‘We free people. We educate them. We help them get good jobs.’

“Good evening,” a stately woman in blue said into the microphone.

She waited for a response that didn’t come, then repeated, more firmly:

“Good evening.”

“Good evening,” the audience replied, rustling in faint embarrassment.

With that quaint bit of social tension, dinner chairman Shirley Divens last week opened the 13th annual Freedom Fund and Awards Banquet of the San Fernando Valley Chapter of the NAACP.

About 250 people--members of the Valley chapter, envoys of companies that support it and friends from other chapters of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People--convened at the Burbank Hilton Thursday evening.

It was one of those affairs in which everyone who made a contribution during the past year received a word of praise--a warm but detailed process that tended to slow the show.

Apparently the problem has been recognized.

“We’re going to all attempt to get us out of here early this evening . . . for a change,” chapter president Jose DeSosa told the audience, provoking both laughter and applause.

To accomplish that goal, DeSosa put the show into the hands of Kathryn Seiffert-Jones, the host of a two-hour Saturday morning interview show on KCOP-TV.

She introduced the four award winners with a crisp, broadcast efficiency, in contrast to the frequent and wordy interjections of DeSosa and other old horses of the 31-year-old Valley group.

The awards stressed community service and cooperation with business rather than the confrontational actions that were in style not so long ago.

That shift in tone was noted explicitly in a film, called “The Challenge,” shown during dinner. It summarized the civil rights struggles and triumphs of the ‘60s and ‘70s and then suggested a new program for the ‘80s without those emotional thrills.

The NAACP’s challenge, one leader after another said, is to give service at the community level and to enlist the loyalty of the new black professionals in business and industry.

This was clearly not new doctrine for the Valley group.

Its first award went to Paul F. Nickel, the general manager of Anheuser-Busch’s Sylmar wholesale distribution center whose company was one of several that bought tables at the banquet and filled them with employees, most of them black.

A retired couple, Evelyn and Tom Montgomery, won the Ray Arnold Community Service Award.

Seiffert-Jones read a long list of the Montgomerys’ volunteer works in public education, youth activities and politics.

Tom Montgomery used his moment at the pulpit to praise Ray Arnold, the late Pacoima activist, as “the most compassionate individual that I knew . . . willing to help anybody, anytime, anywhere.”

Ora Foley Skipper, a bilingual specialist at Harrison Elementary School in East Los Angeles, received the Rita Walters Award for contributions in education.

“Thanks to God, who is the creator of all things,” she said. She then introduced a dozen relatives and friends in the audience.

The only award aimed outside the Valley went to Assemblywoman Maxine Walters (D-Los Angeles) for social and political advocacy. She was not there but sent a representative who explained that she was working that night on the Legislature’s budget conference committee.

The equanimity of the pre-announced awards presentations threatened to descend to boredom during a long introduction of keynote speaker Nathaniel S. Colley Sr.

But Colley dispatched that danger.

A graying Sacramento lawyer who was once chairman of the state Horse Racing Board and is a fixture on the national board of directors of the NAACP, Colley delivered a lively and sometimes ruthless analysis of the NAACP’s current role in civil rights.

At one point, using a rhetorical touch reminiscent of the ‘60s, he quoted a spiritual:

“You can run to the rock to hide your face but the rock cries out, ‘No hiding place, there’s no hiding place down here.’

“Since there’s no hiding place, I would say it is not true that all black people, when they become successful, run away from the struggle,” he said. “Now, I do realize that many, many do. Many of the young professionals that we have put where they are, by affirmative action programs and otherwise, turn their backs. But, you know, I think about that and I don’t care. The reason I don’t care is, that that’s what we’re all about. We’re about emancipating people . . .

“We free people. We educate them. We help them get good jobs. They go buy Mercedeses and whatever else they buy. That’s all right. Because we wouldn’t want them all to stay poor. Nobody wants all black people to stay poor, so they can stay in the struggle. I wish we could make them all rich.”

After Colley was through, the rest was anticlimactic.

The audience thinned noticeably as several more people were being recognized for their good works.

Seiffert-Jones was about to wrap the event up at precisely 10:30, as she had promised, when DeSosa stood up to make one more presentation.

In that vein, the party came to a languid end. No matter. It was just a prelude to another year of work for Paul Nickel, Evelyn and Tom Montgomery, Ora Foley Skipper, even Maxine Waters.

Congratulations. Keep it up.