By Linda Y. Brown

            Over the past few months, Coloradans have been approached by petitioners outside local Wal-Marts, Sam’s Clubs, King Soopers, RTD light rail stops and other public areas, seeking signatures on the proposed Amendment 31 to Colorado’s constitution. Petitioners of Amendment 31 tell voters the initiative will get rid of discrimination and protect civil rights. This description of the proposal is somewhat ambiguous and may have left many voters unaware of what their signature really means.
Rosemary Harris, the president of the Colorado Springs branch of the NAACP, along with NAACP members and other community organizations, are trying to address the petitioners’ misinformation with the Decline To Sign drive.  The drive aims to inform the public that Amendment 31 is aimed at ending all targeted equal opportunity initiatives, designed to assist women, minorities and other target groups in helping to level the playing field in gaining access to public employment, public education and public contracting.
“Amendment 31 is a carpetbagger initiative: an outside effort being forced on the citizens of Colorado and other states by Ward Connerly, a California millionaire who admits that he owes his own success to affirmative action programs. But Amendment 31 is deceptive. It seeks to fool voters into signing what they bill as a ‘civil rights initiative.’ But Amendment 31 has nothing to do with civil rights,” says Harris.  “It would turn back the clock on civil rights.”
Jim Stewart, the president of the Colorado Springs Black Chamber of Commerce and the only Black among nine commissioners on the Colorado Commission on Higher Education, agrees that Connerly’s campaign is wrong and ignores the value of diversity by wanting to strike any language in regard to race in hiring and recruiting efforts. Stewart says the wording of the petition “is packaged in reverse language,” which is misleading.
“He [Connerly] doesn’t want anyone to be constrained by color. He wants the free markets to be opened up. His desire is to kill affirmative action. There will be no consideration to reach out and try and help any minorities if this bill passes. It is absolutely not good… I would argue that the world is not ready for that,” says Stewart.
Connerly, a Black man and founder of the American Civil Rights Coalition and the American Civil Rights Initiative, has been successful in passing similar initiatives in California (1996) with Proposition 209, Washington (1998) and Michigan (2006).  Supporters of his initiatives say they want a color-blind society and that “race has no place in American life or law.”
            Denver political and community activist, Dr. Sly Morgan-Smith, is outraged by Connerly’s efforts to dismantle affirmative action programs.
            “I cannot believe that people around the country who have benefited to great extents from affirmative action programs would be dumb enough to fall for the deceptive tactics used by a Ward Connerly initiative to pass any proposed legislation into law. Without affirmative action programs, there would be very few Asians, Blacks, Hispanics and women in high-level executive, business, academia or elected political offices today.”
            Bill Vandenberg is a co-chair of Colorado Unity, a 12-year-old coalition of business, civil rights, faith, labor, legal and women’s organizations, as well as the executive director of Colorado Progressive Coalition. He says this is not the first time Connerly has tried to put initiatives on the ballot in Colorado, but his past efforts have all been unsuccessful. Vandenberg says Colorado Unity was formed specifically due to Connerly’s success in California, anticipating that he would eventually head to Colorado.
            “Amendment 31 is a cynical attack on equal opportunity programs. It is deceptive in that it says it is anti-discrimination, but in fact it would end up outlawing modest equal opportunity programs such as recruitment, training and retention,” Vandenberg says.
            As a member of the higher education commission, Stewart is well aware of the lack of diversity that comes from not actively recruiting minorities, particularly at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
            “When I walk around the downtown mall in Boulder, guess what’s missing?  Black students. The system screens them out. If a Black kid decides to go to Boulder, nothing in the community or the university is there to make them feel comfortable,” Stewart says. “At the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, kids come in from all across the country, and they feel uncomfortable as well. The Academy reaches out to its students and assigns them to a mentor who is there to help them become comfortable with their surroundings. Boulder is the absolute premier example of why minorities are not doing what they need to be doing in Colorado.”
            Statistics gathered by Colorado Unity show how poorly minorities fare in K-12 education and in pay equity.
- 50 percent of Latino 3rd-graders read at grade level, compared to 81 percent of white 3rd-graders, according to CSAP results.
- A 45-point achievement gap exists between white 10th-graders and African-American 10th-graders on CSAP math testing.
-In 2000, the average annual wage of African Americans among both genders was 25 percent lower than for white men, who were otherwise similar in terms of geography, industry, age and education.
“In order to close the achievement gap in the educational system and to address the historic and present-day disparities in pay, in pay-equity between women and men, between people of color and white Coloradans, we should not at this time be taking any steps backwards in regard to equal opportunity in our state,” says Vandenberg.
            Rather than have Coloradans simply vote Yes or No on Amendment 31, a broad coalition of Colorado groups have come up with a unique strategy, not used in any other state. They plan to give Colorado voters the opportunity to vote Yes for equal opportunity by introducing Amendment 61, the Equal Opportunity Initiative, directly counteracting the Connerly-backed amendment.
            “We believe that Coloradans when viewing this option will vote against the deceptively named civil rights initiative and vote for the Equal Opportunity Initiative.  We’re the first state to try this out, because we believe that Colorado voters deserve that choice. And we also believe that Colorado voters will want to know that the ‘so-called’ civil rights initiative does anything but advance civil rights. It actually takes us backwards,” Vandenberg says.
            Backers of Amendment 61 are hopeful that given a choice Coloradans will vote Yes to maintain equal opportunity programs throughout the state. Supporters have begun a broad-based statewide public education campaign to discuss what equal opportunity programs are and how they benefit all Coloradans.  Beginning in April, petitioners plan to be out in the community to gather signatures to place Amendment 61 on the November ballot.
            “The playing field is still not level,” says Harris. We still have not realized the true American dream of equity for all. It is not time to dismantle equal opportunity programs – it’s time to expand them and further open the American dream to all people. We can be a model for that in Colorado. We can be the state that says, ‘No, we will not be fooled into turning back the clock on equal opportunity.’”

Editor’s note:  For questions about the Decline to Sign campaign and Colorado Unity’s efforts to maintain equal opportunity in Colorado, contact Rosemary Harris at president@coloradospringsnaacp.org, or Bill Vandenberg at cpc@progressivecoalition.org. For questions about the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative, visit http://coloradocri.org or e-mail info@coloradocri.org.
 

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