Civil Rights Groups Out of Touch, Many Blacks Believe : Activism: Urban League president says it is a mistake to think organizations such as his can do everything.

By JOCELYN Y. STEWART

Aug. 31, 1992 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

In marathon sessions, caller after caller flooded the phone lines of black-owned radio station KJLH, jockeying for three minutes of air time to express what many of them had been feeling and saying for years--long before a Simi Valley jury gave everyone else a reason to listen.

Tearful and angry, they spoke of double standards, of betrayal, of their loss of faith in a system that seemed incapable of meting out justice to African-Americans--as demonstrated by the not guilty verdicts in the police beating of Rodney G. King.

“We opened up the phones to them so they could express their outrage over the verdict,” said news director Carl Nelson. “We told them if you’re angry, if you’re upset, take it out on the air. Don’t go in the streets.”

What surfaced with undeniable clarity on KJLH and elsewhere during those three harrowing days of upheaval was not only a deeply rooted bitterness toward the political and criminal justice system, but a paradox that has been festering within the community for nearly as long:

In Los Angeles, a city with a black mayor, numerous other black elected officials and branches of every major civil rights organization, a substantial segment of the African-American community feels voiceless.

As Nelson put it: “The listeners felt betrayed.”

In the months since then, the effectiveness of community-based African-American leadership has become one of the most emotionally charged topics in Los Angeles’ black community.

Expressions of dissatisfaction that were once privately shared are now being openly aired, prompting from several well-known black leaders concessions that the criticisms are not entirely off target, and promises that they will work for change.

Some of the nation’s oldest civil rights organizations--the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, the Urban League, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference--have been accused of being hopelessly stuck in the past and of failing to address the pressing economic and social problems that helped fuel the unrest. Some of Los Angeles’ black churches also have not escaped the barbs.

Latonya Stewart, who grew up in the Jordan Downs housing project, has lived nearly all of her 29 years in Watts. As jobs have disappeared, she has watched people “put their pride aside” and stand in line for free food and clothes at a church where she is a volunteer.

Over the years, she said, black leaders have come to the area promising a better future.

“They pick a spot, make a little speech, but they . . . don’t mingle with the people to find out what their real problems are,” she said. “They come when the cameras come, then they leave.”

Perhaps the most telling illustration of the gulf that some contend exists between black leadership and the black community was beamed into millions of homes after the King verdicts were returned and the violence had begun.

On that night, local television stations juxtaposed scenes of raging fires with footage of politicians, ministers and heads of various civil rights organizations inside the First African Methodist Episcopal Church, urging restraint, planning for the future and listening to uplifting songs by the choir.

Reporters noted that those in the church seemed oblivious to the mayhem unfolding beyond its doors.

“All the lambs were at First AME,” said community activist Dr. James Mays, who runs clinics for low-income and homeless people in South-Central Los Angeles. “The lions were all in the street. It’s not a criticism, it’s a fact. In order for us to avoid a recurrence, we are going to have to bring the lions in with the lambs.”

For the most part, Mays would get little disagreement from leaders of many mainstream civil rights groups who acknowledge that, while waging battles in the corridors of power, they have not always sufficiently reached out to the city’s underclass.

“There are new realities that are thrust upon us, and we can’t operate as if the social realities are the same as they were in 1970,” said Joe Hicks, executive director of the SCLC’s office in Los Angeles. “The world has changed.”

Although critical of his group and others, Hicks said that the rise of conservative politics during the past decade put civil rights groups on the defensive, forcing them to expend their energies preserving “meager gains made during the ‘50s and ‘60s” instead of pressing the battle on such new fronts as AIDS, crime and drugs.

“I think some essential things have to be rethought in terms of who we exist for,” Hicks said. “The agenda cannot exclude massive percentages of the population. . . . It can’t be a package that somebody develops in an organization’s boardroom and takes to the community.”

Lettie Taylor is one of many who believe that the strategy is long overdue.

The 32-year-old mother of three recently attended the Urban League’s national convention in San Diego. She was not one of the 18,000 largely black, mostly middle-class and professional delegates who paid $170 each to hear an address by Democratic presidential candidate Gov. Bill Clinton and to attend such seminars as “Making It! Leaving the Corporate Career Track for Entrepreneurship.”

She and dozens of other like-minded San Diegans slipped into the exhibit hall to take advantage of the many freebies offered at such gatherings--from beach balls to batteries to boxes of cereal.

“I think I’ve heard of the Urban League and the NAACP, but I’ve never had anything to do with them,” Taylor said. “I think organizations like that are OK; I mean they try to promote us to the rest of the world, but I don’t know if they have anything to do with people like me. They can’t give me money or provide food (for) my baby. And look what happened to Rodney King. They couldn’t prevent that.”

National Urban League President John E. Jacob bristles at such talk, saying there is “nothing more relevant” than the group’s longstanding emphasis on helping African-Americans become better educated and penetrate the corporate work force.

