Black Voices Speak Up

They warn Carter against budget cutting at the expense of the poor

Even before the twelve black men and women filed into the White house Cabinet room late one afternoon last week, they knew the meeting was going to be unpleasant. For more than a year they had watched Jimmy Carter, the man they had helped make President, moving toward a more and more conservative economic policy. Now there was open talk that the Administration's fight against inflation would mean substantial cuts in federal spending on programs to help the poor. Unemployment would rise, and there might soon be a recession. The black leaders felt slighted and betrayed.

Through a stiff and difficult 30-minute session, the dozen members of the Black Leadership Forum criticized and interrogated Carter. "We're deeply disturbed by what we've heard," said Joseph Lowery of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. "We don't feel the poor and the minorities ought to bear the burden," said Mayor Richard Hatcher of Gary, Ind. At one point Coretta Scott King, who campaigned extensively for Carter in 1976, said: "I've just been sitting here. I haven't said anything because I'm so deeply troubled."

Carter was equally blunt. He offered no reassurance that funds for job training, health, welfare, housing, free school lunches and community development would not be reduced in his fiscal 1980 budget, which will be submitted to Congress next month. Said Carter: "I don't think you'll be very happy. I'll just have to make the decisions, and I am prepared to take the consequences." Could they come back for another meeting before the final budget decisions were made? "No," said Jimmy Carter.

As they drifted out onto the White House grounds, now bejeweled with Christmas lights, the leaders were in a gloomy mood. "Unless black people are given relief," said National Urban League Director Vernon Jordan Jr., "it will be impossible for them to contain their despair or for them to sublimate their anger through the political process. It is a distressful situation that we cannot contain."

Although Administration economists correctly point out that the poor are inflation's first victims, blacks still suffer an 11.5% rate of unemployment, only recently down from 14%. Joblessness among black teenagers stands at 35%, and blacks still make up a disproportionate share of the nation's poor.

The dispute at the White House may mean serious political trouble for Carter in 1980, if angry and disillusioned blacks either desert him or simply ignore him, as many of them ignored the recent congressional elections. But the meeting also focused attention on the nation's black leaders. Those who met with the President expect to reconvene next week to plan their next moves against the budget cuts. Their job will not be easy. While they seem to be united in opposition to Carter's fiscal policy, the nation's black leaders today are as varied as the people for whom they speak.

Says Carl Holman, president of the National Urban Coalition: "What's happened in the last ten years is that black leadership has diversified. There's no single figure who bestrides the landscape as Martin King did. We've got people working different vineyards." Says Benjamin Hooks, the N.A.A.C.P.'s executive director: "Black leadership has matured and become diverse to represent the diverse interests of the black community."

The change in black leadership has come about not just because of the death of King. "Let's face it," says Jordan, "blacks have a lot of different, sometimes conflicting interests. The blacks who went into unions 15 years ago have different notions about seniority than those who have just managed to get in. Black entrepreneurs are concerned about such things as the capital gains tax. The views of black bankers on interest rates are likely to be very different from those of black borrowers or civil rights organizations. The issues that concern blacks often transcend race."

In part, this new disparity of interests is a measure of black progress. But it is also a sign of changing problems. "It's no longer a question of sitting in at a lunch counter, but rather the rising price of a shrinking hamburger," says Eddie N. Williams, president of the Joint Center for Political Studies in Washington. "You can sit in front of the bus, but will a bus come into your neighborhood and take you to your job? It's not whether there's equal opportunity to get a job, but whether there's a job to be got. These aren't issues of morality; they have to do with sharing the wealth." Says Los Angeles N.A.A.C.P. President Henry B. Dotson Jr.: "It would be a big boost to have a leader to rally around who really understands economics as well as civil rights, but I rather doubt that that kind of messiah is coming soon."

So instead of a few black voices, now there are many. It is all but impossible to rank or rate them. Some head national organizations but have no political power; others have political power but only within a local or regional constituency. After Vernon Jordan first criticized President Carter a year ago for neglecting the needs of the poor, he helped create the Black Leadership Forum to pool the resources and influence of 16 political, civil rights and business organizations. The goal, as Carl Holman puts it, was to avoid "speaking to 5,000 separate miseries." The group includes Hooks, Jordan and such well-known figures as Chicago's Rev. Jesse Jackson, Philadelphia's Rev. Leon Sullivan, former Union Organizer Bayard Rustin and Democratic Congressman Parren Mitchell of Maryland.

