Ezola B. Foster - Career and Political Activism

Career and Political 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, the civil rights movement, 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 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.

Foster has appeared on The Political Cesspool, a white nationalist radio talk show based in Memphis, Tennessee. She has also been a guest on Larry King Live, CBS This Morning, CNN & CO., Nightline, NewsTalk Television, CNN Live, MSNBC, Politically Incorrect, and various CBS, NBC, and ABC newscasts.