A Crisis of Leadership : Culture: The NAACP is dated and tired, critics say. But the selection of a new executive director provides a chance to bring the group face-to-face with blacks’ problems in the ‘90s.

This is a time of soul-searching at the National Assn. forthe Advancement of Colored People, whose board meets Friday in Atlanta in hopes of selecting a successor to Executive Director Benjamin L. Hooks.

The dowdy grandmother of all civil rights groups isn’t merely hunting for a new name at the top. It’s looking for an institutional face lift.

To be sure, the 500,000-member organization is trying to chart a new course in what’s been called the “post-civil rights era.” But the NAACP’s generals find themselves asking many of the same questions that the Pentagon has faced at the end of the Cold War: “Who’s the enemy now? Where’s the battlefront? And how do we modernize our forces in changing times?”

Plagued by financial troubles and infighting, the NAACP is in bad need of a good press agent. With a median age of 55, its membership has failed to keep pace with the growth of America’s black population.

At this point, talk of the organization’s diminishing importance is so widespread that it poses the fundamental question in its own brochure: “Is the NAACP Still Needed?”

Perhaps nowhere is the question more urgent than in Los Angeles as it awaits verdicts in the second Rodney King beating trial. But the answer is far from clear. Critics inside and outside the NAACP charge that the Baltimore-based organization is out of step with the most critical concerns of the black community--and particularly of black youth.

“The NAACP has been moribund for the longest time,” contends Michael Meyers, a former NAACP assistant director who now heads a large New York civil rights group. “It’s in terrible need of new blood. Hooks should have left a long time ago.”

Even the NAACP’s own field marshals acknowledge the organization’s fatigue.

“The NAACP needs a younger perspective and more acute solutions,” argues Shannon Reeves, director of the NAACP’s Western regional office in Los Angeles. “We’ve got to bridge the generation gap in black America. We can’t wait for young people to come to us. We have to go out and get them.”

If Benjamin Hooks represents the NAACP’s past, Reeves may well be its future. At 24, he is the youngest regional boss in the group’s 84-year history. Reeves oversees more than 200 local chapters in a sweeping nine-state region--a region that since the King beating has been the NAACP’s most racially turbulent bailiwick.

A protege of Hooks, Reeves is a tireless apostle willing to employ unorthodox methods to recruit a new generation: Go to a Lakers game, and you’ll find him strolling the halls of the Forum in his NAACP jacket, pumping hands. Go to the Maverick Flats comedy club on Crenshaw Boulevard some Saturday night, and he’ll be passing out NAACP literature and freebie buttons. Weekdays, you might hear him on National Public Radio’s “Talk of the Nation” or find him negotiating with MTV executives to air new NAACP commercials designed to reach disaffected younger blacks.

“The only way you’re going to get young people is to go where young people dwell,” Reeves says. “You have to be willing to try 2creative new solutions.”

If many young blacks today are indifferent to the NAACP, it is, in some senses, a tribute to the organization’s past success. Black America has reaped the benefits of courtroom decrees and legislative victories the organization won decades ago, and as more African-Americans have entered the mainstream--becoming doctors, lawyers, generals, governors and talk-show hosts--many believe they no longer need the succor of a civil rights group.

During Thurgood Marshall’s day, the evils were stark and obvious: The enemy was Bull Connor, the “colored” water fountain and the thousand indignities of “separate but equal.”

Today, the picture isn’t so clear. Racism still rears its head, to be sure. And whenever it does, the NAACP gets the first call. Any time an important racial issue appears on the national scene--from the King beating to the Clarence Thomas nomination--black America still looks to the NAACP for leadership.

But discrimination is subtler than it used to be. Whereas Thurgood Marshall battled blatant segregation, the NAACP’s lawyers now ponder such matters as glass ceilings, affirmative action or the arcane details of voter redistricting.

These days, there are other evils that scream for attention in black America--drugs, teen-age pregnancy, poverty, an epidemic of handgun murders. The NAACP is asking itself whether it should try to solve those problems, too. And if so, how?

Under Hooks, the approach has been to continue along the old path--following the tried-and-true methods of litigation and moral suasion in the halls of government--while adding a few new programs to battle the hydras of the inner city. The organization has tried to do everything, spreading its already limited resources thin. In the process, its sense of mission has grown murky.

