Progressive and business coalition defeats initiative to ban affirmative action

By Chris King Of the St. Louis American

“They talk about California and Washington being progressive states, but Ward Connerly won there. In Missouri, we beat him,” said Brandon Davis, chair of the WeCAN Coalition that led a successful grass-roots effort to defeat the so-called Missouri Civil Rights initiative.

Connerly, a California businessman, has funded local operatives to lead ballot initiatives in a number of states that banned affirmative action programs by state and local governments. May 4 was the deadline for his Missouri partner Tim Asher to file the required number of signatures to get the proposed amendment on the Missouri ballot in November.

No signatures were filed, so no amendment giving voters the option to ban affirmative action programs in the state will appear in 2008.

“It’s something to celebrate, and progressives don’t have many causes to celebrate in Missouri,” Davis said.

WeCAN led a progressive, grass-roots effort that stymied Connerly and Asher’s efforts to garner the required number of signatures.

“Ward Connerly and his rented stooges were not successful in Missouri because it was clear that his motive was to attack a program that helped thousands of African-American and women business owners,” said U.S. Rep. Wm. Lacy Clay.

Asher has attributed the failure of his and Connerly’s initiative, in part, to the hurdles they faced in the form of legal challenges.

The state’s most powerful black business leader - David Steward, founder and chairman of World Wide Technology, Inc. - was critical to the funding of those legal challenges, according to Richard McIntosh, principal of Flotron & McIntosh, governmental consultant to WWT.

McIntosh, a former assistant director in the office of Attorney General Jeremiah “Jay” Nixon, said the Nixon campaign approached him to get Steward involved in the effort to defeat Connerly in Missouri.

Steward provided some of his own funds, and enlisted the support of Tom Irwin, executive director at Civic Progress, and Kathy Osborn, executive director of the Regional Business Council.

McIntosh also contacted Jewell Scott, executive director of the Kansas City Civic Council, who already had been recruited to help fund the effort.

In the end, many of the state’s most powerful business interests helped to pay for the legal services of Chuck Hatfield and Jane Dueker, attorneys at Stinson, Morrison and Hecker, whose legal challenges to the ballot initiative tied it up in the courts for precious months as the clock ticked toward May 4.

In the end, three groups that started gathering signatures after the Missouri Civil Rights Initiative got started successfully submitted enough signatures to get their amendments on the ballot, while Connerly and Asher failed.

Once Connerly and Asher emerged from their legal battles, the resistance to them shifted back to WeCAN (an acronym for Working to Empower Community Action Now).

WeCAN is made up of some 100 partner organizations and hundreds of individual members across the state. Its core leadership trained and managed both a paid and volunteer voter education effort spanning five months.

“Voter educators stood beside signature gatherers to ensure that voters were approached with the truth about Connerly’s initiative - that it would without a doubt ban affirmative action programs in Missouri,” Davis said.

Though WeCAN purposefully steered clear of elected officials as figureheads, Davis said state Sen. Rita Days was “an early driving force behind creating a coalition” and she “raised the seed money to get the coalition off the ground.”

Other signatures on the game ball for defeating Connerly in Missouri go to the SEIU MO State Council, Missouri ACORN (which managed the paid voter education operation) and Missouri Jobs with Justice (which managed volunteer efforts).

In St. Louis, pivotal members of the coalition included the Diversity Awareness Partnership, FOCUS St. Louis, Metropolitan Congregations United and the ACLU of Eastern Missouri.

“Once our voter educators got the word out, people learned quickly that this initiative was bad for everyone,” said Jeff Ordower, Missouri ACORN Head Organizer.

During the course of the campaign, according to Lara Granich, director of Missouri Jobs with Justice, volunteers spent well over 1,000 hours educating voters at grocery stores, post offices and other public areas throughout the state.

“We found that when told the truth about the negative social and economic effect of this initiative on our state, Missouri voters refused to sign the petition,” Granich said.

Davis said the lesson of their success is to place more trust in the grass roots.

He said, “We have a tendency in politics to spend money to persuade people on television, but this effort showed that if you go talk to voters directly about issues, they respond.”