Bias Suit Victory Was Just 1st Round in His Fight With City : In Spite of Minority Gains in Police and Fire Ranks, Ex-Boxer Says Pasadena Can Do More Across the Board

You might expect Charles (Buddy) Bereal of Pasadena to be proud that his city’s police and fire forces were praised recently by an American Civil Liberties Union study as two of the best-integrated departments in Southern California.

After all, those strides grew directly out of a discrimination lawsuit Bereal filed against the city nearly two decades ago.

But Bereal, a longtime activist in Pasadena’s African American community, is nowhere near satisfied. He paid too heavy a price during the eight years he spent fighting the city. His lawsuit--which led to a consent decree in which Pasadena agreed to reform its hiring policies to employ more minorities--not only drained Bereal emotionally, it also brought him close to bankruptcy, and led to a fistfight with a past city manager.

“The police and fire numbers have come up, but that doesn’t say anything about the rest of the city,” said Bereal, who is campaigning to win the presidency of the Pasadena chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.

A former welterweight boxer-turned-coach who now counsels youths in gangs, Bereal is a consummate political street fighter whose burning personality collided long ago with a burning social issue.

While being raised in Pasadena and Los Angeles, Bereal said he acquired an early sense of racial injustice from the tales of discrimination told by his Mexican American grandfather, whose name, Villareal, his family anglicized to Bereal (and now pronounces “Bur- rell “).

“The old man used to tell us stories about Texas,” said Bereal, 48. “One of his brothers got lynched . . . and he said they used to shoot Mexicans like they were rabbits.”

To finance his way through college, Bereal took up boxing and earned a measure of fame as a welterweight in televised bouts.

But his boxing career was cut short, he said, after he and other athletes were recruited by then-Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty for a volunteer anti-gang program and a young boy accidentally poked the up-and-coming boxer in the eye, detaching a retina.

So Bereal switched to the trades, starting as an electrical cable splicer with the city of Pasadena. A year later, he was demoted to construction work, “basically a ditchdigger,” he said.

Determined to regain his previous job, he took the electrician’s test again and flunked. He took it again, this time letting a fellow employee--a white man--copy his answers. The employee passed with a score of 97%. But Bereal was told he had flunked again, he said.

Angered, he searched for others who believed that they had been similarly discriminated against. The resulting class-action lawsuit, filed in federal court in 1975 by Bereal and nine other black and Latino workers, alleged discriminatory practices in the city’s hiring policies for police, firefighters and workers in skilled trades and maintenance.

During the legal battle, the city placed Bereal on unpaid medical leave--a decision he said cut off his eligibility to receive benefits from any other government source. He fell behind on his mortgage, sold his house at a loss and despaired as he saw his wife’s hair fall out in clumps from the stress.

Pushed to the edge, he said, he took his son, then 5 years old, to City Manager Don McIntyre to settle the lawsuit. Instead, Bereal and McIntyre got into a dispute, with Bereal smashing the city manager in the face. He was charged with a felony but acquitted.

Bereal went on to sell his two cars and motorcycle, using the money to buy a diesel truck and work for himself. In 1980, he became a minister, preaching in the Hillside Tabernacle Church of God in Christ, and in 1981 unsuccessfully ran for the City Council.

Finally, in 1983, the lawsuit was settled in a consent decree in which the city agreed to upgrade hiring goals for minorities, rehire those it had discriminated against, and pay each discrimination victim $5,000. At the time of the settlement, blacks and Latinos made up 24% of Police Department employees and 29% of Fire Department employees.

The results of the suit were demonstrated last month when the ACLU reported that Pasadena’s Fire and Police departments had “no equal in the region” for hiring women and minorities in proportion to their numbers in the general population. In a city in which minorities are 54% of the population, blacks and Latinos now make up 51% of Police Department employees and 38% of Fire Department employees. Asian Americans are 4% of the police force and 2% of the Fire Department.

The 1983 settlement swept Bereal back into city employment. He oversaw a youth boxing program, first with the Police Department and then with the Recreation Department.

Yet again he found himself in a squabble. In 1990, he cut back on his expenses during a city-funded trip to a Washington state athletic event. He says he was trying to stretch the money to take a youngster in the city program along; in effect, that meant the city was subsidizing the boy’s trip. A criminal investigation ensued, but no charges were filed after Bereal repaid the money and left city employment for good on a medical retirement.

For the last four years, he has worked for a county anti-gang program and has been active in the NAACP. He is now seeking to head the NAACP’s 800-member Pasadena chapter, which holds its election today. Bereal vows to challenge what he considers the city’s paternalistic attitude toward northwest Pasadena, where many of the city’s low-income black and Latino residents live, and where he lives with his wife and three children.

Despite the ACLU’s praise, Bereal wants the city to do more hiring and promotion of African Americans throughout municipal ranks, especially in management. City statistics show that blacks, who make up 17% of the population, hold 16% of the city’s administrative posts, but Bereal and other blacks have protested to city officials. City Manager Philip Hawkey, while denying accusations that he has failed to promote enough blacks, has established a management-employee committee to look into the issue.

Pasadena’s NAACP president, Taylor Morton, says Bereal’s connections to young people, the community and the church will strengthen the NAACP.

“A person who came from where he came from sends an important message,” Councilman Chris Holden said. “It’s important to see a tough guy, a fighter, take on the system as best he can (and) be a positive role model.”

Others in the city view Bereal as a threatening, angry man whose tools are accusation instead of building bridges.

“He’s not a coalition builder,” said Judith Zitter, a City Council aide.

Bereal says he only wants to see community members empowered and employed. He also wants to start a crisis intervention team in Pasadena to talk to gang members before acts of violence are committed.

“We are on the verge of turning into a ghetto,” he said of Pasadena, referring to increasing gang activity that has moved beyond the city’s northwest section.