A Delicate Balance : Cawthorne Mixes Drama, Clout to Push Black Interests

On a recent afternoon, Herb L. Cawthorne, new president of the Urban League of San Diego, was uncharacteristically mellow.

Here was the man who came to town and landed in the vortex of controversy, the man who has become the spokesman for the black community’s anger over the Market Street vote, the man who called for a mass march and a nationwide economic boycott of San Diego’s tourism trade. And here he was, sitting calmly with his right foot propped up on an open desk drawer, holding a lighted cigarette in his left hand, talking about the virtues of waiting.

“What I read this morning was the I-Ching,” Cawthorne said. “You know what that is? The book of Chinese wisdom.

“And I read about the still mountain. It’s a very important piece because (it says that) in the midst of controversy, stay still. Think hard. Deliberate. Don’t try to fix that which is not prepared to be fixed yet.

“You stay still and the solutions will come, as long as you don’t try to force them.”

In theory, it sure sounds good.

But in practice, those who know the 40-year-old Cawthorne say he is more like a rumbling volcano than the still mountain of Eastern philosophy.

Wide-Ranging Interests

They say he is an energetic and forceful man who is impatient with bureaucracy and a master at attracting and holding attention. His passions, they say, are diverse--public speaking, black history, political action, reading, philosophy, education.

And they say he is as comfortable making discreet contacts in the corporate board rooms as he is appearing before an audience of school children to portray Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglas or Langston Hughes in one of his one-man shows.

“He’s a very charismatic man with a lot of personality, and has had a lot of success by driving directly at a problem, tackling it head on and going to the people involved to solve it,” said Peter Thompson, managing editor of The Oregonian newspaper and a board member of the Portland Urban League, where Cawthorne was last employed.

Don C. Frisbee, chairman and chief executive officer of PacificCorp, the largest company based in Portland, added: “Herb is an activist, a restless man who has to see things accomplished.”

It was not unusual, then, that Cawthorne hit the ground running in San Diego soon after he started the Urban League job in early August. The Urban League promotes equal opportunity and equality for blacks and other minorities.

As the weeks were winding down on a vote of whether to replace the name Dr. Martin Luther King Way with its former name, Market Street, Cawthorne jumped into the fray, warning that a repudiation of the King memorial would strain race relations and sully San Diego’s reputation nationwide.

But it wasn’t until the hectic days after San Diegans voted to strip King’s name from the downtown street that Cawthorne stepped fully into the spotlight with a dramatic style.

When reporters gathered at the Urban League’s Southeast San Diego offices for a post-mortem the day after the vote, Cawthorne arranged to have some men roll a gray casket containing a King Way sign into the room. The people were mourning the loss of a symbol, he explained.

That motif carried over to a highly successful protest march organized by Cawthorne Nov. 8, when a crowd--estimated between 1,000 and 1,500 people--met downtown to walk dirge-like behind the casket. At Cawthorne’s urging, many wore black.

Cawthorne used the familiar ground of the Catfish Club, where the weekly luncheon group of local black leaders meets, to call for a nationwide economic boycott of San Diego’s convention trade in protest to the vote.

And when there were no immediate convention cancellations, Cawthorne returned to the club a week later and hinted that “several” groups were considering the action, but he declined to say which ones. He also attacked the San Diego Convention & Visitors Bureau for not releasing a list of convention groups that had signed up for gatherings starting in 1988.

On Friday, Cawthorne announced that the boycott was suspended after he negotiated with local corporate leaders to form a committee to raise money for a King monument.

“If I had my own individual choice in terms of my leadership of the Urban League right now, I would have never planned a boycott,” Cawthorne said in a recent interview.

“But the people that I serve and that I work for, over the course of many hours of meetings, decided collectively that this was an appropriate response,” he said. “And under the circumstances, I agree.”

Making Friends in Business

Cawthorne has used the furor over Market Street to make inroads into San Diego’s business establishment, and he’s been been quick to size up the state of race relations in his new hometown.

The businessmen he’s approached have been “interested, engaging, willing to listen to the conditions and the hopes of the Urban League . . . .”

“I’ve been able to see many of them,” Cawthorne said. “They’re not frightened, nervous, intimidated . . . . They realize they do not know certain things about the black community and they would like to have an organization to which they can turn to find out more.”

Yet quiet prejudice lives in San Diego, he said. “Among most people, they keep it veiled. They keep it under wraps.

“But in employment, I have been told daily--sometimes three and four times a day--about discrimination in employment situations or in the seeking of employment,” Cawthorne said. “You have people who have come here from other cities who tell me, ‘Herb, be prepared. I have never been anyplace like this.’ ”

If anyone can help improve race relations in San Diego, it is Herb Cawthorne, say his friends from Portland.

“In a word, I’d say he’s moderate,” said Larry Raff, a board member of Portland’s Urban League. “And by being moderate, he can gain the confidence of the Establishment while at the same time being considered a representative of the black community.”

Cawthorne rose to public prominence in Portland while working for Portland State University during the late 1970s and 1980s. He directed the inner-city college’s programs aimed at providing counseling and tutoring for “underprepared” and handicapped students.

His other responsibilities included being the host of local television and radio talk shows, serving on the board of directors for the Portland and National Urban Leagues, and chairing a community based group formed in response to the way the Portland Public Schools planned desegregation.

“The black community in Portland is relatively small, but he very quickly emerged as probably the most articulate and forceful spokesman,” said Thane Tienson, board chairman of Portland’s Urban League. “He probably was viewed (at first) as radical, probably the same way he is in San Diego . . . . He stirred things up.”

In 1979, Cawthorne was appointed to the school board and served as its only black member. He ran unsuccessfully for Portland City Council in 1984, but won the admiration of his opponent.

