The Palacio Podcast
Alex Norman: The Struggle for Justice and Freedom is Forever
Alex Norman, Professor Emeritus of Social Welfare at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, knows more than many the injustices of this country’s history. Born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1931, Alex Norman was a social justice teacher and activist long before he discovered that he was two generations out of slavery. His grandparents on both sides of his mother’s and father’s side of the family were born into slavery. He would learn that one grandmother, Harriet, would be raped by a white man.
“And my grandmother told my grandfather when he came home and my grandfather went and beat this guy senseless.”
Harriet’s husband, Norman’s grandfather, would later be killed by the Ku Klux Klan.
An International scholar and consultant in Community Economic Development and Community Oriented Policing, Alex Norman grew up in a pre-civil rights South era. It was a time when segregation was, as he described it, just there.
“Segregation was like software…it’s just there. You turn on your computer and it just operates. It was just something we accepted. It was just, well, that’s the way it is.”
PalacioMagazine.com met Alex Norman when he was working as a co-founder of Rethinking Greater Long Beach, a community-based think tank that conducts research in education, public safety, and urban demography. When Norman spoke in public forums and previous interviews with me, we were always informed by his life experience, his knowledge of facts, and his calm analysis of the reality of social injustice and conflict. PalacioMagazine.com sat down with Alex Norman besides a quiet canal in Naples for an in-depth and wide-ranging interview that revealed the roots of his lifelong activism for social justice and the lessons he’s learned.
“That was my mother. She had an open hand. That conditioned me to giving. That no matter what condition you were in, there was someone else who was in a condition worse than yours. You had a responsibility for giving.”
The Biography of Alex Norman
Alex Norman is Professor Emeritus of Social Welfare at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, where he was Chairman of Community Organization, Planning and Organization Development. Norman is an international scholar and consultant in Community Economic Development and Community Oriented Policing and is widely published in both national and international journals. He has also worked in diverse ethnic communities as a consultant and facilitator in managing inter-ethnic conflict. His 10-year study of change management in the Los Angeles Police Department resulted in a report that the department used for strategic planning, and he was a team facilitator of Community Policing Seminars at the Pat Brown Institute, located on the campus of Cal State, Los Angeles and sponsored by the Ahmanson Foundation. Norman has worked extensively with the Police Departments in Los Angeles and Long Beach and at the international level as a consultant to the London Metropolitan Police and the Avon/Bristol Constabulary in Bristol, England.
“Our history books are written by the conquerors and the conquerors tell the story from their perspective. So we need to revise the history as it was rather than as the conquerors wanted it to be.”
In addition to being a Professor of Social Welfare, Alex Norman was an Organization Development Consultant and Trainer, specializing in Human Relations and Sensitivity Training, and Managing Inter-ethnic Conflict between Arabs/Jews, Blacks/Koreans, Latinos/Asians and Blacks/Latinos.
Since Alex Norman retired from the University (but not life) in 1991, he balanced a career of an international scholar and independent organization development practitioner. He and his wife, Margie, live in Long Beach where he is engaged in various volunteer activities with private foundations, the Police Department, and community organizations. He is a co-founder of Rethinking Greater Long Beach, a community-based think tank that conducts research in education, public safety, and urban demography. His most recent reports, Ethnic Disparities in Long Beach dealt with income inequality, as does the Long Beach Socio-economic Atlas of Long Beach, which was published last year.
“There are two options in life, you can either succeed or you can give up. There’s nothing in between. When you hit a bump in the road, it’s only a bump in the road. You either go around it, over it, through it, under it but you don’t stop.”
In Norman’s long life and career, he’s received specific awards for his contributions from The Association of Community Organizers (Sylvia Levanthal Award), the L.A. County Human Relations Commission (John Anson Ford Award), the California Social Welfare Archives Hall of Distinction, and the National Association of Social Workers Foundation (Social Worker Pioneer Award).
