Blacks Urged to Unite With Other Minorities : Civil rights: Joining forces with growing Latino and Asian populations can bring social and economic gains, activist says.

Citing “new ethnic realities,” National Urban League President John E. Jacob Sunday urged black Americans to join forces with other minorities to achieve social and economic gains or risk having white Americans “pick and choose” among minority groups.

Jacob warned against “divide-and-conquer tactics” that exacerbate frictions among the groups and noted a particular threat to black people, saying, “Some (minorities) will be accepted grudgingly and allowed in the door. Others--and especially African-Americans--will be confined to the cellar. We can’t allow that to happen.”

Jacob made his remarks during his keynote speech to an estimated 4,000 people at the Georgia World Congress Center on the first day of the league’s 81st annual convention, which continues here through Wednesday.

The comments come as census figures show dramatic increases in Latino and Asian populations, a fact that raises both the overall percentage of minorities in many cities as well as tensions among the groups. The comments reflect a growing concern among American-born black people that newcomers reap a disproportionate share of societal benefits and then leap ahead economically.

The civil rights activist portrayed America’s history as a brutal one that has included slavery, lynchings and discrimination, as well as wave after wave of immigrant groups, each of which learned that “the fastest way to become a real American was to absorb the racism of the majority.”

Asserting that such history may repeat itself amid the most recent waves of immigration, Jacob devoted much of his speech to calling for ethnic unity, warning that as minority groups increase their numbers, racism “threatens to poison America’s destiny” as a multicultural democracy.

He also repeated his misgivings about the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court, but reiterated the league’s neutrality in the confirmation process and congratulated President Bush on his “shrewdness,” saying the President “checkmated the African-American community with the appointment.”

Jacob scathingly criticized the Bush Administration’s record on civil rights and urban policy, calling for congressional passage of civil rights legislation and urging a federal “Operation Urban Storm” that would spend $50 billion a year to combat poverty and structural decay in cities.

To the delight of the mostly black audience, Jacob ridiculed Bush’s advocacy of volunteerism as a way of solving social problems, saying the President keeps “calling for a thousand points of light--as if the government was the electric company.”

“Those points of light need to be hooked up to the powerful generator of a national domestic policy aimed at getting to the root causes of poverty and unequal opportunities,” Jacob said.

In a departure from conventional thinking among many civil rights advocates, Jacob spoke in favor of “enterprise zones” that promote economic investment in inner cities, and he spoke against the practice of creating virtually all-black congressional districts to assure election of black representatives to Congress.

On enterprise zones, an idea promoted by conservatives during the Ronald Reagan Administrations, Jacob said that “the African-American economy has been in permanent depression, and anything legal that might improve it should be tried.”

Making congressional districts all-black amounts to “a new form of political apartheid,” Jacob argued, asserting that it leads to racial polarization and diminishes black political strength in adjoining districts.

Jacob sounded a note of conciliation among the races on a national scale, declaring that “America has to come to terms with diversity” by protecting minority rights and “stop stereotyping people.” While blacks suffer stereotyping, he said, they also stereotype others. Both practices “could crack the American mosaic and endanger America’s future,” he said.

Jacob said black people “have to adjust to the new ethnic realities” as reflected in the 1990 census. According to the census, Hispanics number 22.3 million--only 7.6 million fewer than blacks--while the nation’s 7.2 million Asians are an extremely fast-growing group.

“We’ve become used to seeing race relations in terms of black and white,” he said. “But race relations in the 1990s and into the 21st Century will be more complex.”

Because no single group can “go it alone in a diverse society,” he said, minorities must cooperate on issues such as employment, education, health care and housing, asking a single question: “Is it good for America?”

“Not just: ‘Is it good for African-Americans?’ But, ‘Is it good for America?’ ”