THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Joe Levin

“By the time I graduated from law school, I was a person who was totally opposed to discrimination.“

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, August 2025

JL: My name is Joseph J. Levin Jr. I was born in January of 1943 in Montgomery, Alabama.

JW: Tell me briefly about your childhood. What kinds of things led you to the career you had?

JL: I was born just before the end of World War II. I grew up during the era of Jim Crow in Montgomery, Alabama, which would later become the center of the civil rights movement. As a kid, all I knew was the separation of the races, black and white. It was something I lived with day in and day out. It was not an issue for my early life as a kid, meaning that there was no real discussion of it. The woman who came to our house and looked after me, I thought of her as a second mom. Her name was Sadie McDaniel. She died quite a few years ago. So that’s the era that I grew up in.

JW: Was she white or black?

JL: She was black. And like I said, I thought of her as a second mom. I understood the separation of the races, but it’s not anything I thought about. It was simply internal to me at the time. When I was older, in the 1950s, I began to recognize some of the issues. I grew up in an all-white school system – my grammar school, what they then called junior high school, I guess now it’s middle school, and high school. I grew up in that environment.

Everything was black on one side, white on the other. My dad was a lawyer. I’d go down to his office, take the bus down to his office in the early ’50s into the middle ’50s. And I would frequently go over to the courthouse, which was catty-corner from his office, walk up the steps, go into the front hallway. There were actually two water fountains there. One of them said, “Colored Only”. I knew exactly which fountain to use and which fountain not to use.

Then, we had the bus boycott in Montgomery. That really began to draw my attention to issues of race and the way in which the Jim Crow era functioned and that it was an issue of extreme debate, I’ll put it that way. It didn’t convert me into anything. It didn’t make me think any differently about the world. It just gave me more information about where I lived and the era that I lived in. And in that era, we had lots of separation.

I grew up Jewish. Even in Montgomery, the Jewish community was very much separated. There were Conservative Jews, Sephardic Jews, and Reform Jews, of which I was one. Despite the fact that we had our divisions and our issues, one of the things that we had in common was that in Montgomery, and this is something that I didn’t recognize at the time but later in life, I realized that the key issue to being Jewish in Montgomery was to assimilate with the larger white Christian crowd.  That was exactly what we did at the Standard Club, which was the Reform Jewish country club for many years before Conservatives and Sephardics were admitted. Of course, they had their own country club at that time.

Out there, during Christmas season, we had a Christmas tree in the large gathering area of the club. We had a Christmas tree at our house as well, as did many reformed Jews. Also at the Standard Club, we celebrated Easter with an Easter egg hunt. Clearly there’s a religious component to it, but it was not done to worship Christ. We did it to permit the children and the adults to have some level of assimilation, and that we achieved.

JW: What led you then to the career you had?

JL: It’s a long story, and it’s very difficult.  As I pointed out, I grew up in this all-white environment. It was an all-white environment in terms of who could go to public parks, and who could go into movie theaters and not have to sit in a balcony or go to a theater that would be a black movie theater. There were several of those. Of course, all the schools I attended were all white. In 1960, I graduated from my all-white high school and went to my all-white University of Alabama for undergraduate school.

I’m telling this story to give some idea of what affected me later, as I thought back on it, and it became an issue of greater importance to me. I had never experienced any actual anti-Semitism until I think my first year of high school, and I was signing up for ROTC, and I went to the desk of the sergeant who was signing us up. There was a line. I came to my part of the line, and I gave him my name.

He said to me, “What business does your Daddy own?” I realized that he was referencing me as a Jew, and it was an anti-Semitic comment. It took me a little while to absorb it, but I realized what it was. It was the first time I’d experienced anything like that. Again, in Montgomery we had a country club for the Jews and a country club for the Christians. And the Jews were not allowed to join what was the Montgomery Country Club. It’s still the Montgomery Country Club. I think the first Jew to join was at some time in the early ’90s, and I think they now have some black members. That happened just a few years ago.

