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The New Civil Rights
Movement must continue to mobilize in order to defend our recent
affirmative action victory in Grutter v Bollinger. We are
approaching the 50 year anniversary of Brown v Board of Education
still struggling to realize the promise of integration and real equal
opportunity in American life. Our new movement was inaugurated in action
on April 1st, 2003 with our 50,000 person -- strong racially integrated,
majority high school and college student mobilization on the day the U.S.
Supreme Court heard the University of Michigan affirmative action cases.
The movement that stepped forward on that day has the opportunity to put
an end to the last 30 years of takeaways and place our nation on the road
toward progress again.
As part of building our movement, we have called for a national boycott of
Coors Beer, Papa Gino's Italian Restaurants and any other corporation or
foundation (Bradley Foundation, Olin Foundation, Scaife Foundation) that
has contributed to the efforts of right wing forces to reverse the gains
of the last civil rights movement.
We are boycotting Coors Beer to stop their funding of Ward Connerly's
attack on civil rights. Coors has been a longtime sponsor of the attack on
affirmative action and civil rights. They recently gave California
Republican businessman Ward Connerly $100,000 for his efforts in
California. Connerly has announced he will attempt to put an
anti-affirmative action ballot initiative on the Michigan ballot. Because
of the weakness of popular support, Connerly will need at least 1-2
million dollars to get his segregationist initiative on the ballot. We are
determined to deny him the big money he needs. He is attempting to nullify
our U.S. Supreme Court victory in Grutter v Bollinger through
ballot initiatives state by state. By making an example of Coors, we can
convince Connerly's other potential donors that informational pickets and
publicity identifying them as a business that supports racism and
segregation is not profitable.
Coors has seen its role typically as providing seed money for major
attacks on civil rights like Proposition 209 and the University of
Michigan cases. Once Coors has weighed in with enough money for the attack
to get off the ground, other potential right wing funders are more likely
to contribute. Making clear to Coors that racism is bad business can
therefore play a very important role in reversing the whole period of
right wing and racist attacks on affirmative action and integration.
Our boycott of Coors has a real chance of success because Coors has been
important in funding many reactionary attacks. Over the years there have
been many boycotts and protests of Coors. Some of these have been
successful, some not. Sometimes when past protests have hurt Coors, Coors
has cynically put up money to buy off the protests. The new civil rights
movement will never be bought off by Coors.
Our boycott of Coors for its funding of the attack on affirmative action
can succeed for two main reasons. The first is the strength of the new
civil rights movement in defending affirmative action. The second is that
the beer market is very competitive and Coors is very vulnerable to a
strategy that would lose Coors significant sales in the market. In
particular areas, including on campuses, and in black and Latino
communities, Coors cannot afford to write off those markets. We can make
Coors pay a heavy price for its decisive role in financing racism.
Coors family funding of the attack
on affirmative action and integration:
Coors money has played an important role in the attack on affirmative
action from the very beginning. Millions of dollars in profits from Coors
beer has consistently and generously flowed to the people and
organizations that initiated and continue to advance the attack on
affirmative action programs and K-12 integration programs.
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Coors profits funded the Center
for Individual Rights (CIR), the law firm notorious for the attack
on the University of Michigan's affirmative action programs in the two
cases Grutter v Bollinger and Gratz v Bollinger. CIR
filed the two U of M cases after successfully striking down
affirmative action in the 1996 Hopwood v Texas case. Hopwood was the
first anti-affirmative action lawsuit brought in higher education
since the 1978 Bakke case, and ushered in the recent decade-long
assault on affirmative action in higher education. In 1997, CIR
defended California's segregationist Proposition 209 against legal
challenges. Prop 209 was Ward Connerly's first anti-affirmative action
ballot initiative and caused a sharp drop in underrepresented minority
students at the University of California flagship schools, making
clear to the nation the unacceptable cost of ending affirmative
action.
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William Coors' racism was publicly
exposed in a statement he made to black and Mexican-American
businessmen in 1984. He told the group that if they thought it was
"unfair" that their "ancestors were dragged here in chains against
their will…I would urge those of you who feel that way to go back to
where your ancestors came from, and you will find out that probably
the greatest favor that anybody ever did you was to drag your
ancestors over here in chains, and I mean it."
Later in the speech, Coors elaborated on what he saw wrong in Africa:
"They lack the intellectual capacity to succeed, and it's taking them
down the tubes. You take a country like Rhodesia, where the economy
was absolutely booming under white management. Now, black management
is in Zimbabwe, and the economy is a disaster, in spite of the fact
that there is probably ten times the motivation on the part of the
citizens of that country to make it succeed. Lack of intellectual
capacity--that has got to be there."
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In December 2001, Joseph Coors gave
Ward Connerly $100,000 for his so-called "Racial Privacy Act" (Prop
54), the California ballot initiative that aims to make it illegal for
any state institution to collect racial or ethnic data, making it
impossible to expose patterns of discrimination.
