Economics Is Key Element as Black Leaders Set Goals

A host of black leaders, running the political gamut from Republicans to Communist Party members, sounded a theme of unity Sunday and launched a new national black social agenda with an economic thrust.

“We are fundamentally in an economic struggle,” said the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a keynote speaker at the three-day conference and one of its organizers. He said that the civil rights movement, which has emphasized political power for much of the last two decades, has entered “another stage” of development.

The 1,000 participants of the “African American Summit ‘89” adopted a set of goals Sunday that called, among other things, for the use of part of state government and labor union pension funds for community development projects, the creation of an American Investment Bank to invest the pension funds and the payment of reparations to black Americans by the United States.

The summit also emphasized the importance of the nuclear family and called on the government to resume its role as a provider of housing for the indigent.

Participants included Rep. Ronald V. Dellums (D-Berkeley), chairman of the Black Political Caucus; Democratic National Chairman Ron Brown; Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan; Coretta Scott King, widow of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; radical San Francisco State Prof. Angela Davis; Assemblywoman Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) and Joseph Lowery, director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

That is virtually a who’s who of black politics. But the list of who did not appear got almost as much attention as who appeared.

Not attending, for various reasons, were black mayors such as Los Angeles’ Tom Bradley, Atlanta’s Andrew Young and Philadelphia’s W. Wilson Goode. Also missing were NAACP President Benjamin L. Hooks, Virginia Lt. Gov. Douglas Wilder and Rep. William H. Gray III (D-Pa.), chairman of the House Budget Committee.

Some organizers, without naming names, criticized the no-shows. “There are some people who are not here who said this effort is not worth taking,” Richard G. Hatcher, former mayor of Gary, Ind., and chairman of the event, said in a speech Friday.

He told reporters, however, that he was satisfied with the attendance and that the large number of absentees does not indicate lack of unity.

“This meeting is not about who is not here,” he said. “It is about who is here.”

He said that many officials who wanted to attend could not cancel previously scheduled engagements.

Group Cites Controversy

Fred Brown, chairman of the Black Republican Council, announced last month that the 150 members of his organization would not attend because the controversial Farrakhan and Davis were invited.

Jewish leaders in New Orleans also had denounced the appearance of Farrakhan, who has drawn criticism for referring to Judaism as a “gutter religion” and making other anti-Semitic remarks.

The reluctance of many black leaders to embrace the controversial Muslim leader was a major point of contention. Many participants accused blacks opposed to Farrakhan’s appearance of bowing to pressure from whites.

“I’m sick and tired of having white folks tell us when we can meet and who we can talk to,” said David Richardson, a Pennsylvania state representative from Philadelphia.

Farrakhan announced before the start of the conference that he would not attend. After his speaking role was enlarged, however, he changed his mind, notifying conference organizers Saturday that he would address the summit Sunday, said Ramona H. Edelin, one of the organizers.

1972 Meeting a Success

The precursor to this weekend’s summit meeting was a 1972 conference in Gary, which has been credited with launching blacks on a successful political course.

“That meeting represented a shift in our direction,” Hatcher, one of the nation’s first black mayors and chairman of both gatherings, said here.

“We left the streets, in a sense,” he said. “We left the demonstrations and we began to get involved in the electoral area. We’ve come from a few hundred black elected officials in 1972 to about 7,000 today.”

Similarly, Hatcher and others said, this weekend’s conference represented a stark break from past strategies.

“Success for this meeting is to leave with direction and on the offensive, with an objective that matches the size of the problem,” Jackson said in a speech Saturday. “We cannot have little solutions for a big problem.”

Explains Pension Plan

Jackson proposed the pension fund plan in his address and fleshed it out further in a later meeting with black business people and pension fund managers. Under the plan, which he said he expects will meet resistance, 1% of the $800 billion in public-employee pension funds would be invested each year through the American Investment Bank to rebuild roads, bridges, sewers and houses in urban areas. He likened the idea to a domestic World Bank.

Saying that he intends to take the idea to the leaders of both major political parties, Jackson said: “We intend to have a major series of meetings on economic development and access to capital.”

“I think what he has done is he has launched an idea and put forth a proposal and set in place a possible strategy that we can move forward with,” Waters said.

A number of participants said that the United States should make reparation payments to blacks because their ancestors were slaves. In 1988, Congress approved payments for Americans of Japanese ancestry who were interned during World War II.

“If they’re good enough for the Japanese-Americans . . . they are good for those of us who worked for hundreds of years unpaid and who now need that capital . . . for our own development in this country,” according to a document outlining the summit’s goals.

While lauding black political achievements during the 1970s and 1980s, Jackson and others said that, while black political involvement has increased, so has the rate of poverty, even as crime, drugs and other social ills have further eroded black gains.

Exhorting conference participants to exert pressure in their communities on economic development agencies to invest in black neighborhoods and to form joint business ventures with established firms, Waters said: “There is no reason why white developers should still be developing in black neighborhoods.”

She said that blacks should pressure political leaders to redirect funds and lending institutions to stop redlining--refusing loans to qualified blacks--in black areas.

Farrakhan Addresses Group

In his speech Sunday, Farrakhan said that the black political agenda has done little to help the masses. “We must stop this vanity,” he said. “We must stop this self-seeking. And we must ache when our little brother in the ghetto aches.

“We’ve got to develop a mechanism that will allow us to lift our own people.”

He also expressed mild disagreement with the term “African American,” which black leaders said last December that they would use instead of “black.”

“Even though you say African American, let this never be a denial of black, because even before there was a continent named Africa we were black,” he said.

He said that he believes the term excludes black people in other parts of the world besides Africa and the United States.