You once said, "The best way to help poor folks is not to be one." That sounds like a pretty cavalier attitude.
We in the civil rights movement would do well if we taught that there's one thing we must be able to do—compete. None of this brother-sister stuff. Don't ask me for a break unless you've earned it.
Why are you opposed to affirmative action?
I'm against quotas, not affirmative action. Quotas don't work. When you're hired on a quota, you're automatically pointed to as an affirmative action person and you carry that label around forever. The economist Walter Williams once said, "I'm black, but if I see a black doctor, I don't want to have to ask him whether he's an affirmative action doctor or a regular doctor."
And why are you against busing?
I'm opposed to mandatory busing, not voluntary busing. You can't take away a mother's desire to have her child attend a neighborhood school. And I'm not so sure the white schools are any better. When I was growing up in Washington, D.C., I went to a completely segregated school system. We had all black teachers, and we didn't do too badly. We passed all the so-called white folks' tests and went on to college.
The Voting Rights Act is up for renewal this year and meeting heavy opposition from Southern conservatives. Do you favor it, and will you lobby against those who want to change it?
I'm for it 100 percent. Don't change a word. But whether I'll lobby against opponents I don't know.
Are you against welfare?
No, there are some people who don't have the means to cope.
But you have supported Reagan's cuts in social programs. You sound like a believer in his supply-side, trickle-down economics.
It damn sure doesn't trickle up. The point is, do you want to wait for it to trickle down to you or do you want to take some steps to make your own benefits? I don't want to eliminate poverty. I want to create wealth.
How do you respond to charges that you're sacrificing the poor in the name of economic development?
I can only lay my record open. At the San Diego Urban League we have returned $17 on every dollar the city has put into our business development projects. We have negotiated $24 million in business loans. Now we're trying to develop an asset base that gives us an income flow to allow us to fund social programs without the government hassle. We've gone from zero to $2 million in real estate assets in just five years. Meanwhile the league has provided 8,000 nonsubsidized jobs to the community in the last five years, and that ain't bad. Any time the white folks start bringing you deals because they respect you, that's also affirmative action.
Are you saying the government should not be involved with civil rights?
Without government intervention, we wouldn't have the Voting Rights Act and a lot of other important measures. But I don't think all minority progress comes out of the barrel of a civil rights gun. We've been led too long to believe that all we need is a government program.
Your nomination has been met with conspicuous silence from black leaders. Jesse Jackson of Operation PUSH would not comment to us about it; neither would the National Urban League's Vernon Jordan. How do you respond to those who say you don't represent minorities?
They don't know me. They're sitting in judgment and they've never asked me to say who I was or what I thought. I don't fit the traditional Democratic-labor-union-civil-rights mold. And people are putting out a rap on me that really ain't true.
How are you received at civil rights conferences?
Coldly. I met Jesse Jackson at one and he treated me like shit. When I was attending a conference right after my nomination, Vernon Jordan came up to me and said, "They're holding prayer meetings about you tonight." So I said, "After they do that, they ought to hold prayer meetings for themselves." The black leaders are just killing themselves by abandoning me. I was one of their only links to the Administration, and they've blown it.
Does it bother you to be outside the mainstream of black leadership?
I don't think I'm going to become a black leader. I'll just be the person who leads the commission who happens to be black. We've got to deal with the problems of white folks, too.
Have you always been conservative?
Until I left Washington when I was 42 years old, I was a liberal. Then I began working in Baltimore with the Model Cities program, which was a Democratic program, and I thought the government owed us every damn thing. I didn't know any better. When I got to San Diego 10 years ago, I became an independent. The movers and shakers there are not Democrats, and I realized that the progress was taking place in the private, unsubsidized, free-market sector.
As a black reaching out to white businessmen, have you felt racism directed against you personally?
Sure. My wife and I live in a condominium in La Jolla, which is supposed to be a rich part of San Diego, but there's racism there like anywhere else. I recently went to a $1,000-a-plate civic dinner where a lot of wealthy whites opened their homes before everyone got together for a concert by Bobby Short. Wherever I stood that evening I was mistaken for Bobby Short. They couldn't believe that any black but a musician could attend their function. It doesn't upset me outwardly, but I know that kind of racism is still there.
Did you experience a lot of prejudice while you were growing up?
God, yes. In Washington, you couldn't go downtown to a department store to try on clothes. You couldn't go and eat at the lunch counters. You couldn't go to the bathroom.
Was your family middle-class?
We didn't have a lot of money—beer money for champagne ideas. My father was an assistant director of the D.C. Recreation Department. My grandfather was a Baltimore lawyer who finished Howard Law School in 1896. He never had any money, but he was a helluva lawyer. His family lived on the same block as [Supreme Court Justice] Thurgood Marshall. I did a lot of hanging around on street corners when I was a kid. I didn't get into trouble because the guys knew they'd catch hell from my father if I messed up. "You can't go steal with us," they'd say. "But we'll be right back."
Did you ever march in civil rights demonstrations?
I still have my banner from Dr. Martin Luther King's march in 1963, the march on the Lincoln Memorial when King gave his "I have a dream" speech.
Does it trouble you that there were 514 blacks in executive positions in the Carter Administration and in Reagan's there are only 17?
Were we better off under Carter than we are right now? I don't think so.
President Reagan got one of the smallest percentages of black voter support in more than 30 years. Why did you support him?
There are a whole lot of minorities in this country who support President Reagan and his conservative policies. And I don't in any way equate conservatism with racism. There are black conservatives, black libertarians and black Democrats.
What are some of the good things Reagan has done for minorities in the areas of jobs, housing and social services?
I don't know what I can say specifically, but I don't know anything he's done that is against minorities and the disadvantaged. If minorities and blacks expect everything from the government, then I think we stay on the plantation. The government has been doing things for blacks since 1865, It's time we took care of ourselves.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
