NAACP attorney points to election

LAWRENCE --- The 2004 presidential election is pivotal in shaping the next generation's approach to racial inequality, a leading NAACP attorney said Wednesday.

"The next president, whoever he is, may make three appointments to the Supreme Court," said Ted Shaw, who in May becomes president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense Fund.

An influx of conservative jurists in the past 25 years and the likely appointment of conservative justices to the Supreme Court if President Bush is re-elected will be significant as programs designed to address inequality of blacks, Latinos and Indians move into the "cross hairs of the far right," Shaw said.

He spoke at the closing session of a four-day conference at The University of Kansas about the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The unanimous 1954 Supreme Court ruling declared "separate but equal" schools unconstitutional.

Shaw was a U.S. Justice Department trial attorney before resigning in 1982 to protest the Reagan administration's civil rights policies. He joined the Legal Defense Fund, where he has remained except for three years on the University of Michigan law faculty.

"There's a lot of talk of liberal judges," Shaw said. "I can think of a handful of really liberal federal judges. What has happened in the last 25 years is the federal courts have been very carefully stacked with people of one ideological branch."

Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, said at the conference the campaign between Bush and Democrat John Kerry would determine whether race relations is a federal priority.

"We have an administration that is extremely hostile," said Orfield, speaking specifically of Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

The election also will decide whether rising segregation of students in public schools is addressed, he said.

Orfield said the next president should advance policies that place more minority educators in school classrooms and administration offices.

"You can't run a desegregated school system with a white faculty," he said.

Tim Carpenter can be reached

at (785) 295-1158 or tim.carpenter@cjonline.com.

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Brown: Man seeks more minority educators

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