But in any event, we had that kind of separation. And you could say, “oh, that’s anti-Semitism.” Well, yeah, it was in a sense, but it wasn’t the direct anti-Semitism that was experienced by some of my friends.

JW: Yes, the ROTC sergeant was stereotyping. 

JL: I left it alone, but just for a very few years. Around 1958, there was a retired World War II admiral by the name of John Crommelin. He was running for Governor, later for U.S. Senate. At some point, I think he even tried to be elected President. In any event, he was an intense anti-Semite. He didn’t hide it. He was on television while running for office. We had one or two televisions in our home in the late ’50s. I remember sitting up in my parents’ bedroom on the second floor of our home with my parents, my brother and maybe a younger sister, watching John Crommelin state all kinds of anti-Semitic beliefs. He was the follow-up to Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh.

In any event, Crommelin was intense, and we watched him on television, and I watched him talk about Jews and the very anti-Semitic language that he used about Jews. He identified the parents of some people that I knew who were prominent in the Montgomery community as Jews, anti-Semitic to them as well. That was my second opening. So, anti-Semitism is something that exists, and it exists not just in Germany with Hitler in World War II. We’re talking about people in America. And I learned, as I got older, I learned much more about it.

In 1960, I went to the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, and was, of course, in an all-white Jewish fraternity. Like churches or religious congregations, there were fraternities and sororities for Jews and Christians. Of course, I was in a fraternity. We had fraternities and sororities for Reform Jews and Conservative Jews, and also for Yankee Jews.

I was a ZBT at Alabama. We were just beginning, apparently, to accept Conservative Jews into our fraternity, if they so wished, instead of going to their fraternity, Kappa Nu, which was across the street from ours. That’s the environment that I was in. The civil rights movement was really beginning to take effect. I was still a Conservative Jewish kid. I didn’t really think of it in that way so much as I knew that I liked the politicians who were the Southern politicians. Those are the ones I had grown up with, knew about. I did have a problem with George Wallace, which finally I began to realize.

Then, a fraternity brother of mine, a pledge brother of mine, a guy named Melvin Meyer, who was from Starkville, Mississippi, became at a very young age the editor of the Crimson White school newspaper. And he wrote a commentary. As I later learned, he didn’t actually write it. He edited it and took responsibility for it because those who wrote it were concerned about what the reaction might be to them, if their names were published with it. That’s something I heard. I could not confirm that for sure, but it makes sense. The commentary was in favor of the desegregation of the University of Mississippi with a young black man named James Meredith.

JW: Yes, we have heard of him.

JL: Back then we didn’t have iPhones or anything. We had telephones in the fraternity house, and that telephone blew off the hook with nasty telephone calls. There were hateful messages that were sent to the fraternity from all kinds of areas, from students, from those who were not students. And one night, about 2:00 in the morning, there was a big commotion. I got out of bed, went downstairs outside, and in the front yard of the fraternity was a 10-foot cross burning.

It had been put there by the United Klans of America, which was headquartered in Tuscaloosa at the time. That was really the only group that could have put it there. Even back in Montgomery, when I went back home after Melvin’s article, I went to the Standard Club, the Jewish country club, and very prominent residents of Montgomery would say to me, “why in the heck do you allow such a radical to even be in your midst?”

So, it was not just the white Christian racist community. It was the white Jewish racist community that did not like this. I was unhappy with it because it was interfering with my school life, partying and all of that. I had associations with lots of folks who were not Jewish, were my old friends from Montgomery and those that I’d met there.

That was the beginning, the real beginning, of my brain opening to issues regarding race in particular, but discrimination in general. But this was race. That’s the issue that was prominent in my mind, prominent in the country at that time. Everything was going on, the desegregation of the University of Alabama, I mentioned Ole Miss and Melvin’s article. There was a lot going on and it began to open my brain, which had pretty much been closed to issues related to discrimination. And I had to start thinking about it.

JW: And you did become a lawyer, right? 

