Historic Meeting at the Crossroads

The venerable National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People is at a turning point. Now, 30 years after the courts outlawed racial discrimination, stamping out segregation is no longer the mission. Pervasive poverty, entrenched unemployment and epidemic violence among African Americans are the appropriate focus in the 1990s.

To tackle these ills, the Rev. Benjamin F. Chavis Jr., NAACP executive director, called to a national summit black leaders who run the political gamut from the pragmatic chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, Rep. Kweisi Mfume (D-Md.), to the Nation of Islam’s vitriolic Minister Louis Farrakhan. The gathering, in Baltimore, ended Tuesday.

The approaches of participants differed but emphasized a common challenge: how best to help the black underclass, roughly one-third of black America.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, often the voice of reason at the summit, strongly advocated self-help. He exhorted black Americans to stop blaming others. “We have to stop the scapegoating, bellyaching and bitching. We can stop the drinking, right now. We can stop shooting drugs, right now. We can stop shooting each other, right now. We can start studying three hours a night just like playing basketball, right now.”

Jackson also defended the controversial participation of Farrakhan. “If Israelis and Palestinians can talk, and black South Africans and white Afrikaners can talk, then black Americans of differing philosophies should be able to engage in dialogue without facing criticism,” he said. Farrakhan’s summit role is very troubling because of his anti-white and anti-Semitic rhetoric. Less well-known are his vicious verbal assaults on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other prominent African Americans.

However, even Farrakhan’s critics cannot deny his organization’s success at rehabilitating criminals that others had given up on. It is a comment on the failures of traditional politicians that Farrakhan, for some blacks left out of the mainstream, has filled a desperate void.

The segment of the black community that’s in deep trouble got the attention at the NAACP summit, and rightly so. The future of the NAACP, however, relies on expanding the media-underexposed majority of black America whose ordinariness doesn’t inspire summits.