Gentleman warrior

Heads turn and murmuring begins when the distinguished, silver-haired African American walks through Harold and Belle’s, a popular Creole restaurant in southwest Los Angeles.

A professor looks up from her shrimp and crawfish etouffee. Genteel little old ladies dressed to the nines for lunch grab at his hands. Diners approach his table before he can savor the shrimp, crab, smoked beef sausage, ham and chicken thickening his file gumbo.

“Isn’t that John Mack from the Urban League?” a diner asks. “I know him from TV.”

They know him from images like these: famously leading then-President George H. W. Bush on a tour after the 1992 Los Angeles riots, a photo-op seen round the world; calling for the resignation of then-Police Chief Daryl F. Gates; showing Prince Charles the Los Angeles Urban League Automotive Training Center on Crenshaw Boulevard; hosting his friend Mayor-elect Antonio Villaraigosa, who held his first post-victory press conference at that same center, a partnership between the league and Toyota that resulted from the riots.

Now 68, a star player in myriad powerful arenas, Mack is scheduled to retire as president of the Los Angeles Urban League at the end of this month, causing a seismic shift in Southern California’s African American leadership.

No black leader outside the realm of politics has his insider relationships with the region’s corporate movers and shakers or elite African Americans, liberal and conservative (it was a black Republican who recommended to the White House that Mack escort the first President Bush around L.A. after the riots). During his nearly 36 years in the position, he has seen the city through all kind of changes: the election of a black mayor, growth in the number of African Americans in key and influential positions, the renaissance of the Crenshaw district, development in South L.A., a burgeoning black-Latino political coalition -- as well as escalating tensions between Latinos and African Americans over jobs and at schools, and even for gang turf.

As he prepares to leave the L.A. affiliate of one of the nation’s oldest and most influential civil rights organizations, he cautions that “African Americans live in two worlds. We have had a steadily growing middle class. Look at the African Americans who live in View Park, Baldwin Hills, Lafayette Square and Ladera Heights -- and others who have moved out.

“But for everyone who’s moved up, we have more and more who are still languishing in poverty ... without hope, without opportunity.”

Providing opportunity is the primary mission of the L.A. league, which serves 112,000 individuals annually -- the majority of them Latino now, reflecting L.A.’s changing demographics -- including preschoolers in Head Start programs, students and dropouts improving their skills and adults in need of training or help finding a job. And while its makeup has changed, the league’s goal remains as current as ever: to provide equal opportunity, not just black opportunity.

The job also provides a bully pulpit. Mack frequently speaks out, though usually without the angry edge of some other black leaders. In some quarters, that makes Mack an Uncle Tom, a sellout. Critics point to his support for the opening of a Wal-Mart in the Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw mall to create jobs, despite the company’s low, nonunion wages. They note that the league was paid to recruit workers.

His friend, the more outspoken Danny Bakewell, who heads the Brotherhood Crusade, sees a difference in style between the two. “My voice may have been more vocal and more challenging, and John may have a voice that resonated more with reason. I have a hard edge, anger.... John has a rounder edge, a softer edge.”

“It’s not as though John is incapable of expressing passion, which sometimes translates itself into anger. I saw him in one instance light Daryl Gates up,” says Assemblyman Mark Ridley-Thomas (D-Los Angeles), another close friend.

To be sure, Mack is a gentleman leader, one who never curses or shouts and always dresses in a suit and tie for public events and private meetings. His wife, Harriett Mack, recalls that he even wore a tie on the golf course in the first two years that sportscaster Jim Hill sponsored a benefit tournament for the league.

The National Urban League’s urbane and well-integrated tradition of “quiet warriors” seems in no danger of shifting in L.A. in Mack’s absence. No brick-throwers need apply, say other black leaders who embrace Mack’s consensus- and bridge-building style.

He is comfortable with powerful whites -- like presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and both Bushes -- and they with him.

“I’ve never mau-maued anyone. It’s possible to lead without being loud or threatening,” Mack says in his paneled office at the L.A. league’s elegant, ivy-covered headquarters on Mount Vernon Drive near Crenshaw Boulevard.

The list of Mack’s partnerships with the business elite is long, starting shortly after Phil Hawley of the Broadway department store chain introduced him to other chief executives.

“He can access those who have, as well as those who have not,” says Mack’s longtime ally, the Rev. Cecil L. “Chip” Murray, the recently retired minister of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton and Mack have become friends, surprising, perhaps, given Mack’s history of fighting police brutality and demanding greater accountability for misconduct from Parker Center. Bratton sought Mack’s advice before he was appointed chief and says, “He’s a stand-up leader.... He’s very direct. You know where you stand with him.”

