The Sunday Profile : Against the Grain : Gary Franks’ stand on affirmative action pits him against other blacks in Congress--and the leaders of his own party.

WASHINGTON —  Congressman Gary A. Franks remembers taking a road trip through Ithaca, N.Y., with the Yale basket ball team. He and teammate Leroy Watkins stopped at a diner there, found seats and waited.

Four white players walked in and were served. But it wasn’t until Franks upended a salt shaker, spilling its contents on the floor, that the waitress rushed over. Franks--then a bushy-haired, bushy-bearded sociology student and starting guard--told her, “Now, we’re ready to place our order.”

Twenty years later, the Connecticut Republican is trying to spill salt again, this time on the floor of the House. Again, the issue is race. But now Franks is pitting himself against blacks, and against the GOP leadership, on the touchiest of issues: affirmative action.

All of which places him in a class by himself.

“My measure of him is that he does not have any following in the black community,” says Rep. Julian Dixon (D-Los Angeles), one of 40 members of the black congressional delegation, the largest ever. “And he does give white Americans cover by virtue of the color of his skin. He makes them feel more comfortable in dismantling programs that I think are still well needed.”

The rise and fall of Gary Alvin Franks, 42, over an issue that has been thrust front and center here and in California began in June, when he eagerly sought permission from House leaders to fire the “first salvo against affirmative action.”

He drafted a law that would end the practice of reserving a small percentage of federal contracts--known as set-asides--for companies controlled by minorities or women.

It put Franks on the edge of a conservative tide to roll back affirmative action. In the weeks ahead, Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, who has enlisted Franks to co-chair his presidential campaign, would sponsor a companion amendment in the Senate. And two other Republican presidential contenders would offer sweeping reform: Gov. Pete Wilson persuaded the California Board of Regents to drop race and ethnicity as a factor in hiring and admissions, and Senate Majority Leader Robert J. Dole (R-Kan.) introduced broad legislation that would end race- and gender-based federal affirmative action programs. (An identical bill has been initiated in the House by Rep. Charles T. Canady, a Florida Republican.)

Because Franks is black and has felt the sting of discrimination, he was thought to be in a better position, observers say, than his white, conservative peers to lead affirmative action reform in the House.

“I should think that nobody can deny that he has a standing or a basis or a right to talk about this issue,” says House Majority Leader Richard K. Armey of Texas, who sees a political parallel between Franks’ attack on affirmative action and President Richard Nixon’s 1972 trip to China.

“The idea was that a conservative Republican would have been the only President who could have made that trip. In this case, a black conservative may be the only person who could be judged to have standing [to lead affirmative action reform],” Armey says.

It appears that the Wilson-backed reform, and certainly the Dole-Canady legislation, go further than Franks’ initiative would, barring even informal goals and timetables in minority recruiting. Yet while their efforts continue, Franks’ amendment died late last month in committee, a victim, he contends, of House leaders who “don’t have the stomach to deal with this issue.”

He claims House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) was cowed by threats of endless debate from Democratic minority caucuses. “I was very upset. . . . I told him I would be willing to debate from 10 o’clock to midnight if necessary,” Franks says. “He lied [about promised support], I can’t say it any other way.”

Gingrich’s view is “let’s take it a little bit a slower,” says deputy press secretary Lauren Sims. “Let’s take a look at the issue and do it as a task force issue.”

For Franks, who says he will use the current congressional recess to contemplate his next move, it is a setback in a career of headstrong conservatism.

Since 1990, when he became the first black Republican in Congress in more than 60 years, Franks has been steady in his assault on the racial status quo.

He accused Franklin Delano Roosevelt of creating social programs that resulted in the enslavement of blacks.

He criticized as “racial gerrymandering” those portions of the vaunted Civil Rights Act of 1965 that provided for majority black voting districts. He took the witness stand in the federal case that led the Supreme Court in June to bar the use of race as a predominant factor in congressional redistricting. In his testimony, Franks called such redistricting “apartheid,” prompting Georgia state legislator Billy McKinney to challenge him to a fistfight. (A judge later sanctioned McKinney $500.)

