August 8, 1991

Gov. Mario M. Cuomo today urged the City University of New York to take disciplinary action against Dr. Leonard Jeffries Jr., the City College professor who delivered a racially charged speech at a state-sponsored conference here last month. Mr. Cuomo, whose Advisory Committee on Black Affairs was one of three state agencies that sponsored the black cultural festival at which Dr. Jeffries spoke, stopped short of calling on CUNY to dismiss the professor, as several lawmakers have done.

Democrats struggled today to adjust to the last thing they needed six months before the Iowa caucuses: an already tiny Presidential field that keeps shrinking. As expected, Senator John D. Rockefeller 4th announced in Charleston, W.Va., today that he would not seek the 1992 Democratic Presidential nomination. That announcement, just three weeks after Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, the House majority leader, took himself out of the race, combined with the demurrals of other Democratic heavyweights to create a frustrating, embarrassing pattern for the party.

In January 1964, a half-year after this seductive, unhurried river city banished its segregated lunch counters and water fountains, a triumphant Martin Luther King Jr. arrived here to hail the passing of Jim Crow. The moment, later captured in a local photo exhibition proudly entitled "We Ain't What We Used to Be," is still remembered as one of the purest and sweetest in the often sorrowful 250-year history of blacks in Savannah.

The Chrysler Corporation, which has been under pressure to increase its liquidity for several months, announced plans yesterday to issue 56 million shares of new common stock worth $714 million at current market prices. As the smallest of the Big Three domestic auto makers and the weakest financially, Chrysler has especially suffered during the downturn in the last year and a half in Detroit. Car and truck sales have just begun to pick up.

The Justice Department, stung by criticism that it was too slow to pursue allegations of wrongdoing by the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, has urged Federal prosecutors to speed their investigations of the bank's possible involvement in tax fraud, money laundering and other schemes, Government officials and lawyers familiar with the case said today. The bank, which has already pleaded guilty here to money laundering charges stemming from a 1988 indictment, has been under investigation for years in several cities. But critics in Congress and elsewhere are pressing the Justice Department for results. Last weekend, Attorney General Dick Thornburgh promised that indictments would be forthcoming in "four to six weeks," but he has declined to elaborate, saying only that investigations are continuing in four cities.