I don’t think I’ve captured the things that were happening to me at about the same time. The streets were starting to break out into violence in the early 1960s. I was starting to become conscious that I had a lot of power. Figuring out how to use this gift was a wild, wonderful time. I was like a kid with a wonderful toy.
I decided to leave my partners and go off and just really enjoy this opportunity. With Psychological Associates, I served the crème de la crème of the corporate world and went to the nicest spots for holding workshops you ever wanted to see. I met clients in their posh New York apartments, was introduced to new drinks, Tanqueray gin, and new foods, mussels in a French restaurant. It was a big step to leave all that and to create a new organization that I liked. I knew I didn’t just want to be in private practice, I wanted to be part of an organization of people sharing a certain vision.
By this time, I had been doing enough work in the community to have found some people with whom I shared this vision. We jointly formed Community Psychological Consultants. Paul Donohue, a Marianist priest, Mary Ann Gleason, Bob Snyder and a few other people created this organization.
It had become very clear to me that my two partners and I had entirely different visions of what we wanted to do with our careers. When I realized they were racists, it became impossible for me to continue a relationship with them. This was an extraordinarily painful time. They saw me as very rigid, judgmental, and self-righteous. But the worst part was the wrangling, legal and otherwise, over my contract.
I had a contract that precluded me from practicing psychology in a thirty-mile radius of St. Louis. My family was well entrenched there, and my whole life was centered around St. Louis. I didn’t want to leave—they didn’t want me to compete with them. My divorce from them was much more painful than the one with my wife, my ex-wife. There were a lot of warm feelings among us, and for years our interests overlapped. They let me do what I wanted, and I did, and they were very happy because I was making gobs of money. They were very delighted with my reputation because it was a great honor and they took great pride in this star that they had, who had a big reputation in the city. I was on a radio program called “Ask the Psychologist” for a few years, and I was very well known. They also took very good care of me and my family financially.
MW: Did you leave because finally your conscience wouldn’t permit you to continue?
MR: It was psychological, not a matter of conscience. I was being called by two different groups. I was being called by the corporate elite, the crème de la crème of St. Louis society. I was seeing them all, and getting the good money. They were desperate about their kids, and they loved my work. But then I was being called by this other group of characters.
It had nothing to do with conscience. It’s just that the others were a more appealing group of characters. They were just more fun to play with! (laughs) That’s why I would hate to come across as too humble or humanitarian about giving up the big life for it, because it didn’t feel like I was sacrificing anything. If anything it was a freedom, a liberation. There was just something much more compelling and freeing about it. It just seemed better, felt more right, in every respect.
Leaving my partners was moving to join this other group officially, to come out and declare that this is a new life for me. This was symbolized by forming a new organization. But now what do I do with this organization? I was very conscious of the gift, the power, I had. The Psychological Consultants era, which lasted for about four years, was really a time when I was trying to figure out how to do it.
I experimented with how it could be used to get white people to quickly face some of their prejudices through a program called Block Partnership. It was a poverty program in St. Louis that got together white people from the suburbs and black people from the inner city to see what could evolve in terms of them learning from one another and sharing power with each other by working on projects together. That was it in theory. In practice, it almost collapsed in the very beginning because the groups would fight when they got together and terrible things would happen, and they would be worse off than before they got together. I was asked to do what I could to prepare the whites before they met the blacks. How do you quickly get at core race issues? It was wonderful to be able to see how I could help facilitate that.
Through working in this project, I came upon the person who was probably the most influential person in my life, Al Chappelle. My part of the project involved coming down to his part of the city where his group, the Zulu 1200, were based. The Zulu 1200 were a street gang. If you were going to be in their area, you had to deal with Al, one of the three or four who led the gang. The Zulu’s were different from other gangs. They had a very interesting blend of social consciousness and illicit activities. The money that funded them came from prostitutes paying them for protection. Of course, prostitution was not an activity that I’d like to get involved in, but with that money, it seemed to me they were doing a very sincere job of trying to rehabilitate and raise up their brothers who had been in prison.
So, I’m on their turf and here is one of their leaders at the Block Partnership meeting making accusations about me, based on my race, the fact that I have a doctoral degree. I’m the Great White Father come down to tell them how they are supposed to live their lives. That was the first time I had heard that. I immediately categorized this guy as an ego-tripping militant, and I judged him and diagnosed him. We got into a real competitive thing. My adrenaline is going. This guy was really pissing me off. This was not very good sense on my part, just to begin with because we were on his turf.