A Man of Substance

“Herb is splashy, but don’t let anybody see the presence of splash as an absence of substance because he is a person of substance,” said Dick Bogle, the former police officer and television anchorman who beat Cawthorne by appealing to conservative voters.

Bogle said Cawthorne stumbled a bit in the campaign over the issue of legalized prostitution, a proposal posed by the Portland City Club, a group of local movers and shakers. Bogle said he blasted the idea, but Cawthorne waivered, giving the voters the idea that he might be in favor of it.

Shortly after the council race, Cawthorne accepted a job as president and chief executive officer of the Portland Urban League.

His job was to turn around an organization with $20,000 in debt and mediocre name identification. He did it in a little more than a year by attracting large grants, launching an aggressive fund-raising campaign and heading a high-profile membership campaign that included billboard advertising, said Tienson and Raff.

He also used his title to solidify his position as a spokesman for the black community.

When Oregon Gov. Neil Goldschmidt remarked earlier this year that “somebody ought to squash” one of Portland’s black leaders for criticizing some political appointments, Cawthorne took up the verbal cudgel by saying the state’s chief executive was “so terribly insensitive, so terribly irresponsible, so terribly demeaning to the great office he holds.”

Yet Cawthorne can also use his abilities to temper public sentiments as well. Raff and others recall how Cawthorne helped ease racial tensions in Portland after a black man was killed by a police choke hold.

In San Diego, Cawthorne said that many blacks need police and are wary of them at the same time, a circumstance that can lead to higher crime rates.

“There are many in San Diego who know who the drug dealers are, and because the relationship with the police isn’t as good as it should be, they don’t turn them in,” he said. “So there’s double trouble.”

He said the estrangement between the black community and police is due to a “cadre of officers who are problematic, who overstep their bounds, and around that cadre you will find most of the problems.”

Otherwise, Cawthorne added, most police officers conduct themselves well and most blacks want to work with them.

“The notion that the black community doesn’t appreciate the police? False,” he said. “The notion that we don’t want to work with the police? False.

“I think the police officers and the leadership there has to be more willing to figure out how to work with the community . . . and together we can fashion a program or series of programs that start bringing the messages home in terms of what the attitude of the black community is about crime and criminals.”

In cases where the community is angry, either at the police or at a Market Street vote, Cawthorne said there are ways to deal with it.

“You have to channel the frustration in the community so it does not erupt into divisive and destructive violence,” Cawthorne explained about handling racially delicate matters.

“The other side of that, which is a precarious balance, is you must exercise leadership with sufficient aggressiveness so that through you, the frustration can be released.”

With such a high profile, many in Oregon thought Cawthorne was destined for statewide elective office. But he opted instead to move to San Diego, Tienson said.

“I think Herb sensed, ‘Wait a minute. I’m a black man in a white state . . . .’ I think he thought that his race was a handicap here and he wanted to succeed,” he said.

Cawthorne, however, said he left Portland because he had become “too comfortable.” A “subsidiary mission,” he added, was to resurrect San Diego’s Urban League from its debt and low profile.

So far, Cawthorne said he’s cut more than $100,000 from the Urban League’s $1.6 million budget, and he wants to trim another $35,000. He has plans to build an educational center, where minority students can get tutoring to help them stay in school.

He also hopes to convince local blacks to support black businesses financially: Of the $1.2 billion that San Diego blacks spend a year, only $70 million to $80 million goes to black businesses, he says.

“Black people have to pay attention as to where they spend their money,” Cawthorne said. “They spend money in stores where they don’t hire black people. They don’t have to spend their money there. The question is, ‘Do we want convenience or do we want political and social change?’

“White people always think that when we say that, we’re being unfair,” Cawthorne said. “We’re not being unfair. We’re saying that this is a diversified community. The businesses and who they employ ought to be diversified as well. That’s fair.”

‘Sense of Dejection’

Cawthorne’s most visible role so far has been the way he’s handled the discontent and anger in the black community stirred up by the Market Street issue.

“I never, in all my career, have seen anything like it,” Cawthorne said. “The sense of dejection. The sense of invisibleness. It’s one thing to be stepped on and for somebody to say ‘Excuse me.’

“It’s another thing to be stepped on and the person who stepped on you doesn’t even know he did it.”

The challenge after the Market Street issue is resolved, Cawthorne said, is to train the black community’s attention on making a dent in the unemployment and high school drop-out rates.

Doing that, he adds, will take “energy, organization, vision, motivation, planning, creativity. Keep it going.”

And to help keep the fire stoked, Cawthorne said he does plenty of reading.

His bookshelves in the Urban League offices on Market Street are lined with such titles as “Seizing The Time” by Bobby Seale; “Native Son” by Richard Wright; “Trial by Fire” by Page Smith and “W.E.B. DuBois Speaks.”

The favorites, however, are philosophers, especially Ralph Waldo Emerson. Across the corkboard walls of his office are handprinted notes. Cawthorne has pinned up his favorite sayings: “God’s work will not be made manifest by cowards;” “For every friend he loses for truth, he gains a better;” “Beware--when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet, then all things are at risk;” “We sell the throne of angels for a short and turbulent pleasure.”

“What I think happens is that in the daily world of political activities is you lose sight of the basic elements of humanity that drive you to want to make change in the first place,” Cawthorne said.

“You get caught up in the personal aspects of it. You can get vindictive and self-righteous and so forth, so I try to read a lot to balance all of that.”

Hence, the image of the still mountain. It is a metaphor, Cawthorne said, that does not stand against activism, but one that encourages the black community to stick to its guns with an economic boycott over the Market Street issue.

“The point is, we have chosen our course of action,” Cawthorne said.

“In the midst of fear, in the midst of sabotage, in the midst of many wanting the problem to go away--stay still.”