Firing a Fighter

A setback for civil rights?

His credentials are impeccable, his party loyalties unassailable. A lifelong Republican, Arthur S. Flemming, 76, was appointed Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare in 1958 by Dwight Eisenhower. In 1974 Richard Nixon named him chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, a bipartisan advisory committee whose purpose is to monitor enforcement of civil rights laws. Flemming turned out to be an especially unflinching warrior in the struggle for civil rights. In recent months, after having concluded that Reagan and company lacked commitment to the cause, he began attacking the Administration. Last week he found himself out of a job. Nominated as his successor: Clarence M. Pendleton Jr., 51, a black Republican, president of the Urban League of San Diego and a friend of White House Counsellor Edwin Meese III.

The White House also dismissed another member of the six-person commission, Stephen Horn, president of California State University at Long Beach and a moderate Republican. He was replaced by Mary Louise Smith, former chairwoman of the Republican National Committee. The removal of Flemming and Horn marks only the second time in the commission’s 24-year history that a President has fired members.* Black leaders across the U.S. promptly blasted the move as a threat to the committee’s tradition of outspoken independence. “Arthur Flemming was dismissed for doing his job too well,” charged Democratic Congressman Harold Washington of Illinois. Alluding to the body’s lack of enforcement power, National Urban Coalition President M. Carl Holman said, “I don’t see how you gain anything, even symbolically, doing something like this.” Yet other black leaders interpret the firings as all too symbolic of the Administration’s retreat on such civil rights issues as school integration, affirmative action and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which Reagan has criticized as overly broad. “What the Administration is trying to do,” says Althea Simmons, Washington lobbyist for the N.A.A.C.P., “is not just put civil rights on the back burner, but take it off the stove completely.”

The firings came after the White House nominated William Bell, president of a Detroit minority recruiting firm, to head the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Critics charge that Bell, a conservative black Republican who worked for the Reagan-Bush ticket in last year’s presidential campaign, is unqualified. Says Washington: “The President’s need to have his political cronies run the Government evidently supersedes the need to have agencies that respond to the needs of the American people.”

The man chosen to succeed Flemming is a onetime swimming coach at Howard University in Washington, D.C., who ran the Model Cities program in San Diego from 1972 to 1975 before becoming head of the local chapter of the National Urban League. Pendleton campaigned for Reagan last year, and though he promises to try to block any effort to soften the Voting Rights Act, he shares Reagan’s opposition to busing and affirmative action—policies staunchly supported by the commission.

Pendleton claims that under his leadership the San Diego Urban League has created some 8,000 new jobs, arranged $24 million in business loans and boosted the chapter’s land holdings from $218,000 to $3 million. Yet local blacks charge that Pendleton has ignored the league’s traditional work in the social-service areas of education, housing and legal aid. Counters Pendleton: “The best social program I know of is a job.”

The White House strongly defended its selection of Pendleton. Though Deputy White House Press Secretary Larry Speakes praised Flemming as a “distinguished public servant,” he added that the President simply wanted “his own appointee in the post.” Some civil rights leaders admit that though they may differ with Pendleton’s conservative views, he is a proven administrator capable of running the agency. Nonetheless, some of Pendleton’s new colleagues, three of them Democrats, are uneasy. “Most of us assume that we will be fired too,” says one present commissioner. “To have an Administration tamper with the makeup of the commission after all these years is disturbing.”

* President Nixon asked for and received the resignation of the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, president of the University of Notre Dame, as chairman in 1972 because he supported school busing to attain racial integration.