Transcript
Index
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INTERVIEW WITH LEWIS PITTSLewis Pitts:
Okay. Great. Yes. All right. My name is Lewis Pitts. I was born December 12,
1947, and I was born in Clinton, South Carolina.Matthew Barr:
Let's talk a little bit. I mean, we have so much to cover, a little about what
it was like growing up, let's see, in South Carolina. Is that a small town?Lewis Pitts:
Yeah. It's a small town. I moved from there when I was 10, but those were very
formative first 10 years. My mom and dad both had college educations, but they were more working people. My dad was one of seven kids and it was quite an entrepreneurial family. He was running the family meat market, meaning they sold his little store, sold meat, beef and pork and cheese and bread, and that was about it. I remember back in that day, you pick up the telephone and the operator would say number, please, and his telephone number was nine eight.Lewis Pitts:
And that got me to my dad's store. So that meant that I got to grow up, most of
that time, living in the country. My dad and two of his brothers had built brick houses side by side on a hill that overlooked the pasture and an old barn. And this is not ritzy ranch, or farming. This was just back stuff, so he raised a few cows. There was an old horse or two that'd be around. I had an older cousin, Billy Boy, Billy Boy Pitts, and Saturday mornings, we would chase the horses, finally catch them, and ride and play cowboys and Indians, jump out of the barn. Anyway, it was a blast. I'd go to cattle sales with him. To this day I love to hear an auctioneer saying and call out those numbers and have those kind of memories.Lewis Pitts:
My mom was a school teacher. But then my dad had gone to Clemson and I think the
retail meat business wasn't what he wanted to do. And he took a job then in Bethune, South Carolina, an even smaller town at Kendall Company. And he was the second shift night supervisor, so he started almost at the bottom and then worked his way up. So we lived there. So I went to high school in the town of 600, including indoor pets. There were 24 in my high school class. And it was very isolating, but I didn't know any different. I enjoyed it. I played sports and had a steady girlfriend. And that was when I did through high school. And I had a strong upbringing in the church. On my mom's side, her dad had been a Methodist preacher. His dad had been a Methodist preacher, but that grandfather passed away before I could remember him.Lewis Pitts:
So I didn't ever know him. So at least I got a foundation in trying to do what's
right and wrong. And growing up, at least in the Methodist church, there was a song, "...red and yellow, black, and white. They are precious in his sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world..." So we were not in a racist family there in South Carolina, overtly racist, not a Ku Klux Klan thing. But, my gosh, when I finally got away from all that, I realized how much we were steeped in, at best, separate but equal. And so that was a real learning process. And then I'll stop now, but the summer after I graduated from high school, I started working in the summers before I went to college and I had an experience, well, actually I had experienced in my senior year. I should mention that given that I became a civil rights activist and a lawyer. I was one of three track captains of the football team my senior year.Lewis Pitts:
And the other two guys, I think one of them's father probably was in the Klan. I
didn't know particularly about that, but somehow with that much to do, they convinced me to join with him. And we took sheets and red paint and took plenty of time and built a big banner that it spelled out "Ku Klux Klan rides again". And then we built a smaller one with just three Ks on it. In one Friday or Saturday night, we strung that across the main street of Bethune from the Piggly Wiggly to the Western Auto and climbed up the water tank and taped it somehow on the water tank. Well, I had no racial hatred. I don't know how to explain that other than I was just blinded by the culture of white supremacy and segregation. And our high school newspaper was called the Dixie Cat.Lewis Pitts:
I'd look back at it some years ago, and there's a picture of us standing at one
point in front of a Confederate flag in that high school annual. So anyway, it was just astounding how much I had absorbed, maybe an implicit bias, it wasn't a hatred. But with regard to that KKK thing, I foolishly decided to ride back through town after we had hung it, and the one town cop had already seen it in, and cut it down, and had to lift it up for me to drive under it. And somehow, by the time I got home to my parents, they were up. And I said, "Yeah. We did it." And what's up. And it was a Saturday because the next Sunday morning we had to climb up and take it all down. Then I began to hear stories from a friend of mine's father, a buddy ran the IGA food store and they had already begun to talk somehow because I forgot how long it had been up, that the word spread Klan may be riding again and black folks were coming in to the grocery store to stock up on food.Lewis Pitts:
And, boy, I want to finally begin to make conscious how awful I felt, but that
summer I was working construction on a labor crew. My dad worked at that plant, but I didn't drive a truck, man. I had a shovel and I walked around with the eight or 10 guys on the labor force. They were all African-American, and that was a learning experience for me. But one of the plumber guys, which I thought, man, that must be the height of sophistication to be a plumber and know how to do all that. Well, they were selling raffle tickets. The Klan was raffling a 66 Mustang, so I bought a raffle ticket, man.Lewis Pitts:
I didn't win. And I didn't have any clue that I was being a moron or being
racist. I went off to college to an all white, pretty much all white, all male Wofford College, and actually that began to expand my horizons a bit. And then hopefully every year thereafter I've tried to learn and grow and develop and understand better, but that was some of my beginnings dealing with the race issue.Matthew Barr:
So just back briefly to the town. Were there blacks living around there?
Lewis Pitts:
Well like most Southern towns, there was the colored side of town that there was
no houses side by side, but there were folks in that town. In fact, we had a black maid, one or two different ones that were nice. They'd come. And some point back in that day, you could get a full driver's license, meaning day and night, at 14 years old. So I would sometimes drive her home, meaning to the other side of town, and at some point I don't remember when, maybe when I was in college and was in the summer did that. I began to realize this is bizarre. I'm sitting in the front seat and she's in the back seat, and there's two of us in the car. I think I offered her the opportunity, but back then that was been about as hard on her and awkward to sit up there with me, so that was just the way it went. It's horrible.Matthew Barr:
Yeah. It's hard to think back to that period. So, but your family, your parents
were religious and they were not overtly racist at all.Lewis Pitts:
No. No. I remember we were driving. We moved from Clinton where the cattle and
the meat market was when I was 10, that was 1957, to Bethune and for a couple of years, we would regularly drive back and forth, so this was I'm guessing roughly 58, 59. It's about a two hour drive from Bethune to Clinton, and getting somewhere near Newberry it was late in the afternoon or night, there was a cross being burned. And I remember my parents, I don't remember their words, but their notion that what they conveyed was that's bad. That's not good, that that was sort of not how they would do it, but that other stuff of separate but equal, ride in the back seat, that was very different. Now their views evolved too. I'm talking about in here, I graduated from high school in 66, but they evolved a little more and began to understand a little more.Matthew Barr:
Okay. So then let's talk about briefly you talk about your experiences at
Wofford College?Lewis Pitts:
Yes.
Matthew Barr:
(crosstalk 00:15:24).
Lewis Pitts:
W-O-F-F-O-R-D It's a Methodist college in Spartanburg. It's co-ed now. Back then
it was all male. And from the time I stopped wanting to be a garbage truck driver at about four or five years old because I thought that was cool to drive a big truck, make a lot of noise in the garbage truck, I wanted to be a medical doctor, and help people. So I went to Wofford because it supposedly has a good academic things and being a Methodist, I got a little bit of a scholarship, so to help pay for it, but I quickly went wild. I didn't drink, smoke, or cuss, I used to say when I was in high school, but I learned to do it all at Wofford pretty quickly. And I knew I did not want to spend my college afternoons in the lab.Lewis Pitts:
So I gave up the notion of being a medical doctor and majored in English, and
only towards the end that I decide I thought I'd go to law school. I hadn't really committed to it as a cause at that point. But at Wofford College, I candidly say two things, well, a little broader base of guys, even though there were white, who were from a little bigger towns began to broaden my horizon. The other thing I began to read Bertrand Russell. And the other thing I smoked pot and those things opened my head up. And I think I began to think and crave the pursuit of the knowledge and the joy of understanding even though I wasted the academic side of four years of college. I did just what I could do to get by, and that was about it.Lewis Pitts:
Let's say that I drank a lot. I went to the gym a lot and pursued the women a
lot and that was my college career. But then I began to get serious, went to law school and, I don't know, major stuff as I continued to read, and I started following Marx. I started following Eastern religion. I started paying attention to liberation theology in some fashion or another and trying to figure out how to be a good human being, how to pursue knowledge, the joy of understanding, but more importantly, the obligation and the potential to make change in the world.Matthew Barr:
Okay. So talk about your law school experiences.
