Connerly’s Courage

One of these modern victims is Ward Connerly, an activist almost in spite of himself, a hero, villain, and symbol of the war against quotas. Connerly has now told his tale in Creating Equal, a book that is really three stories in one. The first is the traditional story of how a poor family rises in two generations to affluence. The second is a less usual tale of how a non-public figure becomes a leader and lightening rod. And the third is of the decline, fall, and fall still further of the great liberal lobbies of the twentieth century.

The first story begins in Louisiana in the 1940s, portrayed here as close to the heart of terror, a lawless and frightening place. The promised land is Sacramento, California, which seemed, by contrast, almost like paradise: a place of steady work and decent people, in which the family began its rise into the lower middle class. Connerly’s family had been shattered early: When he was a toddler, his ne’er-do-well father left to live in parts unknown with a series of women who became over time ever younger. Shortly afterwards, his mother, whom his father had beaten, died. His parents’ places were filled by his maternal grandmother and his mother’s younger sister, and, most of all, by that sister’s husband. This uncle, James Louis, is the story’s true hero, a figure of honor and dignity who gave the fatherless boy a grounding in manhood.

James was a man who believed in hard work and respect for himself and others. The family viewed public assistance (on to which his grandmother was forced for a short, painful period) as a disgrace. Connerly took his first job in his teens and began working his way through school. He went to junior college and then Sacramento State, beginning work for the local redevelopment agency the Monday after graduation.

It was the start of a long career at that place where government meets private industry in contracting and real estate: a way to blend entrepreneurship with social planning and make policy while making money. In 1966, he moved to the California Department of Housing and Community Development, becoming the liaison to the state legislature and beginning to mix in politics.

From there, he was hired away by Pete Wilson, an ambitious young politician who chaired California’s Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. Through the years, their lives became interconnected. Wilson became mayor of San Diego, then U.S. senator and governor. Connerly formed a consulting firm, advising communities and businesses how to cope with government, and soon became rich. He did not work for Wilson directly, but he became a crony and a counselor, not to mention a fund-raiser and financial backer.

Connerly also served on councils and boards, becoming one of the figures who make civic society function: the well-heeled businessman with a public presence, one of the many backroom friends of the powerful, just off the radar screen of politics. In 1993, Wilson named him to the Board of Regents for the University of California, a typical sort of prestige appointment for a friend of the governor who was also a big campaign donor. As Connerly writes, “It was supposed to be one of these honorific jobs that gives heft to a career, and it was in this spirit that I took it.” Actually, it was the end of his comfortable, balanced existence — and the beginning of a strange new life.

There are some people who set out to become politicians, because they like the public attention and enjoy the battles. Others take up a cause as a profession because they need a sense of mission. Ward Connerly was neither. He had politics, but no consuming political passions. By temperament an individualist, integrationist, and assimilationist, he believed in the success of the melting pot (of which he was a prime example). He was a Republican moderate, an admirer of Ronald Reagan but somewhat to his left. He believed in the free enterprise ethic, but thought that the government could have a role in initiating and facilitating social improvements.

He was marked by the knowledge he was descended from slaves and by the memory of a 1954 trip to Mississippi, during which the search for a restroom or restaurant had been harrowing. He had seen his powerful uncle tremble with fury when white trash had called him a “boy.” In college, he had been a member of the NAACP and helped to organize a protest when a dark-skinned student had been killed on a motorbike after having been denied housing near campus. But he had also been greatly repelled by the nihilism and tribalism that had come to mark black identity politics after the mid-1960s, finding it self-defeating and incomprehensible.

This was his state of mind in August 1994, when, as a regent, he met with a couple, the Cooks of La Jolla, who had a problem about their son, James.

