Billie Frauman
Billie Frauman was born and raised in Chicago, living near the beach along Sheridan Road in a city she remembered as exciting though not yet the magnificent place it became. She began college at the University of Michigan, where she met her future husband Ed, but a viral dysentery outbreak on campus forced her to withdraw. She transferred to the University of Chicago, which accepted her credits, and graduated with the class of 1942 with a degree in political science. During this period she lived at International House, meeting young people from around the world, and witnessed the wartime removal of Japanese American students, a memory that stayed with her indelibly.
After a seven-year wartime correspondence with Ed, who served in the infantry in the European theater and left as a captain, the couple married in Chicago and moved to Dallas in 1946. Knowing no one, Billie was welcomed into a coterie of friends through Lorraine Sulkin, and she and Ed formed lasting friendships, many with fellow newcomers who had served in the armed forces. She recalled a small but active Jewish community, then centered at Temple Emanu-El in South Dallas under Rabbi Lefkowitz, roiled by a serious split over support for Israel and the influence of the American Council for Judaism.
Recruited by figures including Irving Goldberg, Jack Goren, and others to assist regional director Gus Falk, Billie joined the American Jewish Committee at the cusp of the civil rights era and later became Southwest regional director, covering Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. She recalled how AJC leaders quietly worked with the city's power structure to desegregate hotels and restaurants, avoiding the unrest seen elsewhere. Trained through the National Training Laboratories and earning a master's in public administration, she became an expert in organizational dynamics and coalition building, helping minority groups mobilize. After leaving AJC she consulted, facilitated the Dallas Alliance, and led a leadership training course at City Hall. A lifelong believer in pluralism, she reflected candidly on both its promise and its unintended fragmentation.
Full Transcript
today is monday march the 5th 2001 my name is marna reese and i have the joy of interviewing billy fraumen in my home on orchid lane in dallas texas billy i'm so glad that you're here with me today we have known each other for many many years and i have great memories of you and we will get into that as we proceed in the in the dallas community first i'd like to ask you some personal questions um like where are we born and where did you spend your childhood i was born in chicago and spent the growing up years there in chicago and chicago in
the city in the city when i was growing up in chicago we live near the beach along sheridan road which now has high-rise buildings the beach is no longer there and chicago has changed into a magnificent city very beautiful yes which it wasn't when i was growing up well and it was a very exciting city so what brought you to dallas and how old were you and what were the services i went i had my freshman year at college at the university of michigan and while i was there i met ed and he was a graduating scene it wasn't he was to become my husband
um some years some seven years later because the war intervened i became ill with the university of michigan there was a an outbreak of a dysentery which was not amoebic but it had a it was a viral dysentery of some kind and the campus was pretty well decimated and i unfortunately contracted it and had to drop out of the university of michigan and i spent some months recovering from it and transferred to the university of chicago where i got my degree now what year was this epidemic years ago uh we're talking about the 40s the 40s okay right and so i um i was fortunate
enough i had begun my second year at the university of michigan when this outbreak occurred and i was fortunate enough that the university of chicago took all of the credits gave me credit for the courses that i took and so i was able to graduate with my class and that was the class of 42. 42 at the university of chicago with i got a a degree in political science at the university of chicago lived for a time this was a great period in my life um because i was fortunate enough to live at international house how i managed to get in there see it was such a commute and we lived at a polar distance from the campus the university of chicago campus we lived north campus was south and the commute became such a burden so i was fortunate enough to get to live at international house and met young people from all over of course the sad part of that
was remember the the years okay and remember pearl harbor yes at international house there was a group of wonderful japanese students they were niseis they were born in the united states but there was a cluster of them and i watched the marshalls march those kids away at the you know the excitement and the all of the terror notions that had occurred these students were marched away and they were among those that were later put in our camps in california and i guess you know i lost track but i remember that so clearly that must have been indelible and i had a feeling that i had
something to do it's hard to know it's hard to know i'm not sure what influenced that except you know in those years there was an expectation that you had to involve yourself in community affairs and particularly in jewish affairs so when we moved to dallas ed and i and we moved in 1946 right after the war right after the war he had for seven years we corresponded and he wrote magnificent letters from the front he was in the infantry and he started he was drafted and served for years as a in the european theater and then gradually got he i think he was a captain
at the time that he left you know the everybody the war was over and it was immediately thereafter that after all of these years of correspondence that we got married did you marry in chicago when they moved to dallas we married in chicago which is of course my home was my home moved to dallas didn't know a soul here but somebody had given me lorraine sulkin's then silken's name explain who the ranks are the rain silicon the celebrity no right she um was active in the community but that isn't what prompted our uh friendly relationship because she dallas is not the friendly open city it
