From: Wolf Blitzer/CNN
In: Washington
Posted: 4-9-97

Subject: Clinton To Launch Race Relations Push

President Bill Clinton is planning what his aides describe as a major new push to try to improve race relations in the United States.

He will signal that push next Tuesday when he attends a ceremony at Shea Stadium in New York City on the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's first game in major league baseball. Robinson broke baseball's color barrier.

White House aides say the president also has been spurred into taking action in part as a result of the anti-affirmative action backlash across the country.

On Tuesday, the president said that a decision by a California federal appeals court upholding the state's anti-affirmative action Proposition 209 was a mistake. "And I think we'll all have to regroup and find new ways to achieve the same objective," he said.

White House officials say the president is considering announcing two steps next month to underline his commitment:

• A new presidential panel modeled on the 1968 Kerner Commission which concluded that the U.S. was moving toward two societies, "one black, one white, separate and unequal." The new commission, his aides say, would meet over a period of a few months, not years.

• A White House-sponsored conference that would include civil rights leaders, race relations experts, political leaders and others from all across the country. Clinton's aides say he's become increasingly convinced that as a former southern governor, he's in a unique position to try to heal racial tensions, something that if successful, would provide him with the historic legacy he's seeking in this second term.

In his inaugural address Jan. 20, the president pledged to devote his energies to this cause. "We cannot, we will not, succumb to the dark impulses that lurk in the far regions of the soul, everywhere," he said then. "We shall overcome them."