Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 18, 1993 TAG: 9304200392
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: B-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
NEW LEADERSHIP AT THE NAACP
THE NEW executive director of the national NAACP isn't Jesse Jackson. But the man who did get the job, Benjamin Chavis, is hardly an unknown - though Chavis' prominence, unlike Jackson's, was involuntary.Jackson took his name out of the running last week after some board members pointedly proposed that the board take a bigger hand in the organization's day-to-day running. In Jackson's case, given his relatively weak administrative background, that would have made sense. But, as the board members presumably knew, it wouldn't fit Jackson's one-man-band style.
Chavis, an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, succeeds retiring NAACP head Benjamin Hooks. In recent years, Chavis, 45, has been executive director of his denomination's Commission for Racial Justice. Among his concerns have been inner-city street gangs and the disproportionate storage and disposal of toxic materials in and near black neighborhoods.
It was as a young man, however, that Chavis gained national fame. In 1971, he was sent by the church commission to Wilmington, N.C., when school-desegregation troubles broke out there. Violence escalated; a black student and a white man were killed; a mom-and-pop, white-owned grocery store burned. A year later, Chavis and nine others - the Wilmington 10 - went on trial for arson.
Despite the flimsiness of the prosecution case, a jury of 10 whites and two blacks (empaneled after the local judge used a prosecutor's illness to declare a mistrial and dismiss the original jury of 10 blacks and two whites) found Chavis guilty. Amnesty International said the Wilmington 10 were political prisoners. Not until 1980 - after Chavis had spent four years in prison - was he exonerated. A federal appeals court cited favor-dispensing by prosecutors and obviously perjured testimony by the chief prosecution witness.
Chavis' story suggests caution in declaring that race relations today are worse than ever. So does much other evidence. Twenty-five years ago, a Roanoke city school superintendent who happens to be black? Get serious. A Virginia governor who happens to be black? Impossible.
Still, a recent New York Times/CBS News poll found that many white and black Americans rate race relations today as poor. Only 52 percent of whites and 45 percent of blacks thought they are better than 25 years ago. While amnesia may play a role in these findings, it's also clear that optimistic expectations of 25 years ago have been bitterly disappointed.
Just as clearly, racial issues have become more complex. Chavis' fusion of environmental and racial questions in toxic-materials disputes is one illustration. Economic and social forces also loom larger, relative to civil rights. As stable and upwardly mobile black families took advantage of new opportunities, they fled from low-income black neighborhoods, removing much of the social glue that held those neighborhoods together. Global economic trends have taken away decent-paying, working-class jobs that for many had been steps to economic and social security. Social pathologies - manifest in drugs and crime, family breakup and welfare dependency - are rampant in inner cities. Government's response has been neglectful and ineffective.
The NAACP is itself in something of the doldrums. Its membership is aging; and the unity of the moral crusade against Jim Crow has inevitably fractured in the face of new problems with less obvious answers.
Even so, the group remains perhaps the greatest institutional bulwark in America - rivaled only by the black church, primarily Baptist and Methodist - for the advancement of the community and the promotion of equal rights. Ben Chavis has seen trouble before; he has a lot to cope with now.