2000 is targeted for vote on race

Critics denounce a California businessman's plans for a Florida campaign against affirmative action.

By TIM NICKENS and PETER WALLSTEN

© St. Petersburg Times, published March 16, 1999

In a preview of the long battle to come, a California businessman leading a new campaign to ban affirmative action in Florida traded verbal shots Monday with politicians and black leaders who oppose him.

Ward Connerly, a member of the California Board of Regents, stopped in three cities to formally announce his plans to get the Florida Civil Rights Initiative on the 2000 ballot.

In an Altamonte Springs restaurant, the charismatic speaker quoted John F. Kennedy and contended his proposed amendment meets the goals of the 1964 Civil Rights Act in ending racial discrimination.

"We go back to what Kennedy said: "Race has no place in American life or law," Connerly told about 40 people who paid $20 to hear him speak. "The government should not be using it to decide what happens in the transactions of government."

As Connerly toured the state, his opponents wished he would go home.

"What Floridians want is the politics of moderation, the politics of opportunity for all of our people," Sen. Bob Graham, a Democrat, said in Tallahassee. "We don't need somebody from California to come in here to tell us how to do our business."

But Connerly compared his concern with Florida's affirmative action policies to the nation's outrage over the death of a black man in Texas.

"When a man is tied to the back of a pickup truck and dragged to his death simply because he is black, that is your business," Connerly said. "When someone is denied an opportunity to go to college because of the color of their skin it's your business."

And that was only Day 1 of what promises to be a long, heated debate over such electrifying issues as race, gender and affirmative action.

The lightning rod is Connerly, a black conservative who led successful anti-affirmative action initiatives in California in 1996 and Washington state in 1998. For his next challenge, he chose high-profile Florida over such smaller states as Nebraska and Colorado, hoping to generate more national attention for a position he wants to make national policy.

But Connerly faces more challenges in this state than he did in either California or Washington.

His largest obstacle could be the Florida Supreme Court, which must review the ballot language to determine whether it includes only a single subject. Connerly plans to try the wording he used in other states, even though it would ban discrimination based on race, gender and other factors in public education, employment and contracting.

If the court rejects the wording, he said, the issues could be divided into several amendments for the 2000 and 2002 elections. Connerly said his top priority would be to ban consideration of race and ethnicity in higher education admissions, followed by a similar ban in awarding state contracts.

It is unclear who will lead the Florida effort to collect more than 400,000 signatures needed to get an amendment on the ballot. Connerly said he hopes to find a campaign manager in two weeks and will not run the day-to-day campaign operation.

Money also is a question. Connerly, who also spoke in Jacksonville and Miami, estimated it could cost between $2-million and $10-million to get the amendment on the ballot and run a campaign. He said he has no pledges for contributions and will not raise money outside Florida until the Supreme Court approves the wording of the amendment.

The only organized group that has stepped forward to offer support and money is the Associated General Contractors Council. "We don't want to be the people who pay for the entire effort," said the contractors' spokesman, Allen Douglas. "We'll put in our fair share."

Despite these uncertainties, Connerly is being taken seriously because of his previous successes. His arrival in Florida also puts Republican Gov. Jeb Bush in a political pinch.

Like Connerly, the governor opposes preferences and set-asides based on race. He met with Connerly in Tallahassee in January but later called the Californian's movement "divisive" and said he would not support it.

In a Feb. 19 letter to Connerly, Bush repeated his concerns and made a promise.

"You have my word that I will seek to expand opportunity in a manner that respects each individual and his or her talents and does not create a climate of guarantees based on race," Bush wrote, adding that he had directed his staff to review affirmative action policies.

Again Monday, he would not state a definitive position.

"We have a process for initiatives and referendums," Bush said. "I'm going to wait and see if what's been talked about in the paper turns into reality. . . . I'll have a comment on that if there's something to comment on."

Connerly said his amendment is no more divisive than Bush's efforts to create vouchers to pay for private school tuition or require longer prison sentences for anyone commits a crime while carrying a gun. Those proposals have angered some black legislators, and Bush worked hard to win support from black voters during last year's campaign.

"Jeb wants to keep his equivalent of the Rainbow Coalition together," Connerly said.

Florida NAACP president Leon Russell and several black legislators vowed again Monday to fight Connerly. "We're going to bring every bit of influence and effort we can muster," Russell said.

But Connerly said "rank-and-file" African-Americans are not as opposed to him as black lawmakers. In Altamonte Springs, he smiled as a white Orange County School Board member compared Connerly's beliefs to those held by one of the country's most courageous civil rights leaders.

"What I'm understanding you to say is what Martin Luther King said in his speech, that all men should be judged by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin, is that correct?" asked Barbara Trovillion Rushing.

"By Jove," Connerly answered, "she's got it."