Candidate Bradley says he'll make racial harmony a theme

By Laurence Arnold, Associated Press, April 21, 1999

NEW YORK -- Digging into his own past, Democratic presidential candidate Bill Bradley yesterday recalled wincing at racist remarks uttered by a beloved aunt and feeling uncomfortable about the special attention he received as a white basketball star.

"That's my story," Bradley told an audience of college students. "What's yours?"

Bradley, so far the only Democrat to challenge Vice President Al Gore for the party's presidential nomination, made clear that racial harmony will be a central theme of his campaign and a central goal of a Bradley administration.

"When Ronald Reagan was president, everyone knew that if you wanted to please the boss, you cut taxes, increased military spending, and fought communism," Bradley told an audience of 200 at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City.

"If I'm president, I want one thing to be known: If you want to please the boss, one of the things you'd better show is how your department or agency has furthered tolerance and racial understanding," he said.

Bradley was speaking in a city where the fatal shooting of an unarmed African immigrant by four white police officers has ignited a storm of protest and caused a major political headache for Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.

Bradley did not join the criticism of the officers. He called the shooting "a grievous error by those charged with protecting the very person that they shot." But he added that the case shed light on "white indifference and black suspicion."

Bradley recited a litany of prejudices and injustices: church bombings, incidents of people beaten or killed because they were of Chinese descent or gay, the police practice of pulling drivers over because they are members of racial minorities.

"For me the quest for racial unity remains the defining moral issue of our time," he said.

There are many ways of addressing the issue, he said. "Among black children, 40 percent are destitute. There is no reason why a multiracial coalition cannot be built to lift up our poorest children."

Bradley did not mention Gore or President Clinton, but did refer at one point to "the pain on the faces of Asian-Americans stigmatized by the false suspicions in the 1996 presidential fund-raising scandals."

Harvard University professor Cornel West, author of the 1993 bestseller, "Race Matters," introduced Bradley as "my brother and friend" and endorsed him as "the worthy next president of the United States."

Race relations have been a lifelong interest for Bradley, whose basketball career led him to the intersection of black and white America. He refused to do commercial endorsements as a New York Knick, in part because of discomfort about being hailed as basketball's "great white hope."

In 1992, when white Los Angeles police officers were acquitted of state charges in the beating of a black motorist, Rodney King, Bradley walked to the floor of the Senate, denounced the verdict, and rapped a pencil against the podium 56 times to dramatize how many times King had been hit.