Background

Mr. Freeman, welcome to Berkeley.

It's nice to be here.

Where were you born and raised?

I was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and I don't know if I've been raised anywhere. I've been sort of floating around America, running utilities and serving in government agencies.

Looking back, how do you think your parents shaped your thinking about the world?

Oh, that's very clear. They were immigrants. They both came over from Lithuania, and they were true patriots in the most meaningful sense of the word. They imbued a sense of public service in me. We felt it was a privilege to be in this country and enjoy freedom in a way that, frankly, native-born Americans don't. When you freshly acquire freedom, it's much more meaningful to you. I think that spirit of "can do" -- "This is a great country and it's a privilege to serve" -- formed my life's pattern.

Where were you educated?

I went to school at Georgia Tech. I don't know whether you consider that an education or not.

Oh, definitely, definitely.

I graduated as a civil engineer, and then I worked as a civil engineer for five or six years and decided that I had poor vocational guidance, and I went back to school and went to law school at the University of Tennessee, and that changed my life. It was finally something that I was good at, and I went on from there.

The Civil Rights movement was really an important event for you during your formative years, wasn't it?

It was, because I was there in a Jewish family in the middle of all that. My mother used to sit next to black people on the bus long before Rosa Parks. She was truly colorblind. She used to tell me, with great sincerity, that she didn't care whether I married a black person or a white person as long as they were Jewish, and this is not a joke as far as she was concerned.

Solomon did it, right?

That's right. And the Jews from Ethiopia came to Israel a few years later.

I grew up with black kids before I went to school, because we were kind of poor and we lived in neighborhoods where blacks and whites mixed in Chattanooga, Tennessee, until we went to school, and then we were separated. But I kept up friendships and, basically my parents taught me that people had to be treated as people, not the color of their skin. So I was sympathetic, and actually sat in at some of the lunch counter sit-ins with the blacks in Knoxville. It was very uncomfortable, though, because they kind of accused me of treason. You know, "Why are you there?"

The whites, that is?

Yeah, the whites did, yeah. So it was a difficult time. But in the words of the old song, we "overcame."

What did you learn from that experience about changing the law and about people's resistance to change?

I learned that it is important to speak up. It's important to say what's in your heart. It's not good enough to just feel good or feel kindly toward people; you needed to throw yourself into whatever issue that you were interested in. That was the message that my father gave me before he passed away. He said, "Life boils down to two things: one, you should enjoy life. It shouldn't be a tragedy. But, second, you've got to stand for something. You've got to believe in something and fight for it. Life is a struggle. If you're not struggling, you're really not living."

You finished your degree about the time that the Kennedy administration came in. And you actually wanted to do civil rights in the Kennedy administration, right?

That's right. I had a friend named Lee White who had worked for Jack Kennedy as a senator and was in the White House, and he arranged for an interview for me with John Doar, who was the head of the Civil Rights Department. I had that interview, and I still remember it. He said to me, "Well, Dave, you're a very bright lawyer and you'd make a wonderful person in the Justice Department. But just to be frank with you, with your Southern accent, I don't think you'd do any good before a Southern jury. They would consider you a traitor. I'd rather have somebody without a Southern accent." That was his comment to me. About that time, the general counsel of TVA, for whom I'd worked, became the head of the old Federal Power Commission. So I took a job as his executive assistant. So I made it to Washington in the Kennedy administration, but got into the energy field -- sort of a second choice for me.

Funny, hearing you talking, I can't resist saying, "What Southern accent?"

I've learned to say that I don't have an accent, and it's all the rest of you folks that have one.

I see. So this transition from civil engineering to social engineering was a choice. But the particular field within this public service, was that serendipity, then?

Not necessarily. I had, after all, worked as an engineer and as a lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority, which was a large electrical company, so I had some background in the energy field. It was just not my first love; not my first choice. But maybe you can say that it worked out okay. I would like to think that my life would have been just as well or maybe better spent fighting for civil rights as a full time thing.

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