ROUNDTABLE BREAKFAST: Peacemaking in America

ACR-GNY & CUNY Dispute Resolution Center at John Jay College present:  

VIRTUAL ROUNDTABLE BREAKFAST

PEACEMAKING IN AMERICA:

Doing Depolarization Work

at the

Community Relations Service and Beyond

GRANDE LUM

This presentation shares the behind-the-scenes story of how a small federal agency made a big difference in civil rights conflicts over the last half century. In the second edition book America’s Peacemakers: The Community Relations Service and Civil Rights, Grande Lum continues the late former CRS Associate Director Bertram Levine’s excellent scholarship, expanding the narrative to consider the history of the Community Relations Service (CRS) of the U.S. Department of Justice over the course of the last three decades.

Covered in this presentation are the post–9/11 efforts of the CRS to prevent violence and hate crimes against those perceived as Middle Eastern. Also discussed are the cross-border Elián González custody dispute and the notable tragedies of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, both of which brought police interaction with communities of color back into the spotlight and preceded the later tragedies of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

Over the last decade polarization and division in this country have risen significantly. Grande will share how he has continued his depolarization work at the Ohio State Moritz College of Law’s Divided Community Project and now in his work as senior partner at the Harvard Negotiation Project’s and Issue One’s Rebuild Congress Initiative.

GRANDE LUM is Senior Partner at the Rebuild Congress Initiative, a program of the Harvard Negotiation Project and Issue One. Previously he was the Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs at Menlo College in Atherton, California. Before joining Menlo, he was Director of the Divided Community Project (DCP) at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. Grande was nominated by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the Senate in 2012 as the Director of the Community Relations Service (CRS), an agency within the Department of Justice.

Before joining CRS, Grande Lum was a clinical professor at the University of California Hastings School of the Law, where he directed the Center for Negotiation and Dispute Resolution. His latest book is America’s Peacemakers: The Community Relations Service and Civil Rights (University of Missouri, November 2020. Co-authored with Bertram Levine) which won the 2020 International Institute for Conflict Resolution and Resolution Outstanding Book Award. He is also the author of The Negotiation Fieldbook (McGraw-Hill 2nd Edition, 2010); Tear Down the Wall: Be Your Own Mediator in Conflict (Optimality, 2013). He earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from UC Berkeley and a law degree from Harvard.