JL: I graduated, went to Alabama law school in 1963, in which I think there was one woman in the first, second, and third years of the law school. And there was one black male, maybe in my second or third year, who came into the law school, but he didn’t make it. He had a lot of support, but he did not get through that first year. It was basically a law school that was not very receptive to women, blacks, and had there been other issues at the time relating to sexual orientation, I’m sure that would have been an issue as well.

My father graduated from the University of Alabama law school in 1934, I think it was. Jews had been around for a long time. So, what Melvin did and the way I and lots of others reacted to it negatively really did begin to cause me to start rethinking where I stood, what I did, and how I should think about the world. In law school, because of a couple of professors I had, particularly one in my constitutional law class, also understanding the law, understanding the Constitution, thinking about those issues, particularly in an environment where those issues were being tested in the courts and in the Supreme Court, it forced me to rethink where I was.

By the time I graduated from law school, I was a person who was totally opposed to discrimination. Racial discrimination was the one I focused on because that was the issue that I knew at the time. The broader issue of discrimination that exists today, as those issues came into my head and I realized what was going on, whether you’re talking about discrimination against women or discrimination against other races or other religions or gender identity, those all were brought into the picture.

But when I came out of law school, racial discrimination was an issue that I understood and that I felt strongly about. Like many of us at the time, I was in ROTC in college and law school. I went into the army in 1967, spent time at Fort Benning with black people and with white people – Infantry. I was in military intelligence and went to Fort Holabird in Maryland, the Army Intelligence School. It doesn’t exist any longer.

After a few months at Fort Holabird, I thought I was going to Vietnam where everybody else pretty much was going. The army sent me to Manhattan, where I spent two years. It solidified my view of the world in terms of race, in terms of gender. I worked with black soldiers. I worked with people who had identities I had never really thought about – Irish Americans, Italian Americans, a whole variety of folks.

That period had a huge impact on how I felt about the world. And remember, we were in the middle of the Vietnam War. The military intelligence in New York, the 108th military intelligence group in which I worked, was investigating American anti-war groups. I remember going to Columbia University, where a guy named Mark Rudd had established something called the Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, an anti-war group that we were looking into. We were doing a lot of that.

We even put one of our black soldiers into a black studies program at New York University. In other words, he went in as a spy to see what was going on in the black program. I could go on and on about what was going on there.

JW: How did you become the lawyer that handled the important sex discrimination case in the US Supreme Court?

JL: I came back to Montgomery in 1969. The whole purpose of my life had been to practice law with my dad. He was in a commercial practice in Montgomery. So, I started doing that. I was not especially interested in commercial law. Very early on, within a matter of months, I met another lawyer, Morris Dees, who was in business in Montgomery. He and I had very similar, if not identical, views about issues of discrimination. We wanted to do something about it.

He sold his company, which he was running at the time. He was a lawyer, but he also ran a company. He had filed at least one case involving discrimination, a lawsuit against the City of Montgomery and the local YMCA which was allowing white people to use its facilities but did not allow black people to do so. I didn’t become engaged in that lawsuit until later. I knew that Morris was interested in those issues, so I left my dad’s practice, and Morris and I started a law firm, Levin and Dees. We did that either in late 1969 or early 1970.

We needed the money to do some of the civil rights work we wanted to do, so we also took cases with litigation that were not related to civil rights, to try and bring some money into the law firm to help us pay for the civil rights cases. At that time, if we brought cases and were successful, there was no law that entitled us to any income, any fees, as a consequence.

By 1975, we had started several civil rights cases. Remember, what we were thinking about was race discrimination. That was the issue of the time. We did not start filing cases on behalf of women at the time because that wasn’t what we had started the law firm to do.

JW: It wasn’t a thing at that time.

JL: At that time, though, a young Air Force Lieutenant, Sharron Frontiero was married to Joe Frontiero. Later, she became Sharron Cohen. She was stationed in Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery. She walked into the office one day, and I learned from her that she was unable to get certain housing benefits that were given to male members of the Air Force automatically, because she was unable to prove that she provided more than one-half of the income for her husband and her husband was dependent.