And when President Clinton announced last month his continued support for affirmative action, Franks slammed the Democrats in a news conference as the party of George Wallace and die-hard separatist Lester Maddox.

“He’s got to show that he can out-Clarence Thomas [J.C.] Watts,” says Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.), referring to the Oklahoma freshman who is the only other black Republican in the House.

Franks’ ideology so incenses the other members, all Democrats, of the Congressional Black Caucus that they once booted him out of a strategy luncheon before he could finish his apple pie and ice cream.

“It would probably be better for all concerned if you did resign [from the caucus] . . . admitting you never should have joined the ranks of black legislators who fight to protect the rights of black people,” wrote Rep. William Clay of Missouri in a 1993 open letter.

But Franks did not resign.

“Today, members of the black caucus would like you to hear one message,” he says. “And if anyone else has a different message, they’re an Uncle Tom. And that’s sad. They can’t win on the merits.”

His stand on affirmative action is simple. Although he favors the kind of active minority recruitment that brought him to Yale under a financial aid program, and that he later employed as a personnel chief at such major Connecticut corporations as candy maker Cadbury-Schwepps, he disdains quotas or anything that smacks of special preferences.

Such treatment stamps the recipient as inferior, he argues, as someone who needs special help. Any suggestion that a person could not succeed on merit rankles him to the core. These very preconceptions have denied him accolades, he says, for winning three elections in a largely and increasingly conservative congressional district.

“The press has never given me any credit for winning an election against a white person. I’m very candid to say that,” Franks says. “They can’t say that Gary Franks was deemed by his constituents, 90% white, to be better than a white person.”

And yet the ideology of this lanky politician with the dazzling smile is, like his early life as the son of a brass-maker in Waterbury, Conn., more complex than it seems.

Franks would not go as far as Gingrich to reduce the government’s role in people’s lives. Last year, according to an analysis by Congressional Quarterly magazine, Franks voted with the Administration 71% of the time.

He believes in a woman’s right to a legal abortion and has consistently backed federal funding to support it and to safeguard clinic access. He is a moderate on the environment, voting to ban offshore drilling in California.

In March, when House Republicans were rushing to reduce this year’s federal budget, Franks took issue with their choice of targets. “I am for dismantling the Great Society programs and the Roosevelt New Deal, but I do not believe that the solution is merely to cut, cap or pass the buck to the states,” he said in a speech from the House floor. “The Pontius Pilate approach to governing, a policy that we have taken of late, seems to disproportionately affect the . . . elderly, women, African Americans and other minorities, veterans and children.”

But any shades of moderation are hard to detect inside his Capitol Hill office, where an entire wall is devoted to photographs of Franks posing with GOP glitterati. There he is with George and Barbara Bush, Dan Quayle, Jack Kemp, Gen. Colin Powell and others. But there are also pictures of his family back in Waterbury, his wife of five years, Donna; stepdaughter Azia, 11; daughter Jessica, 4, and 1-year-old Gary Jr.

Franks frequently invokes his children or his past to bolster his stand on affirmative action and his credibility as a spokesman for the black community.

“I’ve said, you’re gonna hear it 50 million times,” he begins in his rapid-fire dialogue, “I don’t want to look at my two daughters and my son next to three white people and tell them they need special help. . . . I’ve dealt with discrimination. . . . I had a cross burned in front of my yard. . . .”

Franks was the youngest of six children born to Richard and Jenery Franks, tobacco farmers from North Carolina who immigrated to Connecticut upon word of jobs in the brass works of Waterbury.

While Franks emphasizes that hard work and excellence marked his and his family’s success, his older sister believes that special assistance--special preference--played a role in their upward mobility. A developer interested in creating a culturally diverse neighborhood sold her parents a single-family home in an area that otherwise would have been off-limits.

“Believe me, in that particular day and age [the ‘60s], there is no way my father would have been able to get this without the assistance of the developer,” says Bonita Franks, an education professor at Bloomsberg University in Pennsylvania.

But moving into this all-white neighborhood would prove menacing.

There were countless threatening phone calls. A stray dog was shot in their yard. And it got worse: Gary, then 11 and a fan of the New York Yankees and “The Andy Griffith Show,” was asleep when a cross was set afire on the lawn one night. He woke to find its charred remains the next morning. The family lived in terror for three months.

