‘90s Civil Rights Battle Lines Drawn Around Prop. 187 : Immigration: California protest strategy harks back to Mississippi’s Freedom Summer of 1964.

They’re calling it “California Summer: 1995,” a conscious throwback to the storied Mississippi Freedom Summer of ‘64, when hundreds of volunteers descended on the South to work on behalf of the burgeoning civil rights movement.

This time, the battle lines are being drawn over very distinct issues--defending the rights of immigrants and affirmative action--and the central venue is California, Ground Zero in the national debates swirling around immigration and affirmative action.

“These days, the eyes of the entire nation are on California, much as they were on the southern states in the ‘60s,” said James Lafferty, a Freedom Summer veteran who is now executive director of the Los Angeles office of the National Lawyers Guild, the activist association behind the summer campaign.

The guild unveiled its plan--touted as a “new civil rights movement”--at a Downtown union hall this week, attended mostly by members of the Spanish-language press.

The group hopes to bring scores of volunteer lawyers, law students and others to California from throughout the nation. Tasks would range from working on the legal challenge against Proposition 187 to building up support for affirmative action, which would be outlawed under a proposed ballot initiative expected to be put before California voters next year.

Organizers view the current assaults on immigrant rights and affirmative action as part of a broad offensive against poor people of color.

“It’s the right wing trying to attack different parts of the community separately,” said Libby Cooper, a veteran human rights lawyer who has worked in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East and came to Los Angeles to direct the summer project.

Leaders of the Proposition 187 and anti-affirmative action movements deny targeting racial groups and call their causes worthy outgrowths of legitimate discontent.

“This is typical liberal thinking. They want to muddle the whole issue,” said Robert Kiley, an Orange County political consultant who managed the Proposition 187 campaign and also favors repeal of affirmative action protections.

The California summer offensive, organizers say, has already enlisted 70 volunteers from as far away as New York. Sympathetic area residents have offered housing for volunteers and one person has donated a car.

Among the volunteers is Amy Dalton, an 18-year-old student at Swarthmore College outside Philadelphia who helped organize a student “Coalition Against Xenophobia” there.

“We need all the people we can get to help,” said Juan Jose Gutierrez, executive director of One Stop Immigration, an Eastside social service organization that is among many Latino groups nationwide planning a 1960s-style march on Washington next year.

Volunteers will help One Stop in assisting the recent deluge of citizenship applicants, work in voter registration campaigns and organize immigrant workers.

Still others will prepare position papers backing affirmative action, said Dominique Shelton, board member of the Black Women Layers Assn. of Los Angeles, also slated to receive volunteers.

Compared to 1964, organizers said, today’s campaign has both advantages and drawbacks.

The California network of sympathetic advocacy groups--largely non-existent in Mississippi--is clearly a plus, noted Lafferty. Less encouraging, he said, is a national political atmosphere hostile to both immigrants and affirmative action, a contrast to the pro-civil rights consensus that prevailed in Washington three decades ago.