Then I caught what I was doing! This was twenty years ago, and I still had not mastered the process of communication I was trying to teach. But I was really working at it, really pushing it to the max. I can recall almost consciously saying to myself “take a deep breath and ask yourself why are you are competing with this guy.” I took a deep breath and I broke the rhythm. Instead of coming back with a competitive response, I came back with something like, “so you’re saying you want these things like the washing machine, the patrol guards around the project, not just to give them some material things, but as kind of a beginning of getting them organized for other things?” “Yeah.” I shifted from a competitive mode to trying to hear what he was saying.
He followed me when the meeting was over. He said “Rosenberg” in a tone of voice that confirmed my thought that he wanted to avenge himself for things that had happened during the meeting. Then he said “you got a horse?”—a car—and I knew he didn’t want to fight. I said “yeah.” He said “take me to the Ship.” That was slang for the Block Partnership Office.
We got in the care, and I’ll never forget this for the rest of my life. He said “what did you do to me in there?” Now I’m as curious as I can be about what point he means. I was very excited that he pointed to the very spot where I had begun to try to understand him. “Well,” I said, “if you had opened your hard head, you would have heard that I did what I was talking about. These communication skills can be very valuable.” He thought about that. He said, “can you teach me how to teach that to the Zulu?” I could hardly believe my ears. To think that he wanted to teach these skills to street gang members.
Then I did something else that was incredible. I don’t know where it came from, but I’m glad I did it. I said, “I’ll trade you that, if you’ll come to Washington D.C. on Thursday with me to teach some teachers why kids are burning the place down.” He laughed, and said he had no education. I think you can teach them better than I. I had no idea how we were going to work together or why I was asking him. There were fires in Washington then, and I was going right into the heart of where they had burned schools down. I needed whatever help I could get.
Washington was the first of I don’t know how many cities we went to together over the next ten years, working throughout the south in school desegregation programs and so forth.
During that time I got an extraordinary lesson from this man, who turned out to be one of the most gifted individuals I’ve ever met. I don’t know that I ever met anybody who didn’t immediately love him. There’s so much that I got out of our relationship and continue to get out of it. There’s still a connectedness, even though he’s doing very well in the corporate world now. In terms of shaping my values, the close connection that I developed with him helped me to plunge into the waters of poverty without as much fear as I would have otherwise had. I saw from his life that if you served people, the money took care of itself. This was not an abstraction—this was how many of the people I was associated with lived.
Chappelle’s life in those days was usually one of service from morning to night. He’d be visiting people in jail, and organizing stuff all over the city. He never had money, but he never seemed to need any. He lived with his mother, and was fed by people as he went along. I could see that people could live very well, with a great sense of warmth and community and love without money. You don’t need money. You don’t have to have a job. That helped me to cut some of the strands and go for stuff in a bigger way than I could have if I thought that I had to proceed from having money.
Of course, what I learned is that you have to have a way of talking the language of the people you are working with, and a style. You’ve got to adjust your training to the people. Chapelle helped get me access to people. For example, he evolved the Fun School, a school that demonstrated that the kids who had been kicked out of public schools could be reached by providing a certain quality of atmosphere and teaching in the school. My job was to teach people from the Association of Black Collegiate volunteers to be teachers in four days.
I got this wonderful opportunity, largely with Chappelle’s help, to translate what I had to offer, and make it available to people in public housing, street gangs, and to a wide variety of black poor people that I could not have reached otherwise. These are people that can really benefit from these services, who aren’t getting them, because there aren’t many people who are trying to translate this stuff for them. These are people who need this whatever power and enlightenment in their lives and are most appreciative when they get it. But, of course, they are hard to give it to—they’re poor. There’s a whole bunch of reasons why. We are getting it to them. It was fun, a challenge, and most exciting.
Vicki Legion came to one of the meetings we ran, and what happened with Chappelle happened with her. I got pissed off and competitive with her, and she ended up having a place in my life similar to Chappelle’s for the next ten years. Chappelle was a great teacher. I couldn’t have asked for someone better to teach me about my racism.
