Part 3: Crossroads

Fact Sheet

Transcript

Narrator: In the 1970s, Dr. Toni Chavis was one of the minority students Allan Bakke accused of taking his seat in medical school. Today, she runs a health clinic in a poor Los Angeles neighborhood.

TONI CHAVIS:
A doctor just selecting to come to Compton when there's other avenues where the pay is higher, no I don't think that you're going to necessarily find someone to opt to come to Compton, California. I think it has to be a passion, it has to be something that you care about... and I remember many older physicians saying to me, 'you've gone to Stanford, why go to Compton?' But that was my dream... I came back to the community, and there were just hundreds of patients who literally were going without care... I have employees now who've been with me for over 25 years. Girls who have been gang members who I helped send back to school. We serve three clinics.

Narrator: Dr. Chavis is having an impact. And she's not alone: African American doctors are five times more likely than others to treat African American patients. And according to the National Academy of Sciences, the patients of doctors who understand their language and culture are actually healthier.

TONI CHAVIS:
Someone has got to measure in that community what's going on... I understand the nuances of Afro-American culture. If you don't have primary care doctors readily available, then people will have crisis-oriented care.

Narrator: Dr. Toni Chavis graduated from medical school in 1977. Today, after the elimination of affirmative action in California, she might not even be admitted.

TONI CHAVIS:
It's sad for me to see that a lot of the gains that occurred during that time have literally been wiped out in the last 10 years.

Narrator: In 1995, California Governor Pete Wilson was gearing up for a presidential campaign. Using the hot-button language of racial preferences and reverse discrimination, he made abolishing affirmative action a cornerstone of his platform.

PETE WILSON: Today affirmative action preferences are inescapably unfair. And they are undermining a fundamental American dream.

Narrator: Wilson used his position as governor to influence the California Board of Regents, the governing body of the University of California.

PETE WILSON: Are we going to treat all Californians equally and fairly... or are we going to continue to divide Californians by race?

PAT HAYASHI:
Pete Wilson was governor, and as governor he is actually president of the Regents of UC... One of his appointments was Ward Connerly, an African American businessman... and so he asked Ward Connerly to introduce at the Board of Regents a resolution which would have prohibited the use of race or gender both in admissions and in employment.

PETER JENNINGS: Today the California Board of Regents met to consider eliminating affirmative action from the nation's largest university system.

DIRK TILLOTSON:
It's beneficial for Pete Wilson to put up a Black man to argue against Black people and people of color... where he couldn't make those arguments himself.

Narrator: Not only was the leading opponent of affirmative action an African American, but Connerly adopted a tactic that caught on: he used the majestic language of the Civil Rights Movement to attack affirmative action.

WARD CONNERLY: Civil rights are not just for Black people. They're for everybody. And when we find that we're discriminating against Asians and whites, all of us ought to rise up and say: stop it!

PAT HAYASHI:
I didn't take it seriously. And I don't think very many people did take it seriously. Why? Because affirmative action and the use of racial preferences was so deeply embedded.in our policies that we thought that it was just a political grandstanding.

Narrator: In July of 1995, the Board of Regents agreed with Ward Connerly and ended affirmative action at the University of California. With this victory, Connerly decided to put an even broader proposal before voters statewide. Though it would eliminate affirmative action throughout the state, he called it the California Civil Rights Initiative. It became known Proposition 209.

WARD CONNERLY AT PODIUM: The state shall not discriminate against or grant equal... or grant preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.

ANGELA HARRIS:
It was really infuriating to see that title, the California Civil Rights Initiative, because people hear the words 'civil rights' and they think 'oh, well. that sounds pretty good... that sounds... like something Dr. King would have wanted.' But the ironic thing is that the Civil Rights Initiative really turns the mission of Dr. King on its head, because instead of having an honest conversation about racism, about injustice, about subordination... what this kind of 'colorblind' initiative proposes is that we ignore race altogether, that we not have that conversation, that we pretend the differences among us really don't exist.

ERIC BROOKS:
It seems very disingenuous to have a society that is so race conscious and then at this one level, when you're trying to get admitted into college or into graduate school, the race thing gets stripped out of your existence.

