Flexible Survival

The National Urban League held its annual conference in St. Louis last week. Joe Boyce of TIME's Chicago bureau attended. His report:

Like middle-aged matrons insisting on class reunions in a futile attempt to recapture the promise and excitement of their youth, civil rights organizations whose glory lies in the 1960s still schedule annual conventions, where they adopt resolutions and issue proclamations. The massive white money and support that backed the civil rights successes of the 1960s just is not present any more--owing to a combination of black separatism, white disillusionment and the economic pinch. In his keynote speech, the executive director of the National Urban League, Vernon Jordan, 37, sounded a gloomy note: "At the very moment that a broad national commitment is needed to bring about parity between white citizens and the black and brown minority, the nation has instead embarked upon a policy of retrenchment, withdrawal and defeatism."

Programs. His Urban League has resisted the downward trend. Financed by money from still optimistic and affluent whites and middle-and upper-middle-class blacks, as well as federal and private foundation grants, the league is emerging as the civil rights organization best equipped to survive the '70s. Based upon flexibility, its survival recognizes that demonstrations accomplish little, violence nothing. The ballot box and a well-organized program are the tools that shape success. It is a survival that acknowledges that whites control the economy of the U.S., including the major financing of civil rights groups; exclusionary or separatist rhetoric is self-defeating.

So when some 5,000 delegates, most of them black, assembled in St. Louis, the profile was low-key, the rhetoric subdued. The convention was a chance for black leaders to get acquainted or meet for the first time, to discuss their common or uncommon problems, to do some morale-building. Participants attended workshops on such matters as minority-business development, prison reform and national health programs. The league announced four new programs: one will prod heads of U.S. corporations to take a more active interest in minority affairs, get involved in the ghetto, re-examine their hiring and promotion policies. Another project will investigate and try to remove the hindrances to black participation in politics--the restricted hours for voter registration, the hostile attitudes of many registrars, the inconvenient locations of places of registration. A third program, started with a planning grant from the National Institutes of Health, will educate young people in the ghetto on the dangers of drug-taking.

The final program is a voter-registration drive--the first undertaken by the league in its 62-year history. Funded by $1 million donated by foundations, the campaign will be conducted in ten medium-size cities. A special target will be 18-year-old blacks in the ghetto. The league, however, is strictly nonpartisan, since it would lose its tax-exempt status if it made a political endorsement. Nevertheless, many of the conference participants voiced their displeasure with the Nixon Administration, and Georgia Legislator Julian Bond gave a speech calling for the President's defeat.

Jordan has stepped into a large pair of shoes. Many at the conference missed Whitney Young, whose energy seemed inexhaustible when it came to working for human rights--until his heart gave out while he was swimming in Nigeria in March 1971. Young, it turned out, had actually, if not intentionally, in some ways evolved a one-man organization because of his easy access to the talent and resources of the big board rooms of America.

Jordan has his own talents. He grew up in Atlanta in the first public-housing project for blacks, earned a law degree, ran the Southern Regional Council's Voter-Education Project and was the highly successful head of the United Negro College Fund. While Jordan was with the fund, Young asked him to become his assistant. Vernon replied that he would not become anyone's deputy. Said Young: "The only other job for you here is mine, and it's not vacant yet."

When, with tragic suddenness, the job did become vacant, Jordan took it. His first step was to decentralize. The league's 101 local affiliates were instructed to search out local needs. "In New York," says Jordan, "we can't decide what is most important to black people in Little Rock. The people in Little Rock have to decide that." He is working to broaden the leadership of the league so that it will include the poor and welfare recipients along with solidly established professionals. A resolution recently passed by the league's general assembly requires that at least 25% of affiliate and national board members be under 30.

Operations. While the league is the most successful civil rights organization now operating, it, too, has financial troubles. So far this year it is running a $500,000 deficit. The league administers programs, many of them federal, that involve spending some $60 million. Carrying out such programs on its $4 million-a-year general operations budget, says Jordan, "is like me, standing 6 ft. 4 in. and weighing 236 Ibs., wearing a size-2 shoe. I couldn't stand up. We need additional administrative overhead to enable us to carry on." In order to get fresh funds, the league is putting more emphasis on soliciting contributions, even approaching the children of generous supporters in the hope, says Jordan, "that they will do the right thing like their daddies." But the league expects that major fund-raising will continue to be done by outside supporters. Says Jordan: "We think it is better for people with power and money who believe in us to ask for money for us than for us to go and ask for it ourselves."

This leads to one of the oldest complaints against the league: that it is white-ruled and white-supported. Jordan insists that the league's policies have not softened under white pressure. The league has sharply attacked the Nixon Administration's stand on busing, for example. Still, the league is interested more in accomplishment than in taking stands, however well intended. "I don't think the civil rights movement of the 1970s is a headline-grabbing thing," says Jordan. "The conference is a reaffirmation of the integrated approach to the problems besetting this country."

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