Tournament of Roses Vows to Seek Minorities

The Tournament of Roses, once more under attack for alleged exclusionary membership practices, has pledged that half of this year’s new recruits will either be members of minority groups or women, and vowed to do more business with minority contractors.

In a letter to activists pressing for the 107-year-old Pasadena organization to open up its membership, Tournament President Delmer D. Beckhart also promised to appoint one black and one woman to the group’s powerful Football Committee, which coordinates the New Year’s Day Rose Bowl game.

The tournament has actively encouraged women and minorities to join the ranks of the white-jacketed volunteers who run the annual Tournament of Roses Parade and Rose Bowl game, he said in the letter.

But black leaders of the Ad Hoc Committee to End Discrimination, which has been lobbying the tournament, responded skeptically.

The tournament commitments outlined in the letter are lacking in specifics, Pasadena developer Jim Morris, a committee leader, said Wednesday. “They’re implementing pretty much everything we’ve been talking about.

“How many people will they recruit this year?” Morris said. “They don’t tell you if it’s 10 or 100.”

Bill Flinn, assistant executive director of the tournament, said he anticipates that the organization will recruit 100 new members. Current membership is 875.

The tournament concessions came as the committee, chaired by Morris and attorney Joe Hopkins, circulated a report charging the organization with presenting “a picture of peace and harmony, while actively practicing discrimination, exclusion and hypocrisy.”

Hopkins has law offices in Pasadena’s predominantly minority northwest neighborhood, where he also publishes the weekly Pasadena Journal. Morris is a developer specializing in building housing for low- and middle-income renters and buyers.

Committee members had threatened to send the report--outlining a purportedly long history of exclusion--to the corporate sponsors of the flower-bedecked floats that parade down Colorado Boulevard on New Year’s Day.

Beckhart responded testily in the letter, addressed to Morris and Hopkins, writing that their allegations were “replete with inaccuracies, half-truths, innuendoes and outright lies,” and threatening the committee with “appropriate remedial action” should they follow through with their threats. Tournament officials would not explain what was meant by “remedial action.”

The tournament and Pasadena’s black community have often sparred on the issue of the tournament’s minority membership. The committee leaders estimate that only 15 of the organization’s active members are black.

Last year, after blacks criticized tournament officials for saying that the organization would never agree to an affirmative action policy for recruitment and promotion, the tournament formed a committee to focus on recruiting black and Latino volunteers.

Two years ago, the tournament aroused anger by appointing a direct descendant of Christopher Columbus as the Rose Parade grand marshal. The dispute was defused by selecting a second grand marshal, then-Rep. Ben Nighthorse Campbell (D-Colo.)

The committee’s report charges that because the tournament is the recipient of bountiful city tax benefits, contributions and resources, it should be required to abide by city laws requiring affirmative action on the part of contractors. This year, for example, the city subsidized the parade and game with $468,000 in city services.

Among other things, the city provides half the cost of police and fire services during the events, as well as makes city streets available to the organization, the report said.

Flinn would not address the specifics of the committee’s charges Wednesday. He said the tournament did not have a record of the number of black or Latino members. He conceded that most of the tournament leadership, including all nine members of the executive committee and 28 of 30 committee chairmen, were white men. A white woman, former La Canada Flintridge Mayor Barbara Pieper, and an Asian-American man, businessman Al Lowe, head committees.

“The key issue is what are they going to do about the executive committee and management, the people who really run the tournament,” Morris said Wednesday.