Foe of affirmative action
weighs a fight in Florida

After two successful efforts, Ward Connerly is expanding his controversial campaign against racial preferences.

By BILL DURYEA

© St. Petersburg Times, published February 7, 1999

Ward Connerly

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Florida is on the line.

It's Tuesday morning in Ward Connerly's wood-panelled office, and the man who engineered two highly controversial and wildly successful anti-affirmative action campaigns in California and Washington is on the phone with a Fort Lauderdale housing contractor who wants Connerly to make Florida state number three.

Were it not for the Looney Tunes tie, Connerly's gray flannel trousers and white dress shirt would match his sober, vaguely know-it-all tone.

"If we decide to do it, you're going to have your work cut out for you," Connerly tells Bill Stroop, executive manager of the Associated General Contractors in South Florida.

He's probing for information, checking the depth of commitment to a campaign that has not begun but one Connerly knows would be bitter, divisive and long.

"Well, I look forward to that," says Stroop, who has asked Connerly to address his group March 15. Connerly agrees to the meeting, but the call ends without Connerly committing to the campaign.

Connerly will not decide for another five weeks whether Florida will get his expertise and his fund-raising prowess. He has received overtures from groups in four other states.

Florida would be a plum, but he must decide prudently. Perhaps more than any other person in the country, Connerly has become entwined in the emotionally charged debate over affirmative action.

The reason is exceedingly simple: He is a conservative Republican, a successful businessman. And he is black.

The reason also is exceedingly complex: As a black man arguing that society should ignore skin color, he is pilloried as a traitor to his race. Comedian Chris Rock brought the 59-year-old Connerly on his show recently and remarked: "You're the only old black man who doesn't hate white people."

So while Connerly eyes Florida, it may be a good time for Florida to take a look at Connerly.

Wardell Anthony Connerly, working class kid turned chief executive officer of his own company, is the kind of person affirmative action was supposed to produce. Except that's not quite what happened.

Connerly was born in Leesville, La., with just as much Irish, French Creole and Choctaw Indian blood as African, he says.

"That's what really gets me is the idiocy of the one drop rule," Connerly says. "Skin color doesn't tell you a thing about me."

His parents divorced when he was 2, and his mother remarried. She died soon after from injuries suffered in a car accident.

Connerly was raised by his maternal grandmother, then by an aunt and uncle in the Del Paso Heights neighborhood of north Sacramento. He moved back in with his grandmother when she followed to California.

"I grew up poor, not destitute," Connerly says.

He went to junior college for two years before transferring to Sacramento State, where he graduated in 1962 with a degree in political science. Along the way he pledged a fraternity, was elected student body president, discovered Barry Goldwater and met his wife, Ilene Crews, whose parents opposed the interracial marriage.

His first job was in the state's housing department. He would have stayed, he said, were it not for the encouragement of a young assemblyman named Pete Wilson. In 1973, Connerly and his wife opened Connerly & Associates, which thrived on advising municipalities on housing development.

Connerly supported Wilson generously from early in Wilson's political career through his campaigns as mayor of San Diego, U.S. senator and governor, giving a total of $108,000, according to Common Cause. Connerly declined Wilson's overtures to join him until 1993, when he accepted an appointment to the California Board of Regents, which oversees the University of California system.

"I think the governor was playing this game of racial diversity," Connerly says of the appointment, careful to point out that as an unpaid position it is not an example of affirmative action.

Some of Connerly's later opponents, many of them black legislators, supported his appointment. They claimed to have been taken by surprise when Connerly first raised questions about how racial preferences were being used in the university admissions process.

But they shouldn't have been.

"For me it's the ultimate insult," Connerly said in a 1991 article on black conservatives. "I don't need any brownie points from anybody. I don't want any from anybody. And to my knowledge we have never taken advantage of it."

In 1994, confronted with evidence that the University of California was relying much more heavily on race as a factor in admissions than a 1978 U.S. Supreme Court decision allowed, Connerly urged his fellow regents to end racial preferences. He was opposed on moral grounds, as well as practical ones.

"We were a lawsuit waiting to happen," he says.

In July 1995, despite the presence of Jesse Jackson, the regents voted 14-10 to end racial and gender preferences in university admissions. That controversial vote gave new life to a similar statewide initiative. With the backing of Gov. Wilson, who was in the middle of a presidential bid, Connerly agreed to chair that campaign.

The personal attacks began in earnest.

Family members claimed Connerly's description of an impoverished youth -- eating nothing but sweet potatoes for days, patching his soles with cardboard -- was a gross exaggeration. He called them liars; other family members agreed. 60 Minutes had plenty of material to work with.

Others tagged him as a hypocrite whose business success was the result of the very affirmative action programs he sought to end.

"That's an absolute lie," he says. "If I'm somehow benefitting from this, why would I want to do away with it?"

As the vote approached, a weary Connerly said he would abandon the cause after Election Day.

"I was getting hardened," he says. "I was afraid to shake hands with a fellow black person because I believed 95 percent of them disagreed with me.

"I feared for my personal safety."

Possibly for good reason. There is no sign outside the three-story Victorian where Connerly & Associates is located, but there are small holes in two front windows from rocks or pellets someone threw at the building in 1995.

"I feared for my family's safety. I feared for my business, whether I was going to lose clients," he says.

