Coalition for Equality’s Mission Clouded by Doubts : Aftermath: Multiracial group formed to solve problems in wake of the L.A. riots has accomplished little, some skeptics say, but supporters remain hopeful.

They watched Los Angeles burn and peered in their own back yard to see if anything was smoldering.

April’s verdicts in the Rodney G. King case incited violence nationwide, but in San Diego all was relatively calm. While the mayor praised the local Police Department and community leaders for the peace, others weren’t exactly sure why the city had been spared destruction or whether something similar could cause it to explode.

The morning after the first night’s rioting, George Mitrovich, the head of the predominantly white speakers’ group called the City Club, paid a visit to the Rev. George Walker Smith, who runs the Catfish Club, an African-American organization.

Smith, a respected pastor and longtime San Diegan, had been up all night, watching and weeping over television reports from Los Angeles. Smith told Mitrovich that the night of rioting was one of the worst of his life.

In previous weeks, the two men had talked about getting more blacks into the City Club and more whites into the Catfish Club as part of their own small efforts at integration.

At the very next Catfish Club meeting a few days later, more than 200 people--black and white--showed up to discuss implications of the riots for San Diego.

Rabbis and ministers and business leaders and government officials crowded the room. After debating how they could create a better racial climate for San Diego, 67 signed their names to help.

That led to a dinner meeting at Smith’s church, at which Mike Madigan, the vice president of a large construction company, spoke about working with the American Cancer Society and its successful crusade to ban smoking in public.

Could the same be done for racism, he wondered.

Today, some 1,500 to 2,000 people have signed up to be part of the San Diego Coalition for Equality, whose mission statement begins with a pledge to “make racism and bigotry unacceptable--in any form.”

Divided into groups of those working for equal treatment in jobs, law and justice, education, health care and for greater public awareness about racism, particularly among youth, the coalition’s nebulous goal of erasing bigotry and hatred is already mired in vague rhetoric only three months after its inception, many of its members say.

While the group talks of “honoring tolerance and denouncing intolerance” and “tearing down the social, economic, educational, legal and political barriers that divide us,” the means to achieve those goals has not been spelled out.

At an Aug. 3 meeting, for example, Mitrovich stood in front of several hundred in the group and said that if the coalition did nothing more than raise the level of awareness about the problem, it would have accomplished something. The very next speaker, bank president Murray Galinson, said he would be disappointed if that was all it had achieved.

“I feel very strongly we have to raise awareness,” Galinson said. “But if I was part of a community that felt economically deprived and was not on a level playing field with others, and all I heard was we have got to raise awareness, I would be disappointed.”

There is some disagreement among the membership about how quickly jobs can be put into place, reforms can be made in police agencies, how parents can be encouraged to be more involved in their children’s education, how health care can be more affordable, and how other important changes can be implemented.

To some members, there should be specific 30-day and 60-day goals to prove its progress to outsiders, many of whom are skeptical about the idea. To others, the work will last at least until the end of the this decade.

“You don’t make the world over in just three months,” said Smith, head of Christ United Presbyterian Church in San Diego. “This is an agenda for the year 2000. We want to make it so unpopular to be a racist in San Diego that those who are will stay in the closet.”

Recent episodes of bigotry have served to underscore the need for the coalition, members say. Ten days ago, vandals spray-painted swastikas on walls and windows of a courtyard surrounding Temple Emanu-El, a reform synagogue in Del Cerro.

San Diego County’s hate crimes have risen 28% over the past year, the county’s human relations commission said, counting 116 offenses against people based solely on their race, religion or sexual orientation. Of that amount, 45 were directed against those attacked because of their race.

Based on those numbers, the coalition believes it has much work to do.

It already has identified organizations that set aside jobs for minorities to ask about further employment, located those willing to provide low-interest loans to new or expanded minority businesses, and pledged to work with an upcoming youth jobs fair at the San Diego Convention Center.

Its committee on law and justice has called for more to be done about law enforcement officers who abuse those in custody, including better training and harsher discipline. It has suggested that human relations and multiethnic training be mandatory for all law enforcement officers.

One education subcommittee is devoted to getting parents more involved in “the lives, development and education” of their children, including efforts to get corporations to allow parents time off for such endeavors.

