Black Leaders Seek to Revive Social Agency : Services: They say the worsening plight of blacks has spurred a new need for the once-powerful Community Improvement League.

Claiming that the plight of black people in the city has not appreciably improved since the 1960s, a group of black leaders is attempting to revive the 26-year-old Long Beach Community Improvement League, once a powerful inner-city social service agency.

“We want to get off the back street and onto the front street,” said Larry Rodgers, executive director of the league, once the largest black-run social service agency in Long Beach. “We want the league to be what its founders intended it to be.”

They plan to build a $1-million day-care and educational resource center, and have received the support of some city officials and at least one well-known local philanthropist. The ARCO Foundation, United Way and the federal Office on Substance Abuse have given preliminary indications of support.

The new center is needed, black leaders say, because the “trickle down” theory of economics under the Reagan Administration did not trickle down to blacks. Federal and state money for social services became scarce, and was funneled to county and city governments instead of community-based service organizations like the league, said Frank Berry, president of the local chapter of the NAACP.

As a result, the services “became so institutionalized that the (black) people who needed them didn’t feel comfortable going to get them,” Berry said. Many services that appeared to be in little demand were eliminated. And large numbers of blacks live under economic conditions as bad or worse today than those existing in the 1960s, Berry said.

Federal unemployment statistics for Los Angeles County do not bear that out. The countywide unemployment rate for black youths dropped from 37% in 1970 to 19.4% in 1987, said Jerry Shea, research manager for the state Employment Development Department. Unemployment among black adults dropped from 13.8% to 10.5% in the same period, he said.

But those figures are misleading, Rodgers says, because they do not reflect the enormous number of black people who have never held jobs, are no longer seeking them, and are therefore not considered officially unemployed. The actual unemployment rate among blacks may now be as high as 50% for youths and 20% for adults, he said.

“You’ve got kids who dropped out of high school in the 1980s who’ve never had a job at McDonald’s or anywhere else,” Rodgers said. “They’ve been standing on the corner selling drugs and they’ve never been counted.”

Among the problems, he said, is the high cost of housing and other necessities, the continuing disintegration of black family life and the increasing presence of gang violence in black neighborhoods.

“We’ve sort of come full circle,” Berry said. “Some of the same kinds of problems that existed just before the (1966) Watts riot exist today.”

Clarence Smith, the city’s only black councilman, said: “There’s a major need for child care and a major need for counseling. The central area needs an organization to receive funds and provide programs.”

Planners said they hope to include day-care facilities for at least 200 children. In addition, they are planning an educational resource center to provide tutoring and homework assistance, a counseling program for parenting classes and anti-drug activities, and a cultural center for classes in art, ballet and music.

“We have to realize that not all black kids are going to become Magic Johnsons,” Rodgers said. “We need to open other avenues for them.”

While the amount of available government funding has dwindled, league leaders said, there are still corporate and foundation grants available to a qualified nonprofit agency. Until recently, Smith said, no such agencies existed in the black community.

Both ARCO and United Way, Rodgers said, have expressed interest in providing all or part of the $25,000 in seed money he estimates it will take to begin the proposed services. He said he hopes much of the service will be provided by volunteers.

And well-known local philanthropist Isabel Patterson has agreed to form a committee to raise the estimated $1 million needed to build the building, he said.

“It’s desperately needed,” said Patterson, 82, whose $550,000 contribution helped establish the Isabel Patterson Child Development Center at Cal State Long Beach. “I’m just thinking of the children.”

If the project succeeds, league leaders said, it will complete the comeback of an organization that was founded in 1964 by black civil rights activists who were then students at Cal State Long Beach. Initially located in the basement of St. John Baptist Church, the nonprofit agency moved in 1965 to its present location, a cramped two-story former church school on Olive Avenue in central Long Beach. The building was purchased with grants and contributions.

The league’s first major program, called Project Tutor, teamed about 300 central area children with an equal number of volunteer tutors--many of them middle-class high school and college students--for individual tutoring and educational field trips.

The organization, benefiting from President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, received massive federal and state funding. It set up the state’s first Headstart program, created counseling and referral centers as well as job training programs, and started the Neighborhood Adult Participation Program, in which the city and other agencies provided job opportunities for low-income residents.

By 1968, the Community Improvement League was the city’s largest social service agency, boasting nearly 200 full- and part-time employees serving about 2,000 people a month on an annual budget of $2.5 million. Many city leaders, including its first black councilman and the NAACP’s Berry, rose to prominence as workers in the league’s numerous programs.

But the entry of more and more local governments--including the city of Long Beach--into the poverty-fighting business and then the dwindling federal and state resources took their toll on the league. Its $2.5-million annual budget shriveled to $175,000; the 200 employees dropped to 12.

For more than a decade now, the league has survived as a relatively obscure child-care center, providing subsidized care for about 80 children of low-income families at its Olive Avenue headquarters.

League staffers hope to change that.

“As far as I am concerned the Long Beach Community Improvement League is the only social service agency left in the black community,” said Berry, who, although no longer formally associated with the league, was honored at its annual awards banquet in 1988. “It’s an agency that the black community has been able to relate to.”

BACKGROUND

Within four years of its founding in 1964, the Long Beach Community Improvement League had become the largest and most powerful social service agency for the black community of Long Beach. A major recipient of federal funding during President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, the agency by 1968 was operating on $2.5 million and employing nearly 200 full- and part-time staffers serving about 2,000 people a month. It was at the agency’s inner city headquarters that the state kicked off its first Project Headstart program in the mid-1960s.