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Southern roots

Like many black leaders of his generation, John Wesley Mack has roots in the Old South.

Named after the founder of Methodism, he grew up in a middle-class family in segregated Darlington, S.C. His father, an eloquent United Methodist minister, always prompt, always polished, became district superintendent. His mother taught first grade.

Mack, who could read before he turned 4, thrived in the town’s school for colored children, where, he says, his black teachers “were really dedicated to making sure all of us learned.... They believed we could excel.”

During his junior high summer vacations, his college-educated parents required Mack and his older brother to pick cotton -- hard, sweaty work that tore up their hands, he says -- to teach them “the importance of work, the discipline of work.”

In high school, he excelled in English, loved history and played halfback on the football team. Summers, he worked for a combination deli-restaurant on the Jersey shore, exposing him to a whole new world without rigid black-and-white boundaries.

At historically black North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University, in Greensboro, he majored in applied sociology, pledged Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, sang second tenor in the chorus, chased girls and was president of his senior class.

At the urging of Whitney M. Young Jr., then dean of the Atlanta University School of Social Work, Mack enrolled in graduate school.

An early leader of the student civil rights movement, he worked with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and barely escaped arrest as the Georgia Bureau of Investigation combed the campus for him.

“They had the wrong name,” Mack laughs. “They were looking for Ted Mack, host of the ‘Amateur Hour.’ ” When he wasn’t leading protests, he courted a teacher, the twin sister of his roommate; they married in 1959. Harriett Mack is as lively as the man she calls “Mack” is staid. She’s as open as he is private. He personifies control. She refuses to hold back.

He minimizes the dangers he faced in Atlanta. She fills in the frightening blanks -- the $90,000 bounty on his head; how the Klan chased him when he was driving to the rural town where she was teaching; the white insurance agent who warned her after she wrote down the name of her husband: “Is that that boy up there in Atlanta causing trouble? Well you better take some insurance out on him.”

She feared he wouldn’t get out alive until their plane took off for California -- where he spent four years as a psychiatric social worker at Camarillo State Hospital, and where their son, Tony, and daughter Debbie were born.

Their second daughter, Andria, was born in Flint, Mich., where Whitney Young, by then head of the National Urban League, had persuaded Mack to go to work for the organization in 1964, the year the federal Civil Rights Act passed.

“He would be gone night and day, day and night,” his wife says in their large two-story home in Lafayette Square. She and the children remained in Flint while he spent six months on the league’s national staff in Washington, D.C.

Then in 1969, L.A. beckoned.

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Ray Charles link

“When John came, the Urban League was nothing of prominence, not like it has become,” notes Geraldine Washington, who heads the L.A. branch of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.

Mack, then 32, worked out of the L.A. league’s office on the first floor of singer Ray Charles’ office and studio. In the parking lot, he met Quincy Jones, Marvin Gaye and other black celebrities.

In his first six months, Mack plunged into school desegregation; pushed for the hiring of blacks on construction sites; hosted a major fundraiser, a football game and a battle of the bands between two black colleges, that attracted 65,000 to the Coliseum; and boosted the league’s membership with a benefit concert at the Shrine Auditorium starring board member and singer Nancy Wilson.

The bar had been raised.

In 1973, the league held its first Whitney Young banquet, named for Mack’s mentor, who had drowned two years earlier. The black-tie gala, a major fundraiser, remains the premier event of its kind in Los Angeles for African Americans.

“Our first honoree was John Wooden, the legendary [basketball] coach of UCLA,” Mack says, recalling that the “room just went crazy” when Tom Bradley entered, two days after he had been elected L.A.’s first black mayor.

With Bradley -- a former member of the league’s board, in City Hall, Mack thrived. So many meetings of powerful African Americans were held in his headquarters that Councilman Dave Cunningham nicknamed it “the black Pentagon.”

As his influence grew, Mack built bridges between blacks and Jews. His corporate donations increased. He battled bank and insurance redlining, the lack of supermarkets in black areas and Hollywood’s lack of black actors.

And, he says, “we were having this war with Daryl Gates.”

In 1991, after four officers were caught on videotape beating Rodney King, Mack attended a meeting with the chief.

“His immediate response was basically that Rodney King deserved it,” Mack says.

No longer moderate in his tone, Mack called for Gates’ head. He testified before the Christopher Commission, formed after the King beating to investigate the LAPD. But he didn’t need the final report to confirm that black men, like his board member and former Laker Jamaal “Silk” Wilkes, had been stopped and handcuffed for “driving while black.” Or that cops guilty of using excessive force, often against blacks, got away with it.

