"He Didn't Give Us Anything

By Ed Magnuson

The President's rhetoric fails to impress blacks

It was the toughest audience the Great Communicator had faced since taking the oath of office. At most, 10% of the nation's black voters cast ballots for Ronald Reagan last year, and the President has done nothing since then to gain their confidence. Of the 450 top jobs in his Administration, only about 15 have gone to blacks, and his budget cuts will most immediately and severely affect the nation's poor, who are disproportionately black.

Thus, when the President last week addressed 3,200 delegates to the annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in Denver, he faced a skeptical audience. Among other reasons, he had turned down an invitation to address the N.A.A.C.P. last year, claiming that his staff had misplaced the invitation until it was too late for him to change his schedule. Margaret Bush Wilson, head of the N.A.A.C.P. board, alluded to that mishap in introducing Reagan, saying: "I understand that he has a much better staff now, and they do not lose our invitations." Needling him while smiling, she added: "The N.A.A.C.P. does not necessarily subscribe to the views that are about to be expressed."

Nor was Reagan's audience impressed by a sometimes eloquent and even courageous speech. He tried hard to convince the N.A.A.C.P. delegates that federal programs had enslaved blacks instead of helping them. Said the President: "Many in Washington over the years have been more dedicated to making needy people Government dependent, rather than independent. They've created a new kind of bondage. Just as the Emancipation Proclamation freed black people 118 years ago, today we need to declare an economic emancipation." Reagan's essential message: blacks will progress financially only when the entire economy improves. "Rebuilding America's economy is an absolute moral imperative if we're to avoid splitting this society in two, with class against class. We must... bring more blacks into the mainstream, and we must do it now." His budget-cutting and tax program will work, Reagan insisted, "because it's aimed at lifting an entire country and not just parts of it."

There were only 13 tepid smatterings of applause during the 28-minute speech. Clearly, the N.A.A.C.P. delegates were less impressed by what he said than by what he failed to say. He did not refer to the specific Administration policies that blacks fear most. These include cutbacks in funds for food stamps, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, school lunches, Medicaid, subsidized housing, job training, small-business loans and general aid to education. He did not mention his plans to funnel federal help through block grants to states, which many blacks consider a retreat to the days when dominant white majorities in state offices denied them equal access to governmental funds. He said nothing encouraging about what blacks see as a federal retreat from affirmative-action programs. Although Reagan described voting as "the most sacred right of free men and women," he did not promise to support extension of the Voting Rights Act of 1965--a law that has put millions of blacks on voting rolls in the South and more than tripled the number of elected black officials.

At the end of his speech, Reagan warmly embraced Margaret Wilson, despite their differences of opinion. Responding to the speech, N.A.A.C.P. Executive Director Benjamin Hooks said he welcomed the opening of a "dialogue," but predicted that Reagan's policies will bring new "hardship, havoc, despair, pain and suffering on blacks and other minorities." That sharp criticism was echoed by other delegates. Said Vincent Chapman, an oil company personnel manager from Des Moines: "We held out hope, but he didn't give us anything. It's all been said before." Coleman Young, the mayor of Detroit, claimed that Reagan's "trickle-down" theory of economics had "failed under Hoover, and it will fail now." The speech, he charged, "added up to an insult." Coretta Scott King, widow of Martin Luther King Jr., deplored Reagan's policies, under which, she argued, "food stamps and school lunches are taken from poor children to finance an arms race."

In interviews across the nation last week, TIME correspondents discovered that this kind of antagonism toward the Administration is growing among blacks. They do not share Reagan's faith that private enterprise will provide jobs and training for unskilled persons who will no longer be helped by federal programs.

Contends Carl E. Officer, mayor of East St. Louis, Ill., which is 96% black: "Private enterprise looks at one thing-- profits, and profits show up in green, not in black, not in white."

Many black politicians admit that social programs have not fulfilled their hopes, but argue that legislation needs to be more carefully drafted and administered rather than abandoned. They deplore Reagan's lack of alternatives.

"Blacks are willing to try anything," says Willie Brown, speaker of the California Assembly. "We don't want to be Chryslers. But he is abolishing CETA and offering a prayer." There is widespread skepticism that local governments will pick up the financial slack as the Federal Government withdraws from some of the subsistence programs.

But what can blacks do as the Reagan policies roll through Congress? Hooks of the N.A.A.C.P. vowed to fight. "We are going out to demonstrate, agitate, remonstrate, educate, selectively buy and wisely vote," he said. The N.A.A.C.P. voted to join an AFL-CIO protest march on Washington in September. Many elderly persons and advocates of women's rights threaten to join a coalition with labor and blacks against the Reagan policies.

The Rev. Joseph Lowery, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, acidly paraphrased Reagan's speech: "We're not going to put you out of the house, just going to cut off the lights, water and gas. As soon as the economy gets better, we're going to help you turn them back on." Lowery noted that Reagan has not been invited to the S.C.L.C.'s annual convention next month in New Orleans. --By Ed Magnuson. Reported by Laurence I. Barrett with Reagan and Richard Woodbury/Denver

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett, Richard Woodbury

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