High Court Declines Anaheim Man’s Job-Bias Case

The U.S. Supreme Court, having staked out a civil-rights position that critics say is hostile to affirmative action, on Monday rejected an Orange County man’s last bid to show that the county denied him several jobs because of his race.

Without comment, the Supreme Court refused to hear a final appeal by Kenneth Robinson, 47, of Anaheim. That lets stand a 1987 ruling by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that found no evidence to support Robinson’s claim that the county refused to hire him for any of four open professional positions because he was black.

The decision came in the wake of a string of major Supreme Court decisions this year--including one Monday involving firefighters in Birmingham, Ala.--that civil rights activists say combine to make it far tougher for minority workers to show workplace discrimination.

“We’re thrilled to see that we’ve prevailed in the Superior Court,” Michael Adams, an Orange County personnel manager, said in an interview. “I’d like to say that this charge was so clearly unfounded that we always knew we’d prevail, but these things are always up in the air.

“This should prove that our hiring procedures are aboveboard and that the county is working very hard to achieve parity in the ethnic makeup of its workplace,” Adams added.

But Robinson, who has a law degree and is now unemployed, pointed to the Supreme Court’s refusal to honor his appeal as another example of a conservative court that has backed away from the civil rights advances of decades past.

In 1983, Robinson moved to Orange County for the sake of his wife’s job transfer and applied for four jobs with the county in professional investigator and examiner positions--one in Superior Court, another in the Social Services Agency, and two in the Community Services Agency.

Turned down for all four openings, he claimed in a federal lawsuit that county officials, despite their assertions to the contrary, knew that he was black from his job application.

And he pointed as evidence of a broader racial bias to what he said was a complete absence of even a single male black employee at that time in Superior Court.

The county countered with statistics on its female black employees, persuading a federal court judge to throw out the claim altogether before it got to trial.

And the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, rejecting Robinson’s claim of an under-represented black-male work force, asserted in its 1987 decision that: “There is clearly no racial discriminatory impact on blacks as a whole.”

Patrick Patterson, an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in Los Angeles, who represented Robinson in his appeal, said that in light of the Supreme Court’s other recent civil-rights cases, “this result is certainly not a surprise.”

But he and attorneys for the county cautioned against drawing any broader legal interpretations from the court’s decision not to hear the case.

“They take the cases that they want to take, and you can’t read much into that,” said Robert C. Carlson, an Orange lawyer who defended the county in the appeal.

A disappointed Robinson, however, lashed out at the decision’s implications, saying: “It just seems that everybody in this country constitutes a class (in the area of equal employment practices) except black men, and that’s now unfortunately the law of the land.

“From slavery times, people have hired black women, but they don’t want the black men. It’s a slave mentality.”

Superior Court Administrator Alan Slater deemed Robinson’s claims of racial bias “preposterous and groundless.” As with all hirings, court officials who reviewed Robinson’s 1983 application never knew his race, Slater said.

County affirmative action officer Ben Alvillar said in an interview that the county subscribes to a “voluntary affirmative action” program, meaning that it seeks to conduct outreach programs to make up for any “noticeable lack” of minority-worker representation but does not use quotas or formulas.

Employee figures provided by Alvillar show that, as of December, 1988, minority males made up 11.9% of the total county work force, and minority females 15.9%. Minorities showed their highest representation (43.6%) among service maintenance workers and their lowest (12.9%) among officials and administrators.

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Part I, Page 1.