Urban League Chief Resigns Unexpectedly

Herb Cawthorne, the fiery president of the San Diego Urban League who became San Diego’s most visible black leader in less than two years here, resigned suddenly at an emergency meeting of the organization’s board of directors Wednesday night, Urban League leaders said Thursday.

Patricia McQuater, chairwoman of the Urban League’s board of directors, said the resignation was effective Thursday but refused to comment further.

“We are going to issue a statement to the press in the morning,” McQuater said Thursday. “I can’t tell you anything else.”

Cawthorne did not return telephone calls to his home and office, but is scheduled to speak today at a meeting of the Catfish Club, a prominent black political forum.

Mystified at Departure

With top Urban League officials refusing comment on the matter, San Diego’s black leaders and even some members of the Urban League board of directors remained mystified at the sudden departure of the man credited with reviving the Urban League toward the end of a decade during which it was plagued by money problems and accusations of financial improprieties involving former president Clarence Pendleton.

Board member Jackie Meshack said that neither Cawthorne nor the Urban League’s five-member executive committee offered an explanation for Cawthorne’s departure at Wednesday night’s meeting, despite repeated questioning from other board members.

“He said that he felt that he needed to step down and try some other things,” Meshack said.

“Many (board members) asked, and they were told because he was under contract that it was not necessary for him to say, and it was not necessary for the board to admit why,” Meshack added.

She said the vote to accept Cawthorne’s resignation, which was recommended by the executive committee, was not unanimous.

“All he told me was that he had resigned last night, but he didn’t say why and I didn’t ask,” said the Rev. George Walker Smith, head of the Catfish Club. “I figured, when he wants me or anyone else to know the reason, he’ll say so.”

However, the suddenness of Cawthorne’s departure suggested that it was not anticipated and may not have been voluntary.

Vernon Sukumu, head of the San Diego Black Federation, said that, when he spoke with Cawthorne on Wednesday only hours before his resignation, “He acted like everything was normal.”

“He didn’t say anything to indicate something like this might be in the works,” Sukumu said. “That kind of makes you think maybe this wasn’t really planned.”

“It will be very interesting to hear what Herb has to say to the Catfish Club,” said one board member, who asked not be identified. “Herb has a tremendous ego, so he’s going to want to frame the exit in his own terms and in a way that reflects best on him. The problem is, that may be in conflict with reality. If that happens, that’s when you may see the board be a little more forthcoming with details.”

An official with the Private Industry Council/Regional Employment Training Consortium, which has awarded the Urban League two sizable job-training contracts, said staff members are reviewing the Urban League’s performance on one of the contracts.

Impropriety Not at Issue

However, Karla Milanette, youth programs manager for the joint city-county agency, said that the investigation does not concern allegations of impropriety. Rather, PIC/RETC wants to know why the Urban League is not meeting numerical goals for the number of young people it intends to train in basic job skills under a $354,000 contract.

However, the Urban League showed “excellent” performance under a $474,000 contract to train adults, Milanette said.

Among other grants, the Urban League also has about $200,000 in funds from the city of San Diego to counsel gang members and other high-risk youngsters and to provide aid to single-parent families.

Unless he assumes another, similarly prominent, position, Cawthorne’s resignation probably will end his role as one of the most outspoken black leaders and a vital connection between the black community and San Diego’s power structure.

“When you lose someone as high-profile as Cawthorne was, and who was arguably able to attract that corporate support, that has an impact in a visible way,” said Wes Pratt, the lone black on the San Diego City Council.

Just three months after he arrived in San Diego in 1987, Cawthorne angrily called for a boycott of San Diego as a convention site after voters stripped the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s name off a major downtown street. The boycott was called off a little more than two weeks later, after Cawthorne said he had negotiated with local corporate leaders a plan to raise money for a monument to King.

That memorial remains unconstructed today, and Cawthorne adopted a much lower profile in the drive to rename the San Diego Convention Center for King. That action is pending before the San Diego Board of Port Commissioners, but appears to be one vote short of the four needed for victory.

The charismatic Cawthorne has organized well-publicized marches of mourning for the victims of drive-by shootings, and just nine days ago led a march through downtown with Mayor Maureen O’Connor and Police Chief Bob Burgreen to demand more state assistance in the city’s anti-crime effort.

Cawthorne, 41, was a leader of the bitter, unsuccessful effort to enact a City Council-sponsored growth-limitation measure last year. His frequent denunciations of a rival measure led to angry exchanges with slow-growth leader Peter Navarro.

“Navarro implies, without subtlety, that black people could not know anything about growth and development,” Cawthorne wrote in a commentary published in the San Diego Union. “Peter Navarro’s dismissal of the possibility that a black mind could differ with him is based on Peter Navarro’s racism, and has nothing to do with the debate.”

Navarro responded, “The profile I get of the guy is that he’s making a lot of noise. The more noise he makes, the more money the business community gives him so he will pipe down.”

Turned Group Around

Cawthorne inherited a financially unstable organization when he arrived in San Diego in August, 1987, from the same post with the Urban League in Portland, Ore. As part of an overhaul of the organization, he fired six employees who later filed unsuccessful grievances against him with the Urban League board of directors.

Two of them, Lynn Turner and Rosalind Winstead, described him as dictatorial and self-interested. “I think his agenda is perhaps different from what one might think,” Winstead said last year. “It smacks of self-interest.”

Board members and others, however, credited Cawthorne with having significantly boosted the Urban League’s fund-raising success over the past two years. Under his leadership, the group grossed about $110,000--the most in its history, Cawthorne noted proudly--at the $150-per-ticket annual dinner that serves as the organization’s primary fund-raiser.

That success came seven years after the Pendleton resigned rather than rehire an Urban League controller who raised 11 separate allegations of misconduct against him, including a charge that he misspent $94,000 of a federal family planning grant. Both charges led to delays in Pendleton’s confirmation as chairman of the U. S. Civil Rights Commission. Pendleton suffered a fatal heart attack June 5, 1988.