Posted on 07/07/2002 11:33:59 AM PDT by GeneD
When the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People last convened in Houston 11 years ago, white Americans were retrenching and blacks were in crisis.
Rodney King had been beaten by Los Angeles police that spring. Liberal stalwart Thurgood Marshall was being replaced on the Supreme Court by the conservative Clarence Thomas. Congress was debating civil rights legislation under threat of executive veto.
And still unknown to members of the nation's oldest and largest civil rights group, a train wreck was barreling toward them. Near-bankruptcy, sexual scandal, catastrophic mismanagement and almost wholesale abandonment by foundations and corporate backers all lay ahead.
But tonight, when the NAACP convenes its 93rd annual national meeting at the George R. Brown Convention Center, the organization again is a venerable house in order.
Under the cool guidance of board Chairman Julian Bond, an impeccably credentialed civil rights leader, and former U.S. Rep. Kweisi Mfume, president and chief executive officer since 1996, the NAACP today is financially flush.
Membership ranks are up. Youth chapters are on the rise. And while the core civil liberties that spawned the NAACP have been won, leaders have embarked on an aggressive and almost militant battle against the vestiges of segregation that remain.
It's the difference, says Bond, between being a social service organization and one aimed at social justice. The former is warm and huggable. The latter is in-your-face.
"We're a social justice organization," says Bond, who will deliver the convention's opening keynote address this evening.
"Social service is joining a group to help build a house for people who can't afford to build a house," he says. "That's wonderful stuff.
"Social justice is saying, `Here is someone working every day of the week. Why can't they buy a house? Why is the price of housing out of their reach?' You can't go house by house to solve this. You've got to get a systemic solution."
In the 1960s, Bond helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, which led protests against segregationist Jim Crow laws across the racially troubled South.
When Bond was elected to the previously all-white Georgia Legislature, it repeatedly refused to seat him because of his vocal opposition to the Vietnam War, until the Supreme Court forced it to.
In 1968, Bond led an audacious counterdelegation to the Democratic National Convention that successfully challenged the credentials of the all-white official delegation. His austere, characteristic calm belies an unrelenting passion for parity.
"It's depressing to know that a majority of whites think discrimination is no longer an issue. It's very much an issue, and politeness doesn't always work," says Bond. "Figure this: We're 93 years old and we've been fighting racial discrimination for all of those years, and others who went before us were fighting for even longer.
"You've got to be aggressive. How long can you wait?"
At the national convention last year in New Orleans, NAACP leaders outlined an ambitious set of what they called "strategic priorities and goals" aimed at achieving true social, economic and political empowerment. With a sprawling network of 1,700 branches across all 50 states, 120 chapters on college and university campuses and 39 prison chapters, the 500,000 members are a formidable force; they have been toughened.
A touchstone for most of America's greatest black leaders, the NAACP nearly imploded in the early 1990s.
Former Executive Director Benjamin Chavis and former Chairman William Gibson racked up a $5 million debt. Part of it was $300,000 in NAACP funds Chavis paid as an out-of-court settlement in a sexual harassment case.
In a spectacularly public free fall, the venerable group cut its staff from 250 in 1992 to just 50 three years later. Foundations and corporate sponsors pulled back their funding. The membership splintered into bitterly feuding factions.
It was a critical juncture. In 1994 Chavis was dumped, and the following year Myrlie Evers-Williams, the widow of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, won a fractious election against Gibson by one vote.
Mining her fame, connections and business skills, Evers-Williams coaxed foundations and corporations back into the fold; at her inaugural, columnist Carl Rowan helped raise more than $1.5 million.
In another master stroke, the board hired Mfume, the politically savvy former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, as CEO. The remaining $3.5 million debt was retired that year, and a 10-year endowment aimed at raising $50 million has been created to permanently fund operations.
"The main thing was to have a sum of money that would buoy the organization so that it wouldn't be under the whim or desire of any one funding source if anything ever went wrong so much that they would be able to call the shots," says Mfume.
Mfume, an astute veteran of nearly a decade on Capitol Hill, is Bond's kindred activist spirit. Together they have pulled the NAACP not just from the edge but onto center stage.
A case in point was a bold voter mobilization drive in 2000 that created the independent NAACP National Voter Fund to sidestep legal restrictions on political activities by the nonprofit, nonpartisan NAACP.
Funded by a handful of anonymous sources, including one who shelled out $10 million, the new entity targeted 17 states in the presidential and U.S. Senate elections and 80 congressional districts, 40 of which were largely black with the rest up for grabs.
By November, the now-permanent fund had made more than 5.2 million phone calls, mailed nearly 7 million letters and splashed hard-hitting ads and commercials on every manner of media. Affirmative action, racial profiling, hate crimes, vouchers -- all were issues scrutinized, and some were attacked.
