Los Angeles -- The Campaign to Save Women's Rights and Civil Rights, the Women's Campaign to Defeat CCRI, announced the launching of Student Freedom Summer '96. The drive is mobilizing college students throughout the country and California to spend the summer registering young people to vote and organizing communities to defeat CCRI.
"The California Civil Rights Initiative is neither Californian, nor civil, nor right, is said Prema Mathai-Davis, National Executive Director of the YWCA of the USA and co-chair of the campaign. "This is a nationwide campaign to gut sex discrimination laws protecting women's jobs and educational opportunities and to ban affirmative action programs for women and minorities. Similar initiatives have been introduced in five other states and bills with similar language have been introduced in 17 state legislatures and the United States Congress.
"The YWCA will be organizing to defeat CCRI out of its 30 local community offices in California," added Mathai-Davis.
"I've been asked 'How could any Californian sign an initiative that will do so much harm to millions of California women, minorities and their families?' Simple: deception and big money -- and with the support of big government contractors and their cronies in high places," said Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority. "Women's groups throughout California and nationwide are galvanizing to expose the fraud and wake-up women to the hazards CCRI poses for their jobs, paychecks, education and business opportunities. Over 100 women's groups nationwide are dedicated to defeating CCRI and similar initiatives," continued Smeal.
"We intend to tear-off the mask of this 'Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde' initiative. Never be has there been so organized or large an effort out of the starting block in California. We are mobilizing thousands of women volunteers who will go door-to-door, leaflet in shopping malls and staff volunteer phonebanks to defeat CCRI," said Patricia Ewing, newly appointed campaign manager. "Freedom Summer '96 -- in honor of the historic 1964 Freedom Summer - will galvanize thousands of students to spread the word that their futures and opportunities hang in the balance. We are ready to roll today -- and we'll continue until we stop this monster dead in its tracks in California -- the state with the strongest sex discrimination laws in the nation."
The backers of CCRI are painting this only as a black-white issue, while they try to sneak in this devastating attack on laws protecting women from sex discrimination," said Kathy Spillar, National Coordinator of the Feminist Majority. "Before November, these opportunistic politicians will wish they had never wielded this double-edged sword."
"Freedom Summer '96 is already organizing on over 129 college campuses nationwide and over 100 colleges in California alone. In addition, we are organizing among high school students and inter-scholastic and inter-collegiate girls and young women's athletic teams," said Traci Scharf, a Dartmouth College junior, and Freedom Summer '96 organizer. "We launched our California college recruitment drive last night at Occidental College, and we will be traveling to each campus throughout the state. Our generation's jobs, sports and educational opportunities are at stake. And we don't intend to lose what our mothers fought for and won."
Four members of the top-10 ranked Chino High School Cowgirls basketball team, joined by their Coach Joe Murillo, attended the press conference to lend their support and to emphasize the importance of defeating CCRI for girls' and women's sports programs. "I am calling girls' coaches throughout the state. We must mobilize or we will see girls' sports opportunities vanish overnight. I'm here because I won't let these girls down. They deserve equality -- not an attack from reaction forces on their futures."