“I remember [my father’s] exact words,” Bonita Franks says. “He said he would stay there until his last ounce of blood [was gone].”

Finally, when Gary found a dead possum wrapped in a death threat and stuffed in the mailbox, the FBI began to investigate, he recalls. Phone tapping ultimately led to the arrest of two white culprits.

Franks cites this experience, often more than once, in public debates on affirmative action to establish his credibility on the issue of discrimination.

Yet, perhaps because he also found acceptance, even popularity, in the nearly all-white schools of Waterbury, Franks seems less wary of white-dominated society than his Democratic colleagues. The cross-burning, he says, demonstrated only that some people are good, some are bad--but most are good.

Family values left a far deeper impression on him.

Richard Sylvester Franks, an older brother who works as a clinical social worker in Prospect, Conn., recalls that neither the switch nor, in some cases, the ironing cord was spared to enforce discipline.

“Our values were basically . . . believing in God, putting God first, working hard, valuing education and not doing anything that would embarrass the family,” says Bonita Franks, who, along with her schoolteacher sister, Joan, tutored and doted on young Gary.

“He had a good heart,” childhood chum Reginald Beamon recalls. “He would give you the shirt off his back.”

On Sundays, the family split up. Jenery Franks, who worked as a dietary aide at a hospital, would take the children to Grace Baptist, where shouting or clapping was forbidden. Richard Franks, who died at 70 in 1982, attended the livelier Zion Baptist.

Politics, such as it was, in the Franks household reflected the tumultuous scenes played out nightly on television. Gary recalls tuning in a spectrum of black voices, from Malcolm X, H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Adam Clayton Powell and Roy Wilkins.

“It was healthy for America. It was healthy for the black community,” he says of that diversity of black leadership.

But it did not spark any political yearnings in the adolescent Franks, although he did beat out the mayor’s son for senior class president while on a scholarship at a Catholic high school.

He was recruited out of Yale by Continental Can Co. to train in labor relations. Jettisoning a plan to study law, Franks spent a decade managing personnel, advancing at three corporations. It was then that he came to admire the Republican tenet on self-reliance and switched parties.

But even after his subsequent rise from Republican town committeeman to Waterbury alderman to a splashy entrance into Congress, Franks remained little more than a blip on national political radar until the GOP’s control of Congress this year offered him a public forum on affirmative action.

His proudest achievements until then included his vocal support of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, his fight to end quotas in the Civil Rights Bill of 1991 and his frothy clash over continued membership in the Congressional Black Caucus.

Now, after colliding with GOP leadership over affirmative action, Franks jokes about an uncertain future. “After calling the Speaker of the House a liar, I may have to run for the Senate,” he says.

Still, Franks says he regrets nothing. “So far as I’m concerned, I can hold my head up pretty high,” he says.

It’s an attitude that reminds former Yale teammate Leroy Watkins of the way Franks used to play basketball. “During the game, he was the kind of guy who looks to take the big shot,” Watkins recalls. “Others might feel they might miss it and get booed. But he never had any hesitancy.”

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Gary A. Franks

Age: 42.

Background: Lives in the town where he was born and grew up, Waterbury, Conn.

Family: He and wife Donna are raising daughters Azia, 11, and Jessica, 4, and son Gary Jr., 1.

Passions: Reading books with his children, especially Dr. Seuss; novels by John Grisham; hot apple crisp and ice cream.

On his family: “We were not a gifted [family]. We had a mixture. We had individuals who skipped two grades. We had individuals who stayed back several times. But the bottom line is, we persisted and we had faith and we worked hard and we did not quit and we were supportive of each other. The closeness of our family was definitely something that was of great pride to us.”

On his academic success: “Because I excelled in what I did, it eliminated a lot of the preconceived myths or biases. They couldn’t say, ‘Oh, black people are stupid.’ I mean, I was getting higher scores than they were.”

On his conservatism: “I’ve been able to raise the level of discussion. I consider myself as being a pioneer in the same spirit in which you had those eight or nine [different] voices in the black community during the ‘50s and ‘60s. I am just offering a different route to the same objective.”