Lewis Pitts:
University of South Carolina in Columbia. I was there from 1970 to 73. So I'll
often say that the sixties hit South Carolina in the early seventies. So there was antiwar stuff going on. I wasn't a part of an antiwar movement, but there was a group in our first year class that formed, had a name called Pettigrew Society that we're trying to do the more progressive things, so there I got exposed to an even broader category. There weren't many women law students back then. There were a few, but there were some smart people. And I was beginning to get introduced to the progressive or what's called left. I don't like particularly left- right terms.Lewis Pitts:
And that's when at some point, one of those guys, I don't recall his name was
helping and encouraging people to apply for a conscientious objector status. So I should probably scroll back to help pay for Wofford because my family was not wealthy. At Wofford there's basic ROTC and in then there's advanced ROTC, Reserve Officer Training Corps, army. So most people who aren't athletes on scholarship, take ROTC. It was just promoted that way. And if you do it your junior and senior year, you actually get paid a little bit, but you're also, in return you get commissioned as a second Lieutenant and have an obligation to go in. So I'd gone through and done that. That meant we would drill every Monday or Tuesday afternoon and spit shine the shoes, and I went into a summer camp at Fort Bragg the summer after my junior year. I had a profound experience there.Lewis Pitts:
I was out on a complex course with an African-American guy who is a militant, so
this was, I guess, 69, militant African-American guy who was attending... I forgot something like maybe North Carolina A&T or one of the historically black colleges, and we were out together. Well, we kind of got lost. I didn't have any water in my canteen. I wasn't about to die, but I was thirsty because you are out in the woods in Fort Bragg. And he offered me his canteen and I was confronted with, do I drink after a black person?Lewis Pitts:
And anyway that was an interesting story. It touched me. And I think I did. I
don't exactly remember. Then interestingly years later, early eighties, 1980s, that same guy was an assistant US attorney in Greensboro when I had begun to represent the victims in the Greensboro Massacre, which I suspect and we will get to, and I was then the lefty radical representing the communist workers' party, and he was the man. He was the US attorney who was refusing to federally investigate. He wasn't the US attorney. He was an assistant. Anyway, our roles seemed to have shifted completely that way. So I applied for conscientious objector status, had to go through those interviews.Lewis Pitts:
The military was saying that I didn't deserve it. And I still have the letters
written in my behalf from people I had worked with during law school, a judge, and some other people. And my own written articulation, it was kind of fascinating here a few years ago, after 40 or 50, to go back and read what you were saying as a young person about your views about war, and morality and those things. But anyway, the last minute, it was granted. And so I got out and didn't have to go to service. And so I was in law school about to graduate deciding whether I then was going to have to go in or would I then do like some did and go to Canada or how would I do that? And I didn't quite know, and then I got it in the mail what you need to do.Lewis Pitts:
And that was that. In law school, I really got interested in... had a nice good
professor, a white guy, from Mississippi who taught a dear friend of mine, Bob Warren and I, and really about racism and civil rights lawyering, and he really helped change our world, John Tims. And I worked for the public defender as a law clerk. That's representing poor folks. That means largely poor whites and poor African-Americans who were charged in the criminal justice system, and that began to lift up the covers of how much systemic racism there is and criminalization of poverty and the criminalization was almost... It was minimum back then compared to what we have now in light of Michelle Alexander's book, "The New Jim Crow," and those kind of things. But even back then people were demanding and saying that we had an unfair criminal and were imprisoning African-American people disproportionately and wrongly. But anyway, I got a chance to see that part of the criminal system.Matthew Barr:
Well, so you graduated in 1973?
Lewis Pitts:
Yes.
Matthew Barr:
Okay. Did you know when you graduated that you wanted to do work to help people?
Lewis Pitts:
I stayed with the public defender. That was the beginning of the constitutional
right to a free lawyer, if you were poor and charged with a crime. That had not long been ordained, or if you will, articulated by a US Supreme Court decision. So the state of South Carolina was starting that, and in Columbia, Richland County, there was a county public defender's office. So I stayed there for three years and it was amazing. I got to do a lot of trial work. I did some appellate work and that was a good thing to be a young, barely confident, but I remember representing an African-American man with an IQ about, if I recall it was, 53 and he was charged falsely with what seemed like eight or 10 rapes. He could barely speak well, Claude Callahan.Lewis Pitts:
And anyway, I had just passed the bar and I had a trial. I was the lead lawyer.
It was a rape of a white, beautiful co-ed at the University of South Carolina by Claude Callahan. And I know she got it wrong and I fought and tangled with the judge and we had an appeal, but ultimately lost it, and to this day, I'm convinced that he didn't do it, and I realize how many times that can happen.Matthew Barr:
Does he (crosstalk 00:25:48).
Lewis Pitts:
So after three years, I wanted to do a little something different and my good
buddy that I just mentioned, Bob Warren, when he graduated, he'd gone to his home town of Allendale, Allendale County, which was, if I recall 60 or more percent African-American, and he hung out his shingle to be a solo practitioner. This is back in the day. In that county, there was no legal aid.Lewis Pitts:
There was no public defender. If you are poor and African-American or white and
poor, you didn't have much. So we tried to, without any subsidized money, tried to represent all those people. And that was an eye opener for me also. The reason, when I moved there, I moved in with Bob because he'd been happily married and had two kids, but he came home one day and the wife and two kids and all the furniture, including the shower curtain were gone. She moved. They couldn't stand the heat. He had threatened to sue over not having an integrated pool, swimming pool, and the kids would come home and say, "Daddy, everybody says we don't have a swimming pool because of you." And so it was dangerous and all these other things, but I moved in with him and we had a blast fighting the man and raising hell and working together and seeing how the power structure worked and trying to challenge.Lewis Pitts:
We did not want to be part of the good old boy system, which meant economically
to survive it was going to be very hard. Because the judges knew if we had a case, it was supposed to be something where our client would get money, and then we may get a contingency from that. They didn't want to help us, so that was quite a part of my life experiences. I'll stop and see if you want to probe any more. And tell me if I'm going too much detail.Matthew Barr:
Oh. You are going beautifully. You're so well spoken. I was just going to ask
how did you survive financially back then?Lewis Pitts:
Barely. I can remember, when I practiced with him, I didn't know anything about
civil law. I think I knew a lot about criminal law because that's all I'd done. On the civil side, even your basic automobile accident... what is a collision insurance versus liability insurance and calling up the insurance adjusters and the fact that these people would buy on payment seemed like from General Motors a mobile home, a trailer to live in, it would leak, wasn't worth a damn. They would stop making the payments.Lewis Pitts:
That'd be hauled into court on some you know debt thing, have the trailer
removed, blah, blah, blah. I remember sitting in my desk looking up at the doorway, and I saw a man in it looked like some coveralls with pliers or some kind of tool and I leaned out and I said, "Bob., what's that?" And he said, he's cutting off the electricity. We haven't paid electricity bill this month. So it went on and on like that, and we didn't have the proverbial pot to piss in, but we ate. We didn't starve and we had some really wonderful... I don't want to bore too much with the stories, but there's just fascinating stories in the Low Country of South Carolina about what was going on and the racism and the violence that was going on and how few people were willing to fight it.Lewis Pitts:
And I'm indebted so much to Bob Warren, my dear friend, who's recently passed,
and this is August 2020, and he passed in March, who taught me a lot about understanding and loving and realizing black people, they ain't the problem, man. It's us. And go be with them. And you realize, man, they'll give you the shirt off their back. Fine. We would go to the honky tonks or juke joints, I guess it was more called that there and were accepted because we were the fighters, and mostly in disbelief that these two young white lawyers, Warren and Pitts, would take on their cases and take it all the way to the state Supreme Court. Maybe we had a $50 retainer fee, but you just do it because you know. If you say, no, that's the end of the line. In fact, that's the only time I think I kept a journal or a diary in my life.Lewis Pitts:
And I look back at that. It was paining me to realize, and I realized it early,
what an unfair system we've got. Whether you can have justice depends on the money you got. And the lawyers, the bar is made up mainly to make money, to be a parasite on that system, and I felt bad about it. And we were trying to do it as ethically and morally as you could, but it's still put us in tension. Somebody comes to you with these horrible stories of destitution, and you're supposed to say, I need $500? Or I need a $1,000 as a retainer fee. So I knew I had to leave that part, and what happened next is by 1978, and I'd gone with Bob in 76, I got exposed to the anti nuke movement. And all of these little chapters feels like in my life, I could go on seems like for hours because they were so impactive on me, but we can't do that today I'm sure.Lewis Pitts:
But there was a nuclear waste site there. There was Savannah River Plant called
the Bomb Plant right near Allendale. There was another nuclear type thing. There was a big civil disobedience. Jackson Browne came and played in a soy bean field. Wow. This was a mind blower to get exposed. And I began to read about the Karen Silkwood case. This woman in 74 had been killed, and all of that was coming together, so Bob and I are actively involved in that. We drew straws. He won. He got to get arrested and the civil disobedience and I didn't, so we had fun doing that. We won an important case. In his situation when he got tried for trespass in a jury trial, they used in the master's court, a state statute that had been on the books since I don't know how long, a hundred years, I don't know. And literally it said to pick a jury pool from where you select six...PART 1 OF 4 ENDS (00:33:04)
Lewis Pitts:
jurors. The sheriff goes out and picks, I think it was 18 good and true, it
might have even said, men. Now, think about this. The law enforcement official, sheriff, that's prosecuting you is going to pick the jurors.Lewis Pitts:
So we challenged that, argued it in the state supreme court, challenged them in
other ways, nearly got thrown out, but we won that case and that overturned. And that makes a point then, for all those years all the lawyers in South Carolina weren't willing enough to fight the system to challenge what, on its face, should be seen as a biased statute that goes to the core of, can you have an unbiased, impartial, fair jury trial?Lewis Pitts:
Another thing that we challenged in there, and an article about our law firm,
and Bob mainly, came out in the Sacramento, California, Sacramento Bee newspaper, The Necktie Revolution. We didn't want to wear ties in the courtroom. We said that puts us to look like as if we were on the side of the bankers, and the insurance lawyers, and the big companies. And we're not.Lewis Pitts:
We're out here to be the people's lawyers and sometimes we'd get thrown out of