In 1992, the riots raised Mack’s profile internationally.

Day and night he was gone, stopping by home to nap before getting up at 3 a.m. to do the morning news shows.

“It was not easy for Harriett,” he says. “She talked about her fears. She was at home. She rushed out and saw the fires. She was frightened for me, not knowing what was going to happen.”

While Mack was away, his son rushed to protect his mother.

“A tree was ablaze in the yard,” threatening the house, Tony Mack says. He and a friend tried to put out a fire burning a strip mall on Crenshaw adjacent to the back of the house.

“A fire truck drove right past us. We tried to flag it down,” he says. It didn’t stop. He asked a carful of guys, who wanted to loot the burning shops, to help douse the flames. One flashed a gun.

It was a dangerous time.

Where was his father?

Helping others.

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Mayoral transition team

Today, he is still sought out.

Mayor-elect Villaraigosa put Mack on his transition team.

Mayors and CEOs call him John, but at his office, he is Mr. Mack.

“At times, he’s a hard taskmaster. He has a vision of what the L.A. Urban League is to be, and what he would like to see for the city. He demanded excellence from all of us,” says Sandra Carter, his vice president of programs for 25 years until she retired in December 2003.

She talks about “the other day at City Hall when Chief Bratton was saying they call him on the weekend and they call him at night. He’s been a 24-hour president.” He’s a workaholic who goes to the office during his vacation and never got sick until he was diagnosed as having prostate cancer.

During his tenure at the L.A. league, Mack has increased the budget from $1.7 million to nearly $25 million. Left undone: an endowment to protect the nonprofit from layoffs and program cuts when the government funding, which makes up 83% of the budget, declines.

As the end draws near, Mack is getting the star treatment.

He’s mobbed at his final Whitney Young banquet at the Century Plaza Hotel. A bronze bust is unveiled. An oil painting is presented. He’s had his own day at City Hall. KABC-TV Channel 7 has broadcast a special tribute. Los Angeles Schools Supt. Roy Romer has said that a school will be named for him. Entrepreneur Earvin “Magic” Johnson, the former Laker, has given him retirement gifts, a European cruise and a Lincoln Town Car, a reward for a CEO who never earned a corporate salary.

He’s been all over the black press: Ebony magazine, Jet magazine, the Los Angeles Sentinel, published by Bakewell, and the weekly Wave, in a front page photo that shows him laughing with his head thrown back.

“Nobody ever sees him like this,” Harriett Mack says, before kissing the picture.

“Most people think of Mr. Mack as this stern national leader,” Carter, his former VP says. She has seen him singing “My Girl,” the Temptations classic, at Christmas parties and dancing the Electric Slide.

He’s “Hollywood Mack” to some, she says, because the banquet has either honored or showcased black luminaries such as Sammy Davis Jr., Ella Fitzgerald, Sidney Poitier, Stevie Wonder and Natalie Cole.

Carter adds, “He loves children, babies and little ones; that seems to be where his heart is.”

That’s evident on a recent Saturday when son Tony brings his wife, Teresa, and the grandkids to visit. Mack bends down to kiss 8-year-old Anthony Mack II and 6-year-old Gabriel John Wesley Mack, who is named for both of his grandfathers. When 4-year-old Gianna Marie Mack sees him, she stops everything, smiles shyly and says, “Hi Papa.”

Mack, no longer in the suit he wore earlier to a bank opening in Inglewood, is wearing a tan shirt and matching slacks. He doesn’t own a pair of jeans, his wife says.

Harriett Mack would like to see him relax more often. She reveals he’s had a tough year, losing four of his closest friends: KTLA weekend anchor Larry McCormick; Dr. Bill Young, his physician; attorney Johnnie L. Cochran; and Rene Etienne, who worked at the league for decades and continued, after his retirement, to coordinate the Whitney Young banquet.

Harriett wants him to write a book. He asks who would read it other than his family.

She wants to return to Harvard University, where he taught a seminar at the Kennedy School of Government. He reminds her they were there during the fall semester before the ice and snow.

Mack says he may do a little teaching. Learn golf.

He has a message, however, for his fans at Harold and Belle’s restaurant: “After June 30,” he says, “I’ll still be around.”

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League prepares for the future

While a nationwide search continues for John Mack’s replacement, James E. Castillo will serve as interim president of the Los Angeles Urban League. Castillo, currently in the league’s No. 2 position, was once the highest-ranking African American at United Parcel Service. During his 35-year career with UPS, he held several managerial positions, including vice president for district operations in Los Angeles.