9-2003

Who is Ward Connerly?

University of California Regent Ward Connerly is the leading spokesperson for the well-financed, corporate-backed, far-right-wing national campaign to end affirmative action and to rollback the gains our society has made towards integration. He is president of the "American Civil Rights Institute" (ACRI) and "American Civil Rights Coalition" (ACRC), which spend millions of dollars on ballot initiatives and legal actions to create separate and unequal social conditions.

"Supporting segregation need not be racist. One can believe in segregation and believe in equality of the races."

- Ward Connerly, when asked his opinion on former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, on CNN’s "Wolf Blitzer Reports" Dec. 13, 2002
 

"I don't care whether they are segregated or not."

- Ward Connerly, regarding California public schools if his Proposition 54 passes and derails school integration efforts, S.F. Chronicle, 9/2/03

Emerge Magazine 3/98

HIS FINANCIAL CONNECTIONS

• Connerly is CEO of Connerly & Associates, Inc., a real estate corporation based in Sacramento. He has gained financially from affirmative action programs in contracting. He attained his Regents position after donating $73,000 to the election campaign of Republican Pete Wilson, who as governor appointed Connerly to the Board of Regents on March 1, 1993, and whose political protégé Connerly is.
• As president and spokesperson of ACRI and ACRC, Connerly earns an additional $400,000/year. [Sacramento Bee, "Connerly’s Crusading is Paying Off," June 26, 2003] He has received at least $100,000 from Joseph Coors of the Coors Corporation and nearly $2 million from other sources to spend on Proposition 54 (the "Racial Privacy Initiative"). [Ann Arbor News, July 27, 2003] Connerly "buys" his ballot initiatives—with his funding, Connerly pays professional companies to gather hundreds of thousands of signatures to place initiatives on state ballots and to finance deceptive ad campaigns.
• Despite a legal challenge filed in 2002, Connerly continues to conceal the source of more than $1 million he is currently spending on Proposition 54 ("Racial Privacy Initiative").

WHAT HE HAS DONE

• In an effort to nullify the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling upholding affirmative action, Connerly is attempting to bring an anti-affirmative action ballot measure to Michigan and has announced his intention to bring similar measures to other states.
• Connerly first gained notoriety when he authored SP-1 and SP-2, which the Regents passed on July 20, 1995, banning affirmative action in UC admissions, employment, and contracting. The Regents later unanimously repealed this ban on May 16, 2001 in response to a BAMN-led demonstration of over 8,000 students and youth on March 8, 2001.
• In 1996, Connerly chaired the campaign for and drafted Proposition 209, which amended the California constitution to bar affirmative action in education, employment, and contracting for all state institutions. In 1998, Connerly campaigned for Initiative 200 in the state of Washington, which has lowered minority enrollment at the University of Washington and has increased segregation in Seattle’s public school system.
• Connerly is chairing the campaign for this October’s Proposition 54 ("Racial Privacy Initiative"), which would bar the collection by the state of racial and ethnic data. Universities, employers, and government agencies would be allowed to engage in discriminatory practices without fear of state information-gathering used to track discrimination.
• In September 2001, Connerly brought a successful suit to eliminate five state equal opportunity programs. This included abolishing outreach programs that provided information to socially disadvantaged businesses about opportunities available through the state, as well as programs that encouraged but did not require the use of underutilized minority and women-owned businesses in competitive bids for state contracts. Connerly also eliminated procedures protecting minority civil service workers from discriminatory layoffs, as well as every integration goal for faculty and staff in California universities and community colleges. Groups that are negatively impacted by these attacks include: women, black Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans (including American Indians, Eskimos, Aleuts, and Native Hawaiians), and Asian-Pacific Americans (including persons whose origins are from Japan, China, the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, Samoa, Guam, the United States Trust Territories of the Pacific, Northern Marianas, Laos, Cambodia, and Taiwan).
• In July 2003, Connerly raised Resolution 38 before the UC Regents, to ban minority and LGBT-themed student orientations and graduation ceremonies. The motion failed.
• Proposition 209 has resulted in severe drops in black, Chicano, Latino, and Native American enrollment in the University of California’s top schools and graduate schools. In the Fall 2003 freshman class, only 315 (3.6%) black, 771 (8.8%) Chicano, 262 (3.0%) Latino, and 51 (0.6%) Native American students were admitted to UC-Berkeley (out of 8,796. For Fall 1995, before the end of affirmative action, 623 (7.1%) black, 1172 (13.3%) Chicano 338, (3.8%) Latino, and 142 (1.6%) Native American students were admitted to UC-Berkeley. [UC-Berkeley Office of Student Research] In 2002, these groups comprised 41.6% of California’s high school graduates. [California Department of Education] In Fall 2002, only one black first-year student enrolled at UC-Irvine medical school, and only two black first-year students at UC-Davis and UC-San Diego medical schools. [UC Office of the President]