Naacp Board

Over nearly four decades in the public eye, Julian Bond has had his ups and downs. Today, as far as the NAACP is concerned, he is up.Way up.As the NAACP celebrates its 90th year with its annual meeting in Washington tomorrow, the history professor marks his first anniversary as chairman of the national board amid praise from most who work with him.Some charge that Bond's focus on tried-and-true civil rights issues such as voter registration and prisoners' rights...

As the board of the NAACP begins a series of meetings today in Miami, Kweisi Mfume, the group's president, is under mounting pressure to decide whether to run for mayor of Baltimore.Mfume's ardent supporters in Maryland see the meetings as decisive to a mayoral candidacy, and NAACP board members are looking at Julian Bond as Mfume's potential replacement as the administrative leader of the civil rights organization.Asked whether Mfume appears to be close to a candidacy, Larry Carter, a board member from Des Moines, Iowa, said, "It seems like it's moving in leaps and bounds in that direction.

In a rare chance to sit back and regroup, the national board of the NAACP is meeting for a two-day retreat this weekend at Harvard's Business School to get the advice of some of the nation's top nonprofit experts on how to run the civil rights organization.The getaway follows a first Harvard retreat last spring focused on organizational crises, a subject near to the NAACP's heart.It also allows the aging, 64-member board to step back from the specifics of governing the sprawling organization and scrutinize how the members work -- and what they can do better.

SMILES AND good wishes accompanied the election Saturday of Julian Bond as NAACP board chairman. But by making one of his first acts the reinstatement of a tainted executive committee member, Mr. Bond may have set back an organization still trying to restore public confidence.Many were surprised when Mr. Bond nonchalantly included James E. Ghee on his list of executive committee members. Mr. Ghee, a Farmville, Va., lawyer, was one of four board members with ethics problems asked to resign last year by the departing board chairwoman, Myrlie Evers-Williams.

WASHINGTON -- Former NAACP Executive Director Benjamin F. Chavis Jr. testified yesterday that he "had no personal motivation whatsoever" in making a deal to pay a former female aide up to $332,400 in NAACP funds after she threatened a sexual-harassment claim.Chavis, who was fired nearly two years ago after the deal became public, was on the witness stand for the third day in the trial of Mary E. Stansel's civil suit against him and the NAACP. The controversy shook public confidence in the Baltimore-based civil rights group.

NAACP President Kweisi Mfume announced yesterday that the civil rights organization has wiped out its debt and expects to hire more than 20 new employees by the end of 1997."

WASHINGTON -- Former NAACP aide Mary E. Stansel testified yesterday that she did not refuse to have sex with then-NAACP Executive Director Benjamin F. Chavis Jr. in April 1993 because "I would not have had a job the next day."But under an NAACP lawyer's questioning, Stansel said she complained to no one other than Chavis about a sexual encounter in a Washington hotel room -- not even to an NAACP board member with whom she was having a long-running sexual relationship.Chavis denies ever having had a sexual relationship with Stansel.

Washington -- William F. Gibson has moved again to muzzle Coopers & Lybrand auditors on the eve of tomorrow's vote that may end his 10-year reign as board chairman of the NAACP.Sources at NAACP headquarters in Baltimore tell me that Dr. Gibson is trying desperately to prevent the board from learning lTC the exact amounts of his credit-card transactions; about plane tickets for his female companion paid for by the NAACP, or about the $126,000 limousine bill that the NAACP ran up between November 1993 and January 1995.

Seven officials of the NAACP asked a federal court in Baltimore yesterday to strip board Chairman William F. Gibson of his control over the organization's finances and to order an independent audit of the fiscally crippled civil rights group.The seven plaintiffs -- national board members and trustees -- also asked the court to dismiss Dr. Gibson if he hinders the accounting.In a 22-page document filed in U.S. District Court, NAACP officials repeated many allegations made by newspaper columnist Carl T. Rowan that Dr. Gibson squandered hundreds of thousands of dollars.

NEW YORK -- Myrlie B. Evers-Williams, the new chairwoman of the debt-ridden NAACP, vowed yesterday to bind up the organization's self-inflicted wounds and move it back to the forefront of the nation's civil rights movement."

Everyone wants to meet the new guy. And so as Benjamin Todd Jealous works the room at Baltimore's Annie E. Casey Foundation, there is a receiving line of sorts that forms everywhere he turns. Roslyn M. Brock, vice chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's National Board of Directors, squires the 35-year-old Californian around the reception on the second day of his new job. He is the 17th CEO and president of the NAACP, "the youngest in our history, and THAT is something," she says as applause fills the room.

