Gregory Kane: NAACP board late on changes
Roslyn M. Brock, 44 years old, will become the chairwoman of the NAACP board of directors soon. The organization is way too late with that move.
Brock will replace current board chairman Julian Bond, whose mouth, at least, the NAACP should have retired at least 10 years ago. In a recent interview with Herb Boyd of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, Brock proudly chirped the line NAACP members have been touting for years.
“I think that the NAACP understood that if it’s to remain relevant, that it really needed to look toward the future to ensure the legacy of the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization,” Brock answered when Boyd asked her if there’s a “youth movement” going on in the NAACP. (NAACP president and chief executive officer Benjamin Todd Jealous was only 35 when he assumed his post.)
Here’s the bad news for Brock, and there is no good news: the NAACP is no longer the “nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization.” That distinction now belongs to the National Urban League, which is a few years younger than the NAACP. Under Bond’s board chairmanship, the NAACP went from being the nation’s largest and oldest civil rights organization to what it is now: a mostly useless, barely relevant hatchet wing of the Democratic National Committee.
Oh, NAACP members and its CEO and Bond claimed they were nonpartisan, but it was what I call the “wink-wink” brand of nonpartisanship. I attended a couple of NAACP conventions in the late ’90s and earlier this decade, and speakers took the podium and proudly told those assembled “We’re nonpartisan, but we know who our friends are.”
Wink, wink.
During the years of former President George W. Bush’s administration, Bond used his annual address to the convention to deliver one of his many “nonpartisan” attacks on Bush. One time he claimed Bush was appointing people from “the Taliban wing of American politics” to his administration. In another tirade, he expressed a fear that Bush might want to repeal the 14th Amendment. (A note to Bond: Presidents don’t do this; state Legislatures and the Congress do.)
Bond was at his most shameless in 2000, when the NAACP Voter Education Fund ran its notorious “issue ad” days before the presidential election that pitted Bush against former Vice President Al Gore. The ad showed a pickup truck pulling a chain and the voice of a woman identified as the daughter of James Byrd, who was killed when three white racists tied him to a pickup truck with a chain and dragged him to death in Jasper, Texas. The three were tried and convicted; two were sentenced to death.
That would have been more than enough justice for most people, but not enough for Byrd’s daughter. And clearly not enough for folks in either the NAACP or the NAACP National Voter Education Fund. They wanted the three convicted of hate crimes as well, as if the punishment for those would have been more severe than being put to death.
So in the ad viewers got to hear Byrd’s daughter proclaim that Bush’s refusal to support hate crimes laws when he was governor of Texas was like seeing her father murdered all over again. This was dirty, cheap, tawdry politics. The ad was clearly anti-Bush and designed to help Gore, but the NAACP National Voter Education Fund folks insisted it was merely an issue ad meant to inform.
Wink, wink.
Bond attempted to disassociate himself and the NAACP from the “issue ad” by ducking behind a technicality: The NAACP and NAACP National Voter Education Fund, were, he claimed, two separate organizations. The NAACP and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund are also separate organizations, but folks with common sense know these distinctions are meaningless. All three groups are simply different, but very close, pews in the same church.
But Bond expressed his support for the ad in an op-ed letter to the Baltimore Sun, proclaiming that the ad was truthful. Yes, it was true that Bush, like many Americans, had a problem with hate crimes laws. But Byrd’s daughter saying that Bush’s lack of passion for them amounted to the second killing of her father falls into the realm of tortured, misinformed opinion.
Bond should have known that. His support for the ad showed a pattern of poor judgment and pro-Democratic Party partisanship that was bad for him and worse for the NAACP. It’s unlikely Brock will be able to undo that damage.