court, sometimes we wouldn't, depending on the judge, but we tried to make a principal out of not aligning ourselves with the corporate powers. So, but at some point then by '78, I don't know how much detail, but I met a lawyer named Danny Sheehan and some of his friends, and they were working on the Silkwood case.Lewis Pitts:
So to make a long story short, I moved from Allendale, South Carolina to
Oklahoma City to earn nothing but a free place to stay with a volunteer person who had an extra bedroom and room and board to work on the Silkwood case, and began to see what a big national case could possibly look like, all the pros and cons of that.Lewis Pitts:
And that set me up to then go and be involved for two years only a little bit
with the Silkwood case, but enough to know how that's... I encourage people to read the books that's the real story. There's a movie about Karen Silkwood, as people know, with Meryl Streep in it, and Cher.Lewis Pitts:
But the real behind the scenes story was it was a plutonium refuel, they were
making it, fabrication plan, but plutonium, bomb grade stuff. It was somehow...there's all kind of theories that it was being leaked out, sent to Israel. Was it the CIA? Was it the FBI?Lewis Pitts:
But we found out how much spying, how much CIA and FBI knowledge there was about
following and spying on Karen, and in the anti-nuke movement in itself, and attacks on the labor movement. So these were explosive revelations to me to begin to understand that. So I also had an important revelation out there.Lewis Pitts:
So I got admitted to the bar in 1973. I'd say by '79, so six years of trying to,
I think I used the wording, use law as a tool for social change. I thought that it was all so rigged. I wasn't doing it anymore. I gave up, I took my briefcase, I ceremonially dumped it over a fire out in the woods in the mountains somewhere in Oklahoma and said, "I ain't wasting my time or this. I'm going to be a freedom fighter."Lewis Pitts:
And I mean literally a freedom fighter and do whatever it took, by whatever
means necessary, to fight for justice. So I was engaging in civil disobedience, helping other groups. So some delightful stories of finding these wonderful people in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that would bring out 300, 400, sometimes 500 people. We'd all get arrested, we'd have a trial.Lewis Pitts:
I'd pick up the phone and call up these nationally known health physicists. I
think of Dr. John Goffman. He had been tasked by the US government to investigate the medical ramifications of nuclear radiation, I think both from military and the civil part, and his conclusions were "Wow, it's killing us." And he became ostracized as a whistleblower.Lewis Pitts:
Other folks, but I said, "I can't pay you some expert witness fee. I don't even
have hardly gas to put in my car. I'm hitchhiking around. But we're going to have a trial out somewhere in Podunk, Texas, or in Oklahoma, in Rogers County, home of Will Rogers. You want to come and tell the people?"Lewis Pitts:
And they will. I get chill bumps as I'm telling this. And he paid for his own
ticket and come out and we would argue duress or necessity. Yes, we non-violently climbed over the fence and got arrested, all 500 or 300 of them, but we had no choice because the other side out of it, and the way Dr. Goffman would frame it sometimes, think of the four corners of that nuclear power plant.Lewis Pitts:
If you put a machine gun on a turret on each one of them and began to spray
bullets, that's what that plant is doing, in terms of radiation. And it was surprisingly successful. We had a trial in Texas where they did that and had two experts, as I recall.Lewis Pitts:
A local country judge who may own land out there, so the judge has to pay
attention. Is this plant going to contaminate my property where I can't raise crops or cattle or sell it? They had a little more of a personal stake in this thing. And they would be very helpful, let Goffman testify. So there were six members of the jury, these big stereotypic Texas looking guys that looked like they would want to lynch me. I had a longer beard, longer hair. I wore cowboy boots because that's how I am.Lewis Pitts:
And they hung up, they wouldn't convict us. And after it, one of the guys that I
thought was most likely to want to pinch my little neck right off, he said to the Dallas, seemed like Morning Herald, "If I'd have known about all in there dangers to that plant, I'd have climbed over that fence with them kids."Lewis Pitts:
So that's how I was still trying to use law as a tool for social change, but
then even wanting to get more radicalized. Stumbled into the people in 1980 who were looking for somebody to help bring justice from the Greensboro Massacre. And the reason they sought Danny Sheehan out is that Danny and his wife, Sarah Nelson, and others of us, a Jesuit father, Bill Davis, had started something called the Christic Institute in Washington, DC.Lewis Pitts:
And long story short, we agreed that we would try to take that on as Christic
Institute. It made sense for me to go there with my Southern accent and my connection to the South. Even though I had not been doing union labor work, I'd been doing anti-nuke work and some racial justice.Lewis Pitts:
But came to Greensboro with an earring on, and didn't want to be a lawyer, and
wanted to be a revolutionary, had followed Che and reading Fidel, and all of that stuff, and had this third world notion of change and revolution, as if we were going to all get guns and go eat monkeys and live up in a tree like Che and those did.Lewis Pitts:
And so, the irony there is that people named the Communist Workers Party,
because they're communists, would be the most out of touch. They were very sane and rational people. I know that you talked to my friend and former client, Signe Waller, recently, how wonderful those people were, they were the cream of the crop of loving, caring, and bright people.Lewis Pitts:
Her husband had dropped out of med school to go work in a textile mill to be a
union leader. They were gunned down deliberately, aided and abetted with the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, but they had a legal part of CWP. And they said, "Look, man. Nobody's saying that the legal system is good. It's whole reason to being there is to legitimate an oppressive system that protects property."Lewis Pitts:
But we have to use that legal system. We have to be in there to defend the
movements. When movements fight back, or their elected leaders, African American leaders were coming up, and the voting rights act had passed a decade and more, and all that. And they are getting hammered. They're cutting the head off the movement by attacking and framing the leaders.Lewis Pitts:
We can't abdicate that system. We have to get in there, and it made a lot of
sense. So I got a haircut. I took my earring out, and I began to be a lawyer again and got to know these wonderful people like Reverend Nelson Johnson and his wonderful wife, Joyce Johnson, and so many, Dr. Marty Nathan, and understand and realize how much the Red baiting the Cold War had warped people's thinking and so forth and so on.Matthew Barr:
Wow. Well, you've covered a huge amount of ground. I want to go back just to a
few things, back to when you were working with your good friend, who sounds wonderful, Warren?Lewis Pitts:
Bob Warren, yes.
Matthew Barr:
Bob Warren, in that small town in South Carolina.
Lewis Pitts:
Yeah.
Matthew Barr:
Given what you were doing and nobody else was doing, were you worried physically
about your safety? Did you get... Obviously the local... How was that for you?Lewis Pitts:
Well, we could have gotten, I did not get any threats. Nobody shot at me or
fired into the house. I know there was concern about that. Bob had grown up and lived there. His father had run the local pharmacy and his mom was a teacher. So the local folks, I guess, maybe had a little more of, they thought we were weird and odd, but maybe tried to tolerate it.Lewis Pitts:
The power structure didn't set us up with drugs or frame us, but boy, they just
would not want and did not let us win, and they took it out on our clients. So the retaliation was more, if you get these lawyers, it's going to be really tough. So I didn't feel the physical intimidation at that point. And I don't think Bob did either.Matthew Barr:
Okay. Because that always comes to mind given later events and what you read
about in the South, of course, especially, but everywhere, obviously.Lewis Pitts:
No, I guess one thing I need to insert there, because it came to play a little
later, is sometimes when you're doing this, you may downplay, you may be in denial about that. I think that was part of the reason, and maybe I don't know that Bob's family might have broken up, is that they felt there was too great of a risk and he and I could be in denial about it, so as to continue to do what we were doing.Matthew Barr:
Well, what about your family? Were your parents worried when you started to
become political? How did they feel about it?Lewis Pitts:
Yeah, I'm sure they were because this was bound to be pretty much a mindblower
for them, but I must say, they were loving and supportive and tried to understand. My dad was a Republican and I think more of the old school, I don't think he'd be a Trump Republican, insanity like that, but he didn't understand it as much as my mom.Lewis Pitts:
Because of her keen interest in learning and some version of liberation
theology, she would understand and try to be supportive. They came to the oral argument that we had in the state supreme court about how you select a jury. They both came. So they were very supportive of me, even though I don't think they totally understood it. They did not try to control or banish me in any way.Lewis Pitts:
She would say it a lot, my mom said, a lot of times, "You took up something five
years ago, and then now people are finally realizing it was the right thing. You just happened to get there before it was okay.", so mom, no.Lewis Pitts:
I imagine the Communist Workers Party case, that was tough for all of us here.
We started this do-gooder Christic Institute in 1980. What we said we were trying to do was take Judeo-Christian principles and ethics, and now I realize even that's too narrow for how I think now, but Judeo-Christian ethics and compare that to government public policy. And when it's out of sync, be a storefront law firm to expose in (inaudible) that.Lewis Pitts:
And here we are, and literally there were eight of us that started that group.
Three lawyers, and then I guess there would be five lay people. We were making $400 a month, if we could raise everybody equally, and how we were going raise funds to start up this Christic Institute, and then take on one of the more controversial cases going in the nation, representing Communist Workers Party people alleging that the federal government had joined in cahoots, using agent provocateurs, in the Ku Klux Klan and the local Nazis, to murder five union organizers who were anti-racist.Lewis Pitts:
That was an uphill battle. But we decided to do it because it was the right
thing to do.Matthew Barr:
Well, now, we have interviewed, or the students interviewed, Willena Cannon, we
have Signe, yourself, and I think there's somebody else. Well, Flint Taylor. We interviewed him, remember, about a year ago. And we should maybe talk about him a little bit, and how you wanted to talk about a little bit about that aspect.Matthew Barr:
But what I'm getting at is, if you could lay out just a little bit more, what
happened in... We were going through this yesterday, the China Grove thing. In other words, you had a group of people, the Communist Workers Party, who were trying to organize Cone Mills, which was a textile plant, which was super anti-union, of course. So if you could just take us through a little bit more, the whole deal with November 3rd, it would be great.Lewis Pitts:
Well, it was called the Communist Workers Party. Took on that name roughly about
November the third of '79. They were going to be a transformation. They were called the Workers Viewpoint Organization, WVO, and I wasn't part of that. I never heard of any of these people, part of the new left that was coming together of what had been white, anti-war, activist, the racial justice, national movements, anti-imperial, all blended and tried to put that all together.Lewis Pitts:
And at least in North Carolina, there had been a real focus on Cone Mills, a
textile plant, and had organizers that they put there, as I mentioned one, let's take Signe's husband at that time, Jim Waller, he was a medical school professor at Chapel Hill and had been very active in, what's the Native American issue that happened in '73?Matthew Barr:
Wounded Knee?
