Addressing black retired workers on the steps of City Hall yesterday, Rep. Charles Rangel called President Bush’s campaign to reshape Social Security a “fraud” and urged African-Americans to combat the White House efforts as part of their civil-rights struggle.

In a “Save Our Social Security” town-hall meeting sponsored by the NAACP and AARP, members of those groups, along with unaffiliated black senior citizens, heard the Harlem Democrat say proposed changes were “one indicator of how vicious and mean they are.” The congressman was referring to the Bush administration’s plan to allow workers to save a portion of their payroll taxes in private, transferable accounts.

For black Americans, the congressman added, the struggle against the proposed changes in the entitlement system was “not only a civil-rights fight, but a fight for America.” Mr. Rangel called on African-Americans to continue their “missionary” work against the Social Security proposals and likened the effort to his marching with Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma to Montgomery.

“We have to get rid of the bums that are trying to take it away from us,” Mr. Rangel said of the Social Security sys tem, referring to Republicans in Washington and City Hall – “people who sleep with Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and the rest of them.”

A member of the City Council from Brooklyn, Charles Barron, joined Mr. Rangel in urging African-Americans to stand against alterations to the system. “It’s bad enough they won’t pay us our reparations,” Mr. Barron, who for a time was seeking the Democratic mayoral nomination, said. “Now they’re trying to take away our Social Security!”

Neither Mr. Barron nor Mr. Rangel detailed at the meeting why the president’s proposals were harmful to the black community. When asked for specifics by The New York Sun after the event, Mr. Rangel said, “The progressive nature of being able to get returns means that lower-income people benefit more than higher-income people” from the Social Security system. Since members of minority groups disproportionately constitute the lower income brackets, the congressman said, they stand to lose the most from Mr. Bush’s efforts – which the congressman labeled “fraud” and an “impeachable offense.”

Mr. Rangel also said the president’s push to “dismantle” Social Security would have a particularly harmful impact on black Americans because they receive disability and survivor benefits from the system in higher proportions than do whites.

Mr. Rangel disputed the Republicans’ vision of Social Security insolvency, but said that if changes need to be made to the system, then raising taxes or increasing the retirement age would be a better solution.

Some supporters of the president’s plan, however, said Mr. Rangel’s suggestions – and particularly his resistance to changing the structure of Social Security – would end up doing far more harm to African-Americans than anything the Bush administration has proposed.

The president of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, Robert Woodson, said African-Americans have fewer years in which to receive Social Security benefits, and thus receive less from the system than whites. For Americans who are now 50, Mr. Woodson said, the life expectancy is 68 for black males and 82 for white females. “If you look at the demographics, it results in a net transfer of about $10,000 from black men to older white women” on a per-person basis, Mr. Woodson, who is black, said.

Mr. Woodson – whose organization has held events to educate African-Americans about the president’s Social Security proposals – said raising the retirement age, as Mr. Rangel suggested, further disadvantages blacks, because it means they would get an even lower return on their contributions to the Social Security system.

Allowing Americans to save some of their Social Security contributions in private accounts, he said, was better. Black Americans wouldn’t lose benefits to the same extent if they die younger than whites, because their unused accumulated wealth can be passed on to children and other survivors, he said, providing a basis for intergenerational wealth accumulation.

A Social Security scholar at the Heritage Foundation, William Beach, also said the claims from Mr. Rangel and other critics about blacks suffering disproportionately from alterations to disability and survivor benefits were unfounded.

Under the administration’s current proposals, Mr. Beach said, changes would be made only to the retirement benefits portion of the Social Security system, leaving the disability and survivor payout structures untouched. Not reforming Social Security’s payouts to retirees, however, might bankrupt the entire system, he said, which would then endanger the disability program and harm black Americans.

To a talk-radio host, Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson, the position of Mr. Rangel and the Naacp seemed little more than self-interest. Rev. Peterson is the author of “Scam: How the Black Leadership Exploits Black America.”

Granting black Americans free exercise of private retirement accounts would undermine their reliance on Democratic figures such as Mr. Rangel, the Reverends Alford Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, and the Black Caucus, Rev. Peterson, who is a Los Angeles based pastor, said.

“They’ve kept black Americans on the Democratic plantation in order to use them for their own personal gain, power, and wealth,” he said.

Based on his work in the black community, Rev. Peterson, who is black, said, most African-Americans support Mr. Bush’s Social Security proposals. Mr. Woodson, too, said support for the Bush proposals was more widespread among blacks than yesterday’s City Hall event would suggest, pointing to a January Zogby poll that concluded a majority of black voters would support some private investment of payroll taxes in individual accounts.