Saving the NAACP : Myrlie Evers-Williams goes way back with the NAACP. Now that she’s talen over, can she make it important again?

Every June 12 for the past 32 years, Myrlie Evers-Williams has been unable to escape grief. Last year was no different. Early in the morning, she and her second husband, Walter Williams, along with an old friend and fellow NAACP board member, Joe Madison, left downtown Washington for the 20-minute ride to Arlington National Cemetery. June 12 is the anniversary of the murder of Evers-Williams first husband--Medgar Evers. Every June 12 for the past 32 years, Myrlie Evers-Williams has traveled to Arlington National Cemetery. Last year was no different. Early in the morning, she and her second husband, Walter Williams, along with an old friend and fellow NAACP board member, Joe Madison, left downtown Washington for the 20-minute ride to the cemetery. June 12 is the anniversary of the murder of Evers-Williams first husband--Medgar Evers. The NAACP’s first field director in the Deep South, Evers was, during his lifetime and perhaps even more so after his death, one of the legendary figures of the civil rights movement--an emblem of the organization’s glorious and defiant zenith in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s.

Immaculately dressed in a dark business suit, white shirt and skinny necktie, Evers crisscrossed Mississippi organizing NAACP chapters and encouraging poorly educated black people to stand up against legalized segregation. For civil rights workers, Mississippi was considered the most dangerous state in the country, and Evers, who was born and raised there, had been the recipient of numerous death threats. Around midnight on June 12, 1963, as he walked from his car toward his home, Evers was shot in the back. His wife and three small children heard the noise. By the time they reached him, he had crawled to the front door, mortally wounded.

As Joe Madison looked out the window of the car as it crossed the Potomac River, his thoughts were on the troubles plaguing the NAACP. He had devoted much of his adult life to working for the oldest civil rights organization in the country, and he took enormous pride in its accomplishments. But he now feared that the group was in such disarray that its very existence was threatened. He was honored that Evers-Williams considered him close enough a friend to accompany her to Medgar’s grave, but at the same time he wanted to use the occasion to persuade her to run for the NAACP’s board chair.

“Driving over there, Myrlie and Walt tried to convince me to run for chairman of the board,” Madison recalls, a broad smile splitting his face. “I told them, ‘No way! I’ve got a better deal.’ And I pointed directly into Myrlie’s face and said, ‘You need to run. You’ve got to do it.’ ”

The closer Evers-Williams got to Arlington National Cemetery, the more pensive she became. Memories washed over her, altering her mood the way a slow, sweeping searchlight can transform the night sea from blinding brilliance to inky blackness. She began to reminisce about her life with Medgar: how they had met on her first day at Mississippi’s Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College; her decision to drop out after her sophomore year to marry him against her family’s wishes; his decision to join the NAACP because it was the most radical, nonviolent organization fighting segregation; the courage it took for him to open a NAACP field office in 1954 in Jackson, Miss.; how she had been his partner from the beginning in civil rights work.

As their car entered the cemetery, Evers-Williams continued to talk, her husky voice growing more reflective. “She was describing that night when he was shot,” says Madison, “how the bullet went through him and landed inside the house. She was talking matter-of-fact, talking about all she went through for 30 years to get Byron De La Beckwith convicted of killing Medgar. How some of the people in Mississippi had told her, ‘Let it rest.’ ”

As they walked across the cemetery and approached the grave site, Evers-Williams became silent. She had begun to think of a more recent memory, of a rainy Saturday four months earlier, Feb. 5, 1994, when Evers-Williams was sitting at the prosecution table in the Hinds County Courthouse in Jackson, Miss. While a court official read the verdict--”We find the defendant guilty as charged”--Evers-Williams clutched the hand of her 40-year-old son, Darrell, and covered her mouth with her other hand. She composed herself long enough to hear the judge sentence Beckwith, whose two previous trials had ended in hung juries, to life in prison. Then, in a burst of emotion that had been bottled up for more than 30 years, Evers-Williams walked out of the courtroom, flung her arms around her son and cried. An hour or so later, she emerged to greet reporters. Her eyes still moist, she thrust her right fist into the air and shouted, “All I want to do is say, ‘Yay, Medgar! Yay!’ ”

Without saying a word, the three stood in front of Medgar’s grave. No one was nearby. Off in the distance, they could see a knot of mourners at the graves of President John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. But here, it was just the three of them, a family of compatriots within the NAACP.

Madison broke the reverie, “Myrlie,” he said, “Medgar is speaking to you now from the grave. And he is telling you that, just as he died for the NAACP, you’ve got to become the chair to see that it continues to live.”

For a long moment, nothing happened. The cemetery was still, everything a blur. “I don’t know where that comment came from,” Madison says now. “I mean, it was very surreal. Nobody was around us, but it was like four people were there: Walter, Myrlie and myself--and Medgar.”