Lewis Pitts:
Wounded Knee. He'd been active in all those kind of things. Well, he, some
people would call it, committed class suicide. He left that strata and went to work at night in the textile mill, and ran, got elected to be president of the union, was exposing the sell out of the establishment union.Lewis Pitts:
And one of their main focuses was that the racism has been used to divide black
and white workers, and when we try to bring a union campaign to either strike or to vote in a union, they go and say to the whites, "Blacks are going to get all the jobs and use it as a divide." And then, they're going to use the Klan to intimidate. So we're going to take that on.Lewis Pitts:
And so, when the Klan would try to mobilize, they would be there in some
capacity or another, like we're seeing on the streets today, people who were saying, "We're just not going to tolerate the fascist arguments of hatred and genocide to people of color."Lewis Pitts:
And that was an incident where there was going to be, in July of '79, in China
Grove, a showing of "Birth of a Nation", the racist film, and people came from Durham and Greensboro and all around, black and white together, and stood out in front of that porch. The anti-racist protestors had sticks and wore helmets and were there to say, "We're willing to fight."Lewis Pitts:
On the porch, the Klan stood with their weapons, firearms. The protestors struck
a match to the Confederate flag and burned it. And luckily nobody was injured. There was no gunfire, but that seemed to be then later used, because you can imagine what that did to rile up the white racist core, there was a United Racist Front that was created then in September of that year that was an effort to pull together the Nazi groups and the Klan groups.Lewis Pitts:
And these groups usually fall out amongst each other, and one leaders ripping
off the money or whatever, and Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the bureau, had sent a full time agent, Bernard Butkovitch, down and he was present and watched all that, probably taped it, but they claim his batteries were dead, so we couldn't get the tape when we were litigating.Lewis Pitts:
And I need to cut the story a little short, but that ATF and the FBI connected
together, and they also, in addition to putting this ATF agent in the Nazi group, they sent him down to track and hook up with Roland Wayne Woods, who their documents said, "This guy's essentially... He's got dynamite. He's got weapons, machine guns. He's really, really dangerous." He was in there supposedly, Butkovitch, to bust him on the firearms.Lewis Pitts:
The Greensboro Police Department, at the same time, found their informant, a guy
who'd been an informant for the FBI who'd worked closely with the grand dragon. They worked for weeks planning and organizing a way to come into Greensboro and confront, to challenge, and we know, to attack an anti-Klan demonstration that was going to be occurring, called by the Workers Viewpoint Organization, to do the things that I was just talking about.Lewis Pitts:
Say that the Klan are not powerful. They ride by night. Don't let them scare you
out of having a union. Don't let them tell the white people that the union is no good and the blacks, or that's just racism. It's been like that, and we're not going to tolerate it.Lewis Pitts:
And the November 3rd anti-Klan march and rally was going to march, as it has
been a common tactic throughout many movements, go through different housing projects and gather people to end up in a church or a building, and have speeches and have an educational forum. They called it a Death to the Klan rally, meaning, in the abstract, we don't want that ideology to exist.Lewis Pitts:
The informants knew everything about it. The police were telling them where it
was going to be. Here we had, several days before November 3rd, more information than you could put in a trunk came in saying, "These Klan and Nazis have machine gun. They're talking about shooting up the place. They're coming in from all over. They're going to come in the night before, find a spot, they're going to attack and do violence on the people."Lewis Pitts:
The police gave the Klan informant the permit to show where there were going on
all do this. Sure enough, that morning of November 3rd, the Klan forms up on the outskirts of town, probably a 15, 20 minute drive on the edge of Greensboro from down to where the housing project called Morningside was going to start.Lewis Pitts:
Knowing all of this, not one time did the police, or the FBI, or ATF, warn the
demonstrators, tell them, "We have information. You're going to be attacked." What the police had done when they issued the permit to the anti-racist demonstrators was tell them, "You can't have any weapons. You can't even have sticks." So they deliberately disarmed the demonstrators.Lewis Pitts:
And I wasn't there. I wasn't in on the planning, but I've spent hours and years,
I have no reason, zero evidence, to think that they were expecting and wanted a violent clash.Lewis Pitts:
So it's early morning, the Klan and Nazis are forming up. That police informant
has literally gone to the FBI prior to this to say, "Don't let this happen. It's going to be violence." They didn't listen. He went to the city attorney and said, "Can you enjoin this march? There's going to be violence."Lewis Pitts:
Other signals were coming in, as I mentioned, from informants around, that there
is going to be a violent clash involving machine guns and serious stuff. The police detective handler of the police informant, drove out there and actually watched as they took guns and loaded them into these cars. It was a nine car caravan. Not once did they send an officer or make a radio call, because they didn't want to, to tell the demonstrators, "Don't show up."Lewis Pitts:
Or neither did they arrest and stop. They clearly had probable cause to stop. In
fact, the handler, Detective Cooper, followed in his unmarked car with a photographer, this nine car caravan as it drove 15 minutes headed right to the site where five people were going to be murdered in front of the TV cameras. Didn't stop them, didn't phone, didn't send anybody. There was not a police officer in sight.Lewis Pitts:
In fact, I took the deposition of a woman police officer with her partner who
had been in that housing project just before this on a domestic call, and she said she mysteriously got a radio communication that told her to hurry up and finish her call and get out of the area.Lewis Pitts:
That caravan drove in while the police photographer photographed it with his
still camera. And they calmly opened up the trunk, pulled out rifles, shot and killed five brilliant, committed people. It's like a rainbow coalition. Dr. Michael Nathan, he's a pediatrician, shot in the face, died. Jim Waller, the medical doctor, president of the union. Sandy Smith, graduated from Bennett College, had been, I think, student body president, union activist. Cesar Cauce, from Cuba, had been at Duke organizing workers rights at Duke. And Bill Sampson had been a Harvard divinity student working in the unions. They were killed.Lewis Pitts:
12, 13 other people injured, the neighborhood terrorized at what happened. And
then, they came, and the Klan drove away, and that was back... There were three, if not four, TV stations who had shown up to watch the getting together of this thing. It's captured on film. It's kind of like the Rodney King thing. They caught it.Lewis Pitts:
And immediately a massive coverup began and a blame the victims. You would have
thought that those fine five people, and their spouses, and their friends, were serial killers and murderers the way they were depicted. Remember, this was right as Reagan is coming in. November '79 is when the massacre took place. Reagan comes in, Cold War is at a height, massive coverup.Lewis Pitts:
People lost their minds. ACLU, local ACLU would actually say, "Well, the police
really didn't have probable cause to stop the caravan." Well, it taught me how ideology can trump, can transcend, any sense of understanding data or facts, to say that they didn't have the cause, given what we pulled together.Lewis Pitts:
So the Klansmen were prosecuted in state court, an all white jury, not guilty.
