Campus protests up and down the state did not soften most CSU trustees’ attitudes toward the plight of people of color and women within academia. In many ways, white board member attitudes hardened because of the perceived disruption to the “status quo,” as it did with many ordinary white Californians. In this chapter I examine the varying levels of resistance and opposition to implementing affirmative action within the California State University system from trustees, Chancellor's Office staff, and elected officials. Despite federal and state laws that opened access to insure racial and gender equity in the nation's public colleges and universities, it would be necessary for pro-affirmative action forces to challenge this resistance to guarantee the success of these policies and programs. Even after the loud, rancorous student protests on campuses across the CSU system in the late 1960s, trustees continued to slow-walk enforcement of affirmative action policy until the appointment of Claudia Hampton as the system's first Black woman trustee in 1974. Hampton's appointment to the board was one of several factors that forced the trustees to fully comply with the law after nearly a decade of obfuscation and overt delays.

On the heels of politicized campus protests at San Jose State and San Francisco State, Ronald Reagan, for example, in his position as governor and as a member of the CSU Board of Trustees, used these events as oppor-tunities to pressure the state legislature and trustees to enact policies that greatly expanded the role of law enforcement in the day-to-day operations of the university. Reagan also used his line-item veto power to dramati-cally cut the State College budget, denying requests to increase support for the Educational Opportunity Programs (EOP) which directly benefited racial minority and economically disadvantaged students needing academic counseling, mentoring, and tutoring services in preparation for admissions and retention in the California State Colleges. In 1970, for example, the Governor's budget included only $1.6 million of the trustees’ proposed $4.1 million as compared to the previous year's appropriation of $3.3 million. Trustees’ notes from that period reveal how the reduction in fund-ing to EOP had a devastating impact on disadvantaged students the public was demanding that the State Colleges serve.

Appendix: Hampton’s Trustee Committee Service and Leadership

Beyond any federal and state mandates, it would take the cultivation of personal relationships with the board's white trustees by the “black woman on board” for the CSU trustees to begin to embrace affirmative action, both in principle and in practice. Within the California State University system, Mabel Kinney was the first woman appointed to the CSU trustee board in 1960. It would take another fourteen years before the board would have its first non-white woman trustee, with the appointment of Dr. Claudia Hampton. As the first Black woman board member, Hampton's appointment might have functioned as an indicator of racial equality and progress. Yet at the time Hampton was installed as a member of the board in 1974, hostile racial attitudes toward people of color were still deeply entrenched in California as in other parts of the country. Thus it should come as no surprise that Hampton's appointment to the CSU Board of Trustees was met with shock for some and open hostility from others. Claudia Hampton had to approach her work using finesse, subtlety, and shrewd thinking to counter this hostility and be effective in her role as trustee. This chapter focuses on how she enacted sly civility through a variety of strategies and tactics to protect affirmative action and push back against those forces that worked to obstruct, limit, or eliminate programs designed to increase access and equity for women and people of color within the California State University system.

In recounting the first few years of her appointment, Hampton told the story of an incident where fellow trustee board member, Wendell Witter, a managing partner of Dean Witter and Company, used a racist term during a disagreement with Hampton about affirmative action policy implementa-tion. Hampton recalled, “Wendell Witter—He was the one who made the comment in a board meeting “I don't understand this. There's a problem. There's a n----- in the woodpile.” The specific phrase Witter used, “n----- in the woodpile,” was a figure of speech used in the United States dating back to the 19th century referring to the concealment of slaves under piles of fire-wood or other hiding places. Newman Ivey White describes how the phrase eventually meant that something was suspicious or wrong.

Paul Bond, a staff writer for The Daily Sundial, the main student newspaper at CSU Northridge, wrote in a 1993 opinion piece entitled “Affirmative Action Is No Longer Effective” that “today, affirmative action means hiring quotas, lower standards and expectations for minorities, lawsuits where employers must prove their innocence (in direct conflict with the Constitution), race norming (artificially raising scores on aptitude tests for certain minority groups), and reverse discrimination.” To support his claims, Bond referenced the work of conservative African American scholars Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele, arguing that affirmative action hurts African Americans. But more than simply name-dropping two African American opponents of affirmative action, Bond claimed that “currently, about three quarters of African American college students drop out before graduation, including thousands from elite colleges,” without offering any evidence to support his claims.