He was in school locally in Montgomery at the time but was drawing enough funds from other work that she just couldn’t make the cut that would be necessary. Men automatically got it. There was no examination of whether they were providing one-half of support. She told me her story, and it just seemed to me to unequivocally be a violation of the due process clause, which provided equal protection, as if this was a state doing this under the 14^th Amendment.

It was pretty clear to me that there was a case here. She needed to be helped. So, we filed a case in the US District Court in Montgomery. We were attacking the constitutionality of a federal law, and we, therefore, at that time, ended up with a three-judge US District Court. Typically, you would go to a one-judge US district judge, and then if you or the defendants didn’t like the result of that case, you’d appeal it to what then was the Fifth Circuit where Alabama was located. It’s now the 11th Circuit. And you would appeal that. And then ultimately, from the Court of Appeals, it might go to the US Supreme Court.

But here, because of what we were doing and the law that we were attacking, the federal law, we ended up with a three-judge US District Court. The most prominent of the three judges was Frank M. Johnson Jr. Judge Johnson was a Republican-appointed US District Judge, had been so since Eisenhower appointed him back in the early ’50s. He was from North Alabama. Another judge was Judge Reeves, who was the US Court of Appeals Judge, because there was always one Court of Appeals judge and two district judges on these three-judge courts. And the third judge, whose name is going to escape me for the moment, was from the northern district of Alabama. Judge Johnson was in the middle district of Alabama.

And so those were the three judges. Frank Johnson had a history of incredibly good rulings related to civil rights. I was thrilled that we had him as our district judge, but I had anticipated that since, at the time, he was the only US District Judge in the middle district of Alabama, and we were filing it there. So, we got Judge Johnson. The other judge I was not as sure of, I was a little more concerned about his record. Judge Reeves, the Court of Appeals Judge, I was happy with, because Judge Reeves had a good history dealing with civil rights issues, but that had to do with racial issues so I still thought he should be a winner for us.

JW: What happened?

JL: I was wrong. Judge Reeves turned out to rule against us in the case, and the other federal judge in the northern district joined Judge Reeves. So, we lost that by two to one. Judge Johnson wrote a beautiful dissent. I looked at that dissent, and I thought, this is a winner. We need to appeal to the Supreme Court, which is where a three-judge court appeal would go.

JW:  You could go right to the Supreme Court?

JL: Yes, we could do that. We began to work with a lawyer by the name of Ruth Ginsburg, who was the Director of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project.

JW: How did you get to her?

JL: Through research initially, but they learned of the case and I heard from a guy named Mel Wolf, who was the director of the ACLU at the time. He’s the one with whom we had communications. Now, it is a long and complex story. I won’t go into all the details here, but at the time, Morris, who was really our only other lawyer at the time, got engaged in the George McGovern campaign in the early ’70s. My responsibility was to do everything that had to be done at the Center.

I was concerned about my ability to do what I needed to do there and also do everything I needed to do with Sharron’s case. I wanted to get whatever assistance we could from the ACLU, and particularly from Ruth Ginsburg and her unit, the Women’s Rights Project. I did have an excellent young associate who didn’t have his law degree yet, was one of the smartest people I ever knew, by the name of Charles Abernathy, who later became a professor at Georgetown University Law School for many years. I think he still does some work there, but not on a permanent basis.

Anyhow, Chuck, as I called him, was able to do a lot of the research that was necessary for the case, but I thought, “okay, we’ll work with the ACLU on this and let them have a role in it.” Long story short, the legal position that the ACLU wanted to take was one that we disagreed with.

JW: Tell me about that.

JL: Well, it’s complicated. It was a legal issue. It had to do with our view that there were two basic approaches to it. One would be what was known as the rational basis test.  We would argue that there was no rational basis for the decision the government was making in that law, that required women to do something that it didn’t require men who are in the same position to do. So, we thought, let’s do that. That’s the argument we want to make.

