Pro-Busing Stand Halted 20-Year Tenure

Despite a 20-year congressional career marked by a wide range of civil rights initiatives and social reforms, James Corman will be forever linked in most San Fernando Valley minds with Bobbi Fiedler and busing.

Corman, a pro-busing Van Nuys Democrat, had faced little opposition before the Republican Fiedler, riding a wave of Valley resentment of a court-ordered desegregation plan, upset him in 1980 by just 752 votes out of 153,770 cast. Fiedler, leader of the anti-busing school board majority, edged him out in a bitter, high-profile campaign based largely on her vow to stop busing.

Headlines of his defeat overshadowed decades of gradual progress.

Corman, 76, grew up the son of a Kansas silica miner who died of lung disease brought on by his work. When young Corman was 13, the Depression forced him and his mother to move to California.

After working his way through UCLA and then USC law school, Corman began practicing law. He won his first election in 1957, earning a City Council seat at age 37. Valley voters sent him to Congress three years later.

Corman plotted a liberal course in Congress, helping pass landmark civil rights legislation as a member of the House Judiciary Committee in the 1960s. He became a leading Democratic advocate for the poor and disadvantaged on the influential House Ways and Means Committee.

The loss to Fiedler, though, chased Corman from electoral politics for good. He still works in Washington as a lobbyist and attorney, and regales friends with upbeat tales of his family life in the Virginia suburbs.

But there has always been a sense of incompleteness over his work in the House.

“It’s just awful to be doing something you love and you think you do reasonably well, and it’s all gone in one election and you can’t do anything about it,” he told The Times years later.