Clarence McClane Pendleton Jr. (b. November 10, 1930, Louisville, Kentucky – d. June 5, 1988, San Diego, California) was the politically conservative African American chairman of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, a position that he held from 1981 until his death during the administration of United States President Ronald W. Reagan.
A native of Louisville, Kentucky, Pendleton was raised in Washington, D. C., where he graduated from the historically black Dunbar High School and then, the also historically black Howard University. Pendleton also had a family connection with Howard University where his father, Clarence Pendleton, was the first swimming coach at the institution, and where his grandfather and father before him matriculated before him. Pendleton enrolled at Howard and earned a Bachelor of Science degree in 1954. After a three-year tour of duty in the United States Army during the Cold War, Pendleton returned to Howard, where he was on the physical education faculty and pursued his master's degree in professional education. Pendleton succeeded his father as the Howard swimming coach, and the team procured ten championships in eleven years. He also coached rowing, football, and baseball at Howard.
From 1968 to 1970, Pendleton was the recreation coordinator under the Model Cities Program in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1970, he was named director of the urban affairs department of the National Recreation and Park Association. In 1972, Mayor Pete Wilson, later a United States Senator and the Governor of California, recruited Pendleton to head the Model Cities program in San Diego, California. In 1975, Pendleton was named director of the San Diego branch of the National Urban League.
A former liberal Democrat, Pendleton switched to the Republican Party in 1980 and supported Ronald Reagan for President. Pendleton claimed that minorities had become dependent on government social programs which create a cycle of dependence. Pendleton advocated that African Americans build strong relations with the private sector and end ties to liberal bureaucrats and philosophies.
In his first year in office, President Reagan named Pendleton to the United States Commission on Civil Rights to replace the liberal Republican commission chairman, Arthur Sherwood Flemming, who had been the United States Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare during the final years of the Eixenhower administration. The Republican-majority United States Senate approved the nomination, and Pendleton became the first black chairman of the commission. He supported the Reagan social agenda and hence came into conflict with long-established civil rights views. He opposed the use of cross-town school busing to bring about racial balance among pupils. He challenged the need for affirmative action policies because he claimed that African Americans could succeed without special consideration being written into law.
Pendleton was as outspoken on the political right as was the later Democratic chairperson Mary Frances Berry would be on the left. Pendleton made headlines for saying black civil rights leaders were "the new racists" because they advocated affirmative action, racial quotas, and set-asides. He likened the feminist issue of equal pay for equal work, written into law in the Equal Pay Act of 1963, to be "like reparations for white women."
Pendleton denounced the feminist concept of comparable worth in the establishment of male and female pay scales as "probably the looniest idea since Looney Tunes came on the screen."
Under Pendleton's chairmanship, congressional funding for the agency was reduced. This prompted some staff members either to lose their positions or to leave the agency in discouragement. Pendleton was considered acerbic by his liberal critics. William Bradford Reynolds, Reagan's Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, described his friend Pendleton as "a man of candor who felt very deeply that the individuals in America should deal with one another as brothers and sisters totally without regard to race and background."
On December 23, 1983, with two Democratic Congressmembers dissenting, Pendleton was re-elected to a second term as commission chairman.
Under Pendleton's tenure, the commission was split by an internal debate over fundamental principles of equality under the law. The commission narrowed the description of legal and political rights at the expense of social and economic claims. The debate centered principally between Pendleton and Berry, an original appointee of President Jimmy Carter. Democrat Morris B. Abram, also a Reagan appointee, was vice chairman under Pendleton. He described "an intellectual sea change" at the agency with the conservative view dominant at that time. Authorized under the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the commission was reconstituted by a 1983 law of Congress after Reagan dismissed three commissioners critical of his policies.
On June 5, 1988, Pendleton collapsed while working out at the San Diego Hilton Tennis Club. He died an hour later of a heart attack at a hospital.
A memorial bench dedicated in Pendleton's honor is located in the De Anza Cove section of Mission Bay Park in San Diego.
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Clarence M. Pendleton, 57, Dies; Head of Civil Rights Commission
Clarence M. Pendleton, chairman of the United States Civil Rights Commission, died yesterday after collapsing while exercising at a San Diego hotel health club. He was 57 years old and lived in San Diego and Washington, D.C.