The other argument, which was a strict scrutiny argument, had never been ruled upon by the Court. The Court had ruled at one time on something that was a rational basis test, but we thought it was a little above rational basis. It was a Reed v Reed test that they had ruled on a year or two before, where they had determined that the defendants, state defendants, had not created a rational basis for certain issues, whether they discriminated against women in wills and trust Issues.

JW: Was that her case?

JL: It wasn’t her case, but she helped on the case. She may have been an amicus in the case. I don’t think she argued the case. In fact, she had never argued a case. In our case, Ruth – or let’s probably say Justice Ginsburg – wanted to argue strict scrutiny, which was a much more complex issue to argue there. The Court had never ruled on it in terms of sex discrimination, and we thought it wasn’t necessary to get them into a debate internally whether rational basis would be enough.

It was that issue and that difference of opinion where Mel Wolf said that only the ACLU could have the case, that we couldn’t have any role in it. I mean, we would have worked with them jointly on the case and argued two different things if they had come to our side on it. So, I said “well, that won’t work,” so we ejected them from the case and went on with our case. Shortly after that, we heard from them, and they wanted to ask if we would allow them to be amicus and argue some part of the case.

And I said, “yes” and they were able to make their strict scrutiny argument. I was worried about that. I didn’t want the court to get all caught up about it, but they were able to do that. I had 20 minutes of argument, and Ruth had her 10 minutes. We both argued our sides of the case. As you may know, the Court eventually came back with a decision based on rational basis.

There were four justices who would have gone with strict scrutiny. Interestingly, and of course, what this case really did was to solidify more of an intermediate basis. In other words, it was rational basis, but there was a little bit more of an edge to it. It was moving in the direction. It wasn’t strict scrutiny, but it got just a little bit closer to that, which has held up since then because strict scrutiny has still not been applied.

Interestingly, several years later, in another sex discrimination case, Ruth was not handling it, but she was advising the lawyer who was. She basically gave him the advice that I had given her years earlier. I read an article in the Harvard Law Review, where she had recommended to him that he not argue strict scrutiny because it might get the court into too much of an argument, into too much of a discussion, and they didn’t need to do that. They could use rational basis, the intermediary rational basis.

So, that was the first sex discrimination case that we did, and when we started it, we were a law firm. We founded the Southern Poverty Law Center in June 1971. So, by the time the case really got on its way, we were the Southern Poverty Law Center. We were still focusing on race discrimination. That was still our key focus, having to do with legislative issues, having to do with desegregating George Wallace’s state trooper force that was infamous for its behavior on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and it was all white at the time. We were going after race discrimination issues. We eventually got into issues related to the Ku Klux Klan and hate groups and that sort of thing. So, issues of sex discrimination were not at the top of our list, and very few people were coming to us about those issues. 

JW: Did you work on any other sex discrimination cases?

JL: We had two other cases during the early time of the Center that were related to sexual discrimination. One case, after Frontiero, was a case in which we sued the correctional system in Alabama for not allowing women to become correctional workers. We were successful in that case. I think that case eventually went to the Supreme Court years later.

We also filed a case, and this was maybe the case that most affects me emotionally, called Relf v. Weinberger. It was filed on behalf of some young black women who had been sterilized under regulations and authority that had been established by the federal government. This happened in Montgomery, Alabama. These two young women had been sterilized.

At the time, I had no idea of the extent of sterilization, of the way in which these federal funds were being used for sterilization around the country, primarily black people, but also in some areas of the country, out in the West, for example, you had some Asians and others who are being sterilized unknowingly, because of their race. But it was mainly young black women around the country, and especially in the South.

We filed that case in Montgomery, Alabama. One of the district judges was still Frank Johnson Jr, who I had hoped we would get. But another judge who was, I’ll try to be kind about this. I won’t directly call him a racist, but he was at least that, I thought. He’s the one who ended up with the case. After filing the case and him getting it, because we didn’t know that until we filed the case, it became clear to me that we just couldn’t go with that. I was worried that it would be just negative to begin with.

