Title: EEOC Diary
Date: February 6 through April 4, 1967
Overview: PCR keeps a diary of his first two months working at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Link to original: [in progress]
Introduction:
My father started work at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in early 1967. He had been the Executive Director of the Missouri Commission on Human Rights from 1963 to 1967, and was recruited to come to DC and work for newly-appointed EEOC Chair Steve Shulman. Dictating into a Dictaphone was his primary means of writing, and he decided to keep a diary of his first few months at EEOC by dictating — in some detail — the activities of each day. After he passed, this 166-page document was among his papers. After scanning and OCR’ing, it’s taking a while to clean up, so I’ll be posting in pieces. Here, first, is one of my favorite excerpts, from the week of March 6-10, 1967.
[Percy Williams, an African-American member of the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity told him] “Pete, you have done a fantastic job and I have certainly been proven wrong. On that day when you came in to see me I would not have given 10¢ in Chinese money for your chances of doing anything.” Percy was of course right in a sense in his appraisal of me. I was a typical white liberal at that time having certain feelings that what was going on in our society with Negroes was wrong and feeling that there was a little discrimination in our society but having absolutely not the foggiest notion of how widespread it was, how deep rooted it was, how hard it would be to root out, how much white people lied about it and what pervasive derrogating effect it had had in oppressing a whole group of people. How well I realize this now, to what extent I am really sensitive, to what extent I have no vestiges of subconscious prejudice on my own I am not prepared to say but I surely have advanced from the stage which I had when I was in college for I considered it liberal that I had once upon a time had lunch with a Negro in his own home, that I had gone to a boarding school which had one dark skinned foreign student in it, that I had belonged to the NAACP in college and been friendly with several Negro students, and that I always smiled and spoke politely to Negroes whom I met in public such as saying hello when I passed a Negro in an elevator or on the sidewalk.
He goes on to describe some of the concrete things he has done to promote equality, including picketing Woolworth’s and acting as a proto-housing-tester, but I was struck — though not surprised, for reasons I’ll write about later — that he was conscious even in 1967 of the limits of his ability, as a white person, to understand racism.
Peter C. Robertson Archive 
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