Mr. Pendleton died of an apparent heart attack at 11:13 A.M. at the Mission Bay Hospital after efforts failed to revive him, according to David Lodge, the San Diego Deputy Coroner.
He was riding a stationary bicycle at the time of his collapse at the Hilton Beach and Tennis Resort, the officials said.
Mr. Pendleton came to the attention of Ronald Reagan in 1980 when he switched to the Republican Party, abandoning his self-described ''bleeding-heart liberalism.'' Guided by Edwin Meese 3d, the confidant of Mr. Reagan, Mr. Pendleton went to work in support of Mr. Reagan's bid for the Presidency. A year later, Mr. Reagan, as President, appointed him as the first black chairman of the Civil Rights Commission.
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As its chairman, Mr. Pendleton was an outspoken proponent of the Administration's ''color-blind'' philosophy on civil rights.
From the time of his appointment on Nov. 16, 1981, Mr. Pendleton was at the center of a political storm. He took several stands that most observers would not have expected from a black on the rights commission.
Mr. Pendleton, for example, opposed desegregation through busing because he believed that such action violated the principle of neighborhood schools. He also doubted that predominantly white schools were necessarily better than predominantly black ones.
In addition, he denounced affirmative action as a ''bankrupt policy'' that detracted from the legitimate achievements of those who would have succeeded in any case. Sharp Response to Critics
Mr. Pendleton would respond quickly and sharply to his critics, many of whom were from the black community, offering to match his record against ''anyone else's rhetoric any day.''
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He said be believed that the commission, under his chairmanship, was critized because the civil rights community arrogated the moral high ground and scorned anyone, especially anyone within the conservative Reagan Administration, who did not ''embrace every tenet of the liberal orthodoxy on civil rights.''
''I think there are people who would like to see the commission go out of business,'' he concluded after Congress cut the agency's budget in 1986 by $4.1 million, giving it $7.5 million that year as against $11.6 million the previous year.
He believed that Congress cut the budget to force him to resign. ''But despite public perception, we aren't missing a beat,'' he said.
Nevertheless, many of the commission's top staff members left, either out of frustration or because their jobs were eliminated as a result of budget cuts. And activity slowed at the agency. Candid and Iconoclastic
''Penny'' as Mr. Pendleton was known, was described last night by several friends, including high officials of the Administration, as candid, iconoclastic and sensitive.
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''He was a man of total and complete candor,'' said William Bradford Reynolds, the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights and a close friend of Mr. Pendleton. ''He was a man who felt very deeply that the individuals in America should deal with one another as brothers and sisters totally without regard to race and background.''
Although Mr. Pendleton was sometimes regarded by civil rights groups as antagonistic to their causes, his friends said he cared deeply about individual rights.
''He probably was the messenger bearing a message that many did not want to hear,'' Mr. Reynolds said.
Colleagues on the commission expressed shock and sorrow at the reports of Mr. Pendleton's death.
''Penny was a unique individual, and we will miss him a lot,'' said Robert A. Destro, who served on the commission with Mr. Pendleton. ''It doesn't make much difference whether someone was a supporter or disagreed with him, we thought he was wonderful human being.''
Mr. Destro said that at the time of Mr. Pendleton's death, he and the chairman were ''taking a hard look at'' the civil rights of American Indians and the medically dependent. Middle-Class Background
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Mr. Pendleton, born on Nov. 10, 1930, in Louisville, Ky., grew up in Washington, D.C., where his father was the first swimming coach at Howard University and an assistant director of the District of Columbia's recreation department.
He graduated from Dunbar High School, where many children of black middle-class families were educated. He then followed in the steps of his grandfather, a lawyer in Baltimore, and his father by enrolling in Howard.
He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in 1954 and worked briefly for the District of Columbia recreation department before joining the Army. On released from the Army in 1957, he returned to Howard, where he had excelled as a swimmer, and took a post as a physical education instructor.
In 1970, Mr. Pendleton became a director of the urban affairs department of the National Recreation and Parks Association. Two years later, he moved to San Diego to serve as director of the Model Cities program there.
In 1975, he become head of the San Diego Urban League and was the only one out of more than 150 officers in the League to support Ronald Reagan's bid for the Presidency.
He is survived by is wife, Margrit, their daughter, Paula, and a son and a daughter by a previous marriage, George and Susan.
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