For better and worse, people tend to take notice of Ward Connerly once his anti-affirmative-action campaign hits their state — as it has in Colorado.
“I think we’ve got to get beyond race,” said Connerly, 68, “and getting beyond preferences is the quickest symbolic way of doing that.”
Born in a small Louisiana town, Connerly was a toddler when his father left and his mother died, leaving him to grow up with relatives in Sacramento, Calif.
He identifies himself as black but describes a heritage of mixed race — black, Irish, French and Choctaw.
At Sacramento State University, Connerly joined student chapters of the NAACP and the ACLU, joined an all-white fraternity and won election as student body president.
“I knew that I was a black guy but didn’t wear it on my sleeve,” Connerly said. “It was not indelibly etched into my soul — largely because mine was a multiracial family.”
After college and throughout a flourishing career as a consultant dealing largely with the construction industry, Connerly developed a relationship with legislator and eventual California Gov. Pete Wilson. Politically, he migrated from Democrat to unaffiliated to Republican.
Wilson, also a Republican, asked Connerly to serve on the University of California’s Board of Regents.
In 1994, two white parents came to him concerned their son had been denied admission to medical school because of racial preferences. Connerly ultimately made the case that race had become too much a factor, and the regents voted to end race-based policies.
“I was simmering more about the way I was being patted on the head by the office of the president and told this nonsense about celebrating our diversity than anything else,” he said.
Connerly then took over the struggling campaign for Proposition 209, a statewide measure that became the template for the anti-affirmative-action initiatives he would advance across the country.
He became revered by some as a proponent of civil rights and reviled by others as the convenient black face on a political agenda at odds with the traditional understanding of that term.
“I’m probably more libertarian — small ‘l’ — than anything else,” he said. “I don’t like being thrown into that box that I’m a ‘black conservative’ solely because I have a view that deviates from the norm as a black guy with regard to affirmative action.”
He says he never imagined that his California effort more than a decade ago would go national.
“I don’t want to leave the world with race in the same position it is now,” he said. “You start getting involved in a battle and you want to win it, you want to prove that you were right.
“You want to vindicate yourself.”
