Off-Color Comments

Ever since he was Governor of California, Ronald Reagan has had to fend off charges that he is insensitive to minorities. So there was surprise last week when the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights released two letters written by its black chairman, Clarence Pendleton Jr., to Reagan, criticizing the President for doing too much to help minorities. Among the actions that Pendleton protested: holding a White House luncheon for Administration blacks. Wrote he: "You did not appoint people by color or gender. Why convene them for [that] reason?" He also chided Reagan for supporting "set-aside" programs that favor minority contractors.

Pendleton, a presidential appointee, has been an outspoken apostle of Reagan's civil rights creed, which includes opposition to quotas and other coercive remedies for discrimination. The letters apparently grew out of talks between Pendleton and two of the Administration's leading civil rights conservatives, Counsellor Edwin Meese and William Bradford Reynolds, the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. Their aim: to keep Reagan true to his conservative beliefs. Pendleton said he wrote the letters to let the President know "there are people who believe in his original agenda."