James Cook, an aspiring doctor, was in many ways a model young man. In high school, he had already completed sixteen university courses. He was a National Merit Scholar and a member of the National Science Olympiad Team who had graduated from high school at sixteen with nothing less than “A” on his record. He graduated in 1992 from UC San Diego, with a Phi Beta Kappa in computer science, having published three articles in medical journals, and gone on volunteer missions to Mexico. His scores on the Medical College Admissions Test were outstanding: Cal Tech and Harvard/MIT accepted him within days of his application, and offered him fellowships. However, all five of the medical schools in the University of California system had turned him down. When he was turned down again the next year, by four of the five schools in the system, his parents secured records of those admitted and scanned them for reasons. Soon they had found them: Most of the blacks and Latinos admitted had scores dramatically lower than those of the Asians and whites. Months later Connerly would obtain a copy of the “Karabel Matrix,” a grid designed by a team at UC Berkeley, which had served as a guide for the system. 8,000 points was the highest mark possible. Asians and whites had to score 7,100 or over. “People of color” were admitted with 6,000 or less. Unannounced and undeclared, a rigid system of preference based upon race had been imposed on the system. James Cook was a victim of state-sponsored prejudice, mistreated because of his race.

As a “person of color,” Connerly was assumed to favor quotas. But Cook was no child of privilege. His background — one grandfather had been a sharecropper in Mississippi, another a laborer — was like Connerly’s. Identifying with the Cooks as victims of state-sponsored preferences, Ward Connerly found the great public cause that would make him a mover, a hero, and a bogeyman.

At the regents’ meeting in November 1994, Connerly raised the question of the Cooks’ findings. At the meeting in January 1995, he brought up the question of preferences. At the meeting in July 1995, he raised and passed, in a tumultuous session, the two measures that ended race preferences in the university school system. And by the end of 1995, he was doing the groundwork on the state initiative — Proposition 209 — that would, after a harrowing battle, end preferences throughout the state.

“Don’t enter this thing lightly,” Pete Wilson warned him, as Connerly started work on his state proposition. “This is going to be the mother of all initiatives. If you do get it on the ballot, you’ll get attacked in a way that will make the regents’ thing seem like kid stuff. They’ll attack me as a racist, and you as my black lackey.” What Connerly would be exposed to in the months and years after is a vivid demonstration of how the Left does business: by enacting unpopular measures in secret, lying about its intentions, and trying to demolish its critics by diversions, distractions, hysterics, and personal attacks.

“Liberals,” says Connerly, “are the true disciples of Machiavelli in our political culture. They are so sure of the nature of their ends that they can resort to the most outrageous means and still feel on the side of the just.” Thus, the administrators at UC denied and stone-walled for five months before they conceded that they held whites and Asians to high testing standards while admitting members of an “under-represented minority.” Thus, when a professor named Glynn Custred joined Connerly in the drive for Proposition 209, Willie Brown (then a state legislator and now mayor of San Francisco) urged students to disrupt his class. Thus, when Connerly tried to address student rallies, he was howled down by radical dissidents, while college administrators approvingly stood by. Thus, opponents of Proposition 209 in California tried to tarnish Connerly by inviting former KKK leader David Duke to speak in its favor. Thus, “Julian Bond made inflammatory speeches to black audiences . . . that the measure would eliminate school lunches for needy children, something he must have known not to be true.” Thus, the League of Women Voters claimed, also falsely, that the measure would put an end to equal pay for equal work.

The pattern would be repeated across the nation. In a similar battle in Washington state, Vice President Gore appeared three times “to wave the bloody shirt with charges that racism had reappeared in the anti-preference movement. . . . ‘The winds of hate are blowing in Washington state,'” he said. In Houston, a radio ad “began with the sound of sirens and gun fire,” and compared the opponents of preferences to the murderers of Martin Luther King. Pressure from Houston’s Democratic administration forced the investment firm of Paine Webber to fire an employee who had aided the anti-preference movement, and the mayor succeeded in wording the ballot in terms so misleading that after it lost (the only time an anti-preference measure has lost), a district judge voided the election.

The assault on Connerly began when he appeared on ABC’s Good Morning America with Congresswoman Maxine Waters, who waved a paper she said “proved” Connerly had benefited from the preference policies he rejected. “It was a lie, of course,” Connerly writes. “As I listened to this woman who had eaten from the public trough all her life, . . . I began to realize that Waters and others like her had too much invested in maintaining a system of racial preferences to ever let go of that system. . . . I knew from listening to her what was ahead of me for the rest of the day, and perhaps for the rest of my life.”