Then all of a sudden, Myrlie Evers-Williams grinned and started to laugh. “You know what,” she turned toward Madison. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

Last February, in an election many believe was a historic turning point for the NAACP, Evers-Williams defeated incumbent William F. Gibson by one vote to become the organization’s chairwoman. Her victory came at a time when many of the NAACP’s most ardent supporters were in despair over the organization’s future. Since its founding in 1909, no other civil rights group has had a record that can match the NAACP’s achievements--campaigning against lynchings, successfully arguing for school desegregation in the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision, effectively lobbying for the Voting Rights and Civil Rights bills in the late 1960s.

But it is as if success has choked the NAACP. Since the early ‘70s the organization has floundered, caught in the crosscurrents of many of the social changes it helped bring about. The last time the NAACP mounted a successful campaign was in leading the civil rights community in opposing the nomination of Judge Robert H. Bork to the Supreme Court. But too often the NAACP hasn’t known whether it should be a congressional lobbying group, a grass-roots political organization, a social service agency or a black chamber of commerce.

Still, nothing in the NAACP’s turbulent history can compare to the crisis now confronting Myrlie Evers-Williams. The organization is about $4 million in debt; the group’s bookkeeping has been so chaotic for so long that nobody knows if that figure is accurate. Foundation and corporate support, a key source of funding for the NAACP’s programs, has dried up as a result. Virtually all of the paid staff at its national headquarters in Baltimore, nearly 200 people, have been laid off during the last year. Since the Rev. Benjamin F. Chavis Jr. was fired last year in the wake of a sex-and-money scandal, the group has been operating without a permanent executive director. And the 64-member board remains as split today as the day it voted 30-29 to elect Evers-Williams to be chairwoman.

The implosion of the NAACP has had reverberations throughout America. Without a strong political organization, African American citizens lost a crucial, supportive voice precisely at a time when hard-won civil rights gains have come under withering attack. “The lack of a viable and strong NAACP is very damaging,” says Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), himself one of the early heroes of the civil rights movement. “We need the NAACP now more than ever before to be out front, laying the foundation, laying the groundwork to take us through the ‘90s into the 21st Century. If the organization is not strong and viable and is bogged down with internal problems, it is almost impossible for it to be effective.”

*

Joe Madison is pacing beneath the stained-glass windows of the darkened chapel at NAACP headquarters, a stately red-brick building in an office park at the edge of Baltimore. He can barely contain his frustration, striding past Evers-Williams and looking at his watch.

“Be cool!” Evers-Williams says, hoping to lighten Madison’s frustration. Tall and conservatively dressed, with an unlined face and chiseled features that make her look considerably younger than her 62 years, Evers-Williams has a regal presence. Accustomed to being at the center of attention, she never conveys the arrogance of power. A makeup artist is applying rouge and fussing over her hair for a fashion magazine photo shoot. It had been scheduled for 3 p.m.; it is now nearly 5.

“I’m real cool,” Madison retorts. His attitude chills the air around him. He has gone to some trouble to arrange for her to have a private dinner in Washington with a potential corporate sponsor, someone with deep pockets and a tight schedule. Dinner is set for 6 p.m., and it is obvious that they will be late.

“Couldn’t this have waited?” Madison asks, now out of Evers-Williams’ earshot. “I mean, the NAACP is having trouble raising money. This is someone who’s willing to talk about giving us some money, and we’re wasting time with a magazine shoot. This is crazy.”

But there’s nothing to be done. Evers-Williams has promised that she would sit for a portrait, and she will keep her word. The corporate representative will have to wait.

If ever a scene captured the dilemma facing Evers-Williams, this photo shoot is it. Dollars and favorable public relations are the necessary elements for her plans to reform the battered image of the NAACP. But she also needs the luxury of time to reflect about how best to revive the association. And just as Madison hovered and tapped his watch, the NAACP faithful are waiting and expecting the impossible immediately.

So far, she has gotten off to a slow start. Four days after she was elected, her husband, Walter Williams, died of prostate cancer. His death was a personal setback, draining her of energy and emotion at the precise moment when she needed all her resources. Then, in the midst of her grief, she had to undergo eye surgery, rendering her cloistered at her home in Bend, Ore. Her inability to travel disappointed NAACP members, who had wanted to see and hear their new leader immediately after her victory.

It disappointed Evers-Williams as well. “This has been a very precarious situation for me, particularly since I said I wanted to be involved right from the beginning,” she says. “I felt it was important to hit the ground running. I have always felt that way, especially when I start something new. I felt what was needed couldn’t wait, and I was eager to put my stamp on things. I haven’t been able to do that, and it has left me open to be crucified by either side.”