So, I dismissed that case in Montgomery without prejudice and refiled it in Washington, DC.  We got a really good judge there, Gerhard Gesell, and we were successful. Eventually, when it was clear that the judge was ruling against them, the government gave up and required that any funds that were used in this way couldn’t be used to sterilize people or kids under the age, unless there were clear understanding and notice and rationale for doing it. In other words, the old system was shot down.

After we filed the case, with us being in DC, there was a hearing before the Subcommittee on Health that was headed by Senator Ted Kennedy at the time, not Robert, the other Kennedy. I remember he wanted to have a hearing. So, I took the Relf parents and the two kids – Minnie Lee and Mary Alice Relf – up to DC. We met privately with Senator Kennedy in his office because nobody wanted the kids themselves to have to testify before hearing their comments. So, he listened to what they said and what their parents said, and he was just so moved by what was going on.

And then the next day, there was a hearing. I testified. The Relf parents testified. The committee, of course, heard everything that had happened, how these children had been sterilized. They had no idea they were being sterilized. The mother, who could not read or write, had no idea that they were being sterilized. She signed a permission, a waiver, but she had no idea what it said. She was told that the kids were going to get some contraception so they wouldn’t get pregnant, but she had no idea they would be sterilized. They would never get the opportunity to have children again. And of course, they still live with that. They’re still around.  Kennedy and the committee listened a lot, and I believe that hearing had a great deal to do with what eventually happened, with how these funds were used in the future. 

JW: And also the decision in the case.

JL: And yes, the decision in the case. There was a subsequent women’s rights case that the Center handled in 2012. I wasn’t involved in it. Interestingly, it was another military case, involving our client, Tracey Cooper-Harris. She was gay, married to another woman. Her partner’s name was Maggie. The Department of Veterans Affairs, when Cooper-Harris left the military, would not allow the same benefits to her partner as the male would get, had it been a male-female marriage. And the District Court in California ruled in our favor, so the VA policy was struck down.

The only other case that I was ever involved in that had to do with sex discrimination was actually in the few years I was in private practice. I represented a woman who was a state trooper in Rhode Island and was being discriminated against because she was a woman for some of the things that were permitted for men, and we were successful in that case as well at the district court level.

Now, the Center did its broader work, such as the work over the years with the Intelligence Project that investigates and publicizes information about hate groups and groups that are discriminatory in their behavior. We started doing that in the early ’90s. It was called a Klan Watch back in the early days. These groups became more prominent like the Proud Boys, for example, which is one that people will recognize today. All of those groups, almost all of them, have some connection to the way in which women are discriminated against. Not every one of them, but it happens. The efforts that we made are not solely based upon discrimination against race.

We, of course, at the Center worked during the years with women’s rights groups. I can’t name for you what they were. I am retired, and even though I’m still an emeritus board member, I am not really into the details of the everyday work. But I can tell you that when I was still around back in the ’90s and 2000s, early 2000s, I think I left in 2016, we were working on issues that definitely benefited all elements of society that were experiencing this relationship.

JW: In closing, let’s go back to Sharron Frontiero’s case, because I’m going to interview her tomorrow. What would you say was the significance of that case?

JL: As a legal proposition, it was clearly very significant because it locked in the notion of rational basis being a little bit more on an interim basis. In other words, the court was going to treat women just a bit higher than they might have treated others in terms of rational basis tests. They did not go to strict scrutiny, but it locked that in. So, I think that was significant. It was significant because it was such an early women’s rights case and because it was the first such case to hold the military to account under the due process clause. 

And it was important, too, because I think it got people, and it got the Southern Poverty Law Center for sure, thinking more about the broader spectrum of discrimination. We had moved into that over the years much, much stronger, even though it was not a key. We don’t consider ourselves solely a women’s rights group. We care about those issues. Cases involving sex discrimination are more likely nowadays to go to a women’s rights group, but even to assist, we’re there. We’re there to be as much help as we can be.

There was one thing that I didn’t get into: the background of my parents.

