April 16, 2000

A CRUSADER FOR CIVIL RIGHTS - WARD CONNERLY

Ward Connerly didn't set out to be a crusader, but one small step at a time he's found himself leading one.

As a University of California regent, he discovered the full extent of the racial preference schemes practiced by university administrators and persuaded a majority of the board of regents to adopt his resolution ending them.

That was in 1995. The next year, he lent his efforts to the faltering drive to collect signatures to put the California Civil Rights Initiative on the 1996 ballot. As Proposition 209, it passed easily.

In 1998, he campaigned for a similar initiative that passed in Washington state. And now he is working to put one on the Florida ballot possibly in 2000, but because the Florida Supreme Court is proceeding with very deliberate speed, more likely in 2002.

His guiding principle: "Distinctions by race are so evil, so arbitrary and insidious that a state bound to defend the equal protection of the laws must not allow them in any public sphere."

Thurgood Marshall, later a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, wrote that in 1954 as lead attorney for Brown vs. Board of Education, the case that ended legal school segregation in America.

Connerly looks back on his journey in a just-published memoir, Creating Equal: My Fight Against Race Preferences.

He grew up in rural Louisiana and moved to Sacramento, Calif., in 1947. As a student at Sacramento State College he chaired a committee against housing discrimination that documented the problem by sending white and minority students as "testers" to off-campus apartments.

That brought him an invitation to dinner from the college president, who suggested none too subtly that the college did not like its students to get involved in off-campus issues, a suggestion Connerly declined to heed. But it also helped him win election as the first black student-body president at Sacramento State. And after graduation his experience helped him land a job with the urban redevelopment agency in Sacramento and in 1968, to a position on the staff of California Assemblyman Pete Wilson. As governor 25 years later, Wilson named Connerly to the UC board.

Connerly was dismayed to discover that his appointment was widely seen as a sop to "diversity" and relieved when the conventional wisdom decided it was "cronyism" instead.

"Cronyism is at least based on one's individual qualities; diversity is based on factors that render diversity irrelevant."

Connerly's critics think it ironic, or worse, that a black man should be leading the fight against racial preferences. During the Proposition 209 campaign, California Sen. Dianne Watson told a Los Angeles Times reporter, "Connerly wants to be white. He doesn't like being black. That's why he married a white woman."

Later, at a Senate hearing, Watson said to Connerly, "You wouldn't be where you are if not for affirmative action. You're turning your back on your kind. Yes, your kind, Mr. Connerly."

Connerly responded, "You're a bigot, Senator Watson. Moreover, you're a lightweight."

I'd say he got that right.

The anti-Connerly rhetoric has moderated in tone, but not in substance.

John Hope Franklin, the distinguished historian who headed President Clinton's lamentably lopsided panel on racial issues, sniffed that Connerly would not be invited to offer his views because he had nothing to contribute.

Connerly's position is ironic only to those who subscribe to the thesis that all black people ought to think alike. As his story shows, he doesn't reflexively take the obvious or the easy position, or let others make up his mind for him. But I don't suppose people of Watson's persuasion will read his book.

The state-sponsored racial discrimination that Connerly opposes is one of the major issues of the presidential election, though the candidates will probably try to say as little about it as they possibly can. Al Gore eagerly favors preferential policies; George W. Bush, Connerly says, "gives evidence of hoping that he is nimble enough to keep (the issue) from catching up to him."

After the Washington initiative passed, Connerly was asked for his reaction. "Two down, 48 to go," he said. November will show whether his battle will have to be fought state by state.

(687 words)