Many former civil rights activists have moved into local electoral politics, forming what black experts say is a strong new cadre of community leaders. White House Aide Louis Martin, brought in by Carter to smooth his relationships with blacks, notes that since the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the number of elected black officials increased from about 300 to more than 4,000.

Though black voter registration still lags badly, there are now 170 black mayors in cities across the country, including such major urban centers as Atlanta, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Detroit and Washington. Marion Barry, Washington's mayor-elect, and his chief deputy, Ivanhoe Donaldson, began their careers as militants in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s. Says Barry: "The times have changed and I have changed. I always knew it was better to make policy than to influence it. Electoral politics is just a tool, like non-violent direct action was a tool."

New Orleans Mayor Ernest Morial believes that local politics is now "the cutting edge of the civil rights movement." But black mayors must balance the needs of all their constituents, often diluting their force as leaders of only the black communities. According to Atlanta's highly regarded Mayor Maynard Jackson, blacks themselves are increasingly skeptical of black leaders. Says Jackson: "If a black candidate believes he can still excite to the same extent the vote-for-me-because-I'm-black spirit, that candidate is badly mistaken. Black people want to know what the black candidate is going to do for them."

The Black Caucus in Congress is well organized and active, but it lost its most prestigious member in last month's election, Massachusetts' Edward Brooke, the Senate's only black. No black will hold a committee chairmanship or leadership position for either party in the 96th Congress. The Black Caucus claims credit for the passage this year of the Humphrey-Hawkins Bill, but the diluted act simply outlined goals for full employment rather than authorizing the means to achieve it. The Caucus was effective in creating the "minority set-aside program," which earmarks 10% of federal construction funds for black and Hispanic contractors.

Despite the increase in their numbers and diversity, black leaders still encounter difficulties in exercising power. They need to form alliances with white politicians, and they find such alliances unreliable in a time of growing conservatism. California's Jerry Brown angered blacks by his tepid support for his running mate, Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally, who lost to a conservative Republican, and for former Congresswoman Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, who lost her campaign for attorney general. Even Ted Kennedy, who remains the most popular white politician among black voters, raised hackles in black communities by campaigning for Ed Brooke's Democratic opponent. Says Massachusetts State Senator Bill Owens: "We'll have to be more cautious in choosing our friends."

With the tide of political sentiment moving against many black concerns, some activists suggest a return to the feistiness of the civil rights movement. Says Howard University Professor Ron Walters: "We need to develop a lobbying apparatus to raise a sophisticated kind of hell. If the Black Caucus meets with the President and is unhappy with what he offers them, what can it do? We need to tie demonstrations in the street more closely to an effect on policies."

One black leader who has done just that is Alfred ("Skip") Robinson. A 42-year-old former building contractor, Robinson last February organized a series of demonstrations protesting alleged police brutality in Tupelo, Miss. He also organized a black boycott of the city's main stores, demanding that they and the city government hire more blacks.

In the tradition of the 1960s, Robinson's group staged hymn-singing marches. Some of his followers were arrested, but the marches spread to Lexington, Okolona, Canton and Corinth. The Ku Klux Klan held counterdemonstrations, and there were scattered episodes of violence. Robinson's tactics are not born of nostalgia; they fit his perception of the problem. "There's no such thing as the New South," he says bitterly. "There's more racism in Mississippi in 1978 than there was in 1972." But some blacks see Robinson's approach as self-defeating. When the Tupelo city government recently adopted a sweeping affirmative-action plan, Robinson issued a new list of demands.

Whatever the tactics may be, black leaders want to avert the risks of a period of "benign neglect" once recommended by New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Says Chicago's Jesse Jackson: "Blacks must have a willingness to engage in mass direct action to dramatize particular issues. Unless we pui 20,000 or 30,000 people in the streets of 30 major areas around the country, the haves will not develop a consciousness to recognize the have-nots."

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