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                                                                                COVER STORIES, Page  38

LOS ANGELES RIOTS

The Limits of Black Power


African Americans have seized control of city halls across the
nation, but their rise has done little to ease the plight of
their most downtrodden constituents

By JACK E. WHITE/ATLANTA


    Tom Bradley based his first campaign for mayor of Los
Angeles on the idea that his election could make a difference
in the lives of average blacks. "I want to provide a sense of
hope for our young people," he said in 1969. "I want them to be
able to look at city hall and know that the system can work. I
want them to know that change is possible. I want them to know
that we can reshape the structure, that it doesn't have to be
destroyed. I want them to know that in city hall sits a man with
whom they can identify, that if he made it, anybody can make it.
That's what this election is all about."

    As it turned out, Bradley lost that election. He won four
years later using a similarly optimistic theme, and has been in
city hall ever since. In the aftermath of the chaos that
erupted in his city last week, Bradley's expansive view of what
his election could accomplish seems hopelessly naive -- and not
just in Los Angeles. The high expectations that greeted the
election of thousands of African Americans to local, state and
federal offices over the past three decades have been displaced
by frustration. By every statistical measure from joblessness to
out-of-wedlock births, the plight of the poorest blacks has
deteriorated in nearly all the cities that blacks control
politically. Black elected officials and black voters alike have
discovered the harsh limits of their power. As the violence in
L.A. showed, many of them remain as alienated from the political
process as they were a generation ago.

    There are many reasons for the depressing state of black
politics. Most black mayors are trying to revive cities that
were already in economic and social decline. Federal aid to
urban areas has been drastically cut even as AIDS, drugs and
homelessness strained social-welfare systems to the breaking
point. The racial climate has worsened because of white fears
of black criminals and disputes over affirmative action. Beyond
that are large social and economic trends: the loss of the
well-paid manufacturing jobs that gave many blacks their first
step up the economic ladder, and the flight from the inner city
to the suburbs of both black and white middle-class families,
leaving behind ever more concentrated populations of the
desperately poor.

    These factors alone would have made it difficult for black
politicians to fulfill the promise of the 1960s. But there are
other dismaying reasons for the disappointment some African
Americans feel about the political process. One is the lingering
power of whites to devise new ways of preventing black officials
from effectively exercising power. Another is that blacks have
often failed to support institutions that are vital to the
realization of their dreams. Perhaps most damaging is the
tendency of many black officials, like former Washington Mayor
Marion Barry and Chicago Congressman Gus Savage, to hide their
failures in a cynical game of racial politics. Their slogan
might be: Support me because I am black, whether or not I
deliver. Until quite recently, the slogan worked.


    WHO PAYS FOR YOUR FREEDOM?

    Ed Brown sits alone in the headquarters of the Voter
Education Project, surrounded by history. The run-down house
near the mostly black Atlanta University Complex is littered
with cardboard cartons stuffed with records that date back to
1962, when America's homegrown version of apartheid reigned
throughout the South and all but a handful of blacks were denied
the right to vote. Today, thanks largely to VEP'S unheralded
support of grass-roots voter-registration and education drives,
5.5 million Southern blacks have registered and the number of
black elected officials in the region has exploded from less
than 100 to more than 4,400.

    Yet VEP is now going out of business, even though its
mission is far from complete: 4 million eligible Southern blacks
are still not registered. Last December the big
white-controlled foundations that have funded vep for the past
30 years ceased their support. Brown, the organization's
director since 1989, tried to raise money from other sources and
failed. "There's a conception on the part of many people that
voter registration and the issues around it are basically passe,
that whatever might have been problems have been resolved," he
says. "That perception, unfortunately, is incorrect. We are no
longer subjected to fire hoses and dogs and physical
intimidation and the prospect of murder in our attempts to
exercise the franchise, but nonetheless there are still
barriers."

    Brown puts much of the blame for VEP'S demise on the
people who have benefited the most from the progress the
organization made possible: black political leaders and the
black middle class, who failed to provide the money to keep the
organization going after the foundations pulled out. Since word
of the organization's collapse began to circulate, he says,
"I've had hundreds of letters from people lamenting the fact
that VEP is going to close. Nobody has said, `How can we --
blacks -- put together a way to save this organization?' In the
final analysis, nobody else pays for your freedom. You have to
pay for it yourself."


