Mayors Demand Bush Meeting on Urban Issues, Urge March on Capital

The nation’s mayors on Thursday demanded a meeting with President Bush to discuss urban issues and called for a massive march on the nation’s capital next spring to protest what they called Washington’s neglect of cities.

“It’s time for mayors and the people of America to take to the streets,” said Boston Mayor Raymond Flynn, president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. “The people of America’s cities are tired of being treated as second-class citizens.”

About 30 top officers of the mayors’ group held closed talks Thursday to develop a strategy for the organization heading into the 1992 presidential elections.

They emerged promising to demand that candidates of both parties address urban issues, with several Republican mayors stepping forward to make clear that the mayors’ complaints were not with Republican President Bush alone.

The group’s officers unanimously endorsed a proposal by Flynn to demand a meeting with Bush “at the earliest possible convenience.”

But some participants said that the group had a fractious debate, largely along partisan lines, when Flynn urged them to organize a march and protest in Washington on April 4, the anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Flynn said that the mayors must lead “a new civil rights movement in America . . . a civil rights movement for economic justice.”

The march was the idea of Osborn Elliott, former editor of Newsweek magazine and now the leader of a citizens’ group in New York City, who made a presentation to the mayors’ group. He said he hoped to get 1 million people at the march.

Flynn and his fellow mayors said money for jobs, economic development, housing and education programs that would benefit cities should come from the billions of dollars the United States pays to help overseas allies defend themselves.

He mentioned a list of countries and regions that he said received about $200 billion in military assistance from the United States.

Norway alone, Flynn said, receives $19.7 billion.

“That’s three years of general revenue sharing,” Flynn said, recalling the long-canceled federal assistance to cities.