Many companies have loaned executives for short periods to work with the coalition. Galinson, who is president and chief executive officer of San Diego National Bank, has even donated office space.

And, the coalition has tried to take the politics out of the efforts by banning elected officials from its membership.

“Nobody is going to use this forum for their political plum,” Smith said. “Some of my best friends are politicians but sometimes politicians create more problems than they solve.”

Although the volunteer coalition members have spent hours on their task, some of its meetings have meandered into little more than group therapy sessions as one person after another expressed personal feelings about bigotry or injustice.

A review of the coalition’s minutes and memorandums by The Times since the group’s inception shows little written progress.

One debate, minutes show, centered on whether to favor “process” or “product” in determining the group’s ultimate achievements, and whether a picnic or a concert should serve as a focal point to draw attention to the coalition’s work.

At some of the meetings, there is a repeated call for more minorities. Galinson estimates that two-thirds of the membership is white.

Such talk caused Al Ducheny, a Logan Heights community activist and chairman of the Harbor View Community Council, to lash out at the coalition in a newspaper opinion column last month. The coalition, stocked with high-priced business executives and other “San Diego insiders” would be doomed if it continues on its “present elitist course” and does not include a blend of representatives from inner-city neighborhoods.

Ducheny’s column rankled coalition leaders but he does not apologize for his remarks.

The group’s mission is too far-reaching, and it will end up accomplishing nothing if it tackles too many tasks, he said. Instead, he and others say, the coalition should concentrate the membership’s energy on two or three major projects, such as reducing the number of blighted areas.

The coalition’s idea of having a picnic or concert to promote itself is laughable, he said, because its membership is already well-acquainted.

“What? Three hundred to 400 people are going to sit around holding each other’s hands and sing ‘We shall overcome?’ ” Ducheny asked. “We already know one another and we are not the problem anyway. We are not the ones who will be doing the rioting.”

While the volunteers who make up the coalition are dedicated in trying to ease the racial tensions that blew out of control in Los Angeles, they should acknowledge that they have more personal interests in mind than abolishing racism, he said.

“They are afraid of losing their shirts and having their banks burned down,” Ducheny said. “It is OK for them to admit they are not trying to build racial harmony but really want to protect their economic interests.”

Mitrovich, whose own City Club has only 50 African-Americans out of 600 members despite his efforts to recruit more, said that blacks may very well be skeptical of the coalition.

“I am sure some will look upon this effort with contempt and cynicism,” he said. “Some will think this is a group of white people trying to assuage their guilt, and maybe we are. But we are either going to find a way to be a community and help one another or not be a community. If we are not a community, I may be able to live with that, but my 3-year-old grandson cannot.”

One of the group’s more concrete efforts is getting private companies to raise money for federal matching funds, which can then be used as loans or grants for small minority businesses. If $2 million can be raised, $8 million in federal money will become available, said Harold K. Brown, associate dean of the San Diego State University college of business administration.

Although the coalition enthusiastically favors the effort, Brown said work on the program began five years ago through the Black Economic Task Force.

“I don’t want to throw damp water on anybody who wants to do good,” said Brown, who is now the co-chairman of the coalition’s economic task force. “But every time a new group starts up, they wind up addressing the same issues other groups have already been working on. It confuses me as to why they don’t check and see what is already been working.”

Having volunteers tackling such a time-consuming and overwhelming problem is one of the group’s inadequacies, Brown said.

“If racism is such a problem, why not get the best staff to address it full time, like the United Way or Urban League would do?” he asked. “It doesn’t make sense to fight a war with sticks and stones.”

Gary Plantz, the co-chairman of the economic task force’s “new business” subcommittee, concedes that “progress to date has been modest but in a volunteer organization, it is very tough to achieve the speed of accomplishment you can in a private organization.”

For many in the group, the fact that hundreds have pledged to work toward a common goal, however lofty and unrealistic it may be, is something that other cities wouldn’t dream of touching.

“I have 2,000 commitment cards,” Smith said. “I have never seen that kind of effort in San Diego in my 36 years here. I am not interested in an exercise in futility. I have heard enough b.s. that has accomplished nothing. This time we are going to make it work.”