America's Peacemakers

The Community Relations Service and Civil Rights

Bertram Levine, Grande Lum

420 pages

Published: November 2020

20 b&w illus.

ISBN: 9780826222169

Format:

Hardcover

Price: $60.00

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About This Book: In this second, expanded edition of Resolving Racial Conflict:The Community Relations Service and Civil Rights, 1964–1989, Grande Lum continues Bertram Levine’s excellent scholarship, expanding the narrative to consider the history of the Community Relations Service (CRS) of the U.S. Department of Justice over the course of the last twenty-five years. That the Trump administration has sought to eliminate CRS gives this book increased urgency and relevance.

The 2009 Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act substantially altered CRS’s jurisdiction, which began focusing on gender, gender identity, religion, sexual orientation, and disability in addition to race, color, and national origin. Lum’s documentation of this expanded jurisdiction provides insight into the progression of civil rights.
Authors and Editors: Bertram Levine was a former associate director of the Community Relations Service; he died in 2006. Grande Lum is Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs at Menlo College and former director of the Community Relations Service (2012–2016). He lives in Hillsborough, California.
Praise For This Book: “This is not only an important history of a major part of the American civil rights movement, it should be essential reading for anyone in the conflict resolution field.”—Carrie Menkel-Meadow, UC Irvine School of Law, co-author of Dispute Resolution: Beyond the Adversarial Model

“Makes for fascinating reading, and teaches much about how to defuse and even mediate highly volatile, emotional encounters between long-standing cultural opponents.”—Heidi Burgess, Co-Director, Beyond Intractability.org, co-author of Encyclopedia of Conflict Resolution and Conducting Track II Peacemaking