Lani Guinier: 'I was nominated - and then the rules were changed.' (nominee to head Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department) (interview) (Cover Story)

• Author: Garrow, David J.

When Lani Guinier was nominated in late April by President Bill Clinton to head the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department, harsh attacks by right-wingers began immediately. Former Reagan Administration official Clint Bolick labeled Guinier an "ideologue," and a Wall Street Journal headline writer bestowed upon her the sobriquet QUOTA QUEEN. Bolick accused the forty-three-year-old law professor and voting-rights expert of advocating "racial quotas in judicial appointments" and favoring a "complex racial spoils system." The Washington Post reported that conservatives were vowing to do to Guinier what liberals did to Robert Bork.

The first week of June they succeeded, when President Clinton caved in to conservative pressure and withdrew her nomination without allowing her the chance to explain her views at a Senate hearing. She has returned to the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

In mid-June, we spoke in her Philadelphia office about her life and education, and her treatment at the hands of President Clinton, a one-time friend from Yale Law School. We spoke at length about the misrepresentation of her views on voting rights. Much of the criticism had focused on two lengthy law review articles, "The Triumph of Tokenism: The Voting Rights Act and the Theory of Black Electoral Success," published in the Michigan Law Review in March 1991, and "No Two Seats: The Elusive Quest for Political Equality," published in the Virginia Law Review in November 1991.

When I asked about the op-ed writers' comparisons of her case to those of Robert Bork, Zoe Baird, and Kimba Wood, she simply said, "I think I've learned from the experience to be very circumspect in commenting in public - on anything - and certainly not to write long law review articles about it. But each of these cases has to be judged on its own merits.

"Robert Bork got a hearing. I did not. My nomination was supported by a letter signed by more than 400 law professors, including the deans of twelve major law schools. That letter got no press. Robert Bork's nomination was opposed by more than 200 law professors. That letter got a lot of press."

Q: I know you were born in New York City, I know your parents ended up at Harvard. Tell me your family story.

Lani Guinier: I'm just sorry I didn't have a more timely opportunity to tell the story when it would have been relevant to the contemporary political scene, as opposed to telling it now, when it's helpful to historians, or to anthropologists trying to understand the culture of Washington.

I went to public school and graduated third in a high-school class of 1,447. I got a full-tuition scholarship to Radcliffe, one for outstanding "Negro" students sponsored by the National Merit Corporation and The New York Times. The Times apparently sponsored it because I had been an editor of my high-school newspaper. I don't believe they knew it, but my father had worked for The Times as an elevator operator back in the 1930s.

He was a student at Harvard in 1929-1930. The publisher of The Times came to visit the freshman class and greeted an assembly of Harvard students who had been editors of their high-school papers. He invited any of them to come to New York; he offered them jobs.

And my father took him up on this. He had to drop out of Harvard because they denied him any scholarship aid; they told him that he hadn't sent in a picture with his scholarship application, and that they had given a full-tuition scholarship to one black man already.

So my father took up this offer from the publisher of The New York Times. They didn't have any black people at the time who worked above the first floor, but my father made it to the publisher's office and reminded him of this meeting. The publisher said, "Well, I guess you're right, I did make an offer, but in your case it's as a freight-elevator operator. And you have to go back down to the basement."

And so he went back down and he ran the elevator for The New York Times and put himself through City College.

Q: By the time you entered school, what was he doing?

Guinier: When we lived in Queens, he was selling real estate and insurance.

I was admitted to Harvard-Radcliffe in 1967 and he was working then in New York for Columbia University, for the Urban Institute. When I got the admissions envelope, my father was even more proud than I was. For him, in some ways, this was a vindication of his aborted college career.

Q: What was your sense in junior high, in high school, of racial identity - of being the daughter of a black father and a white Jewish mother?

Guinier: I went to a "magnet" junior high school, a special program for academic achievers. And I had to take a bus. It was clear to me from the very first day that I was coming from the part of town where all the black kids lived. All of the school buses bringing students to this one school were coming from residentially segregated areas.

By the end of the first week, it was clear to me that we could all be friends at school, but that I was one of the black students, taking the bus with the other black students, and that the Jewish kids all lived in Rosedale or Laurelton and were coming on a different bus.

Q: Were you using the name Lani then?

Guinier: My mother named me Carol Lani after the woman who introduced my parents. My father was a warrant officer in an all-black troop in World War II and my mother was a Red Cross volunteer; they were stationed in Hawaii. They met through a woman named Iwalani, who was part Hawaiian and part black, but my mother was afraid Americans would have a hard time with Iwalani - the "w" is pronounced as a "v." And so they named me Carol Lani, but people were calling me Carolina and Caroluni, and so she just dropped the Carol; I've never used the Carol.

But it's a funny story because then, forty-three years later, there is the headline in the New York Post calling me "Loonie Lani." It reminded me of a Charlie Brown cartoon: "I'm always worrying about the wrong thing."

Q: Were you thinking of law school or a legal career in high school? Or when you first got to Radcliffe?

Guinier: In many ways my interest in being a lawyer was set in 1962 when I saw Constance Baker Motley, a strong black woman, playing such an important role in helping James Meredith get...