Revitalize the NAACP’s Flickering Flame : Civil rights: No matter who heads the group, its focus must be to reach out to the poor.

The firing of NAACP Executive Director Benjamin Chavis was a watershed incident that may force a dramatic restructuring of the NAACP to reflect the needs of poor African Americans. The internal dissension may also foreshadow the creation of an alternative civil-rights organization.

Long before Chavis took the reigns of leadership from his conservative predecessor Benjamin Hooks, the organization had passed its zenith, overshadowed by the oratory of Jesse Jackson and upstaged by the boldness of politicians such as Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles).

Local black leaders, even those of questionable integrity like Al Sharpton of New York were confronting bigots at ground level in Bensonhurst and Howard Beach, while better-educated African Americans like Julian Bond were addressing corporate America in high-rise boardrooms.

Jackson, Waters, Sharpton and Chavis speak face to face with the poorest of black people about keeping hope alive. Although some local chapters have developed reputations for direct community action, national board members too often commiserate only with each other behind closed doors or in conference with businessmen or politicians aspiring to high office.

Multiple strategies are essential but not necessarily effective over the long term unless they take place within a unified organizational structure that involves blacks of all economic classes. As author Clarence Lusane suggests in “African Americans at the Crossroads,” it is time for blacks to establish public-policy lobbies, political-training institutes and community forums of various perspectives to help revitalize our flickering civil-rights campaign to focus on the heinous crimes of racism and self-deprecation.

This unity of purpose and styles is what Chavis was trying to achieve in organizing a summit of African American leaders and the reason he claims he was fired. His imprudent handling of the NAACP’s money and a related sexual-harassment allegation cannot be swept aside. Still, when he reached out to a broader community of African Americans--the purpose for which he was hired--he was accused of abandoning the integrationist civil-rights agenda.

Ironically, Chavis’ first act upon assuming leadership was to open the doors to Latinos and other people of color. But Latinos did not join, nor did anyone else. Membership in the NAACP, which was low before his appointment, continues its precipitous decline.

There is probably very little that can be done to remedy this problem from the perspective of many African Americans, who maintain low or no regard for mainstream civil-rights organizations.

Chavis, therefore, may be in a better position to help rebuild black communities outside the NAACP’s narrow confines than within. He is not merely a theologian--that all important symbol of the African American community--but a former Amnesty International certified political prisoner (for serving four years on a conviction that was later overturned because the evidence had been falsified). This baptism by fire is respected by poor blacks who have similar conflagrations in their lives.

Among the urban archeological ruins of the Reagan-Bush years, Chavis met with black unemployed gang members, young up-from-poverty college kids, idealistic multiculturalists, socialists, spirited Afro-centrists and most controversial of all, working-class supporters of the Nation of Islam. They are the disenfranchised of traditional civil-rights organizations.

Most traditional civil-rights practitioners are principled men and women who have contributed mightily to the cause, but can no more relate to the majority of angry and impoverished black youth today than NAACP giant Roy Wilkins could relate to the “black power” generation of the 1960s.

Our need to end the joblessness, crime and self-hate that are devouring entire black communities make a tactical coalition of Chavis, Sharpton, Waters, Jackson, Louis Farrakhan and other key grass-roots and community organizers imperative.

Strategically speaking, Chavis’ embrace of Farrakhan is no more an endorsement of “Farrakhanism” than network media executives’ embrace of Rush Limbaugh and Patrick Buchanan are endorsements of their insidious bigotry.

In fact, Chavis’ philosophy might even be regarded as an alternative to Farrakhan’s segregationist demagoguery. Chavis voices the view that poor people of all colors must come together to achieve economic and political power in our nation, which continues to favor the prerogatives of wealth. What Chavis and Farrakhan share is a willingness to reach out to the black poor of America.

If it is to survive, the NAACP, no matter who leads it, must do the same.