Connerly’s debut as an anti-preference activist triggered a volley of hateful attacks. As a private contractor, it was claimed, he had benefited from quotas and set-asides. He had become a traitor by wedding a white woman. He was a “self-hating” black. The New York Times profiled him as a disturbed personality who had been raised by a woman who disliked dark-skinned blacks. “It wasn’t much of a stretch from accusing me of coming from a family of anti-black bigots . . . to showing me in a KKK hood, as the Oakland Tribune did in a cartoon . . . to calling me . . . ‘Uncle Tom,’ or ‘oreo,’ or a ‘lawn jockey for the ruling class.'”

Other things happened that recalled the Deep South of the 1950s and 1960s. There were threatening phone calls, obscene graffiti, windows shot out by slingshots and pellet guns, stalkings by gangs of thugs. “At almost every campaign stop,” he writes, “there was organized heckling whose racist overtones created an inflammatory atmosphere that could easily have exploded,” and that some doubtless regretted did not.

Part of this had a political purpose to warn off other black dissidents. But it also seems clear the defenders of preferences have an emotional stake that goes far beyond reason. Liberal whites have a large investment in their claim to moral enlightenment. Liberal blacks, especially those who remember the days when the civil rights movement fought for something worthwhile, cannot let go of the view of themselves as standing on the front lines of freedom. But as integration gained ground with the public, the search for noble, unpopular causes has become more difficult. The claim that race-based preferences are civil rights — that people who oppose them are against civil rights, and that therefore great waves of reaction and racism are sweeping over the country — is a way to hold on to the glories of the past. As Connerly notes, the rationale for quotas has altered dramatically “from remedying the consequences of past discrimination, to promoting ‘diversity,’ to pre-emptively preventing future discrimination, and most recently, to helping whites who require exposure to other racial and ethnic groups.”

Connerly has become almost a full-time activist, pushing anti-preference initiatives in a number of states, most recently Florida. He has lost his privacy and much of his peace, and has unwillingly become a symbol to millions. He is now arguably more famous than his mentor, Pete Wilson, and surely a great deal more hated. He has also become the leader, not of a state or city, but of a state of mind. It is a state of mind opposed to race consciousness, opposed to identity politics, opposed to the disastrous turn taken by the moribund civil rights movement.

He has also become the leading proponent of a different kind of affirmative action; the kind that should have been adopted years earlier. When Ward Connerly first saw the statistics presented by James Cook’s angry parents, he was angry at two different things. He was angry on behalf of James Cook and those like him, who had been unfairly dealt with because of skin color. But he was also angry on behalf of the minority students who had gotten into medical school in their place. Why did they need a rigged system to attend a good college or graduate school? And why did the authorities try to pretend that rigging the system made their lack of knowledge all right? As Connerly writes, in 1994 only 500 out of 18,000 black high-school graduates in California had the grades to attend UC without preferences. And so, Proposition 209 would have another aspect: “Written into my resolution to end preferences at UC there was also a mandate to begin an outreach task force. . . . All aspects of the university . . . have joined together to form partnerships with K-12 schools . . . to help underperforming kids.”

As a result, UC personnel are now involved with public schools throughout the state, mostly in disadvantaged minority neighborhoods, engaged in large programs of outreach and tutoring. Thus, while black and Hispanic enrollment dropped off in the first year after the preference system was ended, it increased again in 1999. There are now more blacks and Latinos at Berkeley than there were at the height of the preference system — except now they deserve to be there and will benefit from being there.

Connerly begins his book with a meeting at the White House in December 1997 when President Clinton, stung by criticism that the “race panel” he had convened lacked any intellectual or political diversity, hosted a conclave of critics of quotas, including Connerly, Abigail Thernstrom, and Linda Chavez. The president was genial, but the vice president was much less so, clearly indicating his intense dislike for the group and its theories. As they left, Bill Clinton bade them farewell, shaking hands warmly.

Then, Connerly tells us, something peculiar occurred: “Al Gore grabbed my hand too, but instead of shaking it, he ground my palm and fingers in his grip as hard as he could. I felt the cartilage compress and almost cried out in pain. I looked at the vice president and he stared back at me with a slight smile as we walked out.”

Some people still need to be taught about tolerance. Ward Connerly could teach them rather well.

A frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Noemie Emery is a writer in Alexandria, Virginia.