    FRUSTRATION AT THE TOP OF THE STAIRS

    No city better symbolizes black political success than
Atlanta. Nearly every important elective office -- mayor,
Congressman, 12 of the 18 seats on the city council -- is
occupied by an African American. Unlike most of the declining
industrial centers where blacks have seized control since the
'60s, Atlanta is a thriving business and cultural powerhouse.
When an ebullient young lawyer named Maynard Jackson became the
first black mayor in 1974, the most prominent feature of the
skyline was the Polaris, a flying saucer-like revolving
restaurant atop the 24-floor Hyatt Regency Hotel. Today that
landmark can scarcely be seen amid the towering hotels and
office towers that have been built since Jackson broke the color
line at city hall.

    But even in this citadel of black political power, the
benefits of economic development have not been evenly shared.
While more than $1 billion has been invested in the affluent,
predominantly white northern portion of the city, there has been
virtually no new development in the black neighborhoods to the
south. Atlanta's population has plummeted from 495,000 in 1970
to 394,000 as middle-class blacks and whites have fled to
suburbs where few blacks lived two decades ago. Black
businessman J.O. Wyatt still resides in Cascade Heights, the
traditional bastion of Atlanta's black bourgeoisie. But he
opened a posh new nightclub called Just Jazz in the white
Buckhead neighborhood. "I've been criticized for that by other
blacks who wanted me to locate it out on Campbellton Road [a
commercial drive in black Atlanta]," he says, "but I had to go
where the money is."

    Because Atlanta limits mayors to two consecutive four-year
terms, Jackson stepped down in 1982 to become a high-paid bond
lawyer. His first two terms were marked by bitter battles to
carve out a share of city business for black companies. Against
strong opposition from the white business community, he insisted
that black-owned construction firms be given a major share of
the contracts for Atlanta's rapid-transit system. He was
succeeded by former Congressman Andrew Young, who devoted his
eight years in office to increasing the city's foreign trade.

    Jackson returned to politics in 1989 and won a third term
as mayor. Although his gospel-tinged oratory about the power of
politics to uplift the poor remains as dynamic as ever, some of
Jackson's strongest supporters complain that his priorities have
changed and that he has become a tool of white business
interests. Jackson's and Young's dickering with developers has
resulted in new business opportunities for black professionals,
but not much of this largesse has trickled down to the poor.
"The civil rights movement might turn out to be one of the
worst things that ever happened to us," says the Rev. Jasper
Williams, pastor of Salem Baptist Church. "The dream of Martin
Luther King has become a nightmare because all it has done is
make white businessmen richer and make us poorer." Says the
Rev. McKinley Young of Big Bethel African Methodist Episcopal
Church, one of Atlanta's oldest black congregations: "It's like
rising to the top of the stairs and discovering that things are
just as difficult there as they were at the bottom."

    Jackson says politics can still be the salvation of blacks
if they would vote in larger numbers for candidates who
sympathize with urban needs. He notes that black turnout in this
year's presidential primaries has fallen off significantly,
compared with 1988's. "I think we are in an era of limited
choices until such time as we activate our numbers and start
taking care of business at the ballot box," he says. "We're
sitting on the means of our economic and social liberation and
not using the power we have." Some critics point out that poor
blacks often go to the polls in record numbers to help blacks
get elected, then drop out after receiving little in exchange
for their votes. One reason is that it is relatively easy to
satisfy the demands of businessmen, including blacks, who can
return the favor with campaign contributions. It is far more
difficult to devise remedies for the problems of members of the
underclass, who lack the savvy and organization to make their
voices heard. Says Atlanta Congressman John Lewis: "A segment
of black leadership has gotten so wrapped up in dealmaking that
they've forgotten the people who elected them."


    THE SOUNDS OF MANY VOICES

    Under the rule of Jim Crow, blacks were united by the
struggle against racial oppression and tended to speak with one
voice. Today the expansion of opportunities has allowed African
Americans to split along economic lines; the interests of the
relatively well-off middle class are not the same as those of
the poor. As a result, skin color alone is no longer a reliable
guide to blacks' political attitudes, which range from the
antiwar radicalism of Oakland Congressman Ron Dellums to the
conservativism of Stanford University economist Thomas Sowell.
Yet many blacks cling to an old tradition of rallying behind any
fellow black who comes under attack regardless of what he stands
for. An emotionally wrenching case in point: the widespread
support among Southern blacks for Supreme Court nominee Clarence
Thomas after his elevation to the high court was threatened by
Anita Hill's sexual-harassment charges. Thomas claimed he was
being subjected to a "high-tech lynching," a phrase designed to
appeal to the racial sensitivities of blacks and white guilt.

