Group Urges Financial Help for Poor Blacks

A group of black leaders, declaring the failure of a costly, 20-year federal “alms race” to help the poor, urged the government Wednesday to provide financial incentives for poor blacks to help themselves start businesses, create jobs, buy homes and educate their children.

“We repudiate the notion that government-wrought solutions are intrinsically better and more effective than the self-help entrepreneurial strategies and resources already in the black community,” said Robert L. Woodson, president of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise.

Members of a “council for a black economic agenda” organized by Woodson agree, he said, “that the focus must be on the economy, the family and the quality of education as the keys to reversing the current isolation and deprivation of black Americans.”

Encouraging Self-Help The council’s proposals to encourage self-help by needy blacks, presented at a news conference, include:

- Legislation allowing an immediate tax write-off for equity investments in small business firms situated in distressed areas.

- Financial incentives for development of areas with vacant and underused property, and for employers in underdeveloped areas to hire and train workers from among the black poor.

- Shift from housing subsidies for the poor to a program of underwriting rehabilitation, ownership and management of public housing units by responsible organizations of black residents.

- An educational voucher program, similar to the GI Bill, to allow poor families to choose alternatives to public schools, such as independent inner-city schools started by black teachers and parents.

- Increasing work incentives for poor families by boosting the earned income tax credit and the income tax exemption for dependents, providing affordable day care for children of working parents and allowing unemployment compensation and other government income payments to be used for education, job training or self-employment.

- Black churches and other neighborhood institutions should be authorized to arrange adoptions of thousands of children trapped in the government’s $2-billion foster care system, where the council said “we are incubating tomorrow’s criminals at public expense.”

Nonprofit Organization Arthur Fletcher, a council member and former assistant labor secretary in the Nixon Administration, said the aim of the council’s proposals was to move away from “a quasi-welfare state to a super-entrepreneurial state” in which blacks can create their own businesses and jobs.

The sponsoring National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise describes itself as a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization, largely financed privately, that seeks black solutions to black problems with the participation of inner-city residents.