The Feds didn't want to pursue the matter for some reason, particularly under Reagan, but community activism, with the supporters, the survivors, the legal team, we filed a lawsuit one year later in December with a broad team, And that will help get me to Flint Taylor in a minute with Christic Institute, People's Law Office in Chicago, and a broad base, but we brought pressure.Lewis Pitts:
The survivors, we would take a bus or we'd get up to Washington, go to the
Congressional Black Caucus, have them hold hearings, demand that. The Feds were saying, "We don't have jurisdiction." Well, my God, it couldn't be a more classic appropriate jurisdiction under the anti-Ku Klux Klan federal statutes.Lewis Pitts:
It was labor, which is when the post Civil War, slaves were then laborers, so it
was labor, and racism, and violence. That was it rolled up. They were claiming they didn't have jurisdiction. So we had to mobilize law professors and people to say, "There's plenty of jurisdiction. You're just not doing it right."Lewis Pitts:
It's like today, Trump and Barr, they exercise jurisdiction when and where they
want to based on political gain, that was happening here. But we forced them to bring prosecution. They were threatening to indict our people. They didn't, they indicted the Klans and Nazis. They indicted the informant. All white jury, not guilty.Lewis Pitts:
Our lawsuit finally came to be brought in 1985 and we had obtained all of this
evidence, a treasure trove of written proof. These other assertions that I've been making here, you wonder, "Why do you say the FBI was working with Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms?" Well, we got a memo that said it's a joint project of those, and mentions Agent Butkovitch. We didn't just make this up. We weren't guessing. This is what their documents showed.Lewis Pitts:
But I had the good fortune to be intimately involved in that and get to meet,
for the first time, Flint Taylor, a lawyer out of Chicago. I think you've got information about him. He was instrumental in helping us do the discovery in the case, take depositions, and try the case. What mainly Flint and a lawyer named Carolyn McAllaster from Durham, and I tried it. It was over a month trial and we got a partially good verdict. It was a verdict that said, jointly liable for the wrongful death of Dr. Mike Nathan were police officers, two police officers, and Klansmen and Nazis.Lewis Pitts:
We think that was the first Southern, or any jury verdict, that held complicit
this thing that's been going on, complicity between law enforcement and racist violence. And there's a rich history of that that sadly isn't part of the curriculum. We're beginning to see it pretty starkly now with the Black Lives Matter movement from Ferguson, Missouri to-New Speaker:
to all of these cases that are now popping out, we see where too much of the
police department mentality is, it's on the side with the right wing racists and why we need to be willing to say, I think, worry about fascism, and tyranny has run amuck.Lewis Pitts:
But Flint, I can tell a lot about his work, but he and his law firm represented
the family of Fred Hampton, the young African American Black Panther Party leader, who was assassinated in his bed with that FBI involvement. Those are things that I encourage people to study up on. It's not going yet to be in your history book, but it ought to be. It's factual. You can find it, and the sooner you know that pattern and practice, the sooner you can take the strong leaps ahead to draw the power conclusion that we need to reform, if not do away with, police as we know it.Lewis Pitts:
It's violence that's gone on and it's covered up. I should probably scroll back
to one of the tactics that started being used during the Reagan administration. It didn't occur against us, in this case, but I do want to say a little more about that Greensboro Massacre case. That thing that I learned from the CWP lawyers, from Arthur Kinoy, a famous lawyer/professor, from white woman activist Anne Braden, is that when you combine the first amendment rights that we have, at least theoretically, as long as we use them and fight for them, to organize, petition, protest, speak out, even do civil disobedience. When you do those things as tactics and public education, working with the media, educating the people, what is the truth, in conjunction with litigation tactics.Lewis Pitts:
Either you bring the lawsuit, as we did in the Greensboro Massacre... We
initiated it because those two prior cases, we didn't have a say so in what was presented. The prosecutors did not want the full story to come out because, as I hope you see, if the full story came on to the jury of all the pre-knowledge, the planning, the preparation by the Klan and Nazis to go attack these people and hurt them, one question should come to mind. Why didn't the cops stop it? Wasn't that the point of it or was it?Lewis Pitts:
They wouldn't go to that area. They downplayed and covered up all the prior
knowledge and it made it sound like it was just a spontaneous shootout that occurred, as opposed to a planned, frankly, it seemed like an assassination to target activists and leaders. The powerful movement so much led by the survivors, the widows, Reverend Johnson, and others to mobilize the faith community, the labor community, and others was a powerful experience.Lewis Pitts:
It's been my honor to be part of that, to be part of such a legal team that had
people like Flint and Callon McAlister (inaudible) and some of the national organizations to try to educate the nation more than just having a narrow legal strategy, which seems like the lawyers will come in on a white horse and solve it with a judge. They are usually the problem, not the solution.Lewis Pitts:
It is essential to blend those together in a way that is... What I think is law
is a tool for social change. And if we're going to be able to have a nonviolent fundamental change or nonviolent transition, and I say if because it's not clear, it's going to be like that. But when you start to rig the judiciary, never mind we rigged the elections to get a Trump in, or all of them, because of the private money that funds public elections, our offices are bought and paid for. It's bribery. You don't have a chance, hardly, few exceptions, to win, unless you can produce the big money.Lewis Pitts:
But when the judges are rigged, and they are going out of their way to rig the
judges, then all those methods that I'm talking about are shut off, and that doesn't leave much chance. The people alone in the street can do it, but let me go back.Lewis Pitts:
I've been involved in two what's called Rule 11, Federal Rule of Civil Procedure
Number 11. It simply says that if a lawyer signs a federal document, a motion or a pleading, that's not grounded in good faith in facts, grounded in good faith in law and is not done in bad faith, if that lawyer does that, that lawyer can be sanctioned personally. What began to happen during the Reagan administration is those right wing conservative judges, the supposed referees in these contests of civil rights, began to use that as an offensive weapon to go against civil rights lawyers.Lewis Pitts:
So think of it is the lawyer studies a case, writes it down, says who's doing
the bad stuff and files a case. It's a shooting of the messenger. You shoot the messenger. One case I was working on with Christic Institute, and this is too much to go into, but it was an Iran-Contra case. It involved all of that stuff with Oliver North and young people today don't have much of a clue what I'm talking about, but it was corruption out of the White House. It was running guns for drugs. It was these kinds of things. We filed a lawsuit that was trying to expose that and expose the role that George Bush, Sr., who was then Vice President, was playing in it.Lewis Pitts:
People don't know, but George Bush, Sr. had been the head of the CIA in 1976. He
was in what Trump now would call the deep state. But we brought out the light, the illegal funding of the Contra movement, the anticommunist movement. Anticommunism is what they did to murder the people in Greensboro. That was an anticommunist movement of ATF, FBI and Greensboro police. They were funding the Contras and to do it without scrutiny from Congress, they had to generate the money. They did it by selling drugs and cocaine. This is pretty well documented.Lewis Pitts:
We put that out in a lawsuit. We worked and we managed to raise $2 million and
do discovery, video documented depositions. This was in the mid to late '80s, '88, '89, in there. We were getting ready to have a trial in Miami in federal court, where I believe that trial would have exposed what I'm talking about, but also exposed that Daddy Bush had been lying and said he didn't know anything about this illegal operation to illegally fund the Contras. He was running for president.Lewis Pitts:
We had invited and had volunteered 40 some-odd of the best and wealthiest
lawyers in the nation to volunteer to work with us, to do this discovery. So I'm saying is this was not just a bunch of peanut heads throwing together something. This was a well scrutinized and researched big piece of litigation that had been brought to fruition, getting ready to go to trial, that would have, I think, altered the outcome of the '88 election.Lewis Pitts:
Right before it was just to go to trial, we'd literally moved all our stuff down
to a Catholic campus, ready for what was maybe going to be a six month trial, the federal judge said, "Oh, I haven't ruled on summary judgment. I'm throwing your lawsuit out, and by the way, because they made a motion for it, I'm going to impose a sanction on the lawyers and the client. We had two journalists that were the clients, of $1. 2 million in sanctions and fines."Lewis Pitts:
So here in the United States, the federal judge and judges, because this same
type thing was happening to Julius Chambers, head of NAACP Legal Defense Fund, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark. They were getting sanctioned for saying they filed frivolous lawsuits. We were being shut down.Lewis Pitts:
This little storefront law firm that started out with eight people making $400 a
month, we had grown to have two offices in DC and out in LA, where there was money being raised. We had 50 people trying to do things that you're supposed to do in a self-governing democracy that uses law for social change and a supposedly detached referee hit us with $1.2 million, and basically crushed the operation.Lewis Pitts:
Within a year or two, Christic had to fold up. That's Rule 11. That's how rigged
our system is. I still believe that, but I also still believe that we need people to go into public interest lawyering and try to work there and challenge and do this comprehensive notion of utilizing the rights of people, recognizing their agency to participate in and, in fact, have government of the people by the people and for the people.Lewis Pitts:
If we don't do that in radical fashion now, which I hope is nonviolent, but
still radical... The street protests of the last month or two since George Floyd is what's brought about look at the shift in the dynamic of the dialogue out there about Black Lives Matter and policing, and what's going on. That bad scenario has been going on all these years, just now getting a different look.Lewis Pitts:
That has chilled lawyers. Think about if you bring a lawsuit that you know the
power structure doesn't like, they could go after, not just throw your piece out, they could say you owe $10,000, never mind $1.2 million. And we lost. We took that up to the U.S. Supreme Court and lost. The way they were writing to find and describe what we did compared to what really happened is the difference between Trump's reality and actual reality. You couldn't recognize how that was the same.Lewis Pitts:
I've got another case that they brought against me and prominent civil rights
attorney, now deceased, William Kunstler, Bill Kunstler, against Bill and me and a law professor. That was over a case we brought in Robeson County, a civil case. Too much detail to go into, but it has scared lawyers out of, most of them.Lewis Pitts:
That's why I love and appreciate Flint and his colleagues and there's a few
others, not many, that still have the courage to weigh in, plead the truth, argue the truth and mobilize people to be supporters and not think that the main point is the litigation. The main point is defending and protecting the mass base of movement for people who then can throw their weight around to finally get us what may be a meaningful democracy.Lewis Pitts:
Well, now back to that $1.2 million. You didn't have to pay that, did you?
