NAACP’s Head Gives Rights Bill Warning : Convention: Benjamin Hooks says defeat of Kennedy measure may lead to economic and social ‘slavery’ for blacks. He also decries ‘selective prosecution’ of black officials.

With the fate of a major civil rights bill still uncertain, the leader of the NAACP opened the organization’s 81st national convention Sunday evening in Los Angeles with a warning that defeat of the legislation may lead to economic and social “slavery” for blacks.

In his keynote address before about 5,000 people at the Los Angeles Convention Center, Dr. Benjamin L. Hooks, executive director of the NAACP, also had indirect words of support for embattled Washington Mayor Marion Barry, now on trial for drug and perjury charges.

Without mentioning Barry by name, Hooks spoke of “the vicious assault on black leaders. At no time since Reconstruction has there been a comparable period of incessant harassment of black elected officials.”

The National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People is focusing this year on passage of the civil rights act of 1990. The bill by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) seeks to reverse five U.S. Supreme Court decisions during the last two years that dealt serious blows to affirmative action and anti-discrimination laws.

“I warn you tonight that unless we are successful in reversing the Supreme Court’s turn-back-the-clock actions, we may again find ourselves--literally and figuratively--on the back of the bus,” Hooks told delegates.

The Senate is to begin debating the bill Tuesday. In April, Atty. Gen. Dick Thornburgh said he would oppose the bill and NAACP leaders fear a presidential veto.

Those who attended Sunday’s opening session were welcomed by Mayor Tom Bradley.

Later, in his keynote speech, Hooks drew strong applause as he attacked the Justice Department and other government agencies for their investigations of black politicians, including Bradley.

“I am so tired of the selective prosecution of black elected officials,” Hooks said. “I’m tired of the hypocrisy. I may be paranoid. But even paranoid people have enemies.”

The five-day convention is also expected to highlight the NAACP’s increasing emphasis on economic and social issues. One convention workshop, titled “The Endangered Black Male,” will focus on the disproportionate number of young black men in prison or suffering from drug and alcohol abuse.

“If we allow a third of black America to wallow in poverty, allow black young men to continue to be gunned down at alarming rates, watch our people become intoxicated by the lures of the drug trade, history will embarrass us,” Hooks told delegates.

A host of black political leaders and entertainers are scheduled to address the convention. They include actress and television talk show host Oprah Winfrey; the Rev. Joseph Lowery, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder, the nation’s first elected black governor, who will address the convention Thursday.

In addition, more than 1,000 high school students from throughout the country will participate in the NAACP’s Afro-Academic, Technological and Scientific Olympics.

Delegates will also consider a resolution that could reverse the organization’s stand on immigration reform. Up to now, the black civil rights group has supported penalties against employers who hire illegal immigrant workers, arguing that the low-paid immigrants take jobs from blacks.

In May, two Latino groups threatened to pull out of the influential Leadership Conference on Civil Rights--a coalition of 183 groups including the NAACP--because the black civil rights group did not support a Latino effort to repeal employer sanctions.