wasn't then it isn't now and um but she had a coterie of friends and included us from the beginning many of these who were became our friends were people that these were doctors and so on who had served in the army or in the armed forces and had lived in texas had been in camps in texas married texas and well went back home and then came back and lived in texas and so you were all in the same boat that's right but um so we form very real friendships here of course lorraine's husband subsequently died and um and and the and the group broke up
it you know he inevitably did but all right so can you tell me what um tell me what dallas was like at that time that you came here right after the war and the jewish community maybe particularly well you already alluded to it a little bit yeah i think one needs to think about what dallas was aside from the jewish community for a moment when i moved to dallas when we moved to dallas in 46 northwest highway was the northernmost boundary i remember that beyond that was prairie literally prayer and when i see the development now is absolutely impossible to believe the jewish community was
small but active um let's see the rabbi at the time oh evan manuel yeah was lefkowitz and of course the the temple was in south dallas and it was a time of great format in the jewish community the over israel i don't know if you remember but the there was a split a serious split in the jewish community over those who wanted to support israel and those who did not that split in some sense continues but uh this was a serious split and um so the jewish community was pretty well roiled up over over this issue was temple emmanuel pretty involved on in terms of
being not i don't want the anti-issue well the american council of judaism was very active in in the temple and that was amazing and that was and yes it was we can't do this israel i mean because uh americans will confront a lot of anti-semitism we will be accused as we were of dual citizenship and that kind of thing but it was an agonizing debate lefkowitz himself was really ambivalent about it i think yes he was and i that resolved itself in a sense uh that it just had to uh the american council on judaism lost a lot of its credibility and its power uh
younger people you know came along and uh and so it settled down it settled down but it was a real conflict and then uh of course uh levio came on the scene and he became the conscience well i wish i could remember the date i i don't remember the date i do remember that he was a power uh during the desegregation times uh he and those were fascinating times okay we're going to get to that all right so just hold that okay because all right we talked about a little bit about what you remember about dallas when you arrived and i'm glad you talked about
the american council for judaism now you eventually went to work for the american jewish community and that's how i remember you as being very much involved in civil rights and social issues would you talk about that and tell me about that what your position was before that period i was involved in the federation i mean that was the jewish covenant yeah that was kamil foe i mean you just were involved gus falk was the regional director of the american jewish community in those years and i was approached by a judge later judge irving goldberg jack goran who was then an executive of neil and marcus
and some others to please please somehow become an assistant to gus and it seemed like a pretty exciting idea at the time because was right at the cusp of the whole civil rights civil rights issues when i first moved to dallas black sat in the back of the bus it was a shock and i was dumbfounded at how quickly one forgot to notice it just was there there were black fountains and white fountains and so on and so on now ajc in those years covered itself with glory in a kind of a quiet way in this way some of the leaders of the ajc were
part of the power structure of the city the same blue good obviously the name [Music] of course mayor thornton not a member of the congregation or the hsc but they were this group along with i think willis tate was then president of snu yes along with tate along with levi olin and there were several others met uh to discuss how dallas could avoid what was going on in detroit and other places the riots the you know the terrible um unrest that was going on as the civil rights movement developed now is this in the 50s or early 60s well you see i no it had
to know it was in the 50s yeah and uh these and i was sort of in there but uh not centrally involved because these guys knew what they were doing and their that time it had to be guys too oh it was all guys it was all guys and that the gender thing came later but they decided meeting after meeting and levi was part of that group and so was uh um well of course these were aj the jews on that committee were all ajc people and they decided that what was happening elsewhere could not be permitted to happen and this was a little cabal
this is the smoke-filled room but you have to honor those guys because they took charge and they said very quiet they said we are not going to have any brians and what did they do what did they do they decreed because they were they had the power to do so that the places hotels restaurants would permit blacks there was resistance sam lou the bloom agency at monumental figure did you know uh i just heard about him as a younger man he was a mountain he walked into a room and uh this rumbling huge man you know he lost him out of weight later but he
was a walking volcano he was a remarkable oh were we not lucky and julius and and of course irving and and levi um sam head of this agency has said this is what we're going to do in every paycheck in every major company in dallas there was a notice that the places of accommodation were to be desegregated and knew that everyone was willing to cooperate wow it was a remarkable feat and not that there wasn't resistance of course there was some of the restaurants but gradually this theme dallas is different dallas is going to not convulse itself over this we're just going to do it