Her trip to Washington this May was her first visit to the East Coast since her election to the unpaid one-year-term position. Arriving in the capital early in the morning and operating on only two hours of sleep, she quickly began to make the rounds. First stop was an address at the morning assembly of a Jewish religious convention. She then stopped by the opening of Senate confirmation hearings for surgeon general nominee Dr. Henry W. Foster Jr., forcing White House aides to scramble to get her a front-row seat. After a brief lunch at her hotel, where she conducted business in a flurry of telephone conversations, she rushed to Baltimore for a show of solidarity with the few employees still working at national headquarters.

Throughout it all, Evers-Williams radiated humility. It was as if, despite her frenetic schedule, she was keeping track of a larger goal that she alone saw and was intent on capturing. “She brings a kind of dignity and purpose to the organization,” says C. DeLores Tucker, a longtime friend to Evers-Williams. “There is more substance to her than what might be evident at first glance.”

As Evers-Wiliams glided down the corridors of the Baltimore headquarters, her Ferragamo pumps clicking on the linoleum floor, she seemed unfazed by how many empty offices there were. Volunteers, some who once were paid staffers, giggled and smiled as Evers-Williams stood in their cubicles and talked with each one of them.

“I’m so happy you are here,” said one woman. “I just hope and pray that you will make a difference for all of us.”

“I’m going to try,” Evers-Williams responded softly.

Those empty offices are a symbol of all that the NAACP has squandered in recent years--not just money, but promises and prestige. Evers-Williams knows that regaining the NAACP’s status may take years, but that she has to resolve the financial crisis immediately or there may be no organization at all. The problem is that nobody--not Evers-Williams herself nor members of the board nor the rank and file nor the corporate and foundation donors--knows how deeply the organization is in debt; $4 million remains the official figure until an audit is released, possibly at the NAACP’s national convention in July.

“It is rather unfortunate that this large, respected national organization didn’t take its financial responsibilities more seriously,” said Dan Borochoff, president of the American Institute of Philanthropy, a highly regarded national charity watchdog group. “The problem in this field is that image counts for too much.” And in Borochoff’s view, the NAACP had escaped scrutiny because of its sterling civil rights image. Donors continued to give, and the media didn’t begin to investigate until the crisis had escalated into immense proportions.

Now, almost all the figures the NAACP supplies are viewed as suspect. For example, the organization says its membership is about 675,000 in 2,200 branches across the nation. Privately, NAACP officials admit that membership number is inflated, a practice that began under Executive Director Benjamin L. Hooks, who claimed a membership of 500,000 at a time when it was more likely half that number. Chavis continued that practice, inflating the membership even further.

Historically, the NAACP has masked its finances to protect its members from lawsuits. But the same secrecy that helped the NAACP survive for decades in white-dominated small towns is now a principal source of its fiscal problems. With no internal system of oversight, members can easily take advantage of the organization. In fact, one of its splashiest fund-raising events--the multimillion-dollar Image Awards--has been marred by scandal over money-handling practices. Debt also has been a constant, something like gravity, that has always weighed heavily upon the organization.

“The NAACP has always operated in the red,” says one board member. “We never worried much about operating in the red because we always eventually paid our bills. But as far as I can remember--and I’ve been on the board for 12 years--we have operated at a $1.5-million deficit from year to year.”

That deficit rose during Chavis’ one-year tenure. Spending lavishly, he plunged the organization deeper and deeper into debt. When the board fired Chavis for secretly settling a claim with a woman who threatened him and the association with a sexual-harassment lawsuit, major donors like the Ford Foundation and General Motors refused to give the NAACP any more money.

Many of the NAACP’s critics held Board Chairman William F. Gibson as responsible for the crisis as Chavis. “The problems were obviously always there,” says William Lucy, an official of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and a seven-year board member. “But now, state leaders, branch leaders started identifying those problems with the chair and the NAACP bureaucracy. Pretty soon the problems started to fall at the chairman’s doorstep.”

In a series of syndicated columns last summer and fall, journalist Carl T. Rowan, a lifetime member of the NAACP, accused Gibson of “double dipping” on his expense reimbursements and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on personal trips, gifts and meals. Gibson denied Rowan’s accusations, calling them personal and mean-spirited attempts to discredit him within the NAACP. Indeed, dissidents within the NAACP were leaking material to Rowan.

The NAACP’s reaction to Rowan’s charges was to hire Coopers & Lybrand, an accounting firm, to investigate the association’s finances and to study the expense reports of its leaders. The report has not been completed, but Evers-Williams has promised to release its findings. Indeed, part of the motivation behind electing Evers-Williams as chairwoman was that the NAACP needed someone whose integrity would be unquestioned.

Already, Evers-Williams has tightened the financial controls of the NAACP and established a committee to review all salaries and expenses. However, she has been less successful at raising money. After a flurry of contributions that followed her into office, she has generated only $500,000 in cash and $1.7 million in pledges.

