Goodbye to the Old Guard

By Kenneth M. Pierce

The civil rights movement braces for an uncertain future

On two successive days last week, the civil rights movement lost, in different ways, two of its most prominent leaders. Roy Wilkins, who had served for 22 years as executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People before retiring in 1977, died at 80. Then Vernon Jordan, 46, president of the National Urban League for the past ten years, announced at a New York news conference that he was resigning to join the Dallas-based law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer and Feld.

Jordan said that one of the firm's partners, former Democratic National Committee Chairman Robert Strauss, had invited him to join the Washington office. By tireless travel and nonstop fund raising in corporate and government offices, the cigar-chomping Jordan has managed to double the Urban League's staff (now 4,200) and quadruple its budget (now $150 million, most of it for job training programs). Said he: "I've always seen this as a ten-year job. It's time for a change, personally and institutionally." Jordan insisted he has fully recovered from injuries sustained 16 months ago when he was shot by a sniper outside a Fort Wayne, Ind., motel. That incident did not influence his decision, he said, adding: "I'm not leaving the movement. I'm leaving the leadership. I won't run away from civil rights cases as a lawyer, but I won't be at the cutting edge."

The death of Wilkins and the resignation of Jordan came at a time of increasing demoralization and frustration within the civil rights movement. That once mighty coalition of black and white organizations captured the nation's conscience and won an end to segregation in public accommodations, besides sweeping legal guarantees of civil rights and voting rights. Yet the movement has seen a sharp decline in political influence since the Reagan Administration took office, as well as a cooling of ardor for civil rights issues among the nation's white majority. As the Rev. Joseph Lowery, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, observes: "Many of our allies in the 1960s now no longer offer support. Some are now among the most vicious opponents of affirmative action."

That growing callousness comes at a time when the average economic status of black Americans remains a national scandal. In 1980, average black family income was $15,806, as against $24,939 for whites Currently, the unemployment rate among blacks is nearly three times as great a that for whites: 16.2% vs. 6.1%. Those disparities have worsened somewhat in the past decade, and for young people the gap is large indeed: a record 50.7% of black teen-age workers were unemployed in August, in contrast with 15.6% of white teenagers.

The Reagan Administration argues that the most effective way for government to address these problems is by improving the overall performance of the economy. But Reagan's spending cuts hit an array of programs-- welfare, food stamps, school lunches, legal services-- that have kept blacks and other minorities from falling even further behind than they would have. And blacks predict that state governments, especially in the South, will slash health services and job training programs once funds for such programs are turned over to the states via block grants. As Vernon Jordan put it in his final Urban League Convention presidential address in July: "Black people don't need to be told that government is on our backs because we know it has been by our side, helping to counterbalance the vicious racism that deprived us of our lives, our liberty and our rights."

But how to attract wider support for such views is perhaps the major question facing civil rights organizations. One reason the general public seems so indifferent to the black cause is the spreading economic pinch produced by inflation. Says Ira Glasser, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union: "When the majority of middle-class people who have a right to think that they've made it begin to fear for the future of their children, it's not a situation that leads people to be charitable to the plight of others." Adds the Rev. Jesse Jackson, head of Chicago-based Operation PUSH: "It was easier to organize a coalition when we were dealing with the economics of plenty."

Frequently, too, civil rights advocates bemoan the absence of a national spokesman with the authority of a Roy Wilkins or the charisma of a Martin Luther King Jr. After polling 5,000 readers, the magazine Black Enterprise concluded in 1980 that "over the last ten years, the absence of clear-cut leadership has been the single most noticeable handicap of the black struggle for equality." In the poll, 30% said they felt Jesse Jackson speaks for blacks generally, 20% named former U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young, and 10% cited Vernon Jordan. But no one was endorsed by even 50% of the readers. Says the Rev. Herbert Daughtry, head of the Brooklyn-based Black United Front: "We've known for a long time that the mass of black people have no confidence in these so-called leaders."

To Bayard Rustin, 71, president of the A. Philip Randolph Educational Fund and a longtime movement theoretician, what is needed to put fire back in the civil rights movement is a broader focus--an approach that may mean, surprisingly, that future leaders of the movement will not be predominantly black. Noting that whites below the poverty line outnumber blacks by more than 2 to 1, Rustin says: "I do not think it is practical to separate the problems of black poverty from poverty as such. It makes it look as if we're asking for special privilege, unless we do it within the context of asking for the elimination of poverty for all." As Rustin sees it, blacks may still have moral grievances rooted in the history of slavery, but politically speaking, now that legal rights for blacks are fully enacted into law, he does not expect Congress to support measures for any single racial group. He explains: "The economic impact of the Reagan Administration is not directed toward blacks. We mustn't fear that. It is directed toward a class of people, the havenots. Today, what you must ask for is education, jobs, hospital care for an entire class of people. So new leadership that will emerge cannot just be a replacement for King, Jordan, Whitney Young and the others."

In fact, some view the lack of one or two dominant national leaders as a sign of progress. "It was a sign of the powerlessness of black people that you could once name most black leaders in less than a minute," says Eleanor Holmes Norton, former head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. She adds: "Now, a thousand flowers are blooming." Indeed, with nearly 200 black mayors in the U.S., and rapid increases in the numbers of black managers, doctors, lawyers and other professionals, the drive toward equality may be able to go forward in boardrooms and professional societies. Says Willie Brown, the speaker of California's state assembly: "Now the politicians who are black are providing one aspect of black leadership, the religious community another, and the professional organizations another. This adds up to even greater institutional change than could ever have been brought about by a Martin Luther King rally or a Roy Wilkins boycott." Jordan echoed that mixture of confidence and loneliness with which many American blacks regard their future in the post-Wilkins, post-Jordan era. Said he: "I don't think there is anything wrong with the black leadership in this country. I think there's something wrong with the white leadership."--By Kenneth M. Pierce. Reported by Dorothy Ferenbaugh/New York and Jeanne Saddler/Washington, with other U.S. bureaus

With reporting by Dorothy Ferenbaugh/New York, Jeanne Saddler/Washington

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