'Climb Up With Me'

Jim Harris - a black who left a factory job to start his own business - is learning some practical lessons in capitalism these days.  He hasn't made it yet into the Fortune 500, but he has survived the first critical year of private enterprise.

Jim and his wife opened a sea food market in Wooster, Ohio, and expanded this to include a restaurant behind the counters when the market alone proved slow go.  Now that they have introduced herb-boiled shrimp, butter-broiled red snapper and a live lobster tank business is picking up.

As president for the past ten years of the Wayne County chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Mr. Harris felt some conflict with his venture.

He continues aggressively to seek the support of big government for "affirmative actions" towards blacks.  Yet, his business experiences bring the feelings of frustration shared by all small business men and women toward government tax policies that stifle economic opportunity.

It all boiled to the top last week during a banquet speech to his NAACP chapter.  He urged the members to help him help blacks.  "Don't wonder what I'm doing.  Come on and go with me.  There's no one man who knows it all.  With your help I would make less mistakes.  I ask all of you to join me.

"It's hard to serve a black race of people because we're a jealous race of people," said Jim.

"Every time I start climbing up a tree, somebody pulls me down because he's afraid I'll get there before him.  Don't pull me down, climb up there with me."

Jim got some unexpected support for his dual role of black spokesman and business owner from the main speaker of the evening - Wendell Erwin, a member of the national board of directors of NAACP and permanent convention chairman.

After recounting the 69-year fight of NAACP for racial equality, Mr. Erwin hit the bottom line: "The United States is the greatest country in the world.  I believe in the capitalistic system as practiced in this country.  I am an affirmed capitalist because capitalism is the only system that will allow you and me to rise.  You can't rise on the welfare system.

"My friends, need I remind you of the recent television program 'Roots'?  What could be worse than that?"  Erwin asked.  "If we're constantly reminded of that, we will strive more diligently to achieve excellence in our endeavors.  Black people can not afford to grow weary."

Both Mr. Erwin and Mr. Harris expressed, in their own ways, the new thinking of black leaders.  Having made substantial gains against social and legal barriers to personal equality, the NAACP is ready to move against the last obstacle: economic discrimination.

This may be the toughest task of all because the results apply less to the individual and more to blacks as a whole.  To be refused a bowl of soup in a restaurant is much more direct and emotional than the failure to raise capital for a fish market.

The movement toward old fashion capitalism - as a doorway to opportunity for blacks - began at the 1976 Republican Convention in Kansas City.  There, Wendell Gunn, a black vice-president of Chase Manhattan Bank, urged the platform committee to recommend lowering of taxes and government regulations to give lower income persons a break.

The policies of government today favor big businesses able to generate venture capital from their own profits.  They don't need lower taxes to stay in business.  Taxes operate to drain off savings needed to leave factory jobs and open a small business.

A recent issue of the Wall Street Journal took note of the top 100 black owned businesses in the U.S.  Of these, 84 were started since 1965.  The biggest, Motown Industries of Los Angeles, had only $61 million in sales last year.  To make the Fortune Magazine list of 500 top industries requires sales of $335 million or more.

A lowering of the capital gains tax from 50 percent to 25 percent - as advocated by the Steiger amendment to President Carter's energy package - smacks of high finance beyond the real life realm of poor blacks and whites.  Yet this is the ticket out of the ghetto employed by all the other minority groups that jumped into the American melting pot.

It is realization of this fact that brings endorsement of business-related tax relief and free market policies from such leaders as Gunn, Erwin, Mayor Tom Bradley of Los Angeles, and Mrs. Margaret Bush Wilson, NAACP chairman.

Their thinking led to a block-buster policy statement by the NAACP opposing energy restrictions and calling for de-regulation of oil and gas.  "We cannot accept the notion that our people are best served by a policy based upon the inevitability of energy shortage and the need for government to allocate an ever-diminishing supply among competing interests.

"Nuclear power, including the breeder, must be vigorously pursed because it will be an essential part of the total fuel mix necessary to sustain an expanding economy," the report stated.

As Gunn puts it, blacks have struggled for decades for the right to buy a ticket on the Freedom train.  They are not about to let government shut down the railroad now.

Or chop down Jim Harris' tree.

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