The District That Stretched Almost Anywhere but East : L.A. County: Since the 1950s, the evidence shows that the supervisors have been gerrymandering the 3rd District away from areas of high Latino concentration.

Not surprisingly, the losers in the Los Angeles County redistricting case condemned the decision and the judge who issued it. A “joy ride of judicial activism,” Supervisor Mike Antonovich said. Retiring Supervisor Pete Schabarum, accusing U.S. District Judge David V. Kenyon of “extraordinary personal bias” and an “attempt to rewrite the Voting Rights (Act),” declared sanctimoniously that “district lines should not be based on ethnic factors.”

The supervisors’ statements imply that the current lines were drawn without reference to ethnicity, while the boundaries that Judge Kenyon has ordered redrawn by June 27 must take ethnic groupings into account.

But evidence developed over 18 months of research--presented at the trial and encapsulated in 25 pages of Kenyon’s 131-page opinion--demonstrates conclusively that in order to preserve their seats, the Anglo supervisors and their political operatives repeatedly and systematically engaged in anti-Latino gerrymandering. In light of the criticism of the court decision, the public deserves to review a brief summary of this evidence.

In 1958, the retirement of Supervisor John Anson Ford from the 3rd District seat he had held since 1934 precipitated a bitter campaign between two Los Angeles city councilmen, Ernest Debs and Edward Roybal. In an election that required four recounts, Debs outlasted the first prominent Mexican-American politician in modern Los Angeles history.

Shortly after taking office, Debs struck a private deal with 4th District Supervisor Burton Chace, adding West Hollywood, West Los Angeles and Beverly Hills, then all less than 3% Latino, to his district. There was no requirement to reapportion at that time--indeed, it was only a year before the 1960 census was to be taken. Since this was before the federal reapportionment decisions, there also was no need to equalize population. If there had been, Debs’ district should have moved east, taking people from the overpopulated 1st District, not toward the “beach district.”

Why did Debs go west? Roybal had barely lost an election but not his ambition. And he was merely the first of a series of savvy young Latino political activists. As long as the 3rd District was centered in central and eastern Los Angeles, Debs was not entirely safe. Circumstantial evidence, therefore, suggests that the 3rd District was expanded westward in order to “whiten” it.

The Board of Supervisors reapportioned itself again in 1963, 1965, 1971 and 1981. Each time, there were proposals to move the 3rd District boundary eastward. Only once was such an offer accepted--in 1965, when the district took in Monterey Park and South San Gabriel.

Usually, the 3rd District moved north. In 1963, it leaped over Mulholland Drive into the San Fernando Valley. It continued to thrust northward in 1965 and 1971, further splitting the Valley, which had historically been part of the 5th District. The areas that it annexed in the Valley and in Eagle Rock had much smaller proportions of minority group members than did the district as a whole or adjacent areas on the east, such as Pico Rivera.

Imagine a split-screen television picture. One half shows the growth pattern of the Latino population from 1958 on, spreading from East Los Angeles out the San Gabriel Valley to Pomona and on into San Bernardino and Riverside counties, with another population center eventually developing around the city of San Fernando. The other half shows the 3rd District, repeatedly stretching farther north and west (but never reaching the largely Latino city of San Fernando), as if it were moving as fast as it could in the opposite direction from the areas of Latino increase.

In 1981, Latino activists spent nine months organizing, drawing proposed new district lines, talking to supervisors and attending public meetings in an effort to merge more Latino communities into one supervisorial district. All their efforts were futile. In a back-room deal on the last day before the legal deadline, the supervisors largely kept the status quo, in fact decreasing the Latino percentage in the 3rd District by a small amount. Honeyed words from the supervisors and their political operatives did not hide from the activists the fact that the exercise had been a sham and that Latino areas were just as split as ever.

These are the facts, in much shortened form, that convinced Judge Kenyon that Los Angeles County supervisorial districts were drawn with the intent of depriving Latinos of an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. The five Anglo male supervisors could not protect their seats from challenge unless they split the Latino community. The effect of their actions--to make it much more difficult to elect Latinos to office--was foreseeable and it was foreseen.

In 1938, a great Republican justice of the Supreme Court, Harlan Fiske Stone, established much of the agenda for the modern judicial system. Once the Supreme Court had abandoned its quixotic attempt to block the reform and recovery program of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, what was it to do? Stone set out two goals--to ensure that the political process operated freely and fairly and to protect those “discrete and insular minorities” who, because of prejudice and discriminatory electoral structures, could not compete equally in politics.

In his decision in the county redistricting case, another Republican judge, David Kenyon, has proved once again that the traditions of the “party of Lincoln” are still alive. By ensuring that all citizens, regardless of race and ethnicity, will have equal rights in politics, Kenyon has not departed from the proper role of a judge but has fulfilled Stone’s historic legacy.