The preferential hiring and promotion of non-Whites by government and big business at the expense of White job seekers and employees -- so-called "affirmative action" -- is now under sharp attack on several fronts and giving ground. The whole program of employment favoritism for non-Whites, which got its start during the 1960s under President Lyndon Johnson, has become in recent years more irksome to the long-suffering White majority and is increasingly susceptible to determined campaigns designed to dismantle it -- especially now that the Federal government has lost some of its former enthusiasm for the program.

One such campaign reached a successful outcome this January, with the Supreme Court's decision that so-called minority "set aside" contracting by local governments constitutes illegal discrimination against White contractors. In that campaign a group of Virginia contractors had instituted a civil-rights suit against the city of Richmond for its policy of awarding 30 per cent of its construction contracts to Black businesses.

Another campaign against affirmative action still is being hotly contested, as the National Alliance, a White activist group based in the Washington, DC, area, attempts to set a precedent by forcing America's largest corporation, AT&T, to halt all anti-White discrimination in the recruiting, hiring, and promotion of its employees. The National Alliance is using its rights as a shareholder in AT&T to force the giant corporation to submit an anti-affirmative action proposal to all the shareholders for a vote.

The use of corporate shareholder proposals in furtherance of social, political, environmental, or other ends is hardly new. It gained prominence during the early 1970s, when opponents of the United States role in Vietnam tried to compel corporations with defense contracts to terminate them. Today the most visible shareholder pro-ponents are those attempting to force U.S. corporations to cease doing business in or with South Africa.

The tactic works like this: A group or an individual with a cause -- saving the whales, say -- selects a corporation, the larger the better, whose corporate activities have some bearing on the whaling industry. The target might be a company which manufactures automobile transmission fluid using whale oil as one of its components. The backer of the cause then purchases shares in this company. As a shareholder he gains certain rights relative to the company. One of these is the right to vote on proposed changes in the company's activities -- or to propose such changes himself.

Toward this end the would-be whale saver submits a proposal to the company's management that it use a substitute for whale oil in its transmission fluid. Under certain conditions the company may then be required to print the proposal in the proxy material which it must mail to all of its shareholders prior to the annual shareholder meeting, so that the great majority of them who will not attend the meeting in person can cast their votes by mail for the directors of the company for the coming year -- and for or against any shareholder proposals.

Even if the proposal is voted down, it gives the proponent a forum, attracts attention to his cause, and puts a certain amount of pressure on the management of the company.

Management is, of course, opposed to all such proxy proposals on principle. If a shareholder made a suggestion which management liked, it would simply implement it, without consulting other share-holders. And if management could have its way, it would simply toss proposals it didn't like into the trash and forget about them. That's the way it used to be, before the government got into the act as a backer of "corporate democracy."

In recent years the Securities and Exchange Commission, a Federal agency which regulates share-holder-owned corporations, has required management, under certain conditions, to submit proposals it doesn't like to all of the share-holders for a vote. The conditions are rather restrictive, however, and management is able to persuade the SEC to permit it to ignore most shareholder proposals. Even the largest publicly owned corporations, with hundreds of thousands or millions of shareholders, generally have no more than two or three proposals included with the proxy material they send to their shareholders each year before the annual meeting. Typically, hun-dreds of other proposals have been discarded during the year, without objection from the SEC.

It was with these facts in mind that the National Alliance, a non-profit educational organization whose principal activity is the promotion of a sense of racial identity and purpose among America's demoralized and deracinated White population, purchased 100 shares of AT&T stock in late 1986. An exhaustive study of the history of shareholder activism, of the voluminous body of SEC regulations on shareholder rights, and of relevant court decisions already had been made by a committee of Alliance members.

In October 1987, after the shares had been held for the 12-month period required by the regulations, the National Alliance submitted the following proposal to AT&T's corporate secretary, Robert Scannell:

"WHEREAS so-called "Affirmative Action" programs to advance non-Whites may contribute toward discrimination against qualified White people;

WHEREAS an Affirmative Action program may contribute to a decline in the quality of a company's work force;

WHEREAS AT&T has an extensive Affirmative Action program to advance non-Whites; therefore, be it

RESOLVED that the shareholders of AT&T hereby request the Board of Directors to take the necessary steps to phase out those aspects of AT&T's Affirmative Action program which are directed toward increasing the proportion of employees from any particular racial or ethnic group through hiring or promotion.

Supporting Statement

AT&T's Afirmative Action program seeks to "ensure proper representation" of non-Whites in its work force. While absolute "quotas" do not exist, "goals" and "targets" for non-Whites do exist. The attempt to achieve "proper" non-White representation through hiring and promotion may have the following negative effects on our Company:

1. POOR MORALE -- White em-ployees may feel discouraged and ignored when they notice that the Company is actively seeking to advance non-Whites. This may be especially true during times of job layoffs.

2. LOWER QUALITY OF PERSONNEL -- AT&T has never had a policy of discrimination against any racial or ethnic group. The mere fact that the representation of a particular group at an AT&T location may not reflect the proportion of that group in the surrounding community is not necessarily an indication of discrimination. Rather, it may be evidence that the intelligence required to succeed at AT&T is not evenly distributed across all racial and ethnic groups.

In an important paper before the 1986 annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, Dr. Linda Gottfredson of Johns Hopkins University presented evidence that tests of intelligence provide the best available prediction of job performance. Neither previous education nor extensive future training can compensate for low intelligence.

With the importance of intelligence in a career at AT&T an IQ of 114 or above would seem to be a desirable characteristic in most job applicants. Yet we must objectively consider the estimate that only 1.1 per cent of the Black population, compared with 23 per cent of the White population, has an IQ in this range. To ignore data such as this in employment practices sacrifices the essential long-term benefits of personnel quality for the short-term approval of pressure groups.

