Set Him Aside

Clarence M. Pendleton Jr., chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, has pursued his limited vision of civil rights too loudly for toolong. He thinks that minorities and women no longer need help in competing in a world that sadly retains many instinctive prejudices. Pendleton is wrong. And he is an embarrassment to an Administration that has finally seen fit to disagree with him on a key policy issue. It is time for him to resign or be removed.

The last straw came when Pendleton and the White House publicly disagreed on the federal policy that sets aside a certain percentage of federal contracts for firms headed by minorities or women. The commission’s staff drafted a report saying that the programs are filled with “rampant corruption,” create a new form of discrimination and should be suspended for at least one year.

Congress authorized the reserving of some contracts for minorities and women in the Public Works Employment Act of 1977. Its assumption was that until the United States more nearly overcomes its prejudices based on race and sex, minorities and women do need help in competing for work. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the concept in 1980. The government awarded $5 billion in set-aside contracts last year.

No sooner had the commission staff’s draft become public than White House spokesman Larry Speakes said flatly, and correctly: “The Administration’s position is that we support the minority set-aside program.” The acting head of the Small Business Administration acknowledges problems in the program, but says that the Administration is working vigorously to solve them. That’s the right approach, one that should also be followed in the controversy over affirmative-action requirements for federal contractors.

Ralph C. Thomas III, executive director of the National Assn. of Minority Contractors, said that the proposal would nullify the progress made by minority businesses and “send the wrong signal to cities and states starting their own minority business enterprise programs.” California, for example, requires contractors building new prisons to make good-faith efforts to give sub-contractsto minorities and women, as does the state Water Resources Control Board on its projects.

In the face of this opposition, Pendleton and a majority of the commission sent the draft back to the staff for more documentation. Pendleton fired off a verbal blast at the White House, urging it to “stop speaking with a double voice and a double meaning” on aid to minorities. The Administration is indeed inconsistent, but Pendleton obviously wants it to be consistently wrong in declining to help blacks, Latinos and women in hiring programs, education and now business contracts.

Pendleton, who is black himself, comes from a family that has been college-educated for several generations. He forgets that he has had advantages that others may have lacked. He is leading the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights resolutely backward, so it may be just as well that today it is only an advisory body. Its own policies, and especially its chairman, need setting aside.