On the grandparent side of the family, on my dad’s side, they were from Odessa in Russia. They originally moved from Odessa to Germany in order to escape Alexander III and the anti-Semitism that existed there in the Romanov Empire. They then moved to the US, eventually to Philadelphia. Excuse me, that was my grandmother’s grandparents who moved to Philadelphia and met my dad’s parents, who had also moved from Russia to Philadelphia. My grandmother married my grandfather, of course, they moved to Newport News, Virginia, where most of her family was, and I know more about her family.

On my mom’s side, it’s very different. They were from Germany. They moved to the US in 1735. They were Lutheran. We think that they moved out of Germany to escape the Lutheran persecution that was going on there at the time and moved to South Carolina. They eventually moved to Alabama. When they moved to the US, they were known as Otto, but that eventually became Hutto.

She was a Hutto in Walker County, Alabama. A large family. There were, I think, 12 brothers and sisters. They lived on a farm. That’s what they did. And the ironic thing you may find is that my great-grandfather, his name was John C. Hutto, was a major in the Confederate Army. And there is a Sons of Confederate veterans camp named for him in Walker County, John C. Hutto Camp.

There are Confederate flags everywhere. My brother and I and my wife had been up there to see it and see his grave. When my mother met my father, she converted to Judaism. It was only some years later that I learned all the details and history on my mother’s side.

The story you may find amusing is that a first cousin of mine, with whom I’m close, lives in Charlotte, North Carolina. She and her husband did the same thing that my wife and I later did, and sometime in maybe the early 2000s, went to Jasper, Alabama, which is in Walker, and where this headquarters is located.

When they got in there, the guy who runs it asked them, because at this point I had written some commentary that identified who my great-grandfather was, “Is it true that” – he used very foul language so I’ll say – “SOB, Joe Levin, is the great-grandson of John Hutto?” My cousin said, “Oh, yeah, that’s true.” He apparently knew about that because the Southern Poverty Law Center had written some very negative stuff about the Sons of Confederate veterans, an opinion we still share.

JW: Do you have some concluding statement you’d like to make?

JL: I won’t be the first person to say that we’re in an era in which the lives of us all — particularly of groups that have been discriminated against historically – women, Blacks, Asians, Jews, Muslims. you name the group – we are at risk. We are under the ruthless governance that is following every dictate that Adolf Hitler followed in Germany. We have a President who considers himself a king. As a country, as citizens of this country, if we don’t want to lose it, we must get out there and do something about it.  And by that, I mean not lose it as established, where all people must be treated equally. We’re citizens. It’s our country. If we don’t do it and we lose it, guess whose fault it is? It’s our fault.

There’s a book coming out in the fall. It’s called Simply Human. It’s a guide to understanding combating hate. It was put together by Ken Stern, who is the director of an organization called the Bard Center for the Study Society of Hate. And he went around the world, not just this country, and got people to write chapters about issues of hate, how it starts. It’s very complicated. It is an incredible book. It examines the brain, and it goes far beyond that. It just examines what happens to people as they become older, meaning from birth onward, how we develop our biases, how hate develops, and bigotry. And I think that that’s something that Americans should read. It is more something that those of us who teach and speak need to read and understand. It is a complex book. It is a long book. And understand and then extend our knowledge to the people who might listen to us.

JW: It will make a difference.

JL: It will make a difference if people know it. And if Americans can’t appreciate – I don’t care whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican or an independent, it doesn’t make any difference. If Americans can’t appreciate where we’re being taken now, then we’ll be there. And this won’t be the America of our youth or even much of what we see today. We’re there. We’re in the early years of the 1930 Nazis. And keep in mind that even back then, we had those in America who were in favor of what Adolf Hitler was doing. There were meetings, large meetings that were held in this country supporting the Nazis. We had Senators who supported the Nazis. We had prominent people like Henry Ford who supported the Nazis. I think we’re in maybe a more difficult time now because we don’t have President Roosevelt. That’s not where we are. And we have a different America. And I think it’s more subject to the Nazism of the 1930s than America ever was then. I could go on forever.