Patrick Chavis, one of five black students whose admission to a medical school in California 30 years ago provoked a Supreme Court battle over affirmative action, died on July 23 in Hawthorne, Calif. He was 50. Mr. Chavis, whose medical license was revoked five years ago for malpractice, was fatally shot as he returned to his car after buying an ice cream cone in Hawthorne, a suburb of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department said.
Investigators theorized that three men had tried to hijack Mr. Chavis's car but fled without it. Mr. Chavis lived in Inglewood, Calif. In 1973, Mr. Chavis was admitted to the University of California at Davis medical school in a program to increase black enrollment. Allan Bakke, a white applicant who was rejected despite having higher scores than the five black applicants, sued to be admitted. In 1978, the Supreme Court struck down the program, ruling that race could be a factor but not the only factor considered for admission.
After graduation, Dr. Chavis returned to Los Angeles as an obstetrician and gynecologist, to the area where he had grown up. In the mid-1990's, his work won him attention in articles in The New York Times Magazine, in The Nation and on television programs. In 1996, Senator Edward M. Kennedy called him a "perfect example" of how affirmative action worked. Mr. Kennedy and other proponents of affirmative action suggested, at least implicitly, that Dr. Bakke, an anesthesiologist in Rochester, Minn., had achieved less than Dr. Chavis.
After Chavis killed that woman, I'm sure Kennedy and the others sent Dr. Bakke an apology.
Kennedy probably identified with him because he's had his own criminal neglience episodes. Such people who promote the racism of affirmative action in utter defiance of the 14th Amendment are shameless. They can't even use the pretext that it helps minorities - it clealy does not. As the Chavis debacle demonstrates it harms us ALL.