State GOP Secretary Has Rare Quality--Street Credibility

The California Republican Party needs Shannon Reeves more than he needs the GOP--and that is the key to his power. He’s smart. He’s 33, ambitious, combative. He’s a small businessman. And as the recently elected secretary of the California GOP, Reeves is the most prominent African American Republican in California.

In the age of Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Clarence Thomas and J.C. Watts, black conservatives may have lost some of their novelty. But Reeves has what most African American Republicans lack: street credibility.

More Al Sharpton than Alan Keyes, Reeves is president of the Oakland chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, one of the nation’s largest. He runs two gas stations. In Oakland. In the ‘hood. On former crack-deal corners.

Reeves was born to a single mother. He went to a historically black college. He lives in a black neighborhood. He likes soul food and mastered good old Pentecostal “call and response.”

When traveling around the state to meet with party faithful, Reeves is often the keynote speaker and the only minority in the room. As such he is called upon to play many roles: Republican cheerleader, party bureaucrat and GOP attack-dog. He is also the sounding board on all things ethnic and, Reeves says, the only one who can link the concerns of minorities to the Republican agenda.

“There is no one in the party who is from the heart of the community,” he said. “They don’t go to church with anybody black. They don’t live near anybody black. They don’t know anything about the black experience.” Reeves wants to teach them, and Republicans, it seems, want to be taught.

“The Democrats have done a better job of creating coalitions in recent elections than we have,” said Shawn Steel, a Southern California lawyer who is chairman of the California GOP. “And President Bush and [Florida] Gov. [Jeb] Bush have made it stunningly clear that the chief goal in every one of our organizations is to embrace diversity.”

Perhaps Reeves’ most well-publicized lesson was the very public backhand he recently delivered to Ward Connerly, author of the state’s ban on affirmative action in state institutions, Proposition 209, passed by voters in 1996.

Connerly had fired up the GOP machinery to collect signatures for his new Racial Privacy Initiative, which would have prohibited key government agencies from collecting data on ethnicity--effectively broadening the affirmative action ban.

Reeves stopped him. Sending more than 1,400 letters to Republican foot soldiers around the state, Reeves denounced the measure as unwise, untimely and divisive. Reeves says Connerly’s first initiative “lost the governor’s mansion, the Assembly. . .” Days after Reeves’ rebuke, the GOP withdrew its support and Connerly rescheduled his ballot drive for next year.

“Shannon said something that everyone was thinking but no one was going to say out loud,” said one prominent state Republican.

This ability to plumb the depths of ethnic tension without seeming tone deaf or insensitive has won Reeves friends among Democrats as well. Reeves got his start in politics on Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign and remains good friends with Jackson’s son, Jesse Jackson Jr., a liberal Illinois congressman. Reeves counts among his mentors former NAACP leader Ben Hooks, and he is scrupulous about retaining his ties to African American communities and concerns.

“I would never be able to sleep at night having the people in my community hate me,” Reeves said.

Hours after sitting on a dais with President Bush at his World Affairs Council speech in Century City last week, Reeves appears on ABC’s “Politically Incorrect” with Rep. Harold Ford (D-Tenn). Both men have been on the show before and it is clear why. Ford, the son of a legendary Democratic legislator, is serving his second term as the nation’s youngest congressman--and his first as one of People magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful People.” Reeves is short and pudgy, but his sharp phrasing and homey diatribes serve him well. The president has just made news by flatly turning down Gov. Gray Davis’ request for federal intervention in the energy crisis and this what the host, Bill Maher, wants to discuss.

“When I was a kid a bag of potato chips was 15 cents. Now it’s 99 cents,” Reeves tells Maher. “We gonna cap the price of potato chips?”

Ford responds: “If you took those 15-cent potato chips and made them $15--yeah, you’d be complaining.”

Then eyeing Reeves’ paunch: “And you can live without potato chips.” Ford’s comment was one part energy argument, one part below-the-belt barb. But after the show, the two men walk out of the studio together, exchange cellular phone numbers and promise to have lunch together with “Brother Jesse Jr.” in Washington.

“When I run for governor,” Ford tells Reeves. “You gotta come down and help me out.”