In January 2002 Joseph Coors, along with John Moores (owner of the San
Diego Padres) and Peter Preuss (Republican University of California
Regent) co-hosted the kick-off event for Connerly's Racial Privacy
Initiative election campaign. By throwing his political weight and
money behind Connerly's effort as well as lending his name, Joseph
Coors has made clear he is not just a passive supporter of Connerly's
attack on civil rights.
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The Coors family gave money to
pro-South African apartheid groups.
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When Joseph Coors established the
Heritage Foundation in 1974, he chose Roger Pearson, an outspoken
anti-Semite and pro-Nazi, as co- editor of the Heritage Foundation
publication "Policy Review." Pearson is the author of a racist book
called "Race and Civilization," which uses pseudoscience to falsely
assert the biological inferiority of black people. Pearson has also
edited or co-edited several racist and neo-Nazi magazines, as well as
written and organized for the far right-wing Northern League in
northern Italy.
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Paul Weyrich, far right wing
strategist and Heritage Foundation co-founder, has many ties to Nazi
collaborators and neo-fascist organizations. In the 1970s, Weyrich and
Joseph Coors made appointments and set up political contacts on
Capitol Hill for Franz Joseph Strauss, then the Bavarian head of
state, who helped émigré Nazi collaborators. The Free Congress
Foundation, co-founded by Joseph Coors and Weyrich, became active in
eastern European politics after the Cold War. Figuring prominently in
this effort was Weyrich's right-hand man, Laszlo Pasztor, a former
leader of the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross organization in Hungary, which had
collaborated with Hitler's Reich. After serving two years in prison
for his Arrow Cross activities, Pasztor found his way to the United
States, where he was instrumental in establishing the ethnic-outreach
arm of the Republican National Committee.
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Coors money was directly behind the
first formal challenge to affirmative action with the filing of the
August 1990 Colorado contracting case, Adarand Constructors, Inc. v
Skinner by the Mountain States Legal Foundation (MSLF). The MSLF was
set up by Joseph Coors, who was the first Chairman of the Board of
Directors and provided the initial start-up money of $250,000.
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On August 1, 2003 a lawsuit was
filed against Berkeley, California's historic voluntary school
desegregation plan, the first of its kind in the nation, established
in 1968. This suit was filed by the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF),
another Coors-funded right wing law firm/foundation. The PLF has
launched this attack as part of a campaign of lawsuits in California,
cynically named "Operation End Bias" in an attempt to use the racist
Proposition 209 to re-segregate state and local agencies. They also
unsuccessfully attempted to end Seattle, Washington's high school
integration plan, losing at the state Supreme Court in June 2003. PLF
is also known for weighing in against affirmative action in the two
University of Michigan cases at the U.S. Supreme Court level with
amicus briefs arguing against the programs.
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During the 1964 Civil Rights Act
debate in Congress, William Coors campaigned for the failure of the
bill. He called the Coors workforce together on paid company time and
urged them to contact their Senators to oppose the passage of the
bill, lying and telling them that sixty white employees would lose
their jobs to black workers if the bill passed.
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Since 1981, Coors money and ideology
has been directing Republican presidents. The Heritage Foundation,
founded and funded by Joseph Coors and other far right wing
supporters, published "Mandate for Leadership," a set of
recommendations to the Reagan administration calling for massive
reductions in social programs and big tax cuts for the rich. Within
his first year in office, Reagan had implemented two-thirds of the
several thousand recommendations. He lauded the Heritage Foundation
and cemented its fame and political influence. When Reagan was
re-elected in 1984, Heritage published "Mandate for Leadership II,"
which included recommendations repealing affirmative action policies,
reducing the enforcement of voting rights and civil rights laws and
lessening legal redress for victims of racist actions. Heritage also
wrote policy guidelines for Bush Sr. and Bush Jr.
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Heritage has successfully put
forward candidates for policy positions in the government starting
with Reagan. The Heritage foundation had substantial input into
Gingrich's "Contract with America" and recently successfully installed
a distinguished fellow from Heritage into the Bush cabinet -- U.S.
Labor Department Secretary Elaine Chao.
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Coors money helped sponsor the
landmark public education setback, the Cleveland vouchers case. In
June 2002 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the use of public funds
("school vouchers") to pay for private schools, including religious
schools. This effort to weaken public education has been led by the
Institute for Justice and annually funded by Coors profits.
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Adolph Coors Sr.'s family friend and
lawyer owned Castle Rock, the monumental red-rock knob that overlooked
the Coors Brewery property, and lent it to the KKK in the 1920's for
cross burnings that could be seen from all over Denver.
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References:
The Coors Connection by Russ Bellant,
1988, 1991
Citizen Coors by Dan Baum, 2001
The Assault on Diversity by Lee
Cokorinos, 2003
People for the American Way website
- http://www.pfaw.org
Corporate Accountability Project
website -
http://www.corporations.org/coors
"Coors and the LGBT Community" -http://www.nlg.org/committees/lgbt/lgbt_coors_statement.htm
Center for Individual Rights
website - http://www.cir-usa.org
Free Congress Foundation website -
http://www.freecongress.org
Heritage Foundation website -
http://www.heritage.org
Downloadable Fact Sheet - PDF File |
