Los Angeles Times Interview : Arthur Fletcher : Fighting to Stop the GOP’s Headlong Plunge to the Right

Arthur A. Fletcher, the Republican Party’s most prominent African American official and its most durable champion of civil rights, poses a problem for the GOP as it gears up for the 1996 election year.

For 50 years, going back to his college days in Kansas, Fletcher has been a Republican activist. Since the age of 30, when he was vice chairman of the Kansas State GOP and helped lobby a fair-employment law through the state legislature, he has been a friend and ally of Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.), the early front-runner in the race for the Republican nomination.

But the 70-year-old Fletcher, a member and former chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, now accuses the GOP of waging “total war” on affirmative action and of using “a group of African American hired guns” to sow confusion in the black community on the issue. He recently broke his political ties with Dole after the senator announced he no longer supports affirmative action. Fletcher wrote a letter, in February, to Dole expressing his disappointment but says the senator never replied.

As assistant secretary of labor in the Nixon Administration, Fletcher devised the first successful enforcement plan for affirmative action, known as the “revised Philadelphia Plan,” that requires employers doing business with the government to set goals and timetables for hiring minorities. As later amended, the plan includes women.

In a conversation last week, Fletcher said he fears the attempt to roll back affirmative action could further aggravate an existing tense racial situation in this country. Already, he says, the United States faces the danger of a race war with heavily armed militants on both sides.

Fletcher, a tall, husky former professional football player for the old Baltimore Colts, is the father of five grown children. He speaks rapid fire in a deep voice and, leaving no doubt that he feels the right wing controls his party, says African Americans think the GOP’s “contract with America” is a contract on them.

Fletcher served as President Gerald R. Ford’s deputy assistant for urban affairs, as President Ronald Reagan’s vice chairman of the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corp., and President George Bush’s Civil Rights Commission chairman. President Bill Clinton named his own chairman, but Fletcher remains a commission member until his term expires next November.

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Question: How have you seen the Republican Party change from your early days?

Answer: From the time I joined the party as an active participant, in 1948, up to the end of Nixon’s first term, the party was reasonably interested in trying to increase the actual participation and involvement of African Americans. After Nixon’s second election in 1972, there was a decided change. At that point, the philosophy of winning elections became anti-black and the party was less than interested in making an organized effort to bring the African American community into the party.

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Q: Does it concern you that all the Democratic congressional delegation from Georgia, for example, is black, and all the Republican delegation is white?

A: That really says something with reference to what is happening to our two major parties. There is real concern in the black community, and among what I call fair-minded white Americans, that the Democratic Party could end up being the so-called “black party.” And with race being the issue that it is today, that bodes not only ill for the black community but it bodes ill for the country as a whole.

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Q: What about the Christian right’s influence in the Republican Party?

A: It’s quite significant and doesn’t surprise me that much. The perception in the black community is that the Southern Baptist church, which is 12 to 15 million strong, is anti-black. In the perception of African Americans, that group includes Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and some other televangelists.

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Q: You’ve been a long-time ally of Sen. Bob Dole’s. He hasn’t answered your letter yet on his opposition to affirmative action?

A: No, Bob hasn’t answered my letter. But it seems to me that Phil Gramm, Pat Buchanan and Pete Wilson and Bob Dornan--all are so far to the right that they’re trying to pull Bob over there, with the clear understanding that if you don’t come over and join this far-out, right-wing element, you will not win the nomination at the national convention.

So Bob understands that being in front in the polls is one thing, and winning the nomination in San Diego is something else. So he’s caught between a rock and a hard place, and I understand that.

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Q: So, realistically, does he have to pander to the right to get the nomination?

A: He’s got to give them considerable consideration if he intends to win the nomination. Of course, in my case, I’m planning to enter the race and lift the debate to a higher ethical and moral level, and actually deal with the issues that this country is faced with . . . the name-calling and the mud wrestling will be over and we’ll be really talking about such issues as America’s present and future security, both internal and external--and now we understand that we do indeed have an internal-security problem, which nobody would have admitted before the bombing in Oklahoma City.

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Q: You mentioned internal security being a problem, but some Republicans and Democrats have dismissed the militia of Montana, Michigan and others around the country as a lunatic fringe--”wackos,” as they put it. Is it a mistake to dismiss these people as just being a little fringe that don’t represent a threat?

A: . . . Trying to deny that a crisis exists is dangerous. It’s time to face the reality of what’s really upon us and deal with it. But I’m finding that everybody says we’ve got to protect First Amendment rights now. I don’t have any problem with that, but that doesn’t give us an excuse to put this issue on the back burner and pretend that it doesn’t exist. It does exist, and it is dangerous. So much so that--I don’t want to be an alarmist, but--the possibilities of a Rwanda or a Bosnia in the U.S. is as real as it could be.