It may be argued by some that Affirmative Action for non-Whites is required to obtain Federal contracts. However, according to the 1987 Proxy Statement, "AT&T's total business with the Federal government in 1985 represented less than 6 per cent of total revenues." This revenue may well be equalled or exceeded by seeking additional non-government contracts.

We, as shareholders, bear the responsibility to urge the correction of the unfair and unsound practices currently included in AT&T's Affirmative Action program. If you agree, please be sure to mark your proxy card FOR this proposal."

AT&T responded with a letter informing the National Alliance that the company's management had decided not to submit the proposal to other shareholders for a vote. The Alliance immediately appealed this decision to the SEC. In a staff ruling on January 25, 1988, the SEC overruled AT&T and told the company's management that the Alliance's proposal, with a few minor changes, must be included with the proxy materials mailed to AT&T's nearly three million shareholders.

As soon as the proxy materials were mailed the news media picked up the story and began treating it as if the sky were falling. Hysterical, vitriolic editorials appeared in dozens of newspapers. One in the New York Daily News was headed "Drop Dead, National Alliance." A columnist for the Washington Post referred to the proposal as a "Nazi diatribe." An article about the proposal in the Miami Herald was headed "Neo-Nazi Ploy." An Associated Press story which appeared in hundreds of newspapers described the National Alliance only as "a Washington, DC, based organization that promotes the study of Adolf Hitler's writings."

The only news account which came close to being objective and factual was a lengthy treatment on the National Public Radio program All Things Considered. And there the commentator, who was quite knowledgeable on the general subject of shareholder proposals, expressed surprise that the tactic was being used by a group outside the leftist, anti-White camp. It was as if she regarded shareholder activism as their preserve, and the National Alliance was trespassing on territory where it had no business.

When the 1988 AT&T shareholder meeting was held in Denver on April 20, busloads of Marxist, homosexual, feminist, and other pro-affirmative action demon-strators -- even a few Blacks -- carried placards outside the meeting hall protesting in abusive terms the National Alliance's proposal. AT&T management, terrified of being considered insufficiently supportive of special privileges for non-Whites, went out of its way to denounce the proposal at the meeting. Company officials called it "outrageous," "prejudiced," and "highly objectionable."

Nevertheless, when the ballots were counted 9.96 per cent of the shareholders who exercised their voting right -- 112,663 persons -- had voted in favor of it, more than for any other proposal submitted that year. It received a 40 per cent greater approval than another proposal on the same ballot: one to increase the scope of AT&T's affirmative action program.

The fact is that shareholder proposals seldom garner the support of as many as 10 per cent of shareholders the first time they come up for a vote. Most shareholders play it safe and vote with management against all new and unfamiliar proposals. Only after a proposal has been on the ballot several times and been subjected to a great deal of public discussion do shareholders develop the courage to vote in accord with their own opinions. As it was, the Alliance's proposal was by far the most popular with AT&T shareholders of the five proposals which made it through the thicket of management protest and SEC regulations in 1988.

Encouraged, the National Alliance resubmitted its proposal in October 1988. AT&T management, under pressure from organized minority groups, pledged to fight it through "other avenues" than the SEC the second time -- apparently indicating an intention to go into the Federal courts in an attempt to get around the SEC's regulations.

In order to get into court, however, the company first had to exhaust its administrative remedies. It told the National Alliance that it would not put the proposal on the ballot for 1989, and it sent a lengthy legal argument to the SEC in support of that position. When the SEC issued a staff decision on December 21, 1988, it was a compromise between the Alliance and the AT&T positions. AT&T was ordered to print a severely pared-down version of the proposal, from which all references to the discrimination against Whites implicit in any affirmative action program had been deleted.

AT&T then appealed the SEC staff decision to the commissioners themselves. Both sides were surprised when on December 29 the five commissioners reversed the portion of the staff ruling which would have permitted AT&T to delete the references to reverse discrimination and told AT&T to print the original proposal, with only one minor change.

This severe setback apparently discouraged AT&T from going to the courts. Instead management decided to print the Alliance's proposal in the proxy materials, but to counter it with a lengthy appeal for the shareholders to vote against it. AT&T's appeal used abusive language against the National Alliance and attempted to persuade the shareholders that, first, its affirmative action program is really only an equal opportunity program, which does not discriminate against Whites, and that, second, if it dropped the program it would lose "billions of dollars."

This time it was the National Alliance which apealed to the SEC, protesting that AT&T's response was false and misleading and would confuse shareholders and intimidate them into voting against the proposal. The Alliance objected to the impropriety of AT&T's ad hominem attack and pointed out the false and misleading statements in the response. In particular, the Alliance protested AT&T's transparent effort to equate affirmative action and equal opportunity.

The SEC refused to intervene on behalf of the Alliance, however, and AT&T printed its 1989 proxy materials with its misleading and intimidating plea to shareholders to vote against the proposal.

The response of AT&T shareholders to the National Alliance's proposal the second time around will be known on April 19, when the final votes are cast at the 1989 annual meeting in New York City. The true significance and impact of the proposal will depend on more than the ballots of AT&T shareholders, however. After all, the aim of the National Alliance goes far beyond merely securing equal rights for Whites in one corporation, or in all corporations.

Equality is a despicable goal, as well as an exceedingly elusive one in the real world, and anyone who seeks no more than that deserves less.

The aim is to take the offensive against the enemies of White America, to show what can be done with the weapons at hand, and to inspire others to take them up and join the fight.

White Americans have sat on their hands for far too long, while their enemies stole their birthright. Now is the time to begin taking it back -- all of it.

(This article was originally published in NATIONAL VANGUARD Magazine, PO Box 330, Hillsboro WV 24946 USA. Fax # 304-653-4690 $2 for complete catalog)