Minority Leaders Vow Solidarity : Reapportionment: Groups vow to challenge any plan that would sacrifice their voting power to preserve seats of Anglo incumbents in the Legislature.

Leaders of Los Angeles County’s Latino, African-American and Asian-American communities made a unity vow Friday to challenge any legislative reapportionment plan that would attempt to sacrifice their voting power to preserve the seats of Anglo incumbents in the state Legislature.

“We will not be reduced to fighting with minority groups with which we have a great common interest,” declared Rita Walters, a black member of the Los Angeles school board now running for the City Council. “We cannot afford to put one group against another.”

Walters and other blacks warned members of the state Senate Elections and Reapportionment Committee at a downtown hearing that failure to maintain two black-dominated Senate districts in the county could be challenged as a violation of the federal Voting Rights Act.

The 27th and 28th District seats are held by Sens. Bill Greene and Diane Watson. But the final 1990 census is expected to show that Latinos now make up more than 50% of the Greene district, which includes most of South-Central Los Angeles and an eastern area around South Gate and Huntington Park. There has been speculation it could be reshaped into a new Latino-dominated district.

But Sen. Art Torres, a Los Angeles Democrat and a member of the committee, promised that Latinos would not seek to make their gains at the expense of black political power.

He told NAACP leaders who testified before the committee that their group had “paved the way for somebody like me to have the civil rights that so many of you fought for. We have a responsibility to make sure that the standards your brothers and sisters won are not forsaken in political expediency.”

Joseph Duff, president of the Los Angeles NAACP, replied: “We are striding forward together for freedom.”

Representatives of Asian-American groups also pledged to work with Latinos and blacks to make certain all are fully represented in Congress and the Legislature.

Asian-Americans constitute about 10% of the state’s population, but hold no seats in the 40-member Senate or the 80-member Assembly. There are nine blacks and seven Latinos in the Legislature. Both black senators and two of the three Latino senators come from Los Angeles County.

The Legislature will redraw congressional and legislative district lines this year to reflect population shifts during the 1980s and to accommodate an increase in U.S. House seats from 45 to 52. While Los Angeles County’s Anglo and black populations increased modestly, the numbers of Latinos and Asian-Americans soared. Federal law requires the new redistricting plan to fully reflect minority population.

Democratic legislative leaders in control of past redistricting efforts have been accused of splitting concentrations of minorities among various districts so that Democrats could control the maximum number of seats. As a result, minorities claim they have been denied the chance to elect members of their own groups to the Legislature.

Leaders of these groups have told lawmakers that any such effort in 1990 is likely to be challenged successfully under federal law, just as they sued to win creation of a Latino district seat on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Under recent changes to the Voting Rights Act, suits are easier to win because challengers no longer have to prove that those who drew district lines intended to discriminate.

As most minority groups have been predominantly Democratic, their criticism of reapportionment in the past has been muted. This year, however, representatives of all three groups have told the committee their first priority is their own ethnic or minority communities of interest rather than their political affiliations or even the integrity of city or county boundary lines.

Friday’s hearing was one of 13 the committee is holding before beginning to draw new Senate districts on the basis of final census figures expected July 15.

Los Angeles County grew during the 1980s, but not as fast as its neighbors and may lose one of 11 Senate districts now wholly within the county.

Voting strength is flowing to the faster-growing regions of Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and San Diego counties, said Sen. Herschel Rosenthal, a Los Angeles Democrat.

“They’re all going to be gaining. We are not going to have as many districts. All the lines are going to change--all the lines,” he said.