My father bucked his times on civil rights: Voices

My sisters and I will pay our last respects to our father Thursday at Arlington National Cemetery. He was no war hero — he said he only drew his gun once in action, and he was terrified. But Arlington is fitting for a life-long warrior for racial justice and civil rights in the service of his country. He remained devoted to the mission despite a president who opposed it. And his story is uniquely American.

Harold Dorell's title was director of civil rights in the Federal Highway Administration Southeast Region 9. His job was to ensure that contractors who built the nation’s highways, tunnels, transit systems and light rail lines hired workers fairly, without regard to race, ethnicity, religion, sex or disability, in line with the 1964 Civil Rights Act. We're a nation of laws and we aspire to the principles of "liberty and justice for all," but making those words reality depends on people in government putting them into action, and Harold did that.

Like government workers in the age of President Trump may or may not choose to do, my father followed his conscience and bucked the national trend under then-President Ronald Reagan, who believed in smaller government and less regulation, and who unsuccessfully vetoed the Civil Rights Restoration Act in 1988.

Harold viewed his work as warfare. His chief weapons were letters, memos and email. His bullets were facts, interviews with aggrieved workers, and charts that described for the contractors and transportation agencies in his crosshairs the course of action that would prevent a shutoff of federal funding to their projects. His battlefield encompassed the federal and state bureaucracies, sometimes including his own colleagues, and it was his knowledge of federal law and regulation that allowed him to out-maneuver his foes.

Andre Boursse, my father’s former assistant in San Francisco, described Harold’s approach as: “Jump out of an airplane and go through the village… make sure we captured everybody before asking any questions.” He adds: “Harold was very good at knowing the rules, regulations and requirements, the norms of the culture, how people magically recruit people who look like themselves.”

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Harold Dorell was born Aug. 20, 1929. A drill sergeant in the Army in the early 1950s, he protested segregation by refusing to abide by a base rule that black soldiers vacate the officers’ den when officers were present. Then, after a commanding major ordered him out or risk court martial, Harold fired off letters of protest to that officer’s entire chain of command up to the president. He wound up being demoted for lateness and deployed to Korea, where he worked in Seoul as a military detective at the Criminal Investigations Division.

He later fought for minorities as an independent long-haul trucker in the United States and as a geologist and mine supervisor in Bolivia. In California in the 1960s, he identified with the self-help ideology of the Black Power movement but felt their rejection of his white wife was unacceptably racist. He moved to Israel in 1969 to get his family away from racial strife in America, then moved back in 1976 to become a civil rights officer at the Urban Mass Transportation Administration (now the Federal Transit Administration) in Philadelphia.

There he took on a network of city officials, contractors, labor unions and transportation officials who had systematically excluded African-Americans and other minorities from working on the Center City tunnel, a project that connected the city’s north-south and east-west subway systems, and disrupted traffic for years in downtown Philadelphia.

I was in middle and high school at the time. My father talked about his colleagues at work, making it clear they wished he’d back off. He spoke of being offered bribes and receiving threats from people he thought were connected to the mob. Instead, he brought the whole project to a halt because the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) was out of compliance.

The project resulted in SEPTA firing its general manager, integrating its board of directors by appointing its first black woman, and creating a new civil rights program, turning it into a model in terms of civil rights, according to a memo he sent to his superiors years later. In notes on the sidelines of another memo, he used the language of war to celebrate his victory. “This was the final battle,” he wrote on Nov. 3, 1980. “Afterwards, they struck their flag. It was exciting & fun while it lasted.”

When he retired from the Federal Highway Administration's San Francisco office, Harold was presented with a plaque. "Your staunch support for approaches which confront illegal practices and patterns is renowned," it said. It added that his pioneering effort for change "reaches to the heart of the promises of the Constitution to ensure fair treatment."

Oren Dorell covers foreign affairs for USA TODAY.

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