    The success of Thomas' tactic was a testament to black
political power. White Southern Democrats, whose re-election
depends on combining huge black voting majorities with much
smaller shares of the white vote, came down in Thomas' favor
after polls showed that large majorities of African Americans
supported him. Among them was Lawrence C. Presley, the only
black county commissioner of Etowah County, Ala. "I felt that
we needed a black to take over that spot on the Supreme Court,"
says Presley. "We felt here in the Deep South that that was a
very vital issue to us."

    Since taking his place on the high court last year, Thomas
has consistently voted with the conservative majority. That was
exactly what most blacks, who knew of his opposition to
affirmative action and criticism of civil rights leaders,
expected. What they did not anticipate is that Thomas, who grew
up poor in segregated Pin Point, Ga., would join in an important
ruling earlier this year that could make it easier for whites
to thwart the effective exercise of black political power. No
brother, no matter how right wing, they felt, could acquiesce
in such a ruling.

    The ruling came in Presley's case against four white
members of the Etowah County commission. For decades these
officials had one prime function: supervising the county road
budget, with each determining how funds would be spent within
his district. In 1986 the commission settled a long-running
voting-rights lawsuit by agreeing to expand the body from four
to six members; they also agreed that the two new members would
have the same duties as the four holdovers. Presley was elected
from a newly created 65% black district in the county seat of
Gadsden. Eight months later, the four white holdovers rammed
through a resolution that abolished individual commissioners'
spending authority over road projects in favor of a common fund
to be governed by the entire commission. Since the four white
holdover commissioners voted as a bloc, Presley, a 67-year-old
retired school administrator, discovered that he had no say over
the largest item in the county budget. He had become a
second-class commissioner.

    Presley filed a federal suit, charging that the holdovers
had violated Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That
provision requires officials in the covered states to "preclear"
changes they want to make "with respect to voting rights" with
the U.S. Justice Department before putting them into effect. The
department can overrule the changes if it finds that they pose
a threat to minority voting strength. Presley contended he
needed control over a portion of the road budget as a bargaining
chip with other commissioners for such things as funding for
improved health care for indigent people in his district. Says
he: "If you want to push something in your district, that's
where you have the power because that's where the money is." The
Bush Administration, which most blacks view as indifferent at
best to their interests, sided with Presley.

    But the court's majority, joined by Thomas, ruled against
Presley on the ground that even though the resolution had
undercut Presley's authority as a commissioner, it had no direct
impact on voting procedures. The decision drew a stinging
dissent from Justice John Paul Stevens, who pointed out that
Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act had been adopted specifically
because "recalcitrant white majorities could be expected to
devise new stratagems to maintain their political power if not
closely scrutinized." The court's narrow interpretation of the
law, says Lani Guinier, a professor at the University of
Pennsylvania law school, could presage "a very anemic view of
political participation in which blacks can vote and even win
office, but they can't govern."

    For Presley, the most painful thing about the ruling was
that Thomas took part in it. Because the black jurist had
concurred in it, many blacks found it hard to discern its
potentially damaging impact on their political aspirations.
"Black people here learned a lesson from this," says Presley.
"Just because he's black does not necessarily mean that he's
positive."


    Despite the frustrations of their first generation in
politics, blacks are far from giving up on the vote. For many,
the past 30 years have been but a painful first step in learning
how to move the levers of power. This year there have been
signs of a new sophistication among African-American voters,
including a willingness to defeat black incumbents, like Chicago
Congressman Savage, who sought to deflect questions about his
ineffectiveness and high rate of absenteeism by attacking
"Jewish" campaign contributions to his opponent, Mel Reynolds.

    Some experts, like Harvard political scientist Martin
Kilson, hail the rise of a new breed of "transethnic" black
politicians such as Virginia Governor Douglas Wilder and Seattle
mayor Norman Rice. Unlike most black politicians, who come to
power representing mostly black constituencies, these candidates
have won elections in predominantly white jurisdictions by
forging biracial coalitions. Their victories suggest that many
white voters are willing to judge black politicians by their
performance in office rather than by their race. Blacks will
expand the limits of their political power once more of them
begin to do the same.