And I couldn’t have asked for a better teacher about my sexism than Vicki. She was meaner about calling it to your attention than anyone else I knew. But anyone could see that she was totally inept at reaching her objective. She was not educating anybody, she was just getting them angry at her. Once she saw the power of the process, nobody put such energy into learning and applying it to the cause of feminism. It was extraordinary for me to have Chappelle who saw the tremendous application of this to his struggle against racism, and then Vicki having the same intensity of excitement about its power in her fight against sexism.
I met another character around the time I met Vicki, and all our lives intertwined. He was the superintendent of schools in Rockford, Illinois—Thomas Shaheen—an Arab who had an intense desire for integrating schools. A book I had written called Diagnostic Teaching, back when I was involved with learning disabilities, got me an invitation to do workshops on the skills in Rockford. Rockford was setting up an alternative school that was designed to be a model and training facility for the entire school district. Shaheen was the main force behind this. He got very sold on the power of what could happen if he and others could learn a way of introducing change that didn’t infuriate the opposition. The John Birch society had offered to pay him to leave his job. They thought he was that much of a menace to the community.
We went ahead and integrated this school well before busing was instituted nationally. There was multi-cultural education. I gave teachers intense training on working on the quality of relationships in the school and how rules were established. This was a radical school.
A little later, in 1970, he got a job as the superintendent of the San Francisco schools. They wanted him to integrate the schools, and he wanted me to be with him from the beginning, instead of, as he said, me bailing him out like I did in Rockford. I’ve got these other things going with Vicki and Chappelle, but I go. A limo picks me up at the airport, takes me to my hotel suite, and picks me up later to join Shaheen at a reception in his honor at the Swiss consular general’s house. There are matches with my name on them in my suite. I think, I’m going to like this game! (laughs) I had the chauffeur and the limo at my disposal whenever I came to San Francisco, which was about once a month for a week. It was a great opportunity at this level and scale to have carte blanche to create what I thought could be of value.
It didn’t take long for Shaheen to come under intense attack. The thing that did him in was his plan to integrate the administrative structure within two years. This was going too far for the city. The mayor got rid of him. He lasted six months.
But here I am sitting there with a bunch of stuff going on. I loved the excitement and the challenge. I had never worked with some of these cultural groups before. I’ve paid some dues, and made some mistakes and pulled together about fifty people. I have things all ready to go, and all of a sudden, the rug is pulled out from under me. I spent a very depressed month back in St. Louis. Then it dawned on me that I was telling myself that they wouldn’t let me keep this thing going, the powers wouldn’t let me. Many times I’ve lectured about this. Part of why they get at you is that you think in terms of what they’ll let you.
Vicki pops into my head. She had been wanting to leave St. Louis and had been talking San Francisco. So I said, ‘Vicki, let’s talk.’ For two years Vicki lived in San Francisco with no income other than that which people, often minority people, donated. Those were two of the wildest years of my life. I had spent the rest of the money I had saved on going out there and keeping things alive. We created the Community Council for Mutual Education, one of the things I’m most proud of is the part that I played in creating that group.
Over the next four years we trained hundreds of minority people in the skills, and we saw that they did use them—which touched the depths of my soul. Miracles happened which affirmed the nature of what we were doing, and helped Vicki and me when we’d get down about how poor we were. Six months earlier, I had the Cadillac and the hotel suite. One night in the middle of this, I wake up on the floor of Vicki’s kitchen with a cockroach in my mouth. (laughs)
During that time I learned continual lessons from Vicki about my sexism. This was a serious issue for Vicki, and congruence of our efforts was very important to her. I liked her conscientiousness and scrupulosity in this area. She looked very hard at how we exercised power in our project so that our process and content were consistent. We had this star syndrome with me being the white male with the visibility. She constantly critiqued what I did and was constantly angry at me, which was wonderful. She knew a lot about that, and she was right. She was also very loving and nurturing to me. So it wasn’t hard to learn from her. I felt fortunate.
There’s a story I tell about her. We had to have good clothes to go to some of the places we went to try to get money. She finally decided to get a dress. When I think about the cheap dress she finally decided on… (cries) It was such a rag…
It was a privilege to be part of this group. It was an honor to have a position of such centrality among them.
Vicki went on to become kind of a cult figure among the radical therapy community in the Bay Area. We still have a very loving relationship, but she had a calling in another area, which involved militancy in another arena. During that time she did this, she was into seeing me as a disapproving father, and she was reluctant to have much contact with me. Actually I didn’t disapprove.