On Election Day, 5,000 workers were deployed to get out the vote. When the dust settled, 10.5 million blacks had voted across the nation, 1 million more than in the 1996 presidential election.
"It was a ground war," says David Bositis, senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, who advises the NAACP.
Bositis credits the sharp hike in Florida's black turnout for the close vote that put George W. Bush's victory at issue. Again, the NAACP was on the front lines, conducting statewide hearings into voter abuses and spearheading state legislation aimed at fixing a broken election system.
Mfume stresses that the NAACP is intent only on increasing the black vote and politically empowering the community.
But more than 90 percent of blacks historically vote Democratic, a fact not lost on Republicans. Since the election, Mfume twice has written Bush seeking a meeting and the White House twice has declined; he invited the president to address the convention in New Orleans and here, and Bush also declined.
"For whatever reason, he has not found it in his time, energy or interest to meet with the nation's largest and oldest civil rights organization to discuss issues of social justice," says Mfume. "This president needs to accept the fact that to be president is to be responsible for governing all of the people, not just some of them."
NAACP leaders say they've moved on since the Florida debacle.
They publicly supported Bush's education bill despite Democratic opposition, and the legislation passed by Congress reflected much of their work.
At the 33rd NAACP Image Awards earlier this year, Mfume gave the President's Award to Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser.
"I like the president personally, but I just don't understand the disconnect, particularly when issues of race and discrimination are still so important to all of us," says Mfume.
The NAACP faces other challenges. Hispanics will soon overtake blacks as the nation's largest minority, and both major political parties are strenuously courting their votes. But black leaders, no strangers to profound demographic shifts, have moved swiftly to forge coalitions with their fellow minorities.
At the national convention of the League of United Latin American Citizens in Houston a week ago, the group presented its highest award to Howard Jefferson, president of the NAACP's Houston chapter.
In January, after a Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration in Austin, state leaders of both organizations announced a new coalition to fight for common causes; they since have launched a joint voter registration drive.
"We believe that colored people come in all colors and that what's good for African-Americans is good for all people of color," says Bond. "We don't see this as competition. We think as the Latino population grows, the army of justice grows stronger."
Politically, says Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, it will be decades before Hispanics reach parity with blacks; there are twice as many blacks in the U.S. House and 590 black state legislators. A third of the Hispanic population still lacks the citizenship required to vote, and the community is exceedingly young.
"A lot of these stories have been overplayed just like stories about Anglos becoming a minority. What a joke," says Bositis. "There are 25 states that are almost entirely white, and that's half the U.S. Senate right now."
A more daunting challenge for the NAACP is incorporating new and young blood into an organization dominated by aging veterans of the civil rights struggle.
"For an organization to be successful over time, it has got to bring younger people in, promote younger people and develop a cycle of leadership. That kind of generation change is inevitable," says Bositis. "You can't have a situation where you have old people clinging to the status quo and be successful."
In a new study called "Diverging Generations," Bositis concludes that blacks between the ages of 18 and 25 are more conservative, pro-business and Republican-leaning than their elders. With no direct memory of segregation and overt discrimination, they also are less concerned with civil rights.
NAACP leaders are trying. In New York last year, the NAACP joined other groups convening in a hip-hop summit.
The ACT-SO competition for gifted and talented young people that precedes each annual convention is celebrating its 25th year. Seven NAACP board seats are reserved for members under 25, and youth recruitment is a key part of the strategic priorities announced last year; Mfume calls it a parallel agenda.
"I see my job at this association as one of getting it ready to turn over to a whole new generation of Americans," says Mfume.
"I'm not going to be here forever. We've got to be able to leave something behind."
Too bad. But Jesse's shakedowns are being disbursed to the troops, apparently.
And while the core civil liberties that spawned the NAACP have been won, leaders have embarked on an aggressive and almost militant battle against the vestiges of segregation that remain.
Translation: Now that there is nothing of substance left to oppose, the organization is in danger of becoming irrelevant. To maintain its political viability, it must invent new causes and conjure up new bogeymen. Otherwise its "leaders" will have to get real jobs and socialists will lose one of their most powerful wedge issues.
It's the difference, says Bond, between being a social service organization and one aimed at social justice. The former is warm and huggable. The latter is in-your-face.
Translation: One actually DOES something. The other runs around threatening violence against anyone who dares voice a dissenting opinion.
"Social justice is saying, `Here is someone working every day of the week. Why can't they buy a house? Why is the price of housing out of their reach?' You can't go house by house to solve this. You've got to get a systemic solution."
"A systemic solution." Translation: Welfare.
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When America is in the same condition as Southern Africa, the NAACP will have no new challenges.
Precisely.
"Social Justice" = socialist tyranny.
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