Police, Protesters Clash at Campus Debate

After a group of rowdy demonstrators clashed with helmeted police outside the Cal State Northridge Student Union on Wednesday afternoon, calm prevailed inside as ex-Klansman David Duke and a civil rights activist debated the merits of affirmative action before a mostly minority audience.

More than 100 police faced off against rock-throwing, shoving protesters drawn to the campus by the widely publicized debate on affirmative action featuring Duke and Los Angeles civil rights leader Joe Hicks.

As many as half a dozen protesters were arrested as demonstrations turned violent when some students who said they were from UC Berkeley and other Bay Area schools gathered outside the Northridge Student Union to assail the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard as he left the 2:30 p.m. debate with Hicks, witnesses said. Police said four of the six arrested were from the Bay Area.

The debate, held before a generally respectful sell-out audience that was quieted at times by ushers, produced no fireworks.

Duke, a former Louisiana legislator, said discrimination against whites, through affirmative action, is as morally wrong as discrimination against minorities.

“I’m not a white supremacist. I don’t believe any race should rule over another,” Duke said.

Hicks, executive director of a Los Angeles advocacy group that works to calm inter-ethnic tensions, said “preference is something still enjoyed by America’s majority population. . . . Discrimination is a part of American life today.”

Duke’s visit blossomed into a national debate after backers of Proposition 209--the November ballot initiative aimed at ending racial and gender preferences in state and local government hiring, contracts and college admissions--protested that it was a political “dirty trick.” The pro-209 forces argued that the invitation to Duke was a scheme by student opponents to sabotage the initiative by linking it to an avowed racist.

The debate and the furor that surrounded it brought media and public attention to a campaign that has made little news.

Duke received a generally civil but unsympathetic response from the mostly minority audience.

Outside the debate, LAPD officers in riot gear and a beefed-up campus police force used tear gas, batons and rubber bullets to force back a crowd of more than 1,000, clearing a path for Duke. Later, police in riot gear, on horseback and hovering in helicopters took up positions around the campus for several hours in a tense standoff with a taunting, chanting crowd.

The confrontation capped an uneasy afternoon in which protesters, many of whom had traveled to the Northridge campus from Berkeley, repeatedly attempted to incite students.

Just moments before police moved in, a woman who identified herself as Yvette Felarca, representing the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action by Any Means Necessary, yelled epithets at Los Angeles police officers.

The violence climaxed three weeks of growing tensions and publicity over the debate between Duke and Hicks, who were paid $4,000 each by the student government to come to the San Fernando Valley campus.

Ward Connerly, a University of California regent who heads the Proposition 209 campaign, asked Cal State Northridge President Blenda J. Wilson to cancel the invitation, “unless it is your choice to dishonor your university and the integrity of the issue before us.”

A last-ditch attempt by a Northridge graduate student to block the debate in court failed when a judge dismissed the contention that Duke’s speaking fee was a misuse of public funds.

Having failed to block the debate, Connerly staged his own counter-rally, addressing about 50 supporters of the initiative during a noon gathering at the Van Nuys Recreation Center, a few miles from campus.

Connerly told the crowd that the anti-affirmative action initiative is designed to “prohibit all discrimination” and repeated many of his earlier criticisms regarding the Duke invitation.

“I think it’s a travesty,” Connerly said of the invitation during an interview. “It’s an insult to people like me, it’s an insult to Jewish people and it’s an insult to gays and lesbians.”

But the interest focused on campus, where free tickets to the 430-seat Student Union were being scalped for up to $300 before the debate and spectators were searched at the door.

Early in the day, the event got off to a noisy start with a crowd that contained elements of 1960s-era political demonstration and 1990s business as usual. The mood was clearly pro-affirmative action, yet most students appeared nonchalantly amused by all the activity, which drew heavy media coverage.

An hour before the debate was to begin, students stopped between classes to listen to the chants of protesters. Student Senate President Vladimir Cerna criticized the influx of outside agitators.

“Most of the protesters don’t even go to school here,” he said during an interview as he was mobbed by more than half a dozen reporters. “They’re from Berkeley and San Francisco. Our people are acting cool.”

Wilson said the university took the proper security measures and blamed the violence on outsiders.

“Everyone should be aware that the altercations took place outside,” she said. “None of them were [Cal State Northridge] students or staff.”

“My sense is that the preparations were adequate and necessary,” she said.

She did not attend the debate, she said, because “I was not interested in hearing Mr. Duke. . . . I don’t find him an admirable being.”