Ezola B. Foster

Ezola Broussard Foster (born August 9, 1938) is an American conservative political activist. Foster is president of Black Americans for Family Values, authored the book "What's Right for All Americans", and was the Reform Party candidate for Vice President in the U.S. presidential election of 2000. In April 2002, Foster left the Reform Party to join the Constitution Party.

Teaching and activism

Foster was born and raised in Louisiana and earned a master's degree from Texas Southern University. In 1960, she moved to Los Angeles, where she was a public high school teacher for 33 years - teaching typing, business courses and sometimes English classes.

She had sought public office prior to 2000 - as a Democrat in the 1970s and as a Republican candidate for California State Assembly in 1984. In the 1980s, she became an outspoken opponent of pornography, sex education, AIDS education and gay rights and founded "Black Americans for Family Values." She was arrested in 1987 with several other women while disrupting the state Republican convention to protest its recognition of the Log Cabin Club, an organization of gay Republicans. In 1992, she was a staunch defender of the police officers in the Rodney King beating case and organized a testimonial dinner for Laurence Powell, one of the convicted officers, in 1995.

In 1994, while teaching typing at Bell High School in Bell, California, Foster was a public advocate of Proposition 187, a California ballot initiative to deny government programs of social services, health care, and public education to illegal immigrants. Her position was extremely unpopular at the school where she taught, which was 90 percent Hispanic. In 1996, after she argued on PBS's "MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour" that illegal immigration was responsible for the low quality of Los Angeles schools, some of her colleagues at the school condemned her in an open letter. Two days later, she attended an anti-illegal-immigration rally where several of her supporters were attacked by members of the Progressive Labor Party, who allegedly wanted to harm Foster herself. Shortly thereafter, she left her job, which she calls a necessity resulting from her treatment at work. She went on speaking tours for the John Birch Society and took workers' compensation for an undisclosed mental disorder — which she describes as "stress" and "anxiety" — until her official retirement as a teacher in 1998.

2000 campaign

Pat Buchanan selected Foster as his running-mate after several other candidates such as Jim Traficant and James P. Hoffa declined his offer. Foster, who had supported Buchanan's campaigns in 1992 and 1996, quit her speaking tour to join the race. While Buchanan was hospitalized during part of the campaign, Foster was the ticket's mouthpiece, campaigning through television and radio appearances.

The issue of her workers' compensation claim was raised during the campaign and led to questions about her mental state. She responded that she had filed the claim for stress and anxiety, and did not release her records.

Personal

Foster is Catholic. Her first marriage, by which she has a son, ended in annulment, she says, when she found out that her husband was a convicted felon. Later, in 1977, she married Chuck Foster, a truck driver. They have two adult children. Foster is a grandmother. She lives in Los Angeles.

Books

"What's Right for All Americans" (1995)

Quotations

* "I was born black, I attended all-Negro schools including college, I grew up in the segregated South during Jim Crow. If anybody knows a racist, I do. Pat Buchanan ain't no racist."

* "God brought African slaves to America so that their descendants would know freedom"

* "This idea that you come to school hungry -- come on! It's crazy! It's just so they can bring in all these lunch programs, breakfast programs -- next, it's going to be dinner! . . . That's not the job of the schools -- to feed the children. Let them pay for it or let them bring their own."

* "The illegals come over [the Arizona border] into the ranches. They kill their cattle. They rape their children. The children can't play in the yard anymore."

* "These mental health programs are another thing that needs to be booted out of our schools! Every time there's a tragedy, they have to send for grief counselors. How totally ridiculous!"

* "Our people were better off under the bondage of slavery than the Marxist 'Great Society' of Johnson."

* "It’s a sad day in America when law makers side with law breakers [illegal aliens] against law abiding citizens"

ources

* Carlson, Peter. "Ezola Foster: Pat Buchanan's Far Right Hand." "The Washington Post" (Sept. 13, 2000)
* [http://www.issues2000.org/Ezola_Foster.htm Issues2000.org - Some of Foster's campaign positions and quotations]
* Foster, Ezola. "Let the Children be Children." "National Minority Politics" (August 31, 1995)