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A controversial activist group met in a South Berkeley church Saturday afternoon to urge parents to enlist in the fight against a lawsuit filed by an Berkeley affirmative action foe backed by a equally controversial conservative legal foundation. 

“The defense of desegregation in Berkeley is a critical moment in the struggle for desegregation and diversity in America,” Luke Massie, national co-chair of the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action and Integration and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) told some 50 activists. “This lawsuit is part of the little-publicized but well-organized attack on desegregation, and we must launch an effective defense. We are in the front lines of the battle with this case in Berkeley.” 

The Alameda County Superior Court lawsuit by Berkeley parent Lorenzo Avila, supported by the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), seeks to end a Berkeley Unified School District plan that encourages racial diversity without specifically using ethnicity as a criterion. PLF attorneys, who are arguing the case for Avila, say the new plan is illegal under Proposition 209, the 1996 voter-passed anti-affirmative action amendment to the state constitution.  

In 2002, PLF successfully challenged the Huntington Beach school district’s integration plan, which was nearly identical to Berkeley’s earlier ethnically explicit school assignment plan.  

On Thursday, Alameda County Superior Court Judge James Richman will hear arguments in on a motion by BAMN, sister organization United for Equality and Affirmative Action (UEAA) and two Berkeley parents to grant them legal standing to join in opposition to the lawsuit. A BAMN-sponsored 8 a.m., two-hour rally outside the courthouse at 201 13th St. in Oakland will precede the hearing. 

The Berkeley lawsuit “is a huge opportunity,” BAMN’s Massie told the Saturday gathering. “If we take a stand here and fight and win, we’ll be setting an example for the entire country.” 

Massie’s sister, Michigan attorney Miranda Massie, is one of the attorneys who will argue for the intervention motion. 

Joining Massie on the platform were Janeare Ashley and Pamela Sanford, graduates of Berkeley schools and respectively the mother and grandmother of current students, along with Joyce Scon of UEAA and Yvette Felaca, a member of the local BAMN chapter. 

“I want my child to attend the best possible schools,” said Ashley, a graduate of Malcolm X Elementary School and the mother of a current Malcolm X student. “I don’t want someone else to tell me where my child can go. If you allow a group of people to set the limits, and if you let them take an inch today, don’t you think they’ll take a mile tomorrow?” 

Massie and Scon had harsh words for mainstream civil rights organizations, which they said have been reluctant to mount legal challenges in light of the conservative mood of Congress and the courts. 

Berkeley NAACP chapter chair Alex Papillon told the gathering he approved of the district’s current integration program, but not the revised program which is scheduled to start with the next school year. “We’d refuse to be an intervenor in defense of a non-race-based plan.” Berkeley’s was “the first and only school system that voluntarily integrated,” Papillon said, “which was a slap in the face of racism because it showed that white people were opposed to segregation.” 

Papillon said he is worried because a partial confluence of interests between whites on the far left who are shooting for a non-race-based society and those on the far right “who are shooting for a segregated society achieved by not using race.” 

The NAACP has filed a separate intervention brief in the case in alliance with the American Civil Liberties Union and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area.  

Papillon said he’ll attend Thursday morning’s rally because “if PLF wins in Berkeley, they’ll crow about it all over the country.”  

John Findley, the PLF attorney representing the Avilas, said he doesn’t think a judicial decision to grant the intervention petitions should have much impact on the case. “We are dealing here with constitutional law, and we assume that’s what will govern the outcome of the case,” he said.  

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