Urban League Gears Up for S.D. Talks : Conference: Civil rights group to promote inner-city redevelopment program, referred to as a Marshall Plan for America.

At a time when percolating social unrest has reached a boiling point in cities across the nation, one of the country’s foremost African-American social service groups comes to San Diego Sunday, bringing its far-reaching urban redevelopment program, which has been referred to as a Marshall Plan for America.

Joining the National Urban League at its annual meeting will be politicians, scholars and corporate executives whose interests in urban redevelopment have been renewed over the past three months by recent riots in Los Angeles and other cities.

The national gathering, expected to draw 18,000 candidates to the Convention Center, comes at a time when the local San Diego chapter is struggling to bring stability to its ranks. The past three presidents of the San Diego Urban League have left under strained circumstances, raising concern over the effectiveness with which the group administers programs and raises funds to support them.

The San Diego Urban League has been without a chief executive officer since March, when Ibrahim Naeem quietly resigned because of what he described as an “overbearing” board of directors that created an “unworkable” situation. Naeem’s departure, just four months before the annual conference, left the host chapter without an executive officer to coordinate convention planning.

Among the attendees will be San Diego City Councilman George Stevens, who said he has not set foot in the Convention Center during its three years of operation. Stevens, an African-American, was involved in a bitter dispute in 1989 over renaming the building after the slain civil rights leader the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The San Diego City Council voted to rename the Convention Center after King, but the Board of Port Commissioners, which leases the center to the city, overrode the council’s vote. Rancor over the renaming spurred Stevens to call for an African-American boycott of the Convention Center in February, 1989.

Although some African-American groups complied with the boycott, many organizations, including the National Urban League, have planned or held events at the center.

The city has taken efforts to honor King with a promenade park--a landscaped strip on Harbor Drive between G Street and 6th Avenue across the street from the Convention Center, Stevens said.

The city also named a section of the California 94 freeway after King. Earlier this month, at the invitation of the Urban League, Stevens agreed to let the dispute rest.

The national conference includes a platform-packed agenda that offers a glimpse at the diversity of issues and concerns facing African-Americans in San Diego and the nation.

The issues--from affordable housing and job training to black entrepreneurship and corporate advancement--cover the condition of African-Americans in every economic stratum of society.

Founded in 1910, the National Urban League is one of the most formidable and longest-surviving social service and civil rights groups in the United States. The nonprofit Urban League is based in New York City and has 112 affiliates in 34 states and Washington.

At the top of the conference agenda are political topics including, “Election ‘92: Parties, Politics and Parity.”

On Monday morning, Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton is scheduled to present his national urban recovery plan of “investing in America’s infrastructure,” which has adopted language and tenets espoused in the Urban League’s Marshall Plan, according to Frank Lomax, Urban League national vice president.

Speakers scheduled for Monday afternoon include Gov. Pete Wilson and Jack Kemp, secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. They are expected to field questions on what the Urban League says is a lack of state and federal funding for social programs.

In addition, Ronald H. Brown, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, is scheduled to talk Wednesday morning about political parties’ responsiveness to African-Americans.

President Bush has been invited to address the conference Wednesday, but his attendance has not been confirmed.

Since the rioting in Los Angeles during April and May, governments and coalitions of business interests have sought to address the underlying causes of the unrest. On Tuesday, Peter V. Ueberroth, president of Rebuild L.A.; state Sen. Diane E. Watson (D-Los Angeles); and John W. Mack, president of the Los Angeles Urban League, will head a panel titled, “Can Cities Survive?” bringing together some of the leaders of the recovery program for areas of Los Angeles damaged by rioting.

A model for redevelopment was presented at last year’s National Urban League conference in Atlanta, along with a compendium of papers prepared by civil rights advocates and scholars addressing issues of particular urgency for African-Americans: mistreatment by law enforcement, discrimination in the judicial system, housing, health care access, crime and portrayals by the media.

Well before the social unrest this spring, the Urban League issued its comprehensive look at black-American life, and noted that conditions had not improved measurably during the 1980s. The Urban League’s diagnosis was that the status of black America remains critical.

Government policy-makers are giving newfound consideration to two Urban League ideas: its Urban Marshall Plan and a new Urban Investment Bank. The latter “invests in our own people and in our own cities,” said National Urban League President John E. Jacob.

The league’s Urban Marshall Plan was named for the former U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall’s massive U.S. foreign aid program to rebuild Western Europe after World War II.

Although most convention delegates will focus their energy on national problems, the four-day gathering also is drawing attention to the Urban League’s San Diego chapter.

In praising the national organization’s achievements, past San Diego Urban League President Herb Cawthorne, now an announcer and commentator for KGTV (Channel 10), has raised concerns over what he described as the over-politicization of the local office.

“I’ll say this much, the Urban League here has a long, looooong way to go, to come close to the standard of commitment, struggle and achievement that the national organization represents,” he said. “I doubt there is any Urban League in the country that has had the problems San Diego has.”

Cawthorne left the organization in January, 1990, amid accusations that he had mismanaged $13,000 of the organization’s money for personal use. Cawthorne said he expressed contrition and accepted responsibility for improper use of some of the funds. But, when he sought to continue in his post, he was rendered ineffectual by the board of directors, he said.

Another San Diego Urban League president, the late Clarence M. Pendleton, resigned in 1982 after the group’s controller accused him of misspending $94,000 of a federal grant.

Pendleton went on to become the director of the Civil Rights Commission under President Reagan and forged a reputation as a staunch conservative who challenged fellow African-Americans for both their support of affirmative action policies and some key civil rights causes.

So it is with both trepidation and high expectation that local black officials are awaiting the convention.

“We can’t let yesterday dictate where we want go in the future,” Councilman Stevens said.

“This is the first time the national convention has been held here, . . . and were looking to get things going on a positive track.”