Claremont Independent

Last Updated: 8/24/08 Section: Online Feature

The Claremont Independent will be interviewing a number of CMC alumni in the coming issues to hear about their time at CMC and some of their life stories. The first interview in this series is with John Doggett '69, a founder and president of the Black Students Union. His political views evolved as he went through CMC and Yale Law, until he came to conservatism. Doggett was an acquaintance of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, for whom he testified at the infamous Anita Hill hearings. This interview is split into two parts, and was conducted by Charles Johnson, an assistant editor of the Claremont Independent.

PART I: LA public schools, CMC, and liberal racism

Tell us a little bit about your time before Claremont.

I entered CMC in the fall of 1965. It was a time when race and class were at the forefront of my life.

I am a product of the public school system of Los Angeles. Each year, my class was the last one to have more white students than blacks, Asians and Latinos. While most of my teachers didn't care about our skin color, a small minority of my white teachers resented this growing "dark cloud" that was befouling their campuses. They yearned for the good-old-days where the only thing they worried about was having too many Jews in their class. Sadly, these hateful teachers spared no effort in trying to convince us that we would never amount to anything because of our skin color.

When one of my high school classmates asked the college advisor at Los Angeles High School for a SAT application, she refused to give him one. She said that he didn't need to take the SAT to attend a Junior College. When he said that he wanted to attend a four-year institution, she told him that she would only give him a SAT application if both of his parents came to the high school to meet with her. My friend's name is Lorn Foster. Dr. Foster has been a Professor of Politics at Pomona College for more than two decades.

Los Angeles High School was very unusual in that it had a private, million-dollar endowment that allowed it to offer special programs for their best students. One program was designed to encourage LA High students to study physics in college. It sent the top ten physics students on a trip to UC Berkeley and the Lawrence Livermore Research Laboratory. To qualify for this trip, you had to have one of the top ten scores on the AP Physics test.

When I took the AP Physics test as a senior, my score was the 6th best in my class. That so upset those who were opposed to fairness for black students that they changed the rules. They said that for my class, besides having the top AP Physics test scores, you also had to have the highest GPA. When they combined the two, I fell out of the top ten and was disqualified from the trip. My parents complained, but they allowed this ex-post-facto rule change to stand and I stayed home.

I entered CMC in August of 1965. President Johnson was escalating the Vietnam War, they replaced student draft deferments with a draft lottery, the Black Power Movement replaced the Civil Rights Movement and the Watts Riots had just torn Los Angeles apart.


My generation was asking questions that were unthinkable when our parents were young. Why, we asked, did our classmates have to die in Vietnam to prop up a government that seemed corrupt and incompetent? Why, we asked, were blacks denied the right to vote, own property, or marry whomever they loved just because of their skin color? Why, we asked, should we trust people over 30?

Just weeks before I became a student at CMC, the Watts Riots ripped through south-central Los Angeles. At its peak, the violence was so extensive that it spread from Compton in the south to the campus of USC in the center of LA. The elected leaders of Los Angeles became so fearful that the rioting would spread to the rest of Los Angeles that they asked the State to declare martial law. Soon after that, National Guard troops entered the riot zone, and the LAPD started arresting thousands of black citizens who had the misfortune to be outside at the time.

I learned this all too well when they arrested me for the "crime" of being outside on the night they declared martial law. Fortunately, Bill Johnson, a black juvenile probation officer who lived in Claremont, recognized what it meant for me to be admitted to CMC. He helped me survive two weeks of martial law confinement until my parents' lawyer could find me and bail me out. Two weeks later, I was at CMC.

When I entered CMC in 1965, I was a member of the largest number of black students ever admitted to the Claremont Colleges at once. There were five of us. We joined three other blacks to make a grand total of eight black students at the Claremont Colleges in 1965.

How did Claremont McKenna influence your political and economic thinking?

CMC was a very special place in 1965. For the first time in my life, I was in an educational environment where the faculty didn't care about my skin color. They were only concerned about what I said in the classroom, what I wrote in my papers and how I participated in the community. I loved being at CMC so much that I only went home when they closed the dorms.

The first CMC professor who changed how I looked at life was a Polish Count who taught my first-year Introduction to International Relations course. He had fled Poland in 1956 when the communists cracked down on the Polish freedom movement. During an office visit, he asked me what my career goals were. I told him that I wanted to become an US Foreign Service Officer and work in Africa and other developing countries. He then asked me a simple question that changed my life.


He said, "So Mr. Doggett, I assume that the reason you want to represent the United States in Africa is because there are no issues facing Negroes in your country that would benefit from your attention." I was speechless. This man, who had been forced out of his country by the communists, was asking me how could I abandon my people in the midst of a revolution about how Americans thought about race and poverty. That conversation changed me.

I decided that I would commit my life to improving the plight of those who were powerless. This conversation led to my attending Yale Law School and spending seven years representing the interest of the poor. It led to my attending Harvard Business School and spending the rest of my life helping to create jobs and wealth.

