Willy Levanthal Interview Re SCOPE, SCLC, &Amp
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Civil Rights History Project Interview completed by the Southern Oral History Program under contract to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History & Culture and the Library of Congress, 2013 Interviewee: Willy Siegel Leventhal Interview Date: April 13, 2013 Location: Malibu, California Interviewer: David Cline Videographer: John Bishop Length: 03:02:18 David Cline: Ready? Willy Leventhal: I’m good. David Cline: Okay. Willy Leventhal: Yeah. John Bishop: We’re rolling. David Cline: Okay. So, today is Saturday, April thirteenth. We are in Malibu, California, and this is David Cline on behalf of the Southern Oral History Program and the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Library of Congress, and today I will be the interviewer. I’m with John Bishop, videographer, and Willy Leventhal. And, Willy, I want to thank you very much for being part of our project. Willy Leventhal: I know it’s— John Bishop: You forgot to say it’s the Pacific Ocean. Willy Leventhal, April 13, 2013 2 David Cline: Oh, and it’s the Pacific Ocean is behind us, as well. Willy Leventhal: It’s a great honor. And I think that, you know, this was a key part of American history and world history, and there are so many lessons for the world to know about how you try and change things without violence. And so, I’m more than more than happy to be a part of this. David Cline: Thank you so much. So, Willy, I wanted, if I could, ask you to start just by telling us about where you grew up, and how you grew up, and how you may have seen some of the lessons that you learned early on playing out in the work that you chose. Willy Leventhal: Born in New York in ’46, but my dad had just gotten back from World War II. He had had a very good chiropractic practice in Saginaw, Michigan, when he went into war. My mother, who was a teacher and later a college professor at USC, special ed, went back and lived with her family in Staten Island. And when my dad got out, he had to sort of start over again, you know, after a couple of years away for service. And, you know, that was when the migration was happening to California. And they apparently talked to some people in Michigan, and they said, “Yeah, there’s a lot of opportunity out there.” Still being in the service, he could fly free out to California. And Bernard, Dr. Bernard Leventhal is his name. They were both—my parents were members of the NAACP at different times. I don’t know at that time, but I know that Hubert Humphrey was his big hero from 1948. In fact, when I worked for George McGovern, it took years—in 1972, and we got the nomination over Hubert Humphrey—it took many decades for my father to forgive me for working against Hubert Humphrey, who was his hero of his generation, as many like Jackie Robinson and Martin Luther King and John Kennedy were for my generation. Willy Leventhal, April 13, 2013 3 But, so we moved to California when I was two. We didn’t have much to start with out here, so we lived in Ramona Gardens, which was a federal housing project, probably about 1948. My mother worked in the campaign of the first Hispanic councilman and then later congressman. I’m blanking on his name, but the federal building is named for him downtown. I’ll think of it later. Roybal! Ed Roybal. She worked—and I’ve since become friends with somebody at Cal State L.A., did a book about Ed Roybal. And my sister had talked to Ed Roybal before he died— his daughter, Lucille Roybal Allard is now, has his seat—he remembered my mother. My mother was an activist. And my grandfather had been the assistant superintendent of New York City Schools, Morris E. Siegel, and had handled all of the veterans retraining and all the vocational education after World War II. So, I come from a family of educators on my mom’s side. My dad’s [parents] were also immigrants. His father and mother were immigrants, as my grandparents on both sides, and they had shoe stores. They fixed shoes and they had shoe stores. And then, typical, next generation became college-educated. My dad was the only one of his generation to be college-educated. So, we lived in the projects for a couple of years. And I think that shaped me, in the sense I saw—I’ve got the pictures in that book you have, you know, of Hispanic kids, Asian kids, black kids, all living in—in fact, the picture from the L.A. Weekly, I went there. I could have had that picture taken anywhere when they chose me as a Person of the Year, after I went to the White House for the Civil Rights Concert. And I particularly went back to Murchison Elementary School, which is right up the street from the projects, where my brother and sister went, and I substitute taught when I worked in LASD for five years. And so, those are my roots, East L.A., East Los. So, I’m culturally, I think, mostly Jewish, but a good bit Hispanic and black, particularly the food for both of those cultures. Willy Leventhal, April 13, 2013 4 But anyway, so then we moved to North Hollywood. My dad first built, and some of his veteran buddies from the—Jewish war veterans—they built a little front to the house we bought, and that was his waiting room. And he used to do his adjustments in the living room. And then, he made a little more success, and him and one guy built about an eight-room office in front of our house. My parents then divorced, and I moved with my mom. She was a special ed teacher in the public schools and liked the county special ed program better than the city. And so, we ended up, first in Westchester, and then in the South Bay Area. And I think Westchester was a very key event in my life, beyond my family’s commitment to quote-unquote “liberal” of that day, which was a very close bond between Jews and blacks and the NAACP [0:05:00] Legal Defense Fund with Jack Greenberg and others, worked with Thurgood Marshall. And my grandfather, as I said in my article, had donated money to the defense of the Scottsboro Boys. My parents were part of the NAACP, you know, as far as membership. My father, as I said, loved Hubert Humphrey. But when I was a Little League baseball player at age ten, most of the kids were Catholic. And they never directed the word “kyke” to me personally, but they used it as kind of a slang negative word, “you kyke,” “you this,” “I’m going to Jew you down.” That was also very prevalent in South Bay, only three Jewish families in my high school, again never directed at me, and me really not knowing what to make of it, but very painful to a child. Because, of course, as a child, you want to fit in, you don’t want people—and, of course, I didn’t understand why they would even say that about my religion, because I liked my parents and the people I met at Temple. They hadn’t done anything wrong that I knew of. And, you know, of course, at that time within the Catholic Church, there was the—which later has changed, and it’s a whole different Willy Leventhal, April 13, 2013 5 day in the Catholic Church, in terms of relations with Israel and Judaism—but in those days, there was the Christ killer, that was [6:13] for a certain time, so came out. And then, the next thing that happened, which is tremendously connected to the word “kyke,” was the Jackie Robinson movie, The Jackie Robinson Story, which I saw at age five. And here on the screen were two things that I related to: baseball, which I loved, still love, and racial prejudice or, you know, prejudice toward somebody and mistreatment of somebody, more verbally with Robinson in that movie than otherwise. And in the Jackie Robinson movie, which came out this weekend, there’s a great scene with Harrison Ford when he tells the Jackie Robinson actor, “I was just there, and there’s a little white boy who’s imitating you.” And I talked to Andy Young about the movie, and Andy said, “The movie was great, the best civil rights movie I ever saw!” And he said, “I thought of you when I saw the movie,” thinking of me. And he may have thought—I’ve been trying to get Jackie’s teammates involved with the Civil Rights Game. I was the one that got Andy Young involved, through my RBI involvement. Went with him to Cincinnati when he gave the address there at the Civil Rights Game in 2009 or 10. And I didn’t identify with Jackie as a ball player. First of all, he was such—he was probably the best athlete in the country for many years, maybe of all time, him and Jim Thorpe were close. But Jackie was an unbelievable athlete. Broad-jumped 25’6” 1940. Would have been in the Olympics like his brother Mack, but they had no Olympics that year.