Rowan, who was instrumental in raising most of that money, believes the burden of raising money will depend on whomever is appointed as the next executive director. “If they can come up with someone who is nationally known, influential and able to appeal to a broad range of groups, the NAACP can escape from its current crisis,” Rowan says. “Myrlie Evers alone can’t do it.”

*

If you had asked her two years ago, Evers-Williams would have told you without hesitation that the last thing on her mind was becoming chairwoman of the NAACP. It wasn’t that she didn’t care or didn’t think she had something to contribute or that she had lost interest. After all, she had been a board member for 10 years and considered the group an extension of her own family. But the idea of assuming the leadership of the group--well, that was beyond the pale.

Walter Williams’ doctors didn’t know how long he would live, and Evers-Williams wanted “to be free to be with Walter and do whatever was necessary for him” for as much time as he had left.

They had met in Claremont, Calif., where she and her children had relocated several years after the murder of Medgar Evers. She had decided to make a new life and was earning her bachelors’ degree in sociology at Pomona College. One day, a handsome, stocky man approached her and asked if she might be interested in seeing some drawings he had made of her husband. His name was Walter Williams, and it wasn’t long before he was escorting Myrlie Evers on dinner dates.

Williams himself had a distinguished record as a civil rights activist. A longshoreman, he had sued his union to compel it to provide equal and integrated resources to black dockworkers on the West Coast. C. DeLores Tucker, who has known Myrlie since the ‘70s, remembers her friend calling for dating advice after meeting Williams.

“She was going on and on about how wonderful he was, how good he was to her and the children,” says Tucker, now chairwoman of the National Political Congress of Black Women, Inc. “But she couldn’t make up her mind about whether to marry him or not. I told her what in the hell was she talking to me about it for? If he was that good a man, she should go on and marry him.”

From the beginning, Evers-Williams says, her second husband never attempted to push Medgar Evers out of her life. “My children and I did not become free until that guilty verdict [against Beckwith] came through,” she says. “Who else would live all those years with another man’s ghost?”

During the trial that led to Beckwith’s conviction, lawyers suggested it would be best if Evers-Williams appeared in Mississippi without her husband. “I told them that was unacceptable because he had been so supportive and deserved to be there with me,” she says. “And he said, ‘I’m not going if they think it best.’

“After the trial--I’ll never forget this--he met me at the airport and gave me a great big hug for winning. He said, ‘Do I have my wife now?’ After all that time, 30 years or so, he now had his wife to himself. That just summarized the gift he had given me, the freedom to pursue that case and bring justice for Medgar. Only a very strong, very secure man could have done something like that.”

After marrying Williams in 1976, she worked as an administrator at Claremont College, an advertising executive at Seligman and Latz, Inc., and as national director for community affairs for Arco. From 1987 to 1991 she served on the Los Angeles Board of Public Works, the first black woman ever to have done so.

Julian Bond, the civil rights activist, recalls the first time he met Evers-Williams at a California political event shortly after Medgar Evers’ death. “She just seemed to me to be an impressive woman who on the one hand was Medgar Evers’ widow, but on the other hand wasn’t living in the past. Without dismissing the past, she was moving on. She was making a life for herself and her kids.”

But now with her second husband dying, Evers-Williams found it difficult to move on. Old colleagues and friends like Bond, Tucker and Madison were pleading with her to run against Gibson, but she couldn’t make up her mind.

By early January, Evers-Williams knew she had to come to a decision and asked her husband what she should do. The story she tells has an almost biblical ring.

“Why are you procrastinating about this?” Williams said to his wife, his anger rising at her indecisiveness. “Why? Why don’t you make up your mind? You know what you have to do.”

“I can’t leave you,” she said.

“I don’t have long, and this is my fight, too,” he said. “And you have to do it.”

Evers-Williams says she was so shocked at the conviction in her husband’s voice that tears came to her eyes.

“Why didn’t you let me know you felt that way?” she asked.

“I did, but you weren’t listening. You were too worried about me to hear what I was saying.”

*

When NAACP board members arrived in New York City in early February for their annual meeting, the election campaign had become so vituperative and intense that neither the Gibson nor the Evers-Williams forces had any idea who was going to win. Julian Bond, helping to lead the dissidents, was so nervous that he could not bear to be in the hotel the night before the election. He took his wife to see the off-Broadway production of “Jelly Roll.” “It was the only way I could calm down,” he says. “We had varying counts of the board members and were really worried that Myrlie might not pull this off.”

In typical fashion, Evers-Williams remained serene amid the frenzy. “It wasn’t the case of letting all of us do the work for her,” Bond remembers. “Myrlie had already spent a lot of her time calling every single board member. By the time she arrived in New York, she had done all she could do.”

The next morning, about 700 NAACP members packed into a ballroom on the second floor of the Sheraton Hotel. From the beginning, the meeting exhibited the deep divisions within the organization. Gibson supporters sat in the