Naacp Convention

INDIANAPOLIS -- South African leader Nelson Mandela got the NAACP's annual convention off to a rousing start yesterday by calling on black Americans to help create a "democratic, nonracial and nonsexist" South Africa.Mr. Mandela, who is expected to become South Africa's first black president next year, said he would ask the United States to end economic sanctions against his country in the "near future.""Today we talk about elections because the sanctions have worked," said Mr. Mandela, who spent 27 years as a political prisoner in South Africa.

NEW YORK -- Saying economic empowerment is the next frontier of civil rights, the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson urged African-Americans to build wealth, buy stock in corporations and own businesses."

ATLANTA -- As national leaders continued yesterday to denounce assaults on affirmative action as unfair to blacks, some turned their criticism on African-Americans, urging them to support Africa economically and politically."

Roughly 500 voices. Sixteen hours of rehearsal. A 60-minute performance before an audience of 5,000. The logistics of creating and directing a huge gospel choir to perform at the 91st annual National Association for the Advancement of Colored People convention in Baltimore would seem daunting to just about anyone. Anyone except Nathan Carter. Carter, director of the Morgan State University Choir, has traveled the world with the college group. Morgan's choir has performed gospel and the works of Philip Glass, sung with the New York Philharmonic and Stevie Wonder, appeared at the White House and the Kennedy Center.

In late May, Bill Cosby blamed low-income African-Americans for squandering the civil rights movement's legacy by giving their children "$500 sneakers" instead of books. Then, earlier this month, Cosby leveled more criticism at the hip-hop generation: "They think they're hip. They can't read; they can't write. They're laughing and giggling, and they're going nowhere." Cosby's comments sparked both howls and applause, and the controversy is likely to continue during the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's annual convention in Philadelphia, which begins today.

IT ISN'T TIME for the NAACP to give up on the goal of an integrated America. Many delegates to the 88th annual NAACP convention are frustrated by white flight from the cities over the past 25 years that has resegregated neighborhoods and turned formerly all-white schools into all-black schools. The tax drain that resulted from the exodus has left many city schools inadequately prepared to teach the remaining urban students who frequently have special needs.But integration as a goal doesn't have to be abandoned by the civil rights organization just because it wants to place more emphasis on education.

Today ends the NAACP's fourth-ever convention in Baltimore. Those gatherings in Baltimore over a span of 86 years reflect human progress but its failure, too. Some of the most noxious problems deliberated over by the earlier Baltimore conventions - lynchings, Jim Crow, apartheid - have long been absent from the agenda, relegated to history. But other issues - principally economic disparity and deprivation, vexed this year's conventioneers as much as those at all the earlier Baltimore meetings.

NAACP leadership continued to denounce an Internal Revenue Service audit of the Baltimore-based civil rights group yesterday, while three members of Congress challenged the IRS to drop the investigation. A letter sent yesterday to IRS Commissioner Mark W. Everson by three House Democrats - Charles B. Rangel of New York, Pete Stark of California and John Conyers Jr. of Michigan - demanded that Everson "publicly, specifically and immediately repudiate the recent actions of the IRS taken against the NAACP."

I am not among the many who are shocked that Ben Carson, the brilliant and widely admired neurosurgeon based at Johns Hopkins Hospital, would emerge as a hero of the political right and Sean Hannity's new best friend. That Carson would stoop to making (and later sort of apologizing for) homophobic remarks on Hannity's national television show - associating gays with pedophiles and people who have sex with animals - didn't surprise me, either. I know: Here's a man who separated conjoined twins, improved and saved the lives of countless children, established a scholars program that has benefited hundreds of young people, wrote inspirational books and gave countless motivational speeches.

100 Black Men of Maryland offered helpings of comfort, food and joy at its ninth annual Christmas brunch. About 850 merry gentlemen and women gathered -- to dine, dance and even do last-minute holiday shopping at vendors' tables at the Martin's West event.Exchanging season's greetings: Howard Tucker, 100 Black Men president; Dr. Warren Hayman, vice president; Walter Carr and Rick Larry, brunch co-chairs; Charles Barnum, Teddy Russell and Kenny Webster, brunch committee members; Dr. Thelma Daley, national chair of the NAACP convention; Jasper Cummings, director of alumni relations of Sojourner-Douglass College; Colles Corprew, Baltimore City minority business coordinator; Roslyn Smith, human resources manager at Northrop Grumman; and Chief Judge Robert Bell, Maryland Court of Appeals.