Reeves was raised in the Bay Area by his grandmother, who worked as a maid and received food stamps. As a junior high school student, he joined the NAACP and has since remained within the organization. By his senior year Reeves was elected a student member of the Oakland Unified School District Board and the NAACP National Board of Directors. After graduation, he went to Grambling State University in Louisiana and, at 19, joined Jackson’s presidential campaign.

Reeves organized voter registration drives and campaign rallies throughout the South and the Midwest, only to lose his faith in the Democratic Party when its presidential nominee, Michael Dukakis, chose Lloyd Bentsen over Jackson as a running mate.

“He won 7 million votes and we thought he should have been on the ticket,” Reeves said. “But the Democratic leadership thought that America wasn’t ready for a black man on the ticket. . . . It made me ask myself: ‘Why am I a Democrat?’ ”

Reeves joined the Republican Party, but he maintained his affiliation with the NAACP.

“He’s one of my young proteges,” said Hooks, executive director emeritus of the organization and a longtime Democrat. “When Shannon became a Republican I cheered him on because I understood he would bring understanding and integrity to the party.”

A month after Reeves earned his degree, Hooks appointed him to be regional director of the NAACP, first in California, then in Texas. Early on, Reeves worked to link his civil rights agenda to his conservative philosophy, taking on racial discrimination by Denny’s employees and criticizing the Dallas Cowboys and Dr Pepper for not hiring enough black workers.

“Economic empowerment represented a new direction for the NAACP,” said John Mack, who worked with Reeves as president of the Los Angeles Urban League. “Historically, they had fought for civil rights from a legal standpoint.”

When Reeves became director of the Oakland chapter, he criticized black elected officials and unions for failing to secure a larger share of city contracts for minority companies. That drew anger from many within the NAACP. But Reeves believed he was merely holding firm to principle: Black leaders need to hold one another --not just whites--accountable.

“When I came to Oakland we had a black congressman, a black assemblywoman, a black mayor, a black city manager, a black superintendent of schools, a black county treasurer, a black chief of police, a black fire chief; we had two out of five blacks on the county Board of Supervisors, we had four out of seven blacks on the school board.

“Now, how could we blame white people for our problems?”

Reeves put his self-help philosophy into practice when he persuaded Chevron to donate two East Oakland gas stations to a work-skills training and economic development foundation he created.

To persuade drug dealers to stay away from his property, “I had to find somebody to find somebody to find somebody,” Reeves recalled. “I had to meet the guy at a basketball game. . . . He basically told me: ‘I’m sure you won’t have no problems.’

“The bottom line is, I had some credibility with guys on the street.”

California Republicans want that kind of credibility. That’s why Reeves speeds from the set of “Politically Incorrect” to speak before the Jewish Republican Coalition at the Skirball Cultural Center. Of about 100 people, Reeves is one of three black Republicans in the room--and the center of attention.

Introducing Reeves, state GOP Chairman Steel tells the crowd that Reeves proves that “the image of our party is undergoing an objective and serious change. It’s not often that our party’s smart enough to elect an active president of a NAACP chapter.”

Reeves’ preferred mode of public speaking is the testimonial. He tells the crowd in the lilting rhythms of the Gospel that he personifies the American dream and the Republican agenda.

“Only in America can a young black boy from East Oakland, where people had written me off and said because I didn’t have a father, because I didn’t have a whole lot of money, said that I wasn’t going to be anybody, that maybe I’d be pumping gas at a gas station. . .” Instead, his foundation runs two stations.

“You might come from a tough inner city neighborhood, but you can still be anything you want to be.”

The crowd swarms around Reeves after his speech.

“What do you think about Jesse Jackson?” asks one man.

“I choose to disagree with his method,” Reeves says. “But before I saw him I never dreamed that I could be president.”

Asks another: “Are they telling people in the black community that things are no better than they were 50 years ago? That there’s still a boot on your neck holding you down?”

“Sure, sometimes they do, and I think the antidote to that is that when Republicans see racist, wrong things happen, we got to stop being quiet and we got to speak up. When [James Byrd] is dragged behind a truck in Jasper, Texas, then-Gov. Bush and the leadership of the party should have gone to the family and said: ‘Is there anything we can do? This shouldn’t happen. Could we sit by you in the courtroom? Does anybody need anything to eat? What can we help you with?’ ”

One man is incredulous. “Would they be welcome?”

Reeves reassures him: “No doubt about it.”