Civil Rights Groups Call for Action Against Calabro

The controversy over Glendale Municipal Court Commissioner Daniel F. Calabro took a new turn Friday as spokesmen for two civil rights groups publicly deplored his use of the word “nigger” from the bench and said he should be banned from hearing criminal cases, pending an investigation by the Los Angeles County Bar Assn.

“I find the use of this term personally offensive and insulting both to me and my people,” John W. Mack, president of the Los Angeles Urban League, told reporters, adding:

“Despite the explanations and rationalizations by Commissioner Calabro and his defenders regarding his use of the term, we are not so easily persuaded to overlook the use of the term by an officer of the court.”

Bar Assn. Query

The Los Angeles County Bar Assn.’s judiciary committee quietly began an investigation of Calabro last week at the request of Larry R. Feldman, the organization’s president, a spokesman said Friday.

The news conference ended Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner’s two-week isolation on the Calabro affair. Earlier this week, Reiner was the only speaker at a two-hour Board of Supervisors hearing to defend his recent decision not to allow the commissioner to hear criminal cases.

Reiner based that decision on a June 15 hearing for a white defendant who was accused of attacking a black man after saying, “Your kind is not welcome here, nigger.”

“Another nigger case?” Calabro responded, according to a transcript. “Another one where this business came up? We’re not past that yet? I thought we were all past that.”

Calabro has said he only intended to express dismay about the frequency of racially motivated cases. He had heard a similar case five days earlier.

Although the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People initially denounced Calabro for using the epithet, Raymond L. Johnson Jr., president of the Los Angeles chapter, later accepted the commissioner’s apology when it was offered at a prayer breakfast arranged by Supervisor Kenneth Hahn and attended by about 50 people, including more than a dozen black clergymen.

On Tuesday, just after the supervisors’ hearing, Reiner met for 90 minutes with a group of influential blacks and Asians, including Mack, Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., an Urban League board member and prominent defense attorney, and Los Angeles Municipal Court Judge Veronica Simmons-McBeth.

Michael R. Yamaki, past president of the Japanese-American Bar Assn., said he was invited to meet with Reiner because of allegations that Calabro has repeatedly mocked defendants of Asian background by mimicking their accents.

Yamaki said he is conducting his own investigation into these charges--which Calabro has denied--but is not operating as “an arm of Ira Reiner.”

Similarly, at Friday’s news conference, Mark Ridley-Thomas, executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Los Angeles, said the event was arranged of our “own volition, not because we were asked to, or ordered to.”

The participants, including Roland Coleman, a board member of the Langston Bar Assn., which represents 102 black lawyers, also condemned the city of Glendale, the site of several racial incidents during the last year.

Calling Glendale a “bastion of racism,” Cochran, once the No. 3 man in the district attorney’s office, said racial epithets become even more offensive in such a setting. He also questioned the thoroughness of the investigation by the Glendale Municipal Court, which cleared Calabro of racial bias.

Taking umbrage at this description of Glendale, City Councilman Larry Zarian noted that 40% of the city’s population is of “ethnic background” and characterized the recent incidents as the work of “nuts.”

“We have no more of them in Glendale than Burbank does, or Beverly Hills, or Bell Gardens or any other city . . . but it has become fashionable to attack the city of Glendale,” Zarian said.

In another development Friday, an aide to Hahn disclosed that the supervisor last week asked California State Bar President Orville Armstrong to investigate the Calabro controversy so that “this matter can be quickly and satisfactorily closed.”

Armstrong could not be reached Friday, but a secretary said Hahn’s letter had only just arrived.