L.A.’s Black Community in Dire Straits, NAACP Executive Director Says

While announcing plans to hold the annual convention of the nation’s largest civil rights organization in Los Angeles next year, NAACP Executive Director Benjamin L. Hooks said Friday that the city’s black community is in dire straits because of the continuing plague of gang and drug-related violence.

“The big surge we’ve had in gang warfare and shootings first surfaced in Los Angeles at the level it is surfacing now (nationwide),” Hooks said at a morning press conference. “And for those of us who travel nationally, we thought it would have been either New York or Chicago.

“There are a lot of reasons why we didn’t think it would happen (here)--less density residentially, a big sprawling city with a black mayor. . . . Nobody ever thought it would happen here. (And) I don’t think that drug warfare has anywhere near reached the intensity it is going to reach.”

Hooks said the 1990 conference of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People will be held at the Los Angeles Convention Center from July 7 to 12. John Mance, a retired Lockheed employee and veteran civil rights activist, will serve as general chairman.

The last time the NAACP held its national convention here was in 1966, the year after the devastating Watts riots. The despair felt then by blacks, Hooks said, remains unchecked despite, or perhaps in part because of, the successes of the civil rights movement.

The work of the late Martin Luther King Jr., Hooks said, bred “a rising tide of expectation that one day America would rise up and live out its promise. It has not done that.”

And with a continued lack of adequate job and educational opportunities, he added, many young blacks now maintain an outlook “so disturbing that it’s going to be difficult to deal with.”

“In Richard Wright’s book, ‘Native Son,’ so many years ago, he said, ‘Live fast, die young, make a pretty corpse.’ We read those words and laughed at them. But it seems if you talk to a lot of young people you will discover that many of them do not (care) about living to be 30 or 40 or 50 years old. All they want to do is live big for a year or two. And they even say now if you tell them they may be dead in two months that, well, you’ve got to die sometime.”

Hooks said increased opportunities rather than intensified law enforcement are the long-range solutions.

“I think the problem is our national government does not realize the dimensions of the problem and has no concept of how to deal with it,” he said. “You cannot simply eradicate drugs by putting out a paramilitary force. You’d have to have the National Guard and the federal Army in every square block of a big city like Washington. And they’d still find a way to sell drugs.”