BOOK PARTY — America’s Peacemaker: The Community Relations Service and Civil Rights, December 28, 2020

7:05–7:15 Welcome — David Levine

7:15–8:00 Remarks: Grande Lum, Co-Author; George Lopez, Commentator and Neil Levine, Reflections

8:00–8:30 Q&A and Reflections

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Guest Speakers

Grande Lum

Grande Lum is the Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs at Menlo College, a small, private, non-profit Silicon Valley school that focuses on business education with a strong liberal arts emphasis.

Previously he was Director of the Divided Community Project (DCP) at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, where he also served as a Distinguished Practitioner in Residence. DCP’s mission is to strengthen communities so they can transform community division into positive action. DCP’s initiatives include establishing programs in advance of civil unrest. In 2018, the American Bar Association Dispute Resolution Section awarded the Lawyer as Problem Solver Award to DCP. Mr. Lum was also a Lecturer at Law and Research Fellow at Stanford Law School.

Grande Lum was nominated by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the Senate in 2012 as the Director of the Community Relations Service (CRS), an agency within the Department of Justice. Mr. Lum guided CRS during a time when race and law enforcement reemerged as a critical national priority. CRS focuses on preventing and resolving racial and ethnic tensions, and in restoring stability and harmony. In addition, CRS also works with communities to employ strategies to prevent and respond to alleged violent hate crimes committed on the basis of actual or perceived race, color, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion or disability. During his tenure, Mr. Lum expanded services in the areas of Transgender and Law Enforcement interaction, anti-Muslim hate crime prevention, Intellectual Disabilities and Restorative Practices.

Before joining CRS, Grande Lum was a clinical professor at the University of California Hastings School of the Law, where he directed the Center for Negotiation and Dispute Resolution. Mr. Lum implemented the law school’s alternative dispute resolution curriculum, the largest (by student enrollment) in the country. He led the Center to first US News Report top law school dispute resolution program ranking ever in 2010.

While he was CRS Director, CRS received the American Bar Association Dispute Resolution Section Lawyer as Problem Solver Award in 2014 and the Association of Conflict Resolution Peacemaker Award in 2013. During his career, Mr. Lum has mediated labor-management contract issues and conflicts involving differences such as race and religion. In addition he has facilitated educational reform and change initiatives. He authored The Negotiation Fieldbook and Tear Down the Wall: Be Your Own Mediator in Conflict. Mr. Lum received his B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley, and his J.D. from Harvard Law School.

George A. Lopez

George A. Lopez is the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C., Professor Emeritus of Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, where he was a founding faculty member. He is a leading expert on economic sanctions, peacebuilding, and various peace-related issues. During 33 years of affiliation with the Kroc Institute, Lopez has engaged in a diverse set of policy and public roles. He served as interim executive director of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1997 and chaired its Board of Directors (1998–2003) presiding over changing the hands of the Doomsday Clock in 2002. As a senior research associate at the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs in New York City in 2001–02 he assisted with the Council’s post-9/11 public programming throughout the U.S.

He held a Senior Jennings Randolph Fellowship at USIP from 2009–10 and served as a member of the United Nations Panel of Experts for monitoring and implementing UN Sanctions on North Korea from 2010–11. From 2013–15, he was the Vice President of the Academy for International Conflict Management and Peacebuilding at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) in Washington, D.C. In autumn 2019 he was named as one of the inaugural non-residential Fellows of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

Lopez has a deep commitment to nurturing the development of high quality peace studies and peacebuilding education at the collegiate level. He is founding director of the Kroc Institute’s annual Summer Institute on Teaching Peace in the 21st Century. This program has assisted the development of peace research and studies programs in more than 100 higher education institutions across five continents. While at USIP, Lopez led the creation of the Global Campus online peacebuilding education platform. Most recently he has accompanied the development of university level peacebuilding programs in Poland, Colombia, and Ecuador, the latter as a Fulbright Senior Specialist.

Author in Memoriam

Bertram Levine

Bertram Levine dedicated his professional life to working on civil rights and community relations, died of brain cancer Feb. 8 at his home in Rockville.

Mr. Levine was an executive with the Community Relations Service of the Justice Department, where he strove to help communities peacefully resolve racial conflicts. He arrived shortly after the organization was founded in 1964 and worked through the urban riots of the 1960s and 1970s and the less explosive but simmering racial problems of the 1980s.

“He was a passionately involved person who could behave dispassionately,” said Roger Wilkins, the first director of the service. “His job was to figure out ways to marshal federal resources and direct them to cities to alleviate the problems that were causing the riots. . . . I have an abiding affection and respect for what he accomplished and for his idealism.”

Mr. Levine wrote a book, “Resolving Racial Conflict: The Community Relations Service and Civil Rights, 1964–1989” (2005), which covered his years at the agency.

He was born in New York and graduated from Syracuse University. He served in the Army during World War II and the Korean War, rising to the rank of captain. He worked on civil rights for the American Jewish Committee in New York before moving to Washington in 1965. He helped draft Rockville’s human relations law and was a commissioner on the Montgomery County Human Relations Commission.