Following in His Footsteps

They marched through Oxnard’s downtown wearing everything from bright dashikis to Dallas Cowboys jackets. The hundreds who streamed down 5th Street on Monday still shared the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of an America that offers equal opportunity to all races.

But like Bruce Stewart, many who commemorated the slain civil rights leader’s birthday also see efforts to dismantle affirmative action programs as the latest threat to King’s vision.

“If we didn’t have affirmative action, people like me wouldn’t be in the position I am now,” said Stewart, a 52-year-old Oxnard banker, who is half black and half Japanese American. “It’s not about quotas. It’s about opportunities for qualified people.”

Stewart was one of more than 250 residents, church leaders and Ventura County politicians who walked the seven blocks from Plaza Park to the Oxnard Community Center for the city’s 10th annual Martin Luther King Jr. Birthday Observance. In light of Gov. Pete Wilson’s support for an initiative that would abolish state programs benefiting minorities, organizers picked “Responding Affirmatively with the Facts” as the event’s theme. And many used the morning to counter arguments that favor wiping out affirmative action.

“No one is going to take your job away,” said Oxnard City Councilman Bedford Pinkard, chairman of the Martin Luther King Jr. Committee of Ventura County. “We are not talking about giving jobs to people who are less qualified. We are talking about a level playing field.”

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As the Oxnard High School band belted out tunes, the marchers made their way to the community center on Hobson Way where the crowd swelled to more than 500.

Keynote speaker Diane Miller, a Republican who heads a political group created largely to help preserve affirmative action programs, scolded Pete Wilson.

In July, at Wilson’s urging, the University of California Board of Regents voted to end race-based preferences in admissions, hiring and contracting within the university system.

In her speech that wandered from a discussion of pop psychology to electoral politics, Miller said that 80% of tenured university professors nationwide and 95% of CEO’s in Fortune 500 companies are white males.

“That to me is preferential treatment,” said Miller, who is the executive director of the Women of America Campaign.

Punctuating Miller’s address, the members of the Ventura County Mass Choir sang the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome,” prompting members of the audience to stand up and lock hands.

Marchers said minorities had made many gains since the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. But they also said that America had a long way to go before realizing King’s dream of a society where people “will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

“Right now, racism is still prevalent,” said Michelle Brown, a 36-year-old self-employed medical consultant from Port Hueneme. “It’s just not as blatant as it was before.”

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Brown said a few weeks ago her two children were playing outside a local fast-food restaurant when another adult yelled, “Get the little black kids off the [playground].”

Joanie Stevenson, an 18-year-old Oxnard resident, said she hoped people would take away at least one message from the march: “It’s not a race thing,” she said. “It’s a people thing.”

Pinkard said people must continue to fight discrimination and battle any efforts to reverse the gains made since King died in 1968.

“We have a lot of people who come out here once a year and this is it,” Pinkard said. “They must remember that this is an ongoing struggle.”