Lewis Pitts:
I say we paid it. A wealthy person out in California, because we had a lot of
support from Hollywood. I got to go with Danny and some people out to Kris Kristofferson's home in Maui in Hawaii to attend a national association of trial lawyers. I didn't see Kristofferson, but he was willing to be in support of our cause and we went out there to talk about this very case. Somebody posted the bond for us so it could go up. That person lost it. The effort to discredit.Lewis Pitts:
Let me go back, to... It began to be revealed, as you know, Matt, in the early
'70s about an FBI program under Hoover called the Counter Intelligence Program. It's called, for short, COINTELPRO. We have the actual memos that they wrote and essentially, they state starkly in these words. There's no ambiguity. "We need to be not police in the criminal sense. We need to be political police." We need people who are the Women's Liberation movement, the National Black Liberation movement, the Black Panther Party, antiwar people, the anti imperial people, all the people like me, and I hope most people out there. If they start being effective, we need to do operations that discredit and neutralize and disrupt them.Lewis Pitts:
They would try to send memos and act as if a Black Panther Party or a faction
was stealing money from another black group, so they would try to have gang wars. That's what's being done. That's the effort to discredit and neutralize. By calling the lawyers and their clients bad faith litigators, that you didn't have the facts supported, it's labeling it. It's just a version of fake news.Lewis Pitts:
It's the way they put fake news out, but with a punitive chilling effect on
people and the lawyers. I became so disenchanted and physically and emotionally impacted by the hypocrisy of this legal system that I quit it in 2014. I had practiced for over 40 years. Not like I didn't try from the inside, but I wrote a lengthy letter and explained to the North Carolina Bar that according to the rules of professional conduct, a lawyer is supposed to be three things, a good advocate for the client, an officer of the court and, quote, a public citizen with a special responsibility for the quality of justice. I said, "I don't see that happening at all." The bar is not supposed to be a business. Profession is a professed calling. It's like theology and medicine. You're not supposed to make bucks. That's a calling.Lewis Pitts:
The law supposed to be like that. It's not that. It's become infected with,
contaminated with, the morals and manners of the marketplace, as one former Supreme Court justice called it. I said, "I don't want to be associated with you. I quit." They tried to tell me I couldn't quit. "You can't quit. You can just be inactive." I had to threaten to litigate to force them to create a rule that would allow the lawyers to relinquish, to quit the bar. I just couldn't stand it anymore. I feel it's that corrupt, but I nevertheless urge people to be lawyers and do it the right way. I just couldn't from a personal standpoint.Lewis Pitts:
What were some of the impacts on your life for the enormous amount of stress
you've gone through worrying about this $1.2 million. That's a lot of huge pressure that has the impact on you and your family. Talk about that.Lewis Pitts:
Well, that one and the one that was rendered here in North Carolina because of
representing Native Americans in Robeson County, who were being framed and the movement was being under attack, that one added up to something like $140,000.Lewis Pitts:
I'll tell you, when you're doing this work, I never tried to and never amassed
any wealth and never amassed a reputation amongst the traditional bar necessarily. I did and I still am proud of and want to be proud of my principles and my integrity and my moral base that I'm doing this, it's right. And to have twice the effort to discredit me with those Rule 11 sanctions, and there are many other ways that it goes on, that's very painful.Lewis Pitts:
So I went through a period after the second Rule 11, I literally wanted to go up
to everybody on the street and say, "I didn't do that. That's all a big lie." In fact, when I was living in Durham, coming out of the Iran-Contra one, letterhead stationery was created by the right wing forces and it was captioned, "Victims of the Christic Institute."Lewis Pitts:
They would write these letters and say the Christic Institute is a complete
fraud. It tells you out there that it's a Judeo Christian based faith group doing good stuff, so you can give tax deductible contributions. All they then do is take your money, fabricate these outlandish sounding cases about law enforcement and violence and drugs. That's what Robeson County had been about. That's what Iran-Contra was about. That's what's been going on. ... and milk you out of your money. Don't believe them. Look, two federal judges have called BS on them. That would be sent around the nation to newspaper editors and it would get published, signed by Ambassador so-and-so, our former ambassador. Anybody that's not paying pretty good attention to where the truth is, and is reading that, it made it nearly impossible to fundraise anymore. That's why the big Christic in DC basically shut down early. I don't know the exact day, but early '90s, by '94.Lewis Pitts:
I went separate from the Washington Christic and did a racial justice effort,
along with the Greensboro Massacre. I had some fascinating cases and around the South about racism and framing black people and not letting a little majority of a black town get started in Keysville, Georgia. I'd meet these wonderful, loving people. It's just so fortunate.Lewis Pitts:
I had a board of directors that had John Hope Franklin, Cornel West, Haywood
Burns, who's a very prominent African American lawyer and scholar, Mayor Gresham and others like that on it. I've got the handwritten letter that John Hope Franklin wrote to John Lewis, saying, "John, look at this group. They need help out here fighting these things." We couldn't find the money, so we had to shut that down. I went to work for Legal Aid, which was the most established job I've ever had, the most money I'd ever made, and that's not very much.Lewis Pitts:
And had delightful experiences there for a while. I ran the mental health unit
and got to see what it's like. This was the mid-'90s, to go to the institutions where mentally ill people are locked in there. This is the cell door type thing. I'd go in and ask them how they were being treated. You began to see there was no treatment in there. It's nothing but custodial care and physical abuse and bombarded with drugs. Many of them would be in there for a year or two until we began to privatize it and they began to throw them out in the street. Now we literally put them in a jail.Lewis Pitts:
That was a broadening experience to understand the mental health system and lack
of system and how much that impacts on families. Of course, I also developed a habit in 1985, when we were about to have my son, Steven, with children and children's rights. Oh, my gosh, children were treated like property.Lewis Pitts:
They don't get to have an actual say in a court proceeding that has the most
significant bearing on are they going to have to go back? Is that 14 year old girl going to have to go back and live with her stepfather who is raping her? I began to see and understand the school to prison pipeline and fight that, the racism there. It was tracking kids right over into prison. So I've been fortunate to get to see and know these wonderful people in these wonderful movements.Lewis Pitts:
I'm still trying to be active as much as I can, but I feel happy that there's so
many young people beginning to take the leadership up and do it effectively and courageously with a lot of spunk and boldness because that's what we need. It's also nice that there's an understanding of appreciating elders and trying to learn.Lewis Pitts:
I wish I could take these learning experiences that I've tried to summarize for
you, maybe too long, and put it in a capsule and hand it to somebody, so they could then start right where I am and not have to go through, "Well, the police, it was just a misunderstanding." We don't need to give the benefit of the doubt to this categorically rigged system.Lewis Pitts:
I guess in closing, I'm trying to do a lot of studying. I think that's
important. Study and then practice. More study and practice and keep learning, but let's start only with the beginning of our country. It's been the same thing, a ruling wealthy elite, whether that was coming from feudalism or what to the emerging capitalist system and wanting to maintain and control power.Lewis Pitts:
The enlightenment period and our revolution and all these ideas from Thomas
Jefferson about people power and self-governing democracy, wonderful. That's like letting the genie out of the bottle. It's wonderful, but they've used it look how many devices have been used, Jim Crow to poll taxes to literacy tests, all that they're doing today to suppress the vote, to allow the minority, the few, the wealthy, to continue to rule.Lewis Pitts:
The earth can't sustain it anymore. Look at the storms that are raging, the
fires that are raging now. If we put a dot down here in the history what's going on, Matt, right now, as you and I talk, fires are burning in Wisconsin because of a protest and people rebelling over police killing a black man, not killing, shooting him in the back. Winds are blowing. Hurricanes are coming in. There has to be a fundamental transformation to stop this capitalist imperative of accumulating more and more wealth through more and more growth, which inevitably has always exacerbated inequality.Lewis Pitts:
And we can't and won't tolerate it anymore. And you maybe can tell, I hope, at
72 years old, I'm still burning and alive with that. I can't do as much, and I'm trying not to do as much, but that's a fire that if we want our progeny, if we want the future generations to have life in any way that is decent, we'd better take heed to it and engage and realize that democracy is not something you have. It's something you do.Lewis Pitts:
Wow. You know, Lewis, this has been very powerful. Spoma gave me the writeup of
your many wonderful victories when you were nominated for the award from the NAACP, which you did receive. You want to talk about that? Talk about that. That's an incredible honor.Lewis Pitts:
Well, I was pleased that Spoma made that nomination and it was received and I
got it. I was really honored to be there and be recognized as a part of the NAACP's spirit and movement to bring about change and work actively in a community. I'm very proud of that. I received the, forgive me, I forget what it's called, but I think it was 2014, the State ACLU Award.Lewis Pitts:
So you know, there's some recognition for this stuff. You don't do it for
recognition, but at least, if by getting recognized, it can help you keep moving and then by doing so, it shares the facts of what you do and the causes that you've been aligned with to spread the word on that, it's part of an educational component. So that's been delightful and helpful.Lewis Pitts:
Well, have you mentored young lawyers and young activists? I'm sure you have,
over the years, to carry on the fight?Lewis Pitts:
Yes. In fact, moving to Greensboro in 1980 and then while that lawsuit was
waiting or getting ready, from '80 to '85 and then on up until '94, part of our, and also, I need to mention a woman lawyer named Gail Korotkin that I worked with, both very closely on the Greensboro Massacre case, and then even when that was over, we had started, it's called Christic Institute South. Then we later changed that name to Southern Justice Institute. And we had, as part of our model, we wanted to be like a strike force. We had to use the military or SWAT team for the movement. We had two lawyers, Gail and me, and we were trying to hire, as an apprentice, a young African American lawyer, and did. We had a woman once and a couple of guy lawyers to train them, to let them see this style of lawyering, where you do the purpose to serve and protect the movement.Lewis Pitts:
And that was, I'm sure, exciting for them. They'd given us good feedback. They
thought that was very helpful. Then after a year or so, because we didn't have much money to pay them to move up in a career, they would then go out on their own. We seeded a sprout that way, and then if they had their own practice, on the side, they could take up some of the political cases.Lewis Pitts:
And I always enjoyed speaking at law schools or law school classes. Usually
within a class, there was a certain percentage, it's never large, that are there because of the same reason I went. It's not to make big bucks or to be a politician. It's a, "Wow. How about using this law as a tool for social change? How does that work?"Lewis Pitts:
So I've tried to pin down and synthesize and summarize the things in the lessons
so they don't have to repeat the lessons. They can see what I learned from Arthur Kinoy and the Flint Taylors and Bill Kunstler, and those other lawyers like that. Mentoring, I think, is very, very important.Lewis Pitts:
And since we're talking about right now, how about the current case, the vigil
every Monday with a hog tie case. Can you briefly comment about that?Lewis Pitts:
Yeah, it's September the 8th, 2018. A homeless African American man, he was like
38 years old, was having not exactly a seizure. He was doing drugs. He was having a mental health breakdown. He had mental health diagnoses. He was in the street roaming, walking around, not plundering, not committing a crime.Lewis Pitts:
Actually, he was begging for help. It was like he was high, buzzed up. "Help.
