A Cautionary Lesson for Our Governor : Prop. 187: Orval Faubus won political points as a bigot; is that how Pete Wilson wants to be remembered, too?

It was ironic and even poetic that former Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus died last week on the same day a federal judge in Los Angeles dealt a major legal setback to Proposition 187, the mean-spirited initiative California voters approved last month in an attempt--born of frustration and most likely futile--to stop illegal immigration.

To those of us who consider a decent public-school education to be a fundamental right for all children in this country, those seemingly separate events fit together quite nicely. In the 1950s, Faubus defied federal orders to admit black children to white-only public schools and became a lightning rod in the fight against racial segregation throughout the South. In the 1990s, California Gov. Pete Wilson, the chief proponent of Proposition 187, has become a similar symbol by trying to use the controversial initiative to keep illegal immigrant children from attending public schools in this state. But Wilson’s status as a Faubus for the ‘90s is not unalterable. He can be forced to change.

During the highly charged campaign leading up to the November election, Wilson often portrayed himself as the victim of unfair attacks by opponents of Proposition 187. To hear him talk, he was just a well-meaning chief executive who on his watch happened to discover all the economic damage illegal immigrants allegedly do to this once-Golden State. So he sadly took on the distasteful task of bringing the troubling problem to the attention of the federal government and, not coincidentally, California voters. It was not his fault that this had to be done in the same political year that sloppily written and constitutionally dubious Proposition 187 was put on the ballot by grass-roots immigration restrictionists.

The initiative aims to halt illegal immigration not by drying up the jobs that lure immigrants to California, but by barring illegal immigrants from government-paid social services. That includes, most significantly, access to public schools--even if an illegal immigrants’ children were born in this country. That runs directly counter to U.S. Supreme Court decisions, one of the main reasons U.S. Dist. Judge Mariana R. Pfaelzer issued a restraining order last Wednesday barring implementation of most of Proposition 187 until legal challenges to it run their course, a process that could take years.

But back to the way Pete Wilson sees things: For just discussing the illegal immigration issue on the campaign stump, he wound up being vilified, especially by angry Latino activists who attacked him as the reincarnation of every historic villain from Cortez to Hitler.

Some of the anti-Wilson rhetoric was overblown. But Latinos did have good cause to be angry with the governor. He blatantly used the anti-immigrant initiative to help revive his reelection campaign, which had once been considered moribund. Wilson may not be a racist villain, but he is clearly an ambitious politician who found a hot-button issue and exploited it--much as Orval Faubus did 40 years ago in Arkansas with school desegregation.

Because Faubus became such a symbol of bigotry in the early civil-rights era, it is often forgotten that he was first elected governor in 1954 as a liberal populist who was a moderate on racial issues. But Faubus’ biographers agree that in 1957 he took a segregationist stance because he feared being defeated for reelection by right-wing rivals.

So, when it became time for Arkansas to implement the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision by allowing nine black students to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School, Faubus played the race card. He threatened to use the Arkansas National Guard to turn black students away, but he was trumped by President Eisenhower, who ordered troops from the 101st Airborne division to escort the children to class.

“(Faubus’) hubris, his romping ambition, got in the way of his doing what I suspect he knew was right,” said Robert Savage, chairman of the University of Arkansas’ political science department, in discussing Faubus’ career last week. But Faubus’ segregationist strategy worked. He won reelection and went on to serve as Arkansas’ governor for four moreterms. And, as Faubus’ obituaries noted, he never did apologize for his actions in 1957.

That final point is what sets Faubus apart from another, better-known politician who came to be closely identified with racial segregation, Alabama Gov. George Wallace. Wallace did apologize for his actions in trying to prevent the desegregation of the University of Alabama in 1963. He did so when he again ran for governor in 1982--after the 1965 Voting Rights Act gave black voters in Alabama political clout they had not had before. It is not insignificant, I think, that Faubus retired from office in 1967 rather than run before an Arkansas electorate that included newly empowered black voters.

The lesson here for the many Latinos in California and elsewhere who universally detest Pete Wilson is obvious. He can either remain an Orval Faubus of the ‘90s or become this generation’s George Wallace. It all depends on Latinos’ willingness to start voting in large numbers, as African Americans did in the segregationist South after 1965.