Urban League Says Reagan Set Blacks Back a Decade

A combination of unemployment and what it called the Reagan Administration’s “voodoo civil rights policies” left blacks in the worst economic shape in more than a decade, according to the National Urban League’s annual “State of Black America” report, released Thursday.

“If the Administration wants to be a ‘Rambo’-like destroyer of civil rights gains, it should not pretend that its efforts are good for black citizens or that they reflect the color-blind society we have yet to become,” the league’s president, John Jacob, said.

‘Hands Off,” Reagan Told

In a marked departure from last year’s conciliatory message urging President Reagan to “take a handful of small steps that could begin to heal the breach between his Administration and black people,” Thursday’s message demanded “hands off affirmative action.”

In his weekly radio address Saturday, Reagan said that blacks are sharing in the nation’s economic recovery and suggested that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech could be interpreted as a stand against hiring quotas.

Jacob responded strongly: “For the Administration to associate the name of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with the attempt to destroy affirmative action is obscene.

“The report we issue today accurately describes a black America excluded from the economic boom, excluded from full participation in job growth and in danger of being excluded from tomorrow’s economic mainstream.”

In addition, Jacob assailed efforts by Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III to rescind or modify a 20-year-old executive order that established minority-oriented hiring goals and timetables for federal contractors.

“Black people today have jobs and opportunities they would not have had without the executive order,” Jacob said. “Companies that do business with the government have significantly better hiring and promotion records for women and minorities than those that don’t have government contracts, and that is directly due to the executive order the attorney general wants revoked.”

White House spokesman Larry Speakes refused to comment on the study, which found that, although most Americans are reaping benefits from a recovering economy, the nation’s 27.9 million blacks:

--Suffer an unemployment rate of 15%, compared to 5.9% for whites.

--Have the highest poverty rate--almost 36%--since 1964, although they make up only 12% of the U.S. population.

--Have 56 cents to spend for every $1 white families have.

--Depend on single mothers to head 37% of all black families. Teen-agers account for 87% of out-of-wedlock births among blacks.

--Show a near-doubling of high school dropouts among 14- and 15-year-olds in the last year.

Jacob said that the figures reflect “the most severely depressed economic condition” for blacks since the Vietnam War ended in 1975.

Warning on Elections

He predicted that cuts mandated by the new Gramm-Rudman deficit-reduction law would be “absolutely devastating” to federal employment programs and warned that blacks would be a major force in mid-term elections in several states in November.

“This year will be very critical and strategic for the black voter,” he said. “Political candidates will need all the support they can muster, and I think this will give blacks a great deal of political leverage.”

The report found that blacks constitute 20% of all voting Democrats. More than 70% of blacks surveyed described themselves as Democrats, 4% said they were Republicans and the remaining 26% expressed no preference.