They're after me. Somebody's trying to get me. Please take me to the hospital. Please take me." The Greensboro police surround him and for a while, were reasonably gentle, talking to him. He said, "Take me to the police." They said, "Okay, get in the police car." He gets in the squad car and they shut the door. There's nobody in it, nobody to drive it. He's caged up in that back little seat thing and begins to get even more frantic. He hadn't-PART 2 OF 4 ENDS (01:06:04)
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Lewis Pitts:
pounded or kicked, but he starts to push and hit at the door. They open the
door, he voluntarily gets out. He's surrounded by several police officers, there's eight total there. They grab him, they push him down on his stomach and they do what any officer should know you shouldn't do. In theory, their training has told them not to do. And the manufacturer of this strap that I'm going to mention, tell you categorically don't do. They hogtied him, meaning they had handcuffed his hands behind his back tight. They cuffed or tied up his ankles and then pulled his ankles up while he was down on his chest. So all his weight is on his body. It's since the mid nineties the US justice department and other people have said you don't do that because people die from positional asphyxiation.Lewis Pitts:
They put him down like that, held him, pressed on him. Didn't take very long,
essentially killed him. He died. The police, they tried to cover it up to begin with. Police chief said we came up to issue the release the next day. We came upon this man, he'd collapsed and died. He didn't mention that they use a Ripp Hobble, that's the manufacturer's name for the device, they hogtied him with. Tried to screen that out. Didn't tell the parents that they'd restrained him in a way that was deliberately indifferent, if not intentional to hurt him. Then it got to be that the NC medical examiner was going to come out with a report autopsy, etc. Medical examiner ruled it was a homicide, mentioned that he had drugs in his body, nobody's denying that, but they called it a homicide. That's a killing caused by another human being. The city's been in massive cover up mode, they don't want to admit they've done anything wrong, they won't. Luckily, and I'm happy to, proud to say, because I've maintained good friendship with Flint and because I know a local lawyer in Greensboro, Graham Holt, we connected all of that together and there's a nice big federal lawsuit with Graham Holt and Flint and the people's law office leading that. They're doing discovery right now. At the moment, the city is paying $300 an hour to private lawyers, they've already spent I believe it's $ 260,000 on lawyers to defend and cover up this homicide and they're refusing to settle with the parents of Marcus Smith. So that has captured the minds of a lot of people.Lewis Pitts:
This coming September the eighth will be the second anniversary. We plan to have
big rallies, to have street demonstrations, glad to say we ought to have civil disobedience seems to be the only thing that makes the city and these officials around... Greensboro somewhat contrasted Minneapolis. They fired the officers, they indicted them. Here, nobody's been fired. Nobody's been indicted. They're all back on the force. It's got to stop. Greensboro has had a similar history. The reason why we're at the same place where the Greensboro Massacre occurred, I could fill in between '79 and now many other, dozens of other examples of police violence, racist based. It's concealed and covered up by a culture of corruption and it involves police associations, we don't have union here, but police association and collusion with the elected officials. And that's not that dissimilar to what's gone on and is going on in most other cities.Lewis Pitts:
That's why it's at a crisis moment right now. And people in the street and
things are burning, sadly.Matthew Barr:
Which then they're using to try to bring it...
Lewis Pitts:
To justify repression. And history will show at this point, Trump is framing
that it's all about law and order and that the justice loving people are really maniacs who are running amok and promoting random violence. I don't think anybody's promoting that. You can't oppress people but so long, and when they have no other remedies, they fight back, they lash out, too often in irrational, arbitrary ways. But if we talk about reparations and I believe in that notion of reparations. I don't think a big hunk of money can be handed out generally to every person who had a family in slavery.Lewis Pitts:
But think about this thing. In our system, that's what our Disneyland democracy
pretends we have is fake democracy. Like those fake dinosaurs in Disneyland or Disney world, fake volcanoes. We have fake system. There're supposed to be compensatory damages and punitive damages that are awarded to people, to their families if they're killed, paid for, by the people who did it and as a punishment. That's what the city of Greensboro should think about, is think up that the settlement of this case for a reasonable amount, what's the value of the life of this man that was needlessly killed.Lewis Pitts:
You can't put a meaningful dollar sign on it, but that's the way we'd been doing
it. That compensation should be thought of as a reparation. And if we started to do those kinds of things, and if that system actually did what it's supposed to do, we may not have a car lot that was burned and torched in that town in Wisconsin.Matthew Barr:
How do you (crosstalk 00:06:55).
Lewis Pitts:
Go ahead, man.
Matthew Barr:
I was going to say, isn't the city, not to get too much into the weeds of this
thing, but the city council in Greensboro's theoretically, is that mostly Democrats? I mean, so there's (crosstalk 01:46:07).Lewis Pitts:
Yeah, good point. Oh yeah, this is the veneer. This is the veneer of a
progressive or a new South. Our city council is made up of nine people, eight women and one African American man who went to Duke law school. And you would think, wow. Not so. I believe they all purport to be Democrats. That tells us why we've got such a big problem with one party that's two wings, all the party of the corporate world, but they're not getting it right. They say some words, they have online seminars, we now have an African American chief of police. We have an African American assistant city manager for public safety. He used to be a police officer. They are fronted. They are used to say, "Oh, we love the community" and all the nice things out there. Meanwhile, as I've just described where it matters about resolving the case, settling it, admitting wrongdoing, rooting out the cause of it, which was lack of training, lack of supervision, deliberate cover up. They're not doing any of that. It's like the magician. Watch my mouth and my hand over here, while with this hand I'm stealing your wallet.Lewis Pitts:
And it's an illusion. And we, the people here in Greensboro, have to throw them
all out. They can't stand up and take a stand and be clearly counted here and not fall prey to the police association and whatever else it is, they're not the people's representatives. And I think most people, a broad array of people, not as they say, just a few of us that are stuck in 1979, it's a growing larger group are going to insist and demand that they be tossed out and replaced with people who understand and believe in transformational leadership.Matthew Barr:
So do you have much sense of optimism for the future?
Lewis Pitts:
I'll tell you, that's a tough one. I have to because it's sort of a matter of
faith. I believe that if, and the if is big, but if and when the people manifest their agency and realize that they are entitled to, that there's a right we have to self-govern and start acting as opposed to deferring, wow, things can change. And I'll often say to my organizer friends, what we could not do and shouldn't even have talked about doing six months ago, it's possible now. Now we haven't pushed it to the qualitative level here in Greensboro yet, but as I mentioned way back earlier, the dialogue, the national dialogue and discussion has shifted some. So I do think and want to believe, because I don't accept the alternative, do nothing. If nothing else, that's my one ethical way that I can be true is to resist and speak out as long as I'm able, whatever happens.Lewis Pitts:
And as more and more people do that, I think it will turn. It's to be determined
if we can turn away from fossil fuel and global warming quick enough to have enjoyable, sustainable life here. Even with that being an if, it's not an argument in my mind to stop. That's like quitting, never getting to first base if you never go to the batter's box, so... I learned from, I think it's Vaclev Havel, hope is not an assessment of the state of the world. Hope is an orientation of your mind and your heart. If you have an orientation towards hope and faith, you can create. You can create that reality. We start to assess, as too many people will do, the unending list of insanity that the Trump people have put forward and how often the Democrats have sold out. I think knocking Biden off the ticket so to speak this time and given us... Not Biden, Bernie. Knocking Bernie Sanders off. But that's not the... that's, we need to note that.Lewis Pitts:
But the other more important part, you will the half glass full is the
orientation of your head and your heart to do, to care for people, even in a social distancing pandemic, associate and organize and mobilize and educate, agitate, and believe in the power of the people. People power proven to work. Labor movements make changes, eight hour day, all these things. Women's movement, African American movement, we go on and on, but it's a paradox. The minute I believe I don't have that power, I won't pick up my pen and tablet and make a phone call, or I won't go to the Zoom meeting. I'll say screw it and I'll just sit back and whine or veg out in front of a movie or over drink or over eat or whatever.Lewis Pitts:
So if you continue, if we continue to believe and share... I enjoy what I call
spiritual Gatorade. I've been calling it that for decades. I keep in my briefcase or backpack always, a stack of sayings, quotes from people, men and women out there that are inspirational. They don't necessarily have to be poems. Can be a little something like Frederick Douglass, "power concedes nothing without a demand." Or Howard Zinn is very good with having quotes that will give us inspiration. And just like you have to refuel your car, refuel your body, we need to refuel our hope and faith mechanisms with whatever your individual spiritual Gatorade may be. It may be dancing, it may be meditating, it may be multiple things, but we need to do that to keep our energy tank alive.Matthew Barr:
Well, you are an incredible inspiration and Spoma and Willena and Signe and all
the wonderful people that we can mention here. And I think your... One thing is they've been, the opposition, the enemy has been using that term, the shock doctrine. There's a great book by Naomi Klein. I think we've used it very effectively to just numb people. One outrage after another, the latest being the destruction of the post office, we could go four years of unending destruction, cutting back on food stamps, the present thing, standing by while people are... No new bill to help people out or stop the evictions and the EPA destruction.Matthew Barr:
It's just, it's very, it's discouraging. It's meant to destroy people's spirit