and they did it you need to tell me that every paycheck of a received a little notice that's right and who signed that notice you know i don't remember they knew it was the authority of this right what would they call wait what was the group called the grand the that's right that is amazing this story i did not yeah and um it's a marvelous story it really is a marvelous story today you know we rail against the smoke-filled ruins and and how small groups used to make decisions for the city and they did and and um this was today it wouldn't have been tolerated
but in those years they they did yell concerns and you can't fault them even though they counseled with nobody they were there no it was not but decisions were made talk about top-down decisions right well all right so you at that time i was an assistant director at that time and interestingly enough um ajc which is after all this marvelous human relations agency had never had a woman as a field director as a matter of fact aj was the birth i was the first ajc was a national organization that explained that it was only later that when i say national they operated out of new
york uh their leadership was you know sterling if not platinum these were people who were movers and shakers to use the cliches we would only see if you had permitted me to get to do some homework don't worry about right and the staff was marvelous i remember david danzig i don't know if you ever knew david these were top flight people in human relations in human relations they understood political processes they were of course uh there was a religious you know the there was a head of jewish affairs but also international these were international people and so on they were marvelous well they later decided
that maybe it was time that ajc would become a membership organization it really wasn't then there were members there was a scatteration of members who contributed and and the like but there was no field operation really right and or very little so they decided dallas was among the first that had you know a regional office regional offices no longer exist in the agency as you know now there are individual you know houston houston office and the dallas office atlanta but there were regions in in their first concept of how to make this more of a grassroots organization it was an elitist organization and how to
do that and i came on at that time when that transition was was beginning and when gus gus retired soon after so i can't remember but i became assistant director and then on his retirement he left i became the southwest regional director and these were regional directors that is to say my turf included arkansas oklahoma as well as texas i did not know that right and so i traveled a good deal creating programs and so on and it was these were very exciting years for me as the ajc moved from being strictly a new york and international organization to being an institution that involved members
well you know i remember doing uh how we used to call on you a lot for when we had certain problems and issues for instance at arthur kramer school do you remember that we had some problems with something with the pta yes right and bigotry or religion in the schools and billy you were the one that we call him well and that was the role of the regional director and and of course i was very much interested in that anyway part of my growth and it really was growth was first i was fortunate enough since i was the only director to be summoned to new
york a i was on committees and so i practically commuted to new york well i frequently did and and watched the development of the organization and learned you know sat at the feet of some of these people but the thing that i discovered about myself was i was interested in organizational dynamics how do groups organize to be effective what do you have to do here is a membership organization but a membership organization is nothing if there isn't a mobilization of the talents involved how do you really do that and how do you relate to the community at large these were odd days anti-semitism in the
early years was very palpable if jews were accused of running everything but in fact there was only one banker that was jewish the french read florence yeah and and jews did not run the community but that was beside the point my interest then became how do i learn to really know the dynamics of organizations and so i spent my vacations going to this marvelous organizational retreat so this was the national training laboratories ntl the national it was called national training laboratories for applied behavioral science and it just woke me up now this had nothing to do with the american jewish community it had nothing to
do that is to say ajc didn't send me there i used my vacation time that way i used my vacation time subsequently to get a master's degree in public administration but this training of how do you deal with groups was just invaluable as an ajc regional director well my next question would be how did you apply that in dallas because when people when i think of committing american history i think of building coalitions right now with that that was that was part of it that was a very important part of ajc it still is but yes but how do you build coalitions how do you
work with groups who have never worked with the jewish how do you involve other faith groups how do you one of the things that i learned quickly was neighborhoods were mobilizing how do you help that process so ajc it wasn't you know i broke out of the strictly jewish context to work in developing some of the grassroots organizations that later on took real life and mobilized can you remember the name well these were these were neighborhood organizations who really wanted to get things done later after i said i left when did i be bridges retired from tennessee and sort of put my own shingle out
but even during the ajc years i worked very closely not only with neighborhood organizations but black and hispanic organisms it was part of the job and that in itself the growth of the mobilization the self-mobilization of minority groups is another whole story and ajc in that we lend some leadership to that in other words you're saying that at that time the blacks weren't organized hispanics they needed help with organization and building you see this was a time this was still a turbulent time and that's right uh outside of marching what you do but marching valuable as it was to call attention to the whole civil