Bond could get away with making such unsubstantiated claims about affirmative action, since public support for legislation and programming to promote educational equity started to wane in the early 1990s. Campus newspapers throughout the Cal State system, and mainstream dailies like the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post, regularly ran articles and opinion pieces during this period lambasting affirmative action and ethnic studies curricula as part of a multicultural movement that had gone too far. Critics of affirmative action claim that colleges and universities lowered standards and denied qualified white students access to the nation's colleges and universities in favor of less-qualified minority students. The end result of these special overtures to racial and ethnic minority students was a growing resentment by white students and working-class white voters, who saw affirmative action as a threat to their chances of getting an education and a good job. In this chapter I examine the impact of the culture wars on educational policymaking within CSU, culminating in the death of affirmative action with the passage of Proposition 209 in 1996, just two years after Claudia Hampton's death from lung cancer.

White resentment towards affirmative action had been a reality since the inception of this legislation, reaching fever-pitch with the Bakke decision in 1978. However, it was not until the early 1990s that the Republican Party began making race, multiculturalism, and affirmative action the centerpiece of their 1992 election campaign.

Following years of slowly and methodically building rapport with her board colleagues, Claudia Hampton was able to translate the social capital she had cultivated into increased soft power that she used in circumventing process obstacles, influencing and shaping policy, and effectively changing the organizational culture of the CSU Board of Trustees from within. This chapter details how Claudia Hampton used the power and influence that she had skillfully acquired in her earliest days on the board, including downplaying her race and playing to the gender norm of the day, to assist the CSU system in the implementation and expansion of its affirmative action program for students, faculty, and staff.

On May 23, 1979, in his final speech as the chair of the California State University Board of Trustees, Roy T. Brophy, a stocky-built white man who made millions in construction in Northern California, stood before the audi-ence gathered at the CSU Board offices in Los Angeles and closed his address with this: “A woman I have known and respected and loved for many years is our new chair. She will be known as the first black and the first woman chair of this or any other major university board of trustees. But she is more than that—she is a person with special sensitivity, special abilities, and special gifts; I am sure we will gain something in sharing them with her in the now future, Chair Dr. Claudia Hampton.” Brophy's somewhat clumsy attempt to mark the historic nature of the election of Dr. Claudia Hampton as just the second African American trustee and the first woman board chair for the California State University Board of Trustees takes on even greater importance when some months later on July 18, 1979, Dr. Hampton stood before the members of board to give her first address as chair. Hampton thanked her peers for the opportunity to serve as their leader and laid out her broad vision for the board during her term in office, never mentioning that she was the embodiment of history in the making. Hampton's silence on the significance of her race and gender in her appointment was characteristic of how she handled herself as a trustee and later as board chair when dealing with race and gender matters within the CSU system.

A Very Fortunate Happenstance

This book traces the history of affirmative action implementation and enforcement within the California State University (CSU) system to its end in California with the passage of Proposition 209 in 1996. It focuses on the black woman on the CSU board of trustees who fought for twenty years to enforce this positive law and prevent anti-affirmative action forces from eliminating these programs designed to increase access to the university for racial minority groups and women. The idea for this book came from a “very fortunate happenstance” while researching another project on a local grassroots organization started by my maternal grandmother called the Office for Black Community Development in Watts, California, in 1979. While searching through the CSU Dominguez Hills Digital Photo Archive, I stumbled across a photograph of a black woman standing at a podium in academic regalia at the 1976 commencement ceremony at CSU Dominguez Hills. The name was listed as Trustee Claudia Hampton but what intrigued me most about this photograph was a notation at the bottom of the picture with the words “appointed by Reagan.” Having written about Ronald Reagan for my doctoral dissertation on conservative philanthropy used to fund the academic culture wars of the 1990s, I knew that Reagan, when he served as the governor of California, had shown great contempt for the efforts made by African Americans to secure their civil rights. In fact, Reagan was a great admirer of Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus, who was at the center of efforts to block the enforcement of the 1954 Brown versus Board of Education decision. The two men shared a belief that school desegregation was a state's rights issue. Similarly, Reagan opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, claiming the latter was “humiliating to the South.”2 He opposed the 1948 Supreme Court decision to overturn restrictive covenants in housing; signed the Mulford Act, aimed at disarming the Black Panthers, into law; and he condemned antiwar and civil rights activists as the “greatest threat to freedom and civility”—actions demonstrating hostility toward the peace and social justice advocacy work taken up by groups like the NAACP, Students for a Democratic Society, and the Black Panthers, among others. Imagine my surprise then at seeing a black woman being appointed by Reagan for any position within his administration.