The second professor who had a profound impact on how I looked at the world was Martin Diamond, a professor of Political Science. Professor Diamond was a brilliant man whom Time magazine selected as one of the ten best teaching professors in America in 1968. He told me that he once was a follower of Leon Trotsky, a "conservative" communist. While he was trying to recruit "workers" while working as a radio operator on cargo ships, he realized that he didn't enjoy what he was doing. He said at that point, he decided that he would spend the rest of his life doing what excited him, and that was teaching.

Dr. Diamond's story was my first exposure to the ideas of Ayn Ryan and the importance of letting one's self interest guide one's life.

The third person who had a significant impact on my life at CMC was George C.S. Benson, the founding president of CMC. President Benson was an accessible, straight talking person. George and I respected each other although he was a conservative Goldwater Republican and I was a reluctant Democrat. We had worked together to recruit qualified black and Hispanic students and crossed swords when I became the first President of the Black Students' Union of the Claremont Colleges.

When I asked George whether I should attend Harvard or Yale law school in the spring of 1969, Clarence Thomas was a sophomore at Holy Cross College and Anita Hill was in the fifth grade.

George asked me why I wanted to go to law school. I said that I wanted to fight for justice for blacks and poor people. George said, "John, Harvard Law School is good at producing corporate lawyers. Yale Law School grads are more concerned about social issues. Given what I know about you and what you want to do, you will be happier at Yale."

I took George's advice. My Yale Law School classmates included Hillary Rodham, Bill Clinton, Clarence Thomas, and Lani Guiner. Twenty-two years later, I spent three and a half hours telling the US Senate Judiciary Committee why Clarence Thomas was a good man and why Anita Hill was lying.

What was significant during my four years at CMC was that the faculty and staff were apolitical. Unlike liberals, they felt that pushing their political ideas on their students would have been wrong. So they led by example. They were smart, dedicated to truth, and honest. They treated everyone fairly and held us all to the same standards. It wasn't until I matriculated at Yale Law School that I realized how special my education had been.

You were the founding President of the Black Student Union (BSU). Tell us a little about that history. Why did you found BSU?

The BSU was created in the wake of white student reactions to a speech by Tommy Jacquette, a community activist from Watts. They invited Tommy to CMC to talk about the Watts Riots. At one point, a white student asked him a question, and he said, "Why don't you ask your black classmates sitting next to you?" When a black female student started to answer the question, several white students said, "We don't care what you think, we only want to hear from the speaker." The hostility of our classmates stunned us.

When Tommy said that learning about African history and culture was important, some white students said that "nothing that had ever happened in Africa had any educational value. Nothing at all."

Those comments shocked us and saddened us. Many white students were clueless about what it meant to grow up in a country that still practiced legal racism. For example, it wasn't until 1973 that the US Supreme Court outlawed anti-miscegenation laws that banned interracial marriage in 1/3 of the states. In many parts of California, community or deed restrictions banned the selling of property to blacks.

The more we thought about what we had heard from our classmates during the Tommy Jacquette speech, the more we realized that we would have to be more proactive if the people of Claremont were to understand the meaning of being black in America in the 1960s. Soon afterwards we decided to form a Black Student Union. I was elected President because my colleagues knew that I was comfortable talking with members of the administration.


Our goals were very simple. We wanted respect. We wanted our colleagues at Claremont to view us as equal members of the community. We wanted them to view the history and heritage of African and black people as equally legitimate as the history of any other ethnic group.

Your fellow classmate, Ken Masugi CMC '69, has described those 1960s years as particularly tense. Masugi said in The St. Petersburg Times that black radicals wanted blacks to account for 10 percent of the student body and faculty, with ten percent of the budget to fund the creation of a black studies center and change the curriculum. After their demands were ignored by the Claremont Colleges, two bombings and 25 arsons occurred on campus. One of the bombs maimed a 19-year old secretary. You were on campus during that time and the president of the Black Student Union. How did you feel about that was going on?

Ken is right that the times were tense, but he is wrong that only "black radicals" wanted change. The overwhelming majority of the black students at Claremont felt that the Colleges needed to do a better job of outreach to encourage qualified black students to apply. The Claremont Colleges had developed a reputation for being elitist institutions that didn't want black students. We selected 10% as a target, but were clear that we only wanted the schools to accept students who could do the work. What we wanted was an affirmative recruiting program, not an affirmative action admission program.

We called for the creation of a black studies center because we were appalled at how ignorant most of our classmates were about African and black history and culture. We felt that the study of the life and history of African and black people was just as important as studying Asian history or Western Civilization. The black studies program was to be the first step in turning the study of the African and Black experience into a legitimate academic discipline.

The overwhelming majority of our members abhorred the violence that had become part of the struggle. Unfortunately, some of our members had friends from other colleges where violence had become a way of life. Although they never arrested anyone for the bombings at Claremont, most of us felt that the people responsible for planting the bombs and most of the arson were students from San Francisco State who felt that we were not revolutionary enough.