rights all of the civil issues marching really doesn't do it it calls attention to it but that is not organizational building how do you do that and it was um this training that i had enabled me later after i really left ajc to work with the dallas well the dallas alliance was a and do we have any dates on this well it was her vision she thought we needed a vehicle a mechanism to pull minorities together with whites because there were very great fissures including lots of anger and she asked tom dunning to be the head of that and tell us well tom dunning may
be running for mayor oh he's been a public figure for a long time actually he is a um he has a very successful insurance company but he has been active in the community for eons in every aspect and the american jewish committee honored him yes right right and so he asked me to be the facilitator and this was an undertaking and now i'm trying to remember i think i had left ages and this would have been in the 70s i think so because and that was the mayor maybe in the 80s well you tell me yeah well all right all right we'll have to look
better and but the the interesting thing is the fasting thing about that and this went on and on and on helen giddings later became the executive director she is now in the congress of the united states she is an african-american woman wonderful bright brilliant but those meetings of the dallas alliance were so astounding because they brought together people who had never sat to the same time who had never blacks leaders in the african-american community who had never talked to a white leader only you know they they were like that yes the ships that passed in the night angrily yes pretty good and these sessions were
remarkable in that it really changed the tone jack lowe do you remember jet low senior was one of the geniuses also behind us he died in the midst of it he but he really gave such meaning to it and jack lowe jr who now is he heads is the business that he heads which was jack lewis yeah um cheryl was a mentor yeah um trying to think i think i was going to say milton toby and milton of course succeeded me as the executive director of the americans committee and he took on all of the relationships and coalition buildings my memory it's like a stream
well all of us um but you know all right let's think from the assassination which was 1963. were you still with the american assassination no i was then with the dallas alliance as a consultant okay so that gives us a little bit of a impartation there you know i was the agency because the alliance didn't come until later yeah i think you're right yeah we had a downtown office i remember that federation yeah right and so i was still with ajc and i was standing outside we were very much oh yes uh gus faulk was still on the scene because i don't know if you remember i'm jumping around that's fine i don't know if you remember that kennedy's trip here was preceded
by a an ad in the dallas morning universe full page with a black border paid for by the john birch society which was very active man saying welcome mr president and in very castigating terms and the upshot of that was that people blamed dallas in other words it was dallas that assassinated the president it wasn't as well it was dallas and that this was planned i do remember that the fbi visited our office really and one reason for that was that unbeknownst to me you know i would speak at various groups and i had no knowledge that if one of those um inter-faith groups or
whatever it was oswald was there really with his with marina was that her name and the woman who had befriended i didn't know that but the fbi knew that this was of course before the assassination but came around now this ad that you speak about was this in the purview of the american jewish committee to sort of run that down and were you well remember adl was very much active also yes everybody tried to run it down we knew it was the john birch side and you have to harken back at how many right-wing bigots in the dallas area well everywhere in arkansas no south
in the south and uh but of course so did you do when you were with ajc then did you do a lot of speaking before groups oh yes that was part of the coalition building anyway and it was part of an education process the jewish community small but growing there were people who had never seen jews before i mean you know who are these people yeah and it was really part of my job well i remember i think you did maybe a workshop or something on deflating the bigot do you remember there was a brochure or something from american jewish right well what would happen
was that um the national organization would publish these wonderful things and then we were encouraged to take them to our membership and how do you do that so you did workshops and so on and of course again subsequently you know i conducted that leadership course at city hall you know tell me about that that was no one did that fit in um that was part of i think um what i was doing after i put my shingle out and tell us what your shingle but you no i had a consultant yeah i became a consultant and i consulted with a lot of organizations initially and
then since i never advertised it sort of dwindled but but i did a leadership training course at the location for city hall and it was this was part of the dallas alliance okay first of all okay but this was it was a sixth session course every kind of leadership development whether that was the planning action coalition building how you resolve conflicts it was how do you personally solve problems as well as within the group that problem solving was very heavily involved in all of those sessions how do you mobilize for action and tyrell bolton our police chief the chief of police sure okay was a
sergeant and he was in my class and we are still you know i still hear from him he was very special he was the smartest kid in the class and um he just just soaked it up all of those things you have that sensitivity and i didn't know that you had something to do with it well he had something to do with it but indeed he attended every session and we had firemen we had we had police officers besides terrell we had neighborhood people but we also had business people we had it was a wonderfully mixed bag the people who just signed on and wanted
