Naacp

The NAACP is maintaining a discreet silence regarding effort to find a successor to executive director Benjamin F. Hooks, who retires next month after 15 years as head of the nation's oldest civil rights organization. But recent news reports have sparked intense speculation over who the Baltimore-based group's next leader will be.Those reportedly under consideration include former presidential candidate Jesse Jackson, former Pennsylvania congressman William H. Gray III, former Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson and anti-apartheid lobbyist Randall Robinson.

In the Rev. Benjamin Chavis, the NAACP has picked a leader well qualified by temperament and experience to lead the nation's oldest civil rights group. Mr. Chavis, one of 10 protesters wrongly imprisoned after the 1971 riots in Wilmington, N.C., has been involved in civil-rights activities for over two decades and comes to the NAACP after serving as director of the United Church of Christ's Commission on Racial Justice, where he helped focus attention on the problem of illegal toxic waste dumping in minority communities.

The state NAACP unanimously endorsed during its annual conference in Solomons yesterday a resolution asking all businesses, labor groups and college students in Maryland to avoid Ocean City next Memorial Day and July 4, the resort's two major holidays.The group also is asking the General Assembly to withhold funds for beach restoration in Worcester County as part of what Gregory Wims, president of the state National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, called "a plan of economic sanctions against Worcester County."

An icon of my youth, the Rev. Ben Chavis, is a leading candidate to succeed Benjamin Hooks as executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.In the 1970s I attended numerous rallies organized to demand Mr. Chavis' release from a North Carolina prison, where he had been sentenced to a 35-year term for arson in connection with the bitter 1971 civil rights demonstrations in Wilmington, N.C. Mr. Chavis was freed in 1980 when his conviction was overturned by a federal appeals court.

When Benjamin L. Hooks became executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1977, Jimmy Carter was in the White House and civil rights organizations had a generally sympathetic reception in the White House and Washington.But most of Mr. Hooks' tenure as one of the nation's most prominent advocates for the African-American community has been consumed by problems he could not have anticipated. The advent of the Reagan and Bush administrations, the increasingly conservative tone of the Supreme Court and the heightened importance of economic issues changed the nature of the game and the demands on black leaders.

MINNEAPOLIS -- Chairwoman Myrlie B. Evers-Williams, seeking a fresh start for the NAACP after nearly a year of scandal and debt, pledged yesterday that the group would get back to the basics of civil rights work."

A CAREFUL examination of the history of African-Americans reveals a strong, determined, compassionate, resilient, faithful people. In our efforts to survive while reaching for the "American dream," we have demonstrated a genetic strength, a spiritual dominance and ability to defy the odds as we experienced one of the most unique forms of oppression and human degradation the world has ever known. Despite constant shifts in positions and changes in the rules designed to maintain this oppression by those in power, many African-Americans have succeeded in approaching some participation in the way of life enjoyed by the majority population.

NEW YORK -- GIVEN THE events of recent months, advocates of racial equality may be forgiven for thinking -- to paraphrase Shakespeare -- that this is the summer of our discontent. The publicly displayed disarray in the NAACP -- the oldest and most respected of the nation's civil-rights organizations -- is the latest in a steady parade of falls from grace by blacks who had become icons of success. Each of these developments receive maximum media exposure, as the depictions of our distress become grist for society's diversion.

Anne Arundel County schools have not made sufficient progress in eliminating racial bias from its student disciplinary practices, according to a civil rights complaint filed by the NAACP. The complaint, filed with the civil rights office of the U.S. Department of Education on Friday, alleges that the numbers of African-American students referred for discipline and suspended have hardly changed since a similar complaint in 2004. That complaint led to an improvement plan agreed to in 2005 by the NAACP and the school system.