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Q: After the L.A. riots in 1992, you said you thought the riots sprang from what you called “a cancer of racism that’s been eating away at the nation’s moral fiber and infecting practically every institution in government--education, health, and the judicial system, the cornerstone of our democracy.” Is that the way you see it now?

A: That’s exactly the way I feel. Nothing has changed. Except we know it now, and we can’t hide it and it’s time to deal with it.

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Q: Are you concerned that the Republicans, with their emphasis on rolling back affirmative action, might kill the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights? It’s almost been killed several other times. Unless you have reauthorizing legislation, you’ll go out of business in September, 1996.

A: They’ll reauthorize it. We’re not an enforcement agency. If we had been an enforcement agency and had some power to cause some direct change, then I’d be concerned . . .

But it’s very clear that that element of the Republican Party that has made race an issue and gender-bashing an issue have their own think tanks, have their own war rooms and are all set at the crack of the bat to put a spin on any negative raised and come out looking like saints.

They have actually put in place the instrumentalities to defend and justify just about any negative that they come up with. In addition to that, they have hired a group of African American “guns” and are paying them well . . . I’m talking about a party that has decided to make total war on affirmative action, starting with confusing African Americans about what equality of opportunity and the message for getting there is all about. Get them to debating the issue among themselves and plant some agents inside the black community to confuse them. A la Tom Sowell. A la Shelby Steele . . .

Those youngsters are being well-financed by right-wing conservatives to cause chaos, confusion and dissension within the black community. They put them out front and get them on talk shows and get them to write books.

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Q: And you say they finance them.

A: Finance them. Not only that, but sell them. There is a group of corporations that buy those books and give them to their employees, then bring Tom Sowell in, and bring in Williams, and bring in Steele to lecture to the work force in a way of saying you have no reason--if you read these guys--you have no reason to be guilty about the plight of African Americans.

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Q: What do you think about the “contract with America”?

A: I find it kind of clever. Some folks call it a contract on America. I might add that that’s what most of the African American community thinks. They think it’s not only a contract on America; they think--when it’s all said and done--it’s a contract on them. The African American community is really concerned about the whole Reagan approach that is now a part of the Gingrich approach--in which they want to call for pulling the plug on programs.

Reagan offered no program, whatsoever, to improve the quality of life for people living on the margin during the full eight years he was in there. Gingrich and the right-wing element that’s running the show now, likewise, have yet to come forth with a program that would cause it at least to be a soft landing on the part of people living life on the margin, but also with the promise of turning it around.

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Q: In the year before the 1992 Los Angeles riots, you were warning about how bad the situation was. And you predicted there were going to be problems in the cities if something wasn’t done. You seem to be saying that, once again, we’re at the point where you can have another explosion.

A: It’s worse than that . . . the difference between the ‘60s, when American cities were on fire, and now is that, this time, the suburbs are armed to the teeth. In addition to that, the ghetto is armed to the teeth.

Couple with that masses of white folk who live in the suburbs and have never really communicated with African Americans. They have no idea that, in their heart of hearts, they’re peace-loving people themselves. Consequently, if a handful of radicals react violently on either side of the equation--and we now know we’ve got them on both sides--we could have a race war.

I wish I could really capture the phrase that would say what I think, where I think we are right now. There is an uneasiness in the black community that almost defies description. I was trying to describe it in a presentation I made. I use the example of farm animals when something is getting ready to happen. They go into an interesting behavior pattern. You’ll see the horse drop his tail . . . and you look around and you can see the clouds, that something’s getting ready to happen. There is that kind of uneasiness in the African American community right now. They anticipate that something horrible is going to happen if we don’t get it stopped.

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Q: That is an extremely scary scenario. Are there other people you know in the African American community, or in the white community, for that matter, who share that sort of view?

A: Oh, yeah . . . in the black community, you can go into any contact point and spend some time there, and the conversation will drift around to how uneasy they feel and how dangerous they feel the times are right now. I imagine that since the explosion in Oklahoma City, it’s accelerated quite a little bit. You can go to barber shops, you can go to beauty salons, and different water holes or back-yard picnics and parties in the African American community, it will drift to that.

Then pretty soon you’ll hear the conversation start talking about the worry and concern we have over the young generation that’s in high school today and that element in colleges and universities and community colleges. Real dire concern about what might happen to them.

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Q. Is the same thing true in the Hispanic community?

A: The Hispanics, after Proposition 187. There was a very rude awakening for them. And what you’re finding when you have conversations with them . . . some of them are still kind of shellshocked over the blatant racism . . .

There is deep, deep concern, and it’s kind of a shock to them. Some of their leadership didn’t perceive that they were being seen in the same light as African Americans.