
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, April 30, 1995                   TAG: 9505040002
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: G-5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: PAUL ANDERSON KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

JUSTICE OFFICIAL BECOMES PRIMARY PUBLIC DEFENDER

There's no question that affirmative action got this child of a one-time welfare mom off the mean streets of Chicago's south side. A scholarship to an exclusive prep school led to Harvard College, then Harvard Law School, a job with a prestigious Boston law firm and now a top assignment at the U.S. Justice Department.

Just don't try to tell Deval Patrick that he didn't deserve it.

``I feel I have worked very hard, that I've accomplished what I've been able to accomplish on merit,'' he said at a recent hearing on Capitol Hill, peering up intently at a panel of congressmen through his round, gold-rimmed glasses.

``I also fully appreciate that everybody - everybody - gets a leg up. Everybody gets help. That's just the way the world works. There's the person who gave you a break for your first job. There's the person who gives you the nod to go to school.

``Affirmative action is only about giving that break to people who didn't and don't tend to get that break - women and minorities. And what you do with that opportunity, how you perform with that opportunity, is up to you. That's where the merit comes in.''

Patrick, 38, who is black, has become the primary public defender of affirmative action in an era when government set-asides and other remedies for past discrimination are increasingly unpopular.

Friends say this isn't the role that Patrick envisioned when he became chief of the Justice Department's civil rights division a year ago.

Patrick quickly drew praise from civil rights leaders for a series of aggressive investigations of bias claims that led to landmark settlements, including those with the Denny's restaurant chain for denying service to black customers and with mortgage lenders in suburban Washington, Milwaukee and elsewhere who routinely redlined black neighborhoods for loans.

Patrick, drawing on his own experience as a staff attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, also has been involved in high-profile voting rights cases, including defense of congressional districts that were drawn to concentrate minority voting strength. He also has sued three states - California, Illinois and Pennsylvania - to force their Republican governors to comply with the ``motor-voter'' registration law.

But it is Patrick's involvement in one case that has helped fuel the anti-affirmative action push. Last year he filed a court motion in support of the School Board in Piscataway, N.J., which chose to lay off a white teacher rather than a black teacher during a round of budget cuts.

The Bush administration had sided initially with the white teacher's claim that she was a victim of reverse discrimination.

Patrick argued that, since the qualifications of the teachers were equal (they even started work on the same day, so they had the same seniority), the School Board should be permitted to include faculty diversity in its deliberations.

by CNB