But something happened on the way out of the spotlight:

"I figured it couldn't get any worse."

Fellow regent William Bagley has a different explanation.

"It went to his head," he says. "Now he's become a celebrity and he enjoys that. He walks into a white Rotary Club and he gets a standing ovation."

Florida is on the line.

Just before noon Tuesday, Connerly telephones WSKY 97.3-FM in Gainesville. The bent of Joe Young's afternoon talk show is conservative, friendly territory for Connerly, who says he is using appearances on such shows as a measure of Florida's receptivity.

From his speakerphone, Connerly can hear his introduction:

"Conservative activist Ward Connerly," Young says, "has brought a sweeping proposal before the Sunshine State to abolish affirmative action "

Connerly winces.

"It's not necessary for him to call me that -- conservative activist," Connerly says. "It's almost a pejorative term."

Moments later:

"Connerly, who is African-American "

"I don't like that," he says, shaking his head.

Introduction over, Connerly is on the air, delivering a message to end the system of racial preferences in university admissions, government contracts and government hiring.

"You can't end discrimination by practicing discrimination," Connerly says. "You can fuzz it up by calling it affirmative action, but it's still discrimination."

The callers are generally sympathetic (except for the fellow who calls Connerly "the biggest Oreo he's ever seen"), but the African-American remark, however innocent, nettles Connerly and he cannot let it pass.

"I'm a black man," he tells the radio audience. "I don't like the term African-American."

Later, Connerly, who is acutely sensitive to the perception he is being cast as an agitator, says he considers himself "an establishment kind of guy."

Establishment indeed.

He lives in a half-million dollar home on a half-acre lot in a neighborhood in which he is the only black resident.

He is the California Republican Party's finance chairman. He's a member of the Rotary. He drives a green Jaguar, and he belongs to a private club -- for RV owners.

He owns a share of three thoroughbreds that he acquired last year for $50,000, although he says he avoids the jockey club when he goes to the track.

"Bush is trying to make it appear that I'm this wild-eyed guy out on the margin," Connerly says, his meeting in Tallahassee with Gov. Jeb Bush still fresh. "But I'm mainstream. The view I'm espousing was endorsed by 58 percent of the people in Washington, 54 percent of the people in California."

But Connerly has proven adept at turning his allies into enemies.

To former Gov. Wilson's chagrin, Connerly voted with the majority of regents to award health benefits to domestic partners. This vote was proof, Connerly says, of how consistently he applies his conservative principles.

"The true conservative ethic is that I will leave you alone to pursue happiness unrestricted by government," he says.

He has been so annoyed with the Republican party's anti-abortion stance and its use as an acid test for Republicans that he has announced he will resign as its finance chairman in March.

"Even in good times the party machinery is useless," he says. "Their day of reckoning will come."

Proposition 209 ended racial and gender preferences. But it did not end the debate.

On the same days that Connerly was conferring with Florida supporters, two discrimination suits were filed against California universities. Minority students claimed they had high grade-point averages but were boxed out by students from better high schools who had access to advanced placement courses. Female and minority professors at Stanford said they were unfairly denied tenure.

Unable to use race as a factor, officials at the University of California at Berkeley watched as black student admissions in 1997 dropped by 80 percent, to 14, says Lydia Chavez, a Berkeley journalism professor. Only one black student accepted the invitation.

The man who led the fight to do away with preferences is now being asked what to do about continuing inequities.

"What he says is his true objective, equal employment opportunity and equal educational opportunities, he hasn't done a thing about that," says Mark Rosenbaum, the lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union who unsuccessfully appealed 209.

In more combative moments, Connerly says that's not his problem. Doing away with one injustice does not mean he must solve all of society's problems.

In the same conversation, he sounds as though his conscience might trouble him sometimes.

"I don't think we can responsibly turn the world upside down, end preferences and not consider other possibilities," he says.

That is why he may vote for a measure that would effectively admit the top 4 percent of every high school class to a University of California school. This would reach poor whites in rural areas as well as poor blacks, he says. But it also would mean that students with superior records at more competitive schools would be rejected in favor of the best students at weaker schools, a lowering of standards that is anathema to Connerly.

Even Connerly's detractors say he may have done some good.

"Give Ward some credit," says fellow regent Bagley, "We have engaged in massive outreach programs to encourage applications. His efforts, although perverse, spawned this."

Since 209 was passed, outreach money has doubled from $60-million to just over $130-million.

Wednesday afternoon, Connerly visits the offices of his non-profit organization, the American Civil Rights Coalition. Connerly formed the organization on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday in 1997 as a way to dispense information on racial and gender preferences and to finance other anti-affirmative action campaigns.

Caroline Kreling, director of administration, tells Connerly, who is not on the coalition's payroll, that the Tuesday radio appearance and other radio interviews generated about 50 calls from people wanting to sign or distribute petitions, which they were disappointed to learn do not yet exist.

A call comes in from a Republican party functionary outside Orlando. He wants to know if the coalition can set up a toll-free number. Connerly relays the request to Kreling.

Fifteen minutes later, Kreling has a number: 1-800-711-5498, which will be switched on Monday.

Florida's on the line.
-- Times researcher Kitty Bennett contributed to this story.

• Connerly guarantees success — in so many words