The NAACP's national board is poised to select a new president and CEO. But a rift among members threatens to shake up the plans, as some complain they have been shut out of the process to choose a new leader for the Baltimore-based civil rights organization.
Calling itself the "Leadership of Conscience," a group of about a dozen NAACP board members expressed its objections at the board's annual meeting in New York last weekend. During board elections, the group waged an unsuccessful effort to unseat Chairman Julian Bond.
Dissident board members say the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is at a critical crossroads as it approaches its centennial next year. They say the matter is not a mere internal squabble and that the presidential selection process illustrates how the nation's oldest civil rights organization is ruled by an elite inner circle that is out of touch with its grass roots.
"There is a significant coalition of opposition formed to push the NAACP forward and to reject the status quo," said J. Whyatt Mondesire of Philadelphia, who was elected to the board last year. "People want to change the agenda and be in the forefront of the civil rights struggle."
Bond contends that board members approved the very selection process to which some now object.
"Of course it worries me if a single member of the board feels that way, but I don't think it is a common feeling," said Bond, 68, the veteran civil rights activist and former Georgia state senator who has been chairman since 1998.
The NAACP is still smarting from the abrupt resignation last March of President Bruce S. Gordon after 19 months at the helm. Board members selected the former Verizon executive with great fanfare, hoping for a fresh approach and that his corporate connections would boost fundraising. But Gordon and the 64-member board that hired him clashed over philosophy and civil rights strategy.
Last year, the NAACP recruited a 15-member search committee made up of activists, scholars and eight board members. The panel will forward the names of three finalists to the board's executive committee, which includes Bond and 16 other board members. In May, the executive committee is expected to recommend one finalist to the full board for its approval.
Some board members complain that the process relegates the full board to little more than a rubber stamp.