DIRK TILLOTSON:
The California Civil Rights Initiative was written to exclude minorities. You know, that was the purpose of it. It wasn't aimed broadly at all preferences, it was aimed very concretely and discreetly at racial preferences.

DANIEL TELLALIAN:
We didn't know what would happen at first. We feared the worst-that most of us would not be there... And so there was a moment of shock and a fear and then an immediate jump to action. We organized, we came together. Everything that we could do to bring as much attention as possible to this... We were convinced that we had done enough on a grassroots level to defeat it.

Narrator: In November of 1996, Connerly succeeded. The margin of victory was only six percent, but Proposition 209 passed.

ANDREA GUERRERO:
The exit polls showed that 56 percent of the voters believed in affirmative action, yet 56 percent of the voters voted for Proposition 209. So that can only lead to one conclusion: The voters were confused about what they were voting for, and rightly so, because the proponents never used the language of affirmative action, when in fact what Proposition 209 did was end affirmative action.

REPORTER: University police moved in on the sleeping protestors. Students and demonstrators were shoved and pushed out of the way; some resisted any way they could. And the arrests began. Protestors continued their demand the University ignore Prop 209.

PAT HAYASHI:
Proposition 209 forced us to change how we admit students. I mean it was just terrible. All the work that we had done was undone overnight.

REPORTER: UC San Diego announced that not one Black student will be entering the medical school this year. 196 applied, none was accepted. No Blacks among the first-year students at Berkeley's law school, either.

ANDREA GUERRERO:
The removal of affirmative action on the law school at Berkeley was disastrous. It was a wipeout. Zero African Americans, no... Southeast Asians, and only seven Latino students entered the law school that year... The result was a whitewashing of the law school that we had not seen for probably 30 years.

DANIEL TELLALIAN:
The diversity was drained out of the school, year by year... I recall going to graduation ceremonies and seeing 30-40 new lawyers of color being graduated and being so excited, and then at the same time almost crying, knowing that no one was coming in to replace those, that the pipeline had been turned off.

Narrator: Ten years after the passage of Proposition 209, Latino enrollment at the UC Berkeley and UCLA law schools has plummeted by 43 percent. For African Americans, it has been a staggering 84 percent decrease. And in the fall of 2006, with an incoming class of nearly 5,000 students at UCLA, only two percent were Black- the lowest number of African American freshmen in 33 years.

WALTER ALLEN:
The declining presence of Black students on the campus is in its own way a judgment that I take personally, because it suggests that we have no place here, and to the extent it says, suggests, that Black students have no place here, it says to me I have no place here.

WARD CONNERLY: We have diversity, don't mistake the absence of Black people being there as our not having diversity. At the Boalt Hall law school, for example, there are whites from all over the world.

WALTER ALLEN:
Literally what you find now is a segregated higher educational experience here in California in the 21st century. And that is a retrograde; we've gone backward in time.

Narrator: And education is not the only arena devastated by Proposition 209. Across the state of California, minority contracting has fallen by 50 percent, and a third of all minority contracting firms have gone out of business.

PATRICK HAYASHI:
We can't call ourselves a democracy... unless we're racially integrated at all levels of our society, including the leadership. And the leadership generally is created through colleges and universities. That notion of what's good for the country, what's important for the public good, was totally lost in that political dialog.

Narrator: With the elimination of affirmative action in California, physicians like Dr. Toni Chavis have rapidly dwindled in number. And those who stand to lose the most are people who live in our most vulnerable communities. Places like Compton, where she practices medicine.

TONI CHAVIS:
I strongly feel that affirmative action is a program that we shouldn't abandon. I think it's wonderful. That's why I want to see our government do all the things that they can do to continue to promote equal access for all people. I think it's the only way that we can go. I would hope to believe that I have given just a little bit back to a community that I love and that people didn't care about. I really think if Americans could see that and see the little Toni from 1969 who finished from Compton and who had a dream to come back... Maybe it's foolhardy to believe... that I believed the dream of Martin Luther King, but I did. Does affirmative action work? I think so.