Racial Flap Still Roiling State GOP

As the only African American among California Republican Party leaders, Shannon Reeves sets his brethren squirming when he shouts about racism in its upper ranks.

“We can’t just sweep it under the rug,” Reeves told party loyalists Saturday at a San Bernardino dinner.

For weeks, fellow Republicans have urged him to keep quiet about his charges of bigotry in the state GOP boardroom. Reeves has refused.

The dispute has not only embarrassed California Republicans; it has also clashed with efforts by President Bush to shed the party’s reputation for exploiting racial divisions. And it has served as a reminder that Bush and the party -- both nationally and in California -- continue to send mixed signals on race, particularly toward African Americans.

Last month, Bush was instrumental in driving Trent Lott of Mississippi from his post as Senate majority leader after Lott praised Strom Thurmond’s 1948 segregationist bid for president.

But within weeks, Bush renominated Lott ally Charles W. Pickering Jr. of Mississippi for a judgeship despite the concerns of civil rights groups about his handling of a cross-burning case. Days later, Bush called on the Supreme Court to strike down the University of Michigan’s affirmative action program.

Whatever the merits of those moves, they led civil rights activists to recall that in the 2000 presidential race, Bush campaigned at Bob Jones University, where interracial dating was banned, and declined to take a stand on statehouse displays of the Confederate flag. As president, they noted, Bush has carried on the White House tradition of laying wreaths at the Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery.

Julian Bond, chairman of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, said Bush -- like Lott and other Republicans -- was “mouthing the language of inclusion” while sanctioning voter bigotry with “a wink and a nod.”

In California, state party Vice Chairman Bill Back apologized this month for disseminating an essay on the theoretical benefits of a Confederate victory in the Civil War. But a few days later, fellow state party board member Randy Ridgel endorsed the essay. Freed slaves, Ridgel wrote, were better off before emancipation because “most of the poor devils had no experience fending for themselves.”

Bush advisors have declined to discuss the California dispute, but defend the president and the party on race relations. They say Bush’s school reforms and other policies benefit minority groups. They also point to his racially diverse administration, with African Americans -- among them Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and national security advisor Condoleezza Rice -- in top jobs.

“He wants a diverse group of people advising him, and that’s what he has,” said Mindy Tucker, communications director at the Republican National Committee. “He also doesn’t believe in quotas. He believes in a colorblind society.”

Democrats, she added, “accuse Republicans of being racist as a political strategy, but that in itself is divisive and does nothing to move the country forward.”

In California, as in the rest of the country, Bush’s political operatives often have described him as “a person of inclusion,” a potentially appealing message in a state where whites are no longer a majority. In April, Bush underscored the point by paying a visit to South-Central on the 10th anniversary of the Los Angeles riots.

But now, the racial turmoil on the state GOP board is undermining the image that Bush has sought to project for himself and, by extension, his party.

“What this whole episode demonstrates is that there continues to be a tremendous degree of insensitivity among Republican leaders about how to handle race issues,” said Sacramento GOP strategist Kevin Spillane.

The trouble has been building for weeks. It started with the Jan. 4 disclosure that Back, a candidate for state party chairman, had distributed the Civil War essay in 1999.

Reeves, the party secretary, responded with an open letter saying Republicans use African Americans like him as “window dressing” to prove the party is not racist when its leaders “act otherwise.” He said he was “sick and tired of being embarrassed” by Republicans who stump at Bob Jones University and “reminisce about segregationist campaigns.” He recalled that white delegates to the 2000 Republican National Convention had asked him six times to carry their luggage or get them a taxi.

In California, he said, Back had spread “bigoted propaganda” that trivialized slavery.

Party activists soon scolded Reeves for speaking out. Ridgel, a retired Lake County rancher, mocked him in two open letters to GOP members. In one of them, Ridgel told him, “Get over it, Bucko. You don’t know squat about hardships.” He urged Reeves to stop “parading” his race and whining about “how awful it is to be a black Republican.” Ridgel threatened to redistribute the essay, challenged critics to “come after me” for doing so -- and suggested that Reeves “resign as Republican Party black window dressing.”

Also taking Reeves to task was GOP Assemblyman Ray Haynes of Murrieta, who told him it was inappropriate to make his grievances public. “This is a family fight,” Haynes wrote in an open letter. “It should be resolved in the family.” Haynes also told Ridgel that his “intemperate and ill-considered remarks” had harmed the party.

In yet another open letter, the 32 Republicans in the state Assembly appeared to criticize both Reeves and Ridgel, although not by name.

“More than a decade of effort to expand the reach of the Republican Party’s policies and messages into minority communities is being seriously undermined by elected party officers,” they wrote. They described the recent letters as “shocking, offensive and intolerant” and urged the state party “to repudiate the hostile and harmful actions of its board members.”

Ward Connerly, a black opponent of affirmative action, added his voice to the attacks on Reeves. In a letter Connerly sent Monday to nearly three dozen GOP leaders, he told Reeves his public remarks were “damaging to our party.”

“I would have much preferred that you use a method of bringing these matters to our attention that was not guaranteed to become the headline in a newspaper,” Connerly wrote. He accused Reeves of damaging his position among GOP leaders and said there was “no epidemic of racism in our party.”

Political analysts see the state and national party as torn between two imperatives. It must maintain the loyalty of its base of white conservatives, some of whom are uncomfortable with shifting demographics. At the same time, it must widen its appeal not just to minority groups, but also to white moderates who frown on bigotry.

“If you move too far in the moderate, tolerant direction, do you lose so many voters in your base that it’s not worth it?” said Ruy Teixeira, co-author of “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” an analysis of national voting trends.

Teixeira said the Republican Party’s contradictory signals on race hark back to the techniques it has used to lure Southern white conservatives from the Democratic Party since passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964.

In the 1980 presidential race, Ronald Reagan advocated “states’ rights” -- the mantra of segregationists -- at a campaign stop in Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964. In 1988, allies of Bush’s father damaged his Democratic presidential rival, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, with a television ad featuring Willie Horton, a black convict who had raped a white woman while on furlough from state prison. And then, in 2000, came the younger Bush’s visit to Bob Jones University and his refusal to condemn the Confederate flag.

“We’re talking about overt signals to the racist element in the Republican base that say, ‘We’re with you,’ ” Bond said.

Ultimately, Bush won just 9% of the black vote, according to a Times poll.

He fared far better among Latinos, winning 38% of their votes. In California, the state party has borrowed Bush’s outreach to minority groups as one of its main themes as it struggles to make inroads among such voters.

Yet GOP strategists fret over the party’s distinct lack of progress, especially when it comes to recruitment of minority candidates. The Republican congressional delegation from California consists of 19 white men and one white woman. All 15 of the state Senate Republicans are white men. Only in the Assembly has the party begun to diversify, with five women, three Latinos and two Asian Americans among the 32 Republicans. No black Republican holds a seat in Congress or the state Legislature.

Mike Madrid, a former state party advisor on Latino outreach, said the California GOP falls well behind its counterparts in Texas, Florida and other states in recruitment of minority candidates. Racial tension on the state board, he said, will “reinforce negative stereotypes of the party” and make it even harder to attract minority candidates and voters.

In the aftermath of the Trent Lott fiasco, national GOP leaders are trying to beat back the same stereotypes. To develop a plan to draw African Americans to the party, Republican National Committee Chairman Mark Racicot and GOP congressional leaders have met in recent weeks with black conservatives, including Reeves.

“There needs to be an agenda that speaks to the needs and issues of concern to black America,” Reeves said. “That does not exist.”

Another important lesson for the party, he said, is that “you can’t see racism and be quiet about it.”