The Legacy

On April 12, 2018, I stood on a stage in Claudia Hampton Hall on the campus of CSU Dominguez Hills, ready to give a joint talk on the history of Black and Filipino solidarity with my colleague Dr. Mary Lacanlale from the Asian Pacific Studies Department. After I introduced myself to the audience, I asked, “Can anyone in here tell me about Dr. Claudia Hampton, the person whose portrait is on the wall?” The only responses I got were blank stares and heads shaking no in response to my question. “Well, before I get started with my presentation, I want to let you know who she was. Dr. Claudia Hampton was the first Black woman trustee in the Cal State system. She was responsible for making sure that folks like me can stand before you as an alum of Cal State Fullerton and Cal State Long Beach and chair of the Africana Studies department, presenting my research on my local family history about Black Filipinos living in the Compton-Carson area. I am working on a book about her. By the time I am done, I hope that more people know who she was and what she did for students of color in the system.”

When I posed the question about who Claudia Hampton was to the audience, I underestimated how much more I would be learning about her and the political dynamics she faced in her twenty-year fight to save affirmative action. Though I was a CSU student during Hampton's years as trustee and have spent most of my professional career as CSU faculty on two campuses, if I had not stumbled across a photo of Hampton in a digital archive, I would have been completely clueless, just like the members of my audience, as to why my campus had a lecture hall named after Hampton. I found it peculiar how so few people on campus knew anything about her, since it took the passage of a faculty senate resolution to have a classroom named in her honor. I asked around to people who had been on campus for decades, some of whom were faculty when Hampton Hall was so named, and I could only identify one person who remembered her.

It would take the threat of a protest during a football game for university officials in the California State College (CSC and later CSU) system to expand their understanding of “education as a public good” to include students of color. This chapter explores how Black student-led protests at CSC campuses across the system forced the CSC Board of Trustees to confront Black and other nonwhite students’ long-ignored claims of racial discrimination and exclusion. These campus protests served as the catalyst for gradual changes within the system, where Claudia Hampton would come to play a key role as a CSC trustee in enforcing affirmative action.

On the evening of September 14, 1967, a headline appeared on the front page of the San Jose News which read “Negro Faculty Member Challenge Claims, San Jose State Race Prejudice Blasted” and in the article, Harry Edwards, a graduate of San Jose State College (SJSC) who had been a star athlete as a student and was now an adjunct sociology professor at the college, was quoted as saying “Segregation is worse here than in Mississippi.” Specifically, Edwards referred to housing discrimination by landlords around the college, who posted vacancies but refused to rent to Black students. Elaborating on the problem of housing discrimination against Black students, Edwards said, “I can show you vacancy signs all over but they’re not vacant for Negroes.”

To San Jose State College President Robert Clark's credit, he quickly mobilized a team under the direction of SJSC executive vice president William Dusel to try to immediately find housing for Black male student-athletes and bring in civil authorities to expose and put pressure on landlords who discriminated against Black students. Shortly following a meeting between Edwards and President Clark, a notice prepared by the United Black Students for Action (UBSA), went out to faculty soliciting their support for the principles for which Black students planned to protest and contained a list of demands that included public deliberations of all problems and solutions related to Black students, increased admission and enrollment of minority students, and public statements from the athletics office, housing, and the office of Greek life, denouncing racism.