that kind of training it was it was a wonderful experience for me and it went on we for um what a contribution well that was part of it but one of the strengths of that course was i used the resources of the community so when we were talking about how do you resolve conflicts the dispute mediation service was already impossible and so herb cook would be a resource person yeah right and so we tried to get the really viable resource people in the community to come in and work with the students who signed up for three years yeah at least i think right and then
it just then the dallas alliance ended i ended when the dallas alliance ended because you ended professionally professionally well i tried to go on but that didn't work out but the dallas the alliance still exists but in different a different form now um and they do their thing but it's not it's quite a different organization they don't hold meetings as such they kind of consult with groups and i and tom dunning i think is still active in it and others that i'm i'm not connected with it at all where do they need did i mean i have no idea no i'm just i'm just going
to change oh yeah of course and that is a whole other subject well that's what i was doing i mean looking back okay boy if things change do you wonder what was accomplished i mean we're still dealing with some of the same issues that we thought were resolved primary schools public schools the integration of public schools racial issues interest groups that are only interested in their own interests that don't cross the board how do you see it well let me give you my perspective right ajc always emphasized pluralism and i believed and believed in pluralism and that is that there never was a melting pot
that was a a fiction what was it france wherefore who created it and uh old henry ford took it on and had this stage production this is i think before where i know it was before he would peek we're going back a long way to the um immigrants among them from eastern europe a lot of jews okay my father right my parents as well and the idea of the melting pot was very gripping and seductive and the old henry picking up the theme would stage a production where the actors would slouch in with dirty clothes filthy uh curved backs and and go into this melting
pot and emerge as real americans okay it was part of the bigotry of the time so ajc rejected the whole idea of the melting there never was a melting pot because people wanted to maintain some hold on their own cultures on their own history okay so we developed the concept we of pluralist that is to say no melting pond but a kind of fruit salad if you were liam raven was was fond of calling it a fruit salad that is to say you had the group but within the citizenry blacks wanted to be blacks and and nurture their culture hispanics etc even native americans okay
well we nurtured that we the ajc so that we helped uh blacks and other minorities to mobilize for their own interests i was very involved in that and as i look back i think we never anticipated that the logical closed was fragmentation each group was demanding its own place in the sun but at the expense of other groups in other words i not only want my piece of the action i want is i want your piece of reaction and the african-american groups were the first to seize the day they were followed by the latinos the native americans are still working on it and in came
an influx of asians who hadn't a clue about how you mobilized for action as a matter of fact the asian american chamber of commerce was kind of the umbrella for that but within that i mean the vietnamese didn't speak to the huhus and the chinese and so on and so on but here was this great surge of identity i am an african-american and on the one hand it was the ultimate of pluralism i mean this was marvelous on the other hand it fragmented and i think it's still fragmented i was going to say this community but i think every community although there may be i
see now the coalitions are again forming interest coalitions are again but i have long considered that all my work was a failure oh no well well in the sense that i helped build this this pluralism i believed so deeply i know you did and um and here's the outcome the outcome was fragmentation and now i think it's being put back together again that is to say people are really talking to people but you have an influx of people we have the muslim or group that's really burgeoning here so you have little factions still you have um the the native americans are still not not organized
but getting there but and even within the asian community while they get together now and again there's the chinese community there is the vietnamese community and you know and there's the korean community and so on and so on i don't know what the outcome of that would be i think it's going to be okay but it breaks my heart to see that our vision hac's vision and my vision was that yes you needed to cultivate your identity but then you would be part of this larger wonderful the american experience experience and um there's no other country in the world that mixes that's the way we
do it so i think we're probably still in the americas i think we are and i think uh oddly enough we're in the early stages of a citizenry that is yes uh concerned with its own identity but concerned with the community at large i think there's a faint beginning of that but i think if there has to be oh they're in trouble and we are and we have been in trust but it's still there's still in my judgment a lot of fragmentation but at the same time there's there are coalition builders at work well that should certainly make and feel good yeah right well you
know what work was not a failure but i one more question i mean you of course we have years of history of integrating i guess um the jews have done very well the jews have done very well in dallas i mean and in the country i think we have a long history of learning how you don't have to go too far back to think of how frightened everyone was that's that's why the american council for judy iran judaism whatever it was for judaism was formed this fear that our being here is still so fragile and of course it's only in america because in every other
country religious the exercise of religion is controlled by the state even in england you know and the crown decides so there goes my voice well i i think we can finish up i just um i think the dallas community is very lucky to have something like you immigrate i'm so lucky to live here i love this it's mutual it really is this was just a great year thank you