Sen. Bradley Brings Racial Harmony Plea to L.A.

Sen. Bill Bradley (D-New Jersey), one of the few white politicians who regularly speaks out on race relations, spent 40 minutes Thursday lecturing a group of business leaders about the need for blacks and whites to get along better in order for America to successfully face its multiracial future.

Then Bradley left the banquet room crowd of 300 suits, nearly all of them filled by whites, most of them middle-aged men, and ran straight into that future--and into the racial complexity that defines Los Angeles but is often overlooked.

Sprinting into a nearby conference room to keep a meeting with high school students, Bradley found that in a matter of seconds his speech already seemed out of date.

The mostly Latino group of teenagers from Jordan, Wilson, Sylmar and Verdugo Hills High Schools didn’t need to be told, as Bradley had mentioned in the speech, that whites will be barely a majority of the work force in four years and that Americans must prepare for a diverse future. They attend schools and live in neighborhoods that have few whites.

They quickly pointed out to Bradley that his speech’s black-white focus was less relevant to teenagers growing up in a city where the combined total of Latinos and Asian Americans exceeds the total of whites and blacks.

“You talked about problems between blacks and whites, but do you think the situation is just as bad between blacks and Latinos?” asked Elvia Elizarraras, 18, from Jordan High School. Her school in Watts was nearly all black for decades, but is now mostly Latino.

Bradley said he decided to concentrate on black and white issues in his speech to keep it tightly focused, but acknowledged his oversight to the students.

“We can’t get locked rigidly into viewing race relations as a black and white conflict, there’s much more fluidity to the problem,” he said.

Bradley’s speech to Town Hall, a public affairs organization, at a downtown hotel repeated themes he has been pushing for more than four years. He began regularly giving lengthy speeches on race in 1991, first on the Senate floor and then at the 1992 Democratic National Convention.

Bradley, who has said he will not seek another Senate term and is considered a possible independent candidate for the presidency next year, last spoke to the Town Hall group in March 1992--one month before riots were sparked by not guilty verdicts for LAPD officers in the beating of Rodney G. King.

Bradley began that speech with the same opening line: “Slavery was America’s original sin, and race remains our unresolved dilemma.”

Today, discussions of race in California often revolve around affirmative action and immigration. Bradley did not link racism and immigration issues in his Town Hall speech, but discussed immigration in depth when asked about it by a Wilson High School student.

In his speech, Bradley spoke less like a political candidate than an advocate trying to move President Clinton to act more decisively on issues involving race.

“I believe he is strongest when he talks about conviction related to race because I do think he has that conviction” Bradley said.

“But the question we need to hear him answer is: What are we going to do about it? One would like to see him . . . remind people of our history . . . [to] get beyond these stupid divisions that diminish our possibilities as individuals and as a nation.”