've drawn on that for our oral historians and been satisfied, I think, with their performance. Anyone chosen to conduct an oral history interview should have some training in the craft. The DC Circuit Historical Society offers its own training sessions, which Pollock describes. We've begun the last three with about a three-quarter of an hour presentation by Don Ritchie, the Associate Historian of the Senate History Office. Don is well-versed in taking oral histories of senators and staff and has published a book, Doing Oral History, which certainly anyone mounting an oral history program would want to refer to. In advance of the training session, we supply all the candidates to be interviewers with a booklet an outline of an oral history of the donation instruments of do's and don'ts and a lot of the raw material that you could get by reading. After Don Ritchie's part, we've had a mock interview right there in the training session with the tape running. Not every federal court oral history project will be able or want to train its own interviewers, but each must take certain steps to assure that its oral histories become part of the permanent historical record. First, it must obtain releases from interviewers and interviewees, both of whom retain rights in the tapes and transcripts until those releases are executed. Examples of releases can be downloaded from the Federal Judicial Center's website and may be tailored to the specific needs of each project. Second, each project must select a repository or repositories for the interviews once they've been edited, transcribed, and properly donated. Steve Pollock suggests that in addition to having interviewees sign releases, they should be encouraged to state their intention to donate on the interview tapes themselves. Wilson offers some thoughts on appropriate archives for oral history materials. We encourage interviewees to put on the tape early their intention to donate. Some of them express that intention and say that there may be portions of my oral history that I would want to put under seal for a time. I will put that on the tape while doing it and anything that I don't so indicate will be donated. That's my intention immediately on its completion. We have all manner of donations. Most, the vast majority, are immediately donated in whole. Some have a portion under seal until the death of the interviewee. Some have a three-year waiting period. One obvious resting place for oral history interviews is a research institution located in the community that the court is in. A local law school, the judge's law school, for example. I believe that one obvious place for transcripts of oral history interviews of a judge would be the library that accepts the judge's papers, ultimately, if that's something that is ongoing. If the plan is to put the judge's papers in a particular research institution, then certainly the obvious place for the oral history transcript would be that same institution. To ensure the broadest possible public access, a project should consider posting its oral histories on the internet. Wherever the interviews are archived or posted, researchers should be alerted to their existence by having them catalogued in one or more of the sources scholars normally review for such information. The primary index of oral history interviews nationally is the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections, maintained by the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Finally, there's this question. Should interviews be audio-taped or videotaped? Wilson and Pollock give us their thoughts. Of course videotaping and oral history interview is another possibility as well as tape recording, and there are some advantages. It's nice, I mean basically think about the difference between radio and television. You get additional information from actually being able to see the person, their expressions and body language and all that are interesting sources of information. The downside is cost, and I think that videotaping can chill the interview subject. If they're worried about the way they look or in addition to what they're saying, that it can be a distraction. I think it's clear that if one had one's druthers, history would be best served if we videotaped the oral histories. But we have no budget for that, so we audio tape them. Even though it would be wonderful to see these histories on videotape, the historian wants primarily two things. The transcript, which should really reflect what the interviewee said, not a lot of the editing afterwards, and a good index. The transcript of former Chief Judge Mikva runs 360 pages. Someone who wants to use the transcript, other than someone who would be writing a book on the judge, would want to dip in to the particular subjects indicated in the index. So the tools for use of our oral histories are there. The videotape would be frosting on the cake. As we've learned today, it takes a small amount of money and a great deal of planning to establish and conduct an oral history project. Once the goals of the project have been defined and the subjects identified and convinced to participate, interviewers must be hired and trained and recording equipment procured. When the taping of an oral history is completed, the tapes, whether audio or video, must be transcribed and edited, releases containing any restrictions on the interviews must be executed, and tapes and transcripts should be made available to researchers. The fruits of oral history are well worth these efforts, as this program has shown. There are a number of publications and national and regional oral history associations that can assist with the nuts and bolts of conducting an oral history project. For a list of these publications and associations, along with a collection of useful forms and agreements, please visit the FJC website. Thanks for joining us.