Ward Connerly’s Super Tuesday for Segregation – Color of Law

So, what’s in it for Connerly? The dollars, of course. Apparently, there is much money to be made in dismantling the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement, and Connerly is first in line to get paid.

In 1996, Connerly, himself a beneficiary of affirmative action through a California set-aside program for minority contractors, was responsible for the passage of Proposition 209, which eliminated the use of affirmative action by the state government in hiring and university admissions. On the eve of Dr. King’s birthday in 1997, thanks to the generosity of the ultra-conservative Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and others, he formed the American Civil Rights Institute (ACRI). (The Bradley Foundation has funded organizations that seek to destroy civil rights, such as the Center for Individual Rights. Charles Murray, author of the infamous book The Bell Curve, is a Bradley fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.) That same year, Connerly also formed the American Civil Rights Coalition (ACRC), the lobbying arm of ACRI. In true Orwellian fashion, these organizations embrace the antithesis of what their names suggest.

The group Media Transparency has detailed the bankrolling of Ward Connerly’s segregationist operations by the Bradley, Olin and Scaife Foundations. When he was unwilling to disclose the funding sources of his failed Proposition 54 – which would have prevented California from collecting important racial data, thereby crippling any efforts to address racial disparities in healthcare and education – a coalition of civil rights organizations sued him. Connerly, who raised $1.6 million for the 2003 Prop 54 effort, was fined $95,000 for breaking campaign financing disclosure laws. According to the Equal Justice Society, some of his largest contributors included John Moores, Sr., University of California Regents board member and owner of the San Diego Padres ($400,000); Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News ($300,000); Joseph Coors, the late Colorado beer baron and founding partner of the Heritage Foundation ($250,000), and William J. Hume, head of the anti-labor San Francisco-based company Basic American Foods ($200,000).