Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 17, 1994 TAG: 9403170103
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"It's unusual for a city not to have some sort of single-member districts," said Benjamin Chavis, in Roanoke to lunch with area NAACP leaders and then head on to Lexington to speak at Washington and Lee University, where his great-great-grandfather, the Rev. John Chavis, was a student in the late 1700's period
Chavis said municipalities around the nation have reached a compromise - some citywide seats, some elected from wards or districts.
Of Roanoke, Chavis said: "Not to have any, I think, is unconstitutional, and it probably needs to be challenged in court."
"It's also taxation without representation. People who pay taxes are entitled to have some representation at the municipal level.
"I believe that the practice of what is going on is in violation of the Voting Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act ensures equal access to voting but is also supposed to ensure adequate representation."
Candidates in the May 3 election for Roanoke City Council have backed the idea of a referendum on a ward system, but Republican candidates say they will campaign against wards.
The Roanoke Branch of the NAACP favors the mayor and vice mayor being elected citywide and the other five members being elected from wards.
It's been almost a year since Chavis became executive director of the NAACP and, therefore, one of the foremost American commentators on civil and human rights. He's hit the road to boost the organization's roots in local communities.
"A week does not go by that I don't visit at least 10 branches," or local chapters, of the NAACP. He spends hours dialing local officers, who are amazed to hear from the organization's chief executive officer. Here, he said, NAACP leaders were surprised when he spent a few hours with them at the Sheraton Inn Roanoke Airport.
His first week in office, he went to South-Central Los Angeles and stayed in a public housing project. He's held meetings with rap musicians and gang members; young people, he says, are rediscovering the 85-year-old NAACP.
Membership has grown 32 percent, from 490,000 members to 650,000, according to Chavis and the NAACP's national membership office. He said the increase among young people has been twice that of adults.
Chavis was 12 when he joined the NAACP; at 45, he's its youngest-ever director. He says the organization must show young people it sincerely wants their involvement, not just their names on membership rolls. "We're not just crunching numbers."
He fought last summer to save a summer jobs program filibustered by Republicans. He went to Hampton to see Allen Iverson, the 18-year-old athlete imprisoned in connection with a chair-throwing incident in a bowling alley. Former Gov. Douglas Wilder later granted clemency.
Chavis is concentrating on five issues: economic empowerment at the grass-roots level; public school reform; leadership development for young people; environmental justice; and better communications or, as he puts it, "putting civil rights back on the front burner."
But everywhere he goes, reporters keep asking him about anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic remarks by an aide to Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan. "I can understand the press asking one day, but on and on and on?"
For the record, Chavis said the NAACP is sponsoring a summit of African-American leaders this spring, and, yes, Farrakhan will be invited, along with many other people.
"Our society focuses on the negative," Chavis said.
He's gotten little media coverage of his campaign to make the NAACP more multiracial. Whites as well as blacks were instrumental in the NAACP after its founding in 1909. Now, Chavis says, the organization is persuading Latinos, Asian-Americans and whites to join in record numbers.
As for President Clinton, Chavis thinks he's doing "relatively well" on civil rights, at least compared with presidents Reagan and Bush. "The Clinton administration is civil rights-friendly," he said.
"He's appointed more African-Americans and other minorities to more Cabinet appointments than any other president," Chavis said, and in positions not before entrusted to minorities.
On the Whitewater land deal that keeps hounding Clinton, Chavis said: "I think Whitewater is like the Farrakhan issue. It's a diversion. I think if there were anything to Whitewater, it would have come out a lot earlier."
People sometimes ask Chavis if the name of the NAACP - the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People - is politically incorrect.
He says the old name evokes progress in civil rights, and the word "colored" is not quite so offensive these days, now that minorities are referred to as "people of color."
There's no need to change the name, he said. "As the organization gets older and older, that name gets more and more significant." He hopes to be director when it celebrates its 100th anniversary in 15 years.
by CNB