The end, after an eight-hour meeting of the NAACP board, was almost anticlimactic. Chavis spoke for more than an hour but, according to some who heard him, offered no new details on the controversial legal settlement with Mary Stansel, the former staffer who had accused him of sexual discrimination. He also failed to convince the board that he was the target of shadowy outside forces trying to block his overtures to Louis Farrakhan and other controversial figures. Though the exact vote was not announced, sources said it had been so overwhelming that there was “no need to count.” “The decision was not easy, nor was it pleasant,” chairman William Gibson said.
Chavis himself took a defiant tone. While conceding that he was “obviously somewhat shaken” by the vote, he said he was “undaunted, unbowed and unbossed” and claimed to be “a victim of an orchestrated campaign to defame my character and my integrity.” He said the African-American Leadership Summit he had scheduled for this week would proceed as planned – though not at NAACP headquarters – and that Farrakhan would be present. “We’re not going to let the lynching that took place here stop us,” he said.
Chavis began his tenure 16 months ago to nearly universal praise and high expectations. In some areas, he delivered. He apparently increased memberships substantially and he generated enthusiasm – particularly among the alienated and the young – for his plans. When he wasn’t sounding paranoid, pillorying enemies and “backstabbers,” he could be an inspiring speaker. But he was lacking in judgment and administrative skills. He had a penchant for keeping secrets from his board and an attitude toward spending (on fancy cars, salary increases and junkets) that would have been expected more of a corporate CEO than the head of a civil-rights organization fighting bankruptcy.
His mistake was to earmark NAACP funds (potentially up to $332,400) as hush money for a woman who threatened to embarrass him – Mary Stansel. He is correct when he suggests that some people had it in for him before that episode came to light. But he is also missing the point. If his judgment and administrative skills had matched his moxie, he could have pulled off some of his more controversial initiatives. He could have defused much of the concern over his meeting with Farrakhan by refusing to cater to the Nation of Islam leader. Instead, Chavis treated him like a conquering hero. And he would not have received criticism for reaching out to gang members had he also made it clear that he was equally concerned about the fate of law-abiding youths who had not yet picked up a gun – or about the working-class people who make up the bulk of the NAACP’s membership.
One board source, asked why the NAACP had chosen Chavis last year, said, “We didn’t know him. He promised to do all these things, and we believed him. He said he would set up an endowment, that $2 million was already promised and that he would raise more. If he had done half of what he said, it would be great. Instead he surrounded himself with ideologues incapable of doing anything.”
The NAACP’s crisis is not all of Chavis’s making. The organization has been troubled for some time. Removing Chavis will not invigorate a 64-member board that is too large and undistinguished to do its job. Nor will Chavis’s removal, in itself, strengthen the organization’s ties to its sympathizers in the foundation and corporate communities. That would require bringing on not only a competent executive director of independent stature, but putting into place a management team that inspires confidence instead of scorn.
In taking the helm, Chavis committed himself to redefining the NAACP and breathing life into the fight for civil rights. But his vision never seemed to leave the past. He often came off as a cross between the Black Panther Party’s Huey Newton and black-power advocate Stokely Carmichael. What much of Chavis’s rhetoric had to do with 1995 was never very clear. Michael Myers, a onetime NAACP official and persistent Chavis critic, believes the NAACP needs at its head “someone with a sense of history who knows who the real enemies are.” Those enemies, in Myers’s mind, are not the media and other bogeymen whom Chavis loved to lambaste, but poverty, discrimination and a thousand other ills that seem to be attacking poor areas all at once. Its members joined the NAACP to be part of a struggle against such evils, not to be taken for a ride by a leadership that can’t seem to get its priorities straight. The question the NAACP must face is not only what kind of executive director can best serve in that struggle, but what kind of board as well.
