Effort to Cancel Debate on Plan to Remake U.S. Racially Fail

Despite pressure to cancel the event, the Glendale Human Relations Council is scheduled to hold a debate Thursday with advocates of a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution seeking to deport or deny citizenship to everyone not of Western European stock.

Representatives of the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith asked that the meeting be canceled because they fear that it will bring unmerited publicity to the so-called League of Pace Amendment Advocates.

The group, which moved its headquarters from Sunland to Glendale in January, espouses a philosophy that racial integration has caused the United States to decline morally and economically. Its spokesmen refused to discuss details about membership or finances.

A recent Anti-Defamation League report said that only “a tiny cadre” is active in the Pace group, although admirers include “some of the most violent and active racists and anti-Semites in America.”

Nevertheless, the Glendale Human Relations Council invited a Pace Amendment Advocates speaker to explain the group’s ideas and why it moved to Glendale.

The council, a non-governmental civil rights group, was revived last year in response to racist incidents in the city and is worried that Glendale may again gain a reputation as being hostile to minorities. The American Nazi Party briefly had its West Coast headquarters in Glendale in the mid-1960s, until convicted of zoning violation charges brought by the city, and the Ku Klux Klan was active in Glendale in the 1920s.

“How do you get across to the general community that there is an evil point of view in their midst if you don’t let them know it is there? Certain diseases need the light of day to be cured,” Ray Reyes, chairman of the Glendale Human Relations Council, said in explaining why he refused to cancel the meeting.

“If we are afraid to give them a forum, we may be saying that their ideas are right,” said Glendale attorney and council official Ken Carlson, who will argue the case against the Pace amendment at the debate.

The Pace advocates supposedly are named after James O. Pace, the pseudonymous author of a 1986 book about the amendment that was sent to all members of Congress and many state legislators.

The proposal would limit U.S. citizenship and most residency to people with “no ascertainable trace of Negro blood, nor more than one-eighth Mongolian, Asian, Asia Minor, Middle Eastern, Semitic, Near Eastern, American Indian, Malay or other non-European or non-white blood, provided that Hispanic whites, defined as anyone with an Hispanic ancestor, may be citizens if, in addition to meeting the aforesaid ascertainable trace and percentage tests, they are in appearance indistinguishable from Americans whose ancestral home is the British Isles or Northwestern Europe.”

Eugene Mornell, executive director of the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations, said that a member of his staff asked Reyes not to hold the debate, which is scheduled for 7 p.m. Thursday at the Glendale Central Library. Mornell stressed that the request was not an official commission stance but that he agreed with it.

“As professionals, having worked on problems of prejudice, we think this is the wrong approach. I don’t think the Human Relations Council is obligated to give a forum to small, fringe groups,” Mornell said.

The county organization helped revive the Glendale civil rights group last year but does not control it.

“They are entitled to make what I might consider mistakes,” Mornell said.

Request Made

The western states counsel of the Anti-Defamation League, Betsy Rosenthal, also asked Reyes to cancel the debate with Daniel Johnson, the self-described spokesman for the Pace amendment. Johnson’s “entire theme is laced with racism, and I don’t think it is an appropriate counteraction to give him publicity which he otherwise would not get,” Rosenthal said.

Meanwhile, Johnson said he is eager to present his views and is upset about the requests to cancel the debate, especially the one from the county commission staff.

“Our position is a legitimate one, and it should be aired. It distresses me that a government-sponsored agency will try to take away our forum. We would not dream of stopping a debate by them,” said Johnson, who identified himself as an attorney working as a business consultant.

Johnson denied speculation that he may be the real man behind the nom de plume James O. Pace. He insisted that the author of the book is a U.S. lawyer who is working out of the country but refused to divulge his real name.

The privately published, 179-page book identifies Pace as having been educated at Columbia University and Harvard University law schools and as a former member of the Board of Editors of the Harvard International Law Journal.

The publications director of Harvard Law School, Deborah Gallagher, said the school investigated the claim last year and discovered that the author did attend the law school for one year and was on that journal board. However, she said the school promised not to reveal the person’s real name or what year he attended Harvard. The journal’s 1980 volume shows a William D. Johnson as being on the staff. Records at Columbia University Law School show that a William Daniel Johnson attended there in 1983.

Daniel Johnson said he did attend Columbia, but he said he never attended Harvard and that his first name is not William.

Sparsely Furnished

Johnson and Arch Edwards, identified as the group’s director of public relations, were interviewed in what they said was the organization’s headquarters--a small, sparsely furnished office on South Glendale Avenue.

They said they moved their office into Glendale because of easy freeway access and because they had heard it is a nice city with good police protection. They said they later learned that the Nazi party and the klan once had supporters in town--a matter that they said they are often questioned about.

Johnson said that while their methods may be drastically different, his goal and that of civil rights group are similar: social peace.

“We think pluralism doesn’t work,” he said.

The Pace book states that American Indians would be allowed to live on reservations but could not be citizens. But, it says, all other minorities should be “repatriated” with financial aid from the United States.

The book identifies Jews as among non-Mongoloid Asians and says that South African whites might be granted U.S. citizenship in return for allowing U.S. blacks to be deported to South Africa.

The proposed amendment would also repeal the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution. The 14th grants citizenship and equal protection under the law to all persons born in the United States. The 15th guarantees the right to vote to all races.