I was attending a campus-wide discussion about race with the President of Pomona College when the bomb that maimed the young lady exploded. When we learned what had happened, it sickened and deeply saddened us by the senseless violence. It turned out that she was the wife of a football player.

When rumors started circulating that her husband and members of the Montclair KKK were coming to campus for killing black students, the presidents of the Claremont Colleges decided that they should evacuate all black students from campus for our safety.

We spent the next two days in the house of Bert Hammond, an administrator. Highway Patrol, LA County Sheriff and Claremont Police officers blocked the street to his house.

BSU's current president, Jeanine Daniels, wants to create a "safe space" for black students on Pitzer College campus. Did you ever feel as if you needed one when you were a student?

When I first walked down the streets of Claremont, some whites stopped and stared at me. Others almost had car accidents because they were shocked to see blacks in their town. This type of reaction was irritating, but it wasn't threatening.

I think it is very important that black students reject the idea that they need a "safe place" that is only for blacks. That is not why you come to Claremont. I am sure that there still are people in Claremont who don't like blacks. Heck, there are blacks in LA who don't like blacks. They are members of the Crips and Bloods gangs. Racism is just a part of being human. Creating a "safe place" is not the solution that I would support. I prefer confronting bigotry, not avoiding it.

Claremont McKenna also sponsors separate racial retreats during the first few weeks of school. Did you ever go on one of those? Do you feel as if those are necessary?

We didn't have them when I was a student. One challenge that new students have is adjusting to the unique place that is Claremont. I was fortunate that my father was a Methodist Minister who had many white friends. We also always lived in racially mixed neighborhoods. If, on the other hand, I had grown up in a completely black or Hispanic community, having an opportunity to talk with people about the adjustments necessary to become comfortable at Claremont would have been very helpful.

Why do you think college presidents, like Pamela Gann, who supports increasing the diversity of the campus, seem so quick to support these programs?

Before Barack Obama, the only so-called black leaders that the press supported were professional "victims" like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. There were others of us who had a different perspective, but the press ignored us. So, if you are college president and your only source of information about what the black community wants are professional victims, you will fall into the trap of believing that these programs are necessary.

Barack Obama's success is fundamentally changing the discussion about race in this country and around the world. I expect many programs that are based on racial victimization will wither and die because of his success.

You've written that you walked away from the conservative movement after you read the states' rights chapter of Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative, but that you revisited the movement years later. What made you reconsider it? It seems a long journey from BSU President to entrepreneur, conservative talk show host, and WorldNetDaily.com columnist. Help explain it to me.

One reason that I resigned as the President of the BSU was that some of my colleagues felt that I was more interested in trying to fix problems than engaging in confrontation. They were right.
Lorn Foster, my high school classmate who is now a Professor of Politics at Pomona, introduced me to Ayn Rand when I was at CMC. I had never read anything like her writing before. Her words resonated with me and reinforced the messages of my parents. My parents told me that black people had to work twice as hard as whites to be respected. They said that might not be fair, but that it would ultimately make me better and stronger.

The intellectual growth of Malcolm X before his assassination also deeply moved me. Ayn's and Malcolm X's writings reinforced my parents' message of self reliance and independence. By the time I graduated from CMC, I realized that I had developed a much more self-reliant and conservative ideology that those who supported the nonviolent civil rights movement and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I agreed with Ayn and Malcolm that allowing people to abuse you was a crime against nature.

I will never forget the first time I felt comfortable with my decision to become a Republican. It was just before the 1990 Texas elections and my former wife and I were leaving an Austin fund raising event for Clayton Williams, the Republican nominee for Governor of Texas. Clayton was a true Texas character. He had big ears, a wide smile, a quick wit, tremendous wealth, and not a lick of political sense at all.

As we walked out of the old Austin Opera House, we started to walk past camera crews waiting for Candidate Williams. As is our tradition, we smiled at them and said good evening. Immediately, a young white man and woman shouted, "What are you minorities doing supporting a Republican? What have these people done for your people?"

The arrogance of these white, liberal racists stunned us. I quickly responded, "I am an American and I can support whomever I want. You know, I left the Democrat Party because of racists like you who can only see a black face and not an American citizen."

He then said, "You are not an American, you are a minority." I got right up into his face and said, "I am not a minority. That is a word that you people created and I reject. I choose to call myself an American, and how I define myself is all that counts."

As I walked away, many white Republicans looked back at that camera crew in shock. For the first time, they had seen the power and the fury of white liberal racism. Before that confrontation, I had been struggling with the tension between my conservative beliefs and my history of equating Republicans with southern racism. That one encounter in 1990 erased any doubt I had about the wiseness of my conversion. From then on, I was committed to the destruction of white liberalism, wherever its slimy head appeared.

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