“Are we going to reach brothers and sisters standing on the corners with their fists raised? Probably not,” he said in an interview. “We need to try to reach out, but we also need to target our resources. We’ve chosen to focus on education and jobs. The Urban League can’t be all things to all people. It’s a mistake, particularly that the media makes, thinking that organizations like the Urban League can do everything.”

With all the soul-searching since the riots, one thing does seem clear: The nature of leadership in the black community has begun to evolve as those who operated on the fringes, warning of explosive problems, are now being heard.

“There are going to be new voices and new personalities that come to the front,” said Cynthia Hamilton, a community activist and professor of Urban Studies in Cal State Los Angeles’ Pan-African studies department. “That’s what happens when you have social movements. . . . And that’s what makes change so exciting and frightening for some people.”

Among the voices finding a wider audience are those of South-Central Los Angeles gang members, whose well-publicized truce has raised calls for economic opportunity. Also more visible and vocal are members of the Nation of Islam, who have been organizing the once-warring gang members, leafletting housing projects and stepping up their criticisms of law enforcement. African-American business people are also finding themselves at the podium more often.

Some point to individuals such as Danny Bakewell of the Brotherhood Crusade as an example of the kind of leadership the community needs, a mixture of street-level activism and boardroom savvy.

Last year, Bakewell spearheaded boycotts of several South-Central Los Angeles stores owned by Korean-American merchants where African-American customers had been beaten or killed. More recently, to ensure that blacks participate in the rebuilding of their community, Bakewell has been shutting down construction sites that do not employ African-Americans, temporarily putting Latino laborers and others out of work in the process.

“This city needs more Danny Bakewells who uncompromisingly will defend the rights of African-Americans,” said Clyde Johnson, who heads the Los Angeles County Black Employees Assn. “I think we’re going to see a lot more emerge out of the rank and file.”

According to Bakewell, “it’s not enough to have the ability to walk the halls of City Hall and to feel included by the Tom Bradleys and the (state Sen.) Art Torreses and the governor. We also have to be able to reach the bowels of the community because this is where our friends live, this is home to us, this is where we come from.”

Other leaders may be hesitant to engage in confrontational tactics because “everybody wants to be nice,” Bakewell said. “They don’t want the powers-that-be to see them as someone who will challenge them.”

Bakewell, however, is not without critics, who say that he should focus on bigger issues and that his job-site protests have created tensions between African-Americans and Latinos at a time when they should be working together to help cool the city’s racial turmoil.

“In no instance are we saying other people should not work. We are merely saying we deserve to work,” said Bakewell, who argues that the real target of criticism should be the general contractors who exclude blacks from hiring.

For the most part, the confrontational style of Bakewell and other activists who are gaining larger constituencies stands in sharp contrast to the coalition-building tactics of the mainstream civil rights organizations. Today’s wave of emerging leaders are less concerned with reaching into the white Establishment for support than with empowering black residents.

Although their approach is different, leaders of the established groups say the more militant activists reflect the wide range of political views and sentiments that have always existed in the black community.

“It’s simply part of the landscape of leadership in the African-American community,” said Hicks of the SCLC. “In a sense I think that’s positive. . . . I don’t think there’s a need for (leaders) to be a homogenous group of people all speaking with the same voice.”

One of the chief criticisms of Los Angeles’ mainstream civil rights groups has been that, while they argue that their abilities are limited, they have not recruited grass-roots activists in an effort to build a coalition with political muscle and layered community representation.

“It’s a whole new culture out there--new music, a new language,” said former football star Jim Brown, whose Los Angeles-based Amer-I-Can program has attracted national attention for turning around the lives of hard-core gang members.

“The NAACP has been good in courts, the Urban League helps with jobs,” he said. “(But) they’re all above these guys on the street and the guys coming out of prison. They can’t relate to them.”

From helping to quell racial tensions at the Jordan Downs housing project to orchestrating a truce in Watts among the Crips and Bloods, members of Amer-I-Can have shown how to reach young men who have not responded to political leaders, churches or any other program and who are at the core of many of the inner city’s worst problems.

But for all of Amer-I-Can’s successes, Brown said he has met with few of Los Angeles’ elected officials and has never been invited to sit down with the city’s civil rights organizations, except Bakewell’s Brotherhood Crusade. “It’s amazing,” he said. “People are stuck with old ideas.”

Like Brown, activist Michael Zinzun also has been laboring in the trenches on an issue of deep concern to residents of minority neighborhoods--police brutality.

For nearly two decades, as head of the Coalition Against Police Abuse, the former Black Panther has organized countless demonstrations, working out of a sweltering, cluttered office on Western Avenue near 28th Street. Known for his heated rhetoric and in-your-face tactics, Zinzun was never embraced by traditional black leaders.

But Zinzun said changes may be coming. Recently, as he made the rounds to mainstream leaders to talk about police brutality, he said he was actually welcomed inside. “Before,” he said, “you couldn’t even get them on the phone.”

