"It's Still White Supremacy"

By Jack E. White

The last time I wrote about the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, back in 1995, it was a real horror story. The venerable civil rights organization had just ousted its executive director, Benjamin Chavis, for dipping into the treasury to settle a sexual-harassment case against him. The chairman of the board, William Gibson, had been accused by other board members of running up his N.A.A.C.P. expense account by thousands of dollars. Membership was dropping. There was a deficit of nearly $4 million. The only message was chaos. Better, I argued, to pull the plug on the N-Double-A and replace it with a new organization.

I'm glad they ignored my advice.

By last week, when the granddaddy of all civil rights organizations met in Atlanta for its 89th annual convention, it was in its best shape since Roy Wilkins stepped down as executive director in the late 1970s. There's a surplus of $2 million. Membership has stabilized at 400,000. A bevy of impressive talents like youth director Jamal Bryant has joined the staff. And the N.A.A.C.P. has recovered the impatient, insistent but always dignified voice that made it the most important force in the fight against segregation. As the new chairman of the board, Julian Bond, 58, declared in his keynote speech, "I promise you'll be reading about the N.A.A.C.P. because we are fighting for civil rights and not because we are fighting each other."

Which is bad news for Ward Connerly and his allies in the anti-affirmative action movement, who have prospered in recent years because the N.A.A.C.P. ceded them the moral high ground. Almost all efforts to increase minority participation in the workplace and on campus have been redefined by opponents as quotas and racial preferences. Lurid stories about white male job seekers or college applicants being passed over for less qualified blacks or women have been accepted as the norm, even though many of the tales turned out to be bogus. Yet the N.A.A.C.P. was in such disarray that it couldn't fight back.

Those days ended five months ago, when Bond took over as chairman. Meanwhile, former Baltimore Congressman Kweisi Mfume, the hapless Chavis' replacement as executive director, has proved to be an adept fund raiser and effective lobbyist. Bond's predecessor as chairman, Myrlie Evers-Williams, did such a good job of cleaning up Gibson's mess that Bond is free to devote himself to the organization's true mission: fighting for racial justice. He's the right man for the job: a charismatic civil rights hero since the 1960s, when he served as spokesman for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Since then he has worked as a college history professor, as narrator of the civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize, and even as a poet.

Bond does not mince words. When I asked him what issues he thought the N.A.A.C.P. would be dealing with in the next century, he said, "It's still white supremacy. It still means so much to those who practice it. It defines who they are. It makes them feel that they are better than others. It ensures them positions in employment and college admissions they otherwise might not have. It still puts a lid on the dreams of black people, though to a lesser extent than in the past because of the civil rights movement." That, to be sure, is a message a lot of people, black and white, don't want to listen to anymore. But with an advocate as eloquent as Bond making the case, it's a message they ought to hear.