Pinched Purses

Most U.S. civil rights organizations are feeling a financial pinch--largely because donors let down after passage of the civil rights bill while operating budgets keep rising. The civil rights balance sheet, according to leaders of the five largest organizations: > The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (S.N.C.C.) is currently so low on cash that it has cut all salaries in half (even those of $10-a-week workers in Mississippi). Officials insist that the problem is an annual one, caused in part by the fact that potential contributors are still paying Christmas bills. A victim of growing pains as much as pinched purses, S.N.C.C. in the past year has doubled its paid staff (from 115 to 235), is considering upping its budget from $750,000 in its current fiscal year to a whopping $2,000,000. > The N.A.A.C.P. depends heavily on membership dues, last year had an income of $1,100,000, or $200,000 below 1963. The organization lost some 70,000 members (down to 462,000) because its workers concentrated on getting the rights law passed and Goldwater defeated instead of on getting memberships renewed. The group spent $400,000 more than it took in, but officials 'say that $300,000 in redeemable bail money for people arrested in Mississippi is included in the deficit. > The Congress of Racial Equality is in serious trouble, took in $900,000 in its last fiscal year, but has run its accumulated debt up to $150,000. For six weeks of the past four months, its top executives got no pay. CORE has changed its mind about opening a new Washington office this year, and is reducing its expenses by not hiring replacements for staffers who quit. >Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (S.C.L.C.) spent $625,000 last year, managed to stay even with its income. The current budget is $500,000. Most of S.C.L.C.'s cash comes from big-name (Harry Belafonte, Mahalia Jackson) benefit performances, from monthly direct-mail appeals, or from book royalties and speaking appearances by King, who raises as much as $10,000 from a single talk. Oddly enough, S.C.L.C. figures that it lost money because King got the Nobel Peace Prize: it kept him away from his normal speaking schedule. > The National Urban League is the most comfortable of all, figures easily to raise $1,900,000 this year. Last year it collected $225,000 more than it did in 1963, credits its strong financial condition to the fact that its support comes from foundations, federal grants, prosperous Negro and white businessmen, labor unions and blue-ribbon banks or corporations. The league got $650,000 from corporations last year.

-Waving off reporters at rear: Public Safety Director Wilson Baker.

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