The real measure of change, he said, will be “determined by how much they’re willing to follow the demands coming out of the community and how much participation the community has in the decision-making process.”

Rev. Cecil Murray, pastor of First AME Church, nods knowingly when the question of the relationship between various community leaders and activists is raised, conceding that before the uprising, meetings between them would happen only “either by coincidence or not at all.”

“It had a (negative) impact on the community. If there’s anything our community needs, it’s unity,” Murray said. He noted that First AME, where Mayor Tom Bradley is a parishioner, is now trying to create a consortium of groups representing the black community’s economic diversity and social complexity.

Murray acknowledged that black churches, once so pivotal to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, must accept that they, too, have grown lax in tackling fundamental problems in the communities they serve. They are “out of touch,” he said, especially with young African-Americans who have turned to gangs for identity and direction.

“The majority of black churches are intimidated, threatened by the very nature of gangs,” he said, echoing a widely voiced criticism: that many mainstream African-American organizations are unable to connect with inner-city youths.

Recognizing the severity of the generation gap, NAACP Executive Director Benjamin L. Hooks earlier this year picked 24-year-old Shannon Reeves to head the organization’s western region, overseeing operations in nine states and a small branch in Japan.

He is the youngest person to hold that title in the NAACP’s 83-year history.

“If you want to bridge the generation gap,” Reeves said in an interview, “you have to go to the generation that is in touch.”

“While some seasoned leaders may not want to deal with gang members, I have to because that’s my generation,” he added. “That’s why I identify with rap music, it’s the music of my generation. . . . My priorities may be the same as an older member, but the way I reach them will be different.”

Reeves, an Oakland native and graduate of Grambling State University in Louisiana, joined the NAACP as a teen-ager. His involvement intensified when, for three years running, he was a local champion of the organization’s annual academic competition for high school students. His specialty was public speaking.

At 17, he became one of seven young adults--the youngest ever, in fact--to join the NAACP’s 64-member national board, a position that first brought him to the attention of Hooks.

Reeves says one of the biggest dilemmas confronting civil rights leaders is remembering their constituency.

“Many times you get hung up in meetings with the governor and with the mayor,” he said. “That begins to be your group of association because you’re constantly in battle with that level. You spend less time in the projects, in the inner city. The challenge for organizations is to truly base themselves in the community.”

If Reeves represents the future, then John Mack has come to symbolize an era that some believe is drawing to a close. For 20 years, he has been president of the Urban League’s Los Angeles branch, serving longer than any of his counterparts in the city’s other mainstream black organizations.

Over the years, Mack has learned to move easily within Los Angeles’ power structure, forging strong ties with Bradley and other influential politicians and celebrities. A few years back, he made headlines after disclosures that he and several other well-connected individuals obtained a multimillion-dollar concessions contract at Los Angeles International Airport under a city business program designed to help disadvantaged minorities and women.

Fair or not, Mack’s longevity and style have made him a lightning rod for critics of the established civil rights groups. In some quarters, despite his accomplishments, his name has become synonymous with the ineffectiveness of a generation of leaders.

“There’s a tendency to expect African-American leaders to be miracle workers, to wave a magic wand and right these historic wrongs, but it’s not quite as simple as that,” Mack said when asked about the criticisms. “The point is not that black leadership has failed (but) that white leadership has not listened.”

Mack argued that the gulf between leadership and the community is “exaggerated and overplayed” by the media. “It’s in vogue now to say we’re out of touch.”

Mack suggested that there is a “communication gap” between established leaders and “some segments of our constituents,” who do not understand that the larger white Establishment holds the power to bring real change.

For years, he said, civil rights leaders have been addressing issues of jobs, health care and poverty. The Urban League’s Los Angeles office, through its job training office, helped 3,000 people obtain employment last year while hundreds of young people received tutoring and other services at its literacy center, he said.

“Maybe we haven’t operated all of the programs that people think we should,” Mack acknowledged, “but the ones we have, we do pretty well.”

Mack’s high profile, for which he has been criticized, also reflects the media’s practice of interviewing the same leaders on issues concerning the African-American community.

“I blame John Mack but I also blame the media,” said Johnson of the Black Employees Assn. “There are at least a dozen grass-roots groups that should be consulted on issues that relate to black people.”

No matter what new leaders emerge from the rubble and despair of the civil unrest, their effectiveness will be determined largely by whether they can rally followers to become more politically active.

“It’s a two-way thing,” said Etha Robinson, standing at a stall in the Crenshaw Mall, selling baked goods. “If you don’t like the people in office you do something about it. We’re just as guilty as the leaders are. The community is lethargic.

“We’ve got to stop waiting for other people to solve our problems,” she added. “Until we get out of that syndrome and realize that liberation requires pain and suffering and that the struggle is constant, our situation is going to remain the same.”

Times staff writer Carla Rivera contributed to this report.