(3 of 5)
Connerly argues that the nation can move beyond its racial divide only by doing away with all race-based remedies; he favors affirmative-action programs based on economic need. "We've got to close the books on the past," he says, and "not give anyone lifetime membership in the Victims' Club of America because of what happened to their ancestors. I don't for a minute say that if you're black with kinky hair you have the same chance as a blue-eyed blond in America. But racial quotas and set-asides are tearing us apart. They breed white resentment and the suspicion of black inferiority, and they haven't kept pace with our multiethnic society." Connerly, who is of African, French, Irish and Choctaw descent, is married to an Irish-American woman; their son is married to a Vietnamese American. "What racial box on the university admission form is their child supposed to check?" asks Connerly.
At 58, Connerly is old enough to remember the days of Jim Crow, but the worst racism he encounters today, he says, is a "subtle patronization" from some whites. "I think part of our racial problem is that my fellow black Americans are so sensitive to the issue of racism that it almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy," he says. "You look for it, and by golly, it's there--whether it's real or not."
As a self-made man, "Ward finds it insulting to think that any black person might need affirmative action to compete," says San Francisco lawyer William Bagley, an opponent of Connerly's on the university board of regents. "He didn't need it. He doesn't see why anyone else should."
Connerly's life, a Horatio Alger tale of an orphan's adversity, pluck and triumph, has an almost mythical value to his supporters. He was born in Louisiana, where his parents divorced when he was two (he hasn't seen his father since) and his mother died when he was four, leaving him in the care of her sister and brother-in-law Bertha and James Louis. At six, he moved with them to Bremerton, Wash.--a journey made difficult by segregation laws that shut them out of hotels, rest rooms and diners--and later to Sacramento, where Connerly's uncle worked in a lumberyard. As a child, Connerly found work running errands, helping a carpenter, hawking ice water to laborers. "I was a little hustler," he says with a chuckle.
His fortunes changed at the age of 12, when his grandmother, who had retained legal custody of him, moved him from the relative comfort of his uncle's home to what he calls "a desperate situation" at hers. His grandmother raised chickens and sold eggs, he says, but "on many days there was nothing to eat but sweet potato." Connerly fought back by taking a 27-hour-a-week job as a stock boy. He worked all through high school and college, paying his own way.
Because of the symbolism of Connerly's story, a stir was raised last month when a group of unnamed relatives claimed in the monthly San Francisco Focus that Connerly's youth was "very middle class." Said one: "There was no poverty. There were no chickens. Nobody sold eggs."