Two months ago, NAACP board member Alice Huffman played a pivotal role in a Democratic National Committee meeting that paved the way for Sen. Barack Obama to clinch the party's presidential nomination. Obama's historic victory - the first for a black candidate - has been celebrated as a civil rights milestone. But when the Illinois senator takes the stage at the NAACP's annual convention in Cincinnati next week, Huffman and other board members of the nation's oldest civil rights organization will not be endorsing him. As a tax-exempt nonprofit, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is forbidden to engage in partisan politics.

He's very Obama, isn't he? The Ivy creds. The biracial parentage. The lawyer wife. The victory, after some contentious balloting, of his more youthful candidacy over the more establishment one. The selection of Benjamin Jealous this weekend as the new president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People puts a decidedly fresh face on an organization that many have criticized as too rooted in the past. At 35, he is the civil rights organization's youngest president ever, and by picking him, board members seem to be saying, "This is not your father's NAACP."

NAACP Chairman Julian Bond named a nine-member search committee yesterday to replace Kweisi Mfume, who announced last week his resignation as president of the Baltimore-based civil rights group. The committee includes members and staff of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, as well as people from outside the organization. In addition to Bond, they are NAACP Vice Chairwoman Roslyn Brock; NAACP board member Rupert Richardson; Jack Kemp, a former Republican congressman from New York and former secretary of Housing and Urban Development; Hugh B. Price, former president of the National Urban League; NAACP board member Alice Huffman; Philip Murphy, managing director of the investment management division at Goldman Sachs & Co. and board member of the NAACP Special Contribution Fund; Coleman Peterson, president of Hollis Enterprises LLC and board member of the NAACP Special Contribution Fund; and Nicholas Wiggins, a member of the NAACP youth board.

HEY, DON'T shoot the messenger. I couldn't make this stuff up. But you just have to hear some of the names being bandied about as to who should be the next president and chief executive officer of the NAACP now that Kweisi Mfume has resigned effective Jan. 1 of next year. Don't you pine away for those days when what was then called the NAACP's executive secretary was selected from someone who had toiled anonymously but effectively within the organization for years? But the era when a James Weldon Johnson would be replaced by a Walter White, who would be replaced by a Roy Wilkins, seems long gone.

Dennis C. Hayes is ice to Kweisi Mfume's fire. A decided introvert compared with the outgoing - and magnetic - NAACP president. So, when reporters asked yesterday whether Hayes, the NAACP's general counsel since 1990 and its interim president beginning Jan. 1, was interested in replacing Mfume full time, Hayes looked mock-horrified and stood silent in the shadows of Mfume and NAACP Chairman Julian Bond. "I happen to love my job as general counsel," he said later in a phone interview. "We do important work in the legal department."

NEW ORLEANS -- A multiyear contract extension for NAACP President Kweisi Mfume has been approved by the executive committee of the civil rights organization's board of directors, Julian Bond, the organization's chairman, said yesterday. Bond's announcement, made during a board meeting at the 92nd annual meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was met with applause. He said that a few minor details must be worked out but that he expected Mfume to continue leading the nation's oldest civil rights organization "for many years to come."

PHILADELPHIA - The NAACP is sometimes accused of being an old organization that's out of touch with the young. But yesterday at a meeting of the NAACP's board, 10-year-old Nathaniel Keith Jenkins of Allentown, Pa., led members in a chant by spelling out "N-A-A-C-P." His cheer afforded a lighthearted break in an otherwise serious day, as the 64-member board conducted business that included the adoption of resolutions passed at the annual convention in July in Baltimore. No major initiatives were announced during the board's three-day quarterly meeting, which concluded yesterday, but voter empowerment, health care issues, racism in government agencies and education were among key issues discussed.

When Kweisi Mfume adopted a West African name 30 years ago, he chose Swahili words that evoked a warrior prince. Today, members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People embrace him as their "conquering son of kings" - and for good reason. Mfume, the president and chief executive officer of the NAACP, has overseen the revitalization of the venerable civil rights organization. The "new" NAACP is a financially sound organization, a historic institution energized by young faces, an association updating its civil rights agenda for the 21st century.

As the board of the NAACP begins a series of meetings today in Miami, Kweisi Mfume, the group's president, is under mounting pressure to decide whether to run for mayor of Baltimore.Mfume's ardent supporters in Maryland see the meetings as decisive to a mayoral candidacy, and NAACP board members are looking at Julian Bond as Mfume's potential replacement as the administrative leader of the civil rights organization.Asked whether Mfume appears to be close to a candidacy, Larry Carter, a board member from Des Moines, Iowa, said, "It seems like it's moving in leaps and bounds in that direction.