and fight resistance and it's easy, to be honest, sometimes I feel very discouraged myself with things going backwards. I mean, all these interviews with people such as yourself or people like Reverend Cardes who were... went through unbelievable terror to get the right to vote and so on and so forth. And yet here they're still going at it, trying to stop it. So I guess my question, and I think you've answered partially, but how one keeps a sense of faith. I mean, for a lot of people that may be more of a...spiritual is often a religious thing, but for you, what balm do you have?Lewis Pitts:
I'm not part of any institutional religion. I kind of don't know how I would
define God. So I don't know it's hard not to define that as an old man with a beard and a robe or something. I don't, I never... it's been decades or longer since I had that. But there's a, I feel there's a cosmic oneness, there's something about cosmos, which is the sort of the coming together to connect. It's more of an Eastern philosophy, I guess, the oneness of things. And there is a beauty in an in sync connectedness of out in nature. So being out in nature and being with other people and helping and serving is a way to get that spiritual Gatorade and recharging. The thing about... And I know that I'm questioning a core tenant of liberation theology, which is that there is a God who cares about history and acts in history.Lewis Pitts:
And I'm just wondering if it's that way, I would to expect her, it, he, them to
have hurried up and act and not the amount of person created suffering. I think that separates a lot of us activists to the core types. How much is an acceptable amount of pain and grinding poverty? And I've often said if psychological pain and misery and hurt and stress were converted to blood, we'd have it... The earth would probably be filled up to here with that. We need to see the pain that is happening in every of these poor neighborhoods, black and white, where amphetamine opioid addiction is rampant, people self-medicating, this is just not tolerable. And I always believed the Che Guevara point that the true revolutionary is motivated by love. You need to love, that's the loving, that why you care, that's where empathy, I think, comes from, you feel that pain.Lewis Pitts:
But anchoring in love in no way says you can't be outraged and maybe you can
tell that I remain outraged at how long this has gone on, how stark and clear it can be. How sadly successful the education system has been that covered up and create a veil to create a distortion, to give us a version of history that has wiped out most of the people's movements and that doesn't talk about the corporate...Today, that Hamilton could be deemed so famous because it because, maybe I'm going off... I don't have a script, but I'm just telling you what I think. Manuel, what's his name, Miranda, I mean guy comes on television, he does ads for Capital credit cards. And he's made a national hero out of Alexander Hamilton, who was the bank man, who said he didn't believe in real democracy. He thought literally the rich and the well born should rule the country.Lewis Pitts:
He never believed in that we should have an inclusive concept of suffrage that
involved everybody, because everybody has human dignity. And if you therefore have dignity, you get a reasonable say in what's going to happen as we construct the society. And we've got to get at a telling of the actual truth and that's why I admire my wife Spoma Jovanovic and her work, you as a professor, the teaching world, education world really is a frontline place to start teaching this critical pedagogy, and we have to stop the notion that education is to prepare you for a job. That was almost in the flow of everyone, Bill Clinton, everybody, we got to prepare you to compete in the global economy. Compete. Compete ultimately leads to war, we need cooperation. And the most important purpose of education, and you used to hear it framed this way more, the Jeffersonian type way is to prepare you for citizenship.Lewis Pitts:
What does it take? If we want to have and believe in a self governing,
constitutional democracy of the people, by the people, for the people, they need to have the benefit of the raw, awful history of colonialism and imperialism, genocide of the Native Americans. We need to teach the kind of thinking that a self-governing citizen has to have, and I call it the three C's. It's critical thinking and it's creative thinking, transformation to what new, and then courageous thinking, because when you start thinking and talking like that, somebody is going to try to cut your funding or deny your tenure or fire you from your high school job because you stepped on a flag, as happened to that guy making a point, I didn't know where it was, near Fayetteville. So we have to, one of the most revolutionary places to do work is K through 12 and higher education.Lewis Pitts:
To demand that social justice be an aspect when all the powers, the Koch
brothers, the big money or (inaudible) the Pope foundation and people here, they have minions that crank out their articles, that trash lefty professors who have the audacity to talk about social justice as if somehow that's wrong to talk about. There are values embedded in these constitutional founding documents. There's some bad stuff in those things, man, embrace slavery, believe me, I get it, but the notion of all people created equal, that the purpose of government is to establish, that's a verb, justice, that to seek out the common good, the general welfare, those are values, not the 10 commandments, not the Bible, we're not doing it going over there with it, but those values need to be taught in school as the civic values and ethics about how you live a good life that is... however you want to frame it.Lewis Pitts:
Whatever a priori comes from your God, your imam on your, however, you do it,
from the sun and grandfather, grandmother moon, but enacted here. And we have to teach our children that, to share. And right now these very concepts are being trashed and have been as communism or socialism or something wrong. But I don't think those old tropes are going to last too much longer. I just, they can't. They're wearing out.Matthew Barr:
Just like... Absolutely. Okay well, I know this has been a long, an incredible
interview and I want to thank you. And I know you have other things to do.Lewis Pitts:
You too, thank you man. I enjoyed talking with you and I appreciate it a project
like this.Matthew Barr:
Absolutely. One final thing though. I'm like Columbo. Remember that old TV show
with the lawyer? Not a lawyer, the detective always had one more question with the beagle, he always went after the rich and powerful who was like, who is this Columbo.Matthew Barr:
But anyway, I think there's a lot of fear out in the land and you've been a
courageous person throughout your life, you like to fight. And I heard something... A fight in terms of mental combat and or the combat in a courtroom. And that November 3rd commemorative celebration, or however you want to put it, at Bennett last November, that was very powerful. Somebody said fighting is winning. And I'm struck by that. When you fight, you win. You may not win that fight, but you're winning because you're fighting. How did you deal with the fear that most people are not willing to do a lot, honestly, it's much easier to go along with the tide. How did you learn to fight the fear that you may have felt in your life?Lewis Pitts:
Oh, good question. And I never was shot at or beat up or lynched and all that.
So my fear, if you will, the danger was, it's kind of pretty intimidating to be sitting in front of a judge and all that powerful stuff with all the tools they've got and basically tell them without mincing words, what you think and what's right. So I felt the fear and I would have to steel myself, be ready for it and remember not to soft pedal it. And in fact, really man, many times be provocative, say it precisely to provoke because it needs to be said. And I'm very proud of some of the... We were, there's a war story. We're in a, I have to set the context, but it was a federal trial, the two Native Americans in Robeson County, they had taken... It's too much to go into, but the federal judge was basically doing everything in his power to hurt our defense and help the prosecutor.Lewis Pitts:
So I said, "Judge, why don't you just pull up a chair over there with the
prosecutor and sit with him if you're going to help him like that?" And lawyers don't usually do that. And I hadn't been preplanned it because it hadn't come up, but it needed to be said. And I'm glad I said it because they needed to be... they talk about prophets speak truth to power. I don't claim any religious prophetic connection there, but there's something about a power, just like fighting is winning, that's a version of the fighting is to use those words. And I'm proud that I've done that a lot and I know that people... One also, I think it models.Lewis Pitts:
Think about it, if you're a person of color or poor folk and you've got a lawyer
who's white and therefore potentially privileged and he or she won't even speak it out, why should they speak it out? So I wanted to model, yeah, I got an advantage, I can do it and may or may not get fired or be hungry, but I want to show you that this is what we all have to do and I'll do it with you. I'll get arrested with you. I've been arrested, I think it's seven times for civil disobedience. So it's not just about standing back and let them take all the heat and then write a fancy brief. It's engage with it also. And that's a form of resistance and going to the defense of others just seems... I don't know.Lewis Pitts:
I like to think that that's one of the traits that is human. We're starting,
we've had such a rotten culture. I worry that it's starting to taint what is defined as human nature. Ever since Margaret Thatcher and Reagan and neoliberalism and all that, they want us to say there is no more collective. There is no more society and group, maybe your family. It's individual. That's by design. That's to make us totally not believe the very important labor motto, if you will, injury to one is an injury to all and we got us- and the word solidarity. That's a, I think, a very spiritual.... Solidarity and yeah. And injustice is a breach, a tearing of the solidarity and oneness that we all should be feeling. And fighting, I don't know, it's just what has to be done.Matthew Barr:
You are something else. One final thing, so what did judge say when you told him
to go over to the...?Lewis Pitts:
Actually he called me up to the bench, I believe it was and said, so meaning it
doesn't get heard in the crowd. And he said, and of course the newspapers wrote it up the next day, people were going whoa. And I believe this was the one when he said, "When this trial is over, we'll have a hearing on contempt." Well, our two Native American men had been charged with kidnapping and 17 kidnaps and gun violations and all that because they did take over the local newspaper in protest of the corruption by the law enforcement in drug trafficking that was killing their people and deaths that were occurring in the South. And that's a longer story, but lo and behold, our guys admitted that they did what they did, but said they felt compelled to do it. And the jury turned them loose. It was an acquittal.Lewis Pitts:
It was an absolutely shocking verdict, which spoke politically to that jury
believed that the corruption in Robeson County was so deep and bad that they were willing to say not guilty to these guys that took guns and went in and took over the local newspaper, which is a, I have to say, it's a very drastic thing. So when all that happened, the judge never got around to calling me back up.Matthew Barr:
Unbelievable. All right, my friend, thank you so much.
Lewis Pitts:
Thank you for your time.
Matthew Barr:
I appreciate it deeply. Take care.
Lewis Pitts:
(crosstalk) Say hey to Cornelia.
Matthew Barr:
Bye bye.
Lewis Pitts:
Bye bye.
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