But with the next director, the NAACP will be “embarking on a new path,” proclaims William F. Gibson, the group’s powerful chairman of the board. “We must turn our attentions to the pressing social and economic problems facing African-Americans.”

In a curious way, the NAACP’s identity problems are mirrored by its decision to move its cramped New York headquarters to Baltimore in 1986. Though the new home offers cheap real estate and lower operating costs, the move was not a logical choice. The focus of the NAACP’s legislative and legal work is in Washington, and its fund-raising efforts are principally based in Manhattan, where the organization was headquartered for its first 75 years.

By being in Maryland, many believe the NAACP is betwixt and between.

“It’s like they were aiming for Washington but just kind of missed the mark,” Clarence Page, a prominent black commentator and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Chicago Tribune, says in a lengthy NAACP profile in the current issue of Baltimore magazine.

The national digs are located in a former mental hospital in a rolling business park near the northwest edge of Baltimore. Pleasant, spacious, and best of all, paid for, the large brick edifice still has the aura of a sanatorium despite substantial renovations.

Walking through the complex, one feels the inertia of history, from the moldering casebooks in the law library to the yellowed magazines in the archive room. Hallways are bathed in the former glories of The Struggle, walls crowded with tarnished plaques and portraits of grim-looking trustees.

Nearly every room, cove, alley and cul-de-sac on the grounds has a historic name affixed to it: The Roy Wilkins Auditorium. W. E. B. DuBois Lane. Walter White Way. On a recent afternoon, workmen could be seen outside the main entrance hoisting a set of huge white letters with a hydraulic lift, letters that would soon spell: THE BENJAMIN L. HOOKS BUILDING.

In the downstairs library are volumes of the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis, going back to the days when W.E.B. DuBois served as its unflinching editor. It is an illuminating exercise to compare one of the early issues of The Crisis with a current one, to understand how dramatically the NAACP’s concerns have changed since its early days.

Take the May, 1918 issue. There, one finds an investigation of a lynching in Monroe, La., another story about a black man in Estill Springs, Tenn., who was burned at the stake by a white mob, and a long article about the indignities suffered by all-black regiments in World War I.

Now open the October, 1992 issue. Here, wedged in between ads for London Fog raincoats and United Airlines, one finds an article about the changing role of professional black women, a look at why so few blacks won Emmy Awards last year and a profile of Whoopi Goldberg.

Paging through today’s slick color magazine, one might be tempted to ask: What crisis?

On this particular afternoon, Ben Hooks is up in his war room, toiling behind a creneled fortress of documents. He is wearing his usual pin-striped three-piece suit. Ensconced on his broad leather throne, he seems like a statue in progress; you can practically see the plaster thickening as he talks.

“I’m tired and weary,” he says. “These long years of public life have had their toll.” During his tenure, his hair has turned from black to downy white.

It’s been an extraordinary year to end on, Hooks muses, starting with the Los Angeles riots and ending with the federal trial in the Rodney King affair. He ticks off some of the high points of his tenure--the Martin Luther King holiday bill, South African sanctions, renewing the Civil Rights Act. It’s obvious that he holds a deep affection for the group he calls “the most cussed and discussed civil rights organization in the world.”

Thunk! Thunk! Thunk!

Hooks peers out the window to see what the racket is. He smiles: It’s the workmen outside, hammering in the “H.” He’s enjoyed the ride, he says. And he is still astounded at how far blacks have progressed since his boyhood in segregated Memphis.

“I look at Clinton’s Cabinet--four African-Americans. Just undreamed of in my lifetime. I look at 38 blacks in Congress. Those are just two examples among thousands. How can you say we haven’t come a long way? It’s such a huge achievement, you can’t hardly put your arms around it.”

Hooks says he’ll now divide his time between preaching, teaching, and practicing law--while writing his memoirs.

“I may be leaving the executive directorship,” he vows, “but I shall never leave the fight. And when I move on to the Brighter Glory, I’ll be fighting up there, too.”

Hooks tendered his resignation last year after the national board fell into an internecine war over term limits that led to the ousters of several longtime board members. He claimed his decision was unrelated to the term-limit feud, and he vigorously denied rumors that he had been fired by board chairman William Gibson. But to outsiders, such as former NAACP assistant director Michael Meyers, the thumbprints of a Gibson “massacre” were obvious.

The search for the new director has been conducted with utmost secrecy. With Hooks’ contract technically having expired March 31, many NAACP members have expressed concern that the search committee has dithered too long, that the new executive director will be denied a transition period to settle into the post.

The 21-member search committee had winnowed 75 applications to four: veteran civil rights activist Ben Chavis; Jewell Jackson McCabe of the National Coalition of 100 Black Women; the NAACP’s own Earl Shinholster; and the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Jackson had been regarded as the favorite of several prominent board members, but his candidacy reportedly had been met with a groundswell of negative reactions among the rank-and-file. On Wednesday, he withdrew his name from consideration, saying it “would not be in the interest” of the membership for him to continue.

Whoever the new executive director will be, no one has any illusions about the difficulty of the post. He or she will sit at the apex of the civil rights Establishment, and arguably all of black America. As former board member Julian Bond puts it, “The executive director’s got to be a magician.”

One of the first rabbits the new director must pull from the hat is finding a way to appeal to younger blacks without alienating the over-50 stalwarts. Some have intimated that the NAACP must embark on a public-relations campaign to modernize its image--starting, perhaps, by changing its dated name. One suggested face lift is the “N-Quadruple-A”--the National Assn. for the Advancement of African Americans.

Says columnist Clarence Page: “NAACP just shouts, ‘Old Fogey!’ to young people. The only black folks who call themselves colored anymore are at least 85.”

Shannon Reeves argues that the NAACP must place far greater emphasis on the organization’s 500 youth councils and college chapters. “We have to catch people when they’re young,” Reeves contends. “We need a more active presence at the nation’s 117 historically black colleges. Those are your future mayors, governors, CEOs. You have to grind into them the relevance of the NAACP in changing times.”

To that end, Reeves’ office is now embarking on a public-relations effort that will feature young black celebrities such as Malcolm-Jamal Warner of “The Cosby Show” to help rejuvenate the group’s profile. Declares Reeves: “People are going to have to identify the NAACP with younger faces.”

Another modern touch? Reeves’ office is now considering converting its billing system to allow members to charge their annual dues.

Perhaps most difficult of all, the NAACP’s next executive director must grapple with the larger question of the organization’s evolving mission. He or she will have to forge a balance between traditionalists, who say the group should stick to its civil rights guns, and those who urge a more aggressive role in solving social and economic problems in the inner cities of America.

It’s not as though the NAACP has ignored the problems of the underclass. “We are painfully aware of the social pathologies which are eating the black community alive,” says Hooks, who notes that his group has organized many conferences to study the problems of the inner city and has initiated bold programs, such as Back-to-School/Stay-in-School, directly aimed at these problems.

But many critics argue that despite such efforts, the organization has only paid lip service to the notion of “empowerment.” One such critic is Robert L. Woodson, a former NAACP organizer in Pennsylvania who is now director of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise in Washington. Woodson argues that in both substantive and symbolic ways, the NAACP should make economic self-reliance the centerpiece of its efforts.

Among other things, he says, the organization should help create black banks, encourage a voucher system to assist black-run independent schools and organize public-housing residents to help them buy their own homes.

“The approach of the NAACP under Hooks has been to blame black America’s problems on white people,” Woodson says. “They’re still fighting the Klan. They don’t see it, but the new Klan is drugs. The new Klan is teen-age pregnancy. The NAACP needs make an abrupt change or else it’s headed for extinction.”

Hooks, for his part, acknowledges that much more needs to be done in the economic arena. But he balks at the notion that the NAACP should make economic uplift its focus.

“It’s not our ball of wax to create jobs,” he argues. “Our ball of wax is opening up the jobs that are there. We change minds and attitudes, mores and folkways. And we will never abandon the fight for civil rights. Racism is not dead. (Former Klan leader) David Duke is real. He may have had his face lifted, his nose altered, but his heart is the same.”

Shannon Reeves wryly observes that the NAACP’s detractors never seem to have trouble finding the group’s phone number whenever they experience the sting of racism firsthand.

“Our office gets more than 150 calls every day,” he says. “If you’re sitting in a nice four-bedroom house with a Mercedes in your driveway, chances are you won’t be calling on the NAACP on a regular basis. But the minute that glass ceiling hits you, or you get skipped over for a promotion because of race, you’ll find us.”