COLUMN ONE : Chavis a Riddle for NAACP : Members are watching closely, trying to see where their new executive director will lead them. He speaks of sweeping changes--exciting for some, but too radical for others in the group.

When Benjamin F. Chavis Jr. strode into the packed banquet room of the state NAACP convention, the crowd--dark suits on the men, pastel hats on the women, kinte shawls on everybody--became a single organism straining for a glimpse.

What should they make of him, their new national executive director? Had an upstart radical assumed control of the 84-year-old NAACP? How dramatically--perhaps dangerously--would he alter its course? Or, as others wondered privately and in whispers, would he be more of the same: a fresh-faced, front man for a 64-member board viewed in some quarters as too tradition-bound, too ponderous?

The same questions will be on the minds of delegates at the NAACP’s national convention this weekend in Indianapolis. They will be closely watching the 45-year-old preacher from North Carolina, hoping to glean the direction in which he intends to steer the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization.

In Florida, Chavis offered only a hint, though a pointed one. “I’ve been on the job now for about eight weeks,” he said. “I’m proud of what the NAACP has done, what the NAACP is doing. But I want to tell you something: I want you to fasten your seat belts. You haven’t seen anything yet.”

In his broad vision, the NAACP would more aggressively confront and attempt to change the moral and political attitudes that result in racism, rather than simply drawing attention to the existence of social injustice.

And if Chavis’ past offers a road map, such change may be on the horizon. That’s the opinion of almost everyone who has tracked his evolution from black power activist to United Church of Christ minister to a position of rare prominence for an African-American in the nation’s environmental movement.

No doubt about it, said Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourners, a liberal Washington-based religious magazine, Chavis is a radical departure from the traditional NAACP leadership.

“Ben Chavis’ career has been as an activist from prison, from the bottom up, from the streets,” said Wallis, who worked with Chavis on environmental issues and efforts to reduce gang violence. “He has . . . a very strong vision of justice, one could even say a radical vision of justice.

“We haven’t had this kind of vision for fundamental social transformation expressed by the leader of an established civil rights organization . . . since the late years of Dr. King,” Wallis added. “Ben has that vision now.”

That may be. But a host of challenges lurk ahead. Not everyone in the organization relishes the prospect of the brand of change he may bring. And, sometimes, despite the best intentions, great moves within the NAACP have a way of backfiring with acrimonious consequences.

Already his talk of internationalizing the organization, reaching out to non-blacks, strengthening the group’s financial base and economically empowering black communities has bristled the backs of members frightened by sudden swerves from the group’s traditional approach of using the courts and pressing for legislation to address the problems of Black America.

And in a move that at first seemed the perfect symbol of his fence-mending style of leadership, Chavis stirred up controversy by involving the NAACP in a battle between two cities for a National Football League franchise. He also pushed the board toward a controversial stand supporting homosexuals serving openly in the armed forces.

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Despite his age, Chavis is a veteran of more than 30 years with the NAACP. His parents gave him his first membership card when he was 12 and living in rural, racially constricted Oxford, N.C.

“It was like an honor, a privilege, just to have that card,” he recalled. “I also felt that this was my license. Not a driver’s license, but a struggle license. I thought I was given permission by my parents--and encouragement--to stand up for things that I saw that they didn’t feel comfortable standing up to.”

At 14, Chavis used the card as if it were armor, desegregating the whites-only library in Oxford by walking in and checking out a book. “I was surprised how easy that was and thought any future attempts at desegregating public facilities would go as smoothly,” he said, shaking his head at his youthful naivete.

As a teen-ager he became a civil rights organizer, working alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. At 18, he was recruited as a field worker by Charles Cobb, then executive director of the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice.

After graduating from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 1969 with a chemistry degree, Chavis returned to Oxford as a high school teacher, where he was unable to resist the pull to lead his students in protests against racial injustice across the state.

In February, 1971, Chavis traveled with a team of Cobb’s organizers to Wilmington, N.C., to help organize student protests against segregated schools. A year later, he was arrested and convicted along with nine others on charges of conspiracy and inciting a mob to fire-bomb a white-owned grocery store.

After four years in prison, the band of protesters, known as the Wilmington 10, was freed. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the evidence against them had been falsified.

Chavis used his imprisonment to earn a divinity degree from Duke University. After his release, he went to work for the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice, a Cleveland, Ohio-based organization that had helped pay the Wilmington 10’s legal costs.

He worked for that organization for 25 years before he was elected to the NAACP post in April over a slate of candidates that included the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

Twice married, Chavis has six children and three grandchildren. His expects his wife, Martha, a Dominican-American, to play an active role in NAACP affairs. “My wife speaks five languages fluently, so she can reach out to other people,” he said.

As an ordained minister and head of the United Church of Christ’s commission, Chavis was an aggressive proponent of changing the nation’s political and moral status quo. His strategy was to organize young activists, rallying them to engage in non-violent protests against racial violence or segregation.

Chavis described his leadership philosophy in a 1986 interview in “Black Voices in American Politics,” a book by North Carolina Central University political scientist Jeffrey M. Elliott.

“We must become organizers of the poor and rejected, because only when we build a mass-based movement in this country will we really convince those in power to stop their policies,” Chavis said.

More recently, as the commission’s director, Chavis turned his attention to fighting toxic waste dumps in black and poor communities. He coined the term “environmental racism” and made it stick as a way of publicizing the issue.

In style and substance, Chavis’ ambitions for the NAACP seem reminiscent of the bold and sweeping expectations of W.E.B. DuBois, the prolific author and intellectual who helped found the organization in 1909. DuBois envisioned the NAACP as an organization that black and white Americans would use to combat racism from the post-Civil War Reconstruction period.

Chavis, who with his reddish-bronze skin and his neatly cropped goatee bears a remarkable resemblance to Malcolm X and DuBois, has updated that mission. While acknowledging that black Americans are no longer victims of de facto segregation, due in part to two generations of activism by the NAACP, he argues that new approaches are needed for blacks to gain full participation in the nation’s mainstream.

“I think my role as executive director and, by extension, the role of the NAACP is to serve as an agent of social change,” Chavis said. “We are not just a vehicle for social status delivery.”

He said it is not the group’s job to provide homeless shelters or soup kitchens, although some branches do provide such services. The job for the NAACP, he said, is to find solutions to homelessness, poverty, illiteracy, unemployment and the other poxes that afflict minority communities.

Chavis wants to build the NAACP’s financial base and boost minority-owned businesses. He promised the board he would bring $1 million to this year’s annual meeting as seed money for a proposed $100-million endowment that would provide long-term financial security for the organization, making it less dependent on corporate contributions.

“The organization is running at a deficit and it has for a couple of years,” said Don Rojas, the NAACP’s director of communications and one of Chavis’ new advisers. “So one of our top priorities is to move rapidly toward the financial consolidation of our resources and to reduce and eliminate that deficit very quickly.”

The lack of an economic strategy for black communities has been a constant criticism of the civil rights community from young and entrepreneurial-minded African-Americans.

The organization also was criticized during the 15-year tenure of former Executive Director Benjamin L. Hooks for failing to proportionately increase its membership, especially among young African-Americans.

Promising to do better, although vague about the strategy, he said: “My objective is to win brothers and sisters back to the organization, back to the movement.”

One controversial element of his agenda is to make the NAACP more receptive to diverse ideas by inviting greater participation by non-blacks. The addition of a Latino NAACP branch in the Bronx is under discussion. He is also talking about establishing NAACP branches overseas, perhaps in South Africa, and he said he plans to talk to South African anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela about it when Mandela comes to the NAACP national convention.

“I want to form a strategic alliance between the NAACP and the ANC. So when I talk about internationalizing the NAACP, all of a sudden the Watts branch is talking about the future of the Soweto branch of the NAACP.”

While few in the NAACP are willing to record their opposition so early in his tenure, it is clear that not everyone within the 500,000-member organization is eager to bear-hug all of Chavis’ ideas.

One critic, Hazel Dukes, the influential president of the New York State conference of chapters and a board member who supported Jackson for the executive directorship, said she would be “a little disturbed” to learn of the formation of another chapter in her domain.

Another Jackson supporter and former NAACP board member, New York entrepreneur Percy Sutton, expressed doubts about whether Chavis can build the promised financial endowment for the organization. Sutton has a long and successful history of fund raising for the NAACP.

Some black activists like Jackie Cissel are organizing a protest at the annual meeting to tell Chavis and other leaders they do not appreciate the board’s recommendation that the membership support gay rights. “Everyone we have talked to on this issue has expressed astonishment at this,” Cissel said. “They cannot believe that an organization that’s one of the most respected in the country would buy into the homosexual movement.”

And, just three months on the job, Chavis has embroiled the organization in public controversy. Under his leadership, the NAACP negotiated a $1-billion “fair share” agreement with Denny’s restaurants that promised to increase black employment and business opportunities with the company. It was designed as a win-win situation for both Chavis and Denny’s, which has been hit by an avalanche of negative news stories stemming from a pair of racial discrimination suits.

For the owners of Denny’s, the deal was a marketing coup aimed at salving their company’s wounded image and enhancing their bid to bring an NFL franchise to Charlotte, N.C., just up the road from their headquarters in Spartanburg, S.C. For Chavis, the deal offered an opportunity to arrive at this weekend’s convention with a shining trophy showing his new leadership.

The potential bonanza of goodwill soured after officials in Baltimore, home of the NAACP’s headquarters, complained about the civil rights organization’s seeming endorsement of Charlotte’s--and Denny’s--football aspirations over their own. At the news conference announcing the agreement, Chavis said the NAACP would “do what we can and help out in any way possible for the Carolinas to get a franchise.”

But at an embarrassing news conference on Wednesday, Chavis backed down under pressure from local and community leaders, including Maryland NAACP officials, Gov. William Donald Schaefer and Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke, all of whom are lobbying the NFL for a franchise in Baltimore.

“Unfortunately, some of the statements . . . announcing the fair share agreements have led some to believe that the NAACP has endorsed the Carolinas’ franchise bid in Charlotte over other cities,” Chavis said reading from a prepared statement. “That was not our intention, and we therefore apologize.”

Surveying the Denny’s situation, Wallis at Sojourners offered a prayer for Chavis’ soul because of the deals he may be tempted to make as he tries to meld his message of social justice with the practicalities of leading the NAACP.

“Most of the civil rights organizations have become more careful, more conservative. I’m praying for my brother Ben Chavis, praying that in this new position . . . he will remember the streets and remember who all this is for . . .

“Who or what will be changed here?” he added in benediction. “The Rev. Ben Chavis or the NAACP? That is the question that’s going to be asked.”