Naacp President

As NAACP delegates gather this weekend in Milwaukee for the group's 96th convention, it will mark a year since Chairman Julian Bond's searing critique of the Bush administration, triggering an IRS audit that nearly cost the organization its tax-exempt status. Today, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and President Bush remain at odds. The civil rights group continues to fight the Internal Revenue Service investigation. And for the fifth year in a row, Bush has declined an invitation to speak at the convention.

After four years of refusing to meet with the nation's oldest and largest civil rights group, President Bush sat down at the White House yesterday with NAACP President Kweisi Mfume. Mfume called it a "very frank, open meeting" that he hoped would mark the end of a rocky relationship between the president and the leadership of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Bush spoke to the group while campaigning in 2000 but did not accept invitations thereafter. The estrangement came to a head when Bush refused to speak at the NAACP's annual convention in Philadelphia this summer, blaming rhetoric and name-calling from its leaders.

Bruce S. Gordon was, as always, tactful and circumspect in explaining why he was bowing out as NAACP president after only 19 months at the helm. He would only say that there were differences between himself and others in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; presumably, that meant his differences were with some on the organization's 64-member national board. His low-key pronouncement was in keeping with the no-nonsense, corporate approach to civil rights advocacy that he brought to the organization.

In the first shake-up of his two-week tenure as NAACP president, Kweisi Mfume has fired about 15 staff members, including the civil rights group's membership director.Mr. Mfume's chief of staff went from office to office at the organization's Northwest Baltimore headquarters late Friday afternoon, handing employees letters telling them that "regrettably, the position you now occupy will be eliminated."Although the letter gave the staff members 30 days' notice of their dismissal, fired employees said they were advised to pack up their belongings right away and not to return to work.

A former NAACP regional director, laid off by President Kweisi Mfume in March, has filed a $1 million sex and age discrimination suit against the civil rights group in U.S. District Court.Janice M. Washington, 48, of Randallstown contends in the suit that the NAACP paid women a quarter to a third less on average than men in comparable jobs. Men filled "by far the best-paying jobs" while women generally carried out the "exceptionally demanding day-to-day work of maintaining the flow of donations and running the programs," the suit charges.

NEW YORK -- Challenging critics to join him, Kweisi Mfume vowed yesterday to lead a financially strengthened NAACP this year in defending affirmative action, shaping welfare reform and garnering capital for black-owned businesses."

W. Gregory Wims is a mild-mannered management consultant with the unusual hobby of taking on high-powered adversaries -- the National Institutes of Health, Hughes Network Systems, GEICO and the Montgomery County government, to name a few.Mr. Wims, 44, pursues his avocation as president of the NAACP's Montgomery County branch, where he is in the middle of a two-year term. By orchestrating a string of news conferences and rallies in recent months, he has heightened the civil rights group's profile.

NAACP President Kweisi Mfume is used to people taking his picture in public. He is, after all, a former member of Congress and a "favorite son" of Baltimore's black community. But Sunday after a luncheon at the Hyatt Regency, it was his sons Donald and Keith Mfume - not the civil rights leader - to whom people flocked. About 20 or so people jockeyed for position to get pictures with Donald, 32, and Keith, 30. Donald Mfume is a senior vice president of corporate finance with Redwood Securities Group, a minority investment banking firm based in San Francisco with offices in Los Angeles, New York, Singapore and Washington.

NAACP President Kweisi Mfume yesterday called on companies to become more ethnically diverse.Addressing a group of business people at the Center Club downtown, Mfume said that diversity will help a firm's bottom line, and that too few companies are actively hiring and promoting minorities. "Homogeneous work teams are generally less innovative than those representing diverse viewpoints and diverse backgrounds," he said.The former congressman decried what he called "a national scourge of insensitivity and intolerance," and said that business and economic topics are central to the quest for greater racial harmony and equality.

The city's top public safety officials -- Police Commissioner Kevin P. Clark, State's Attorney Patricia C. Jessamy and Mayor Martin O'Malley -- met privately yesterday to discuss a prominent civil rights organization's concerns that political infighting has hampered coordinated crime fighting. G.I. Johnson, president of Baltimore's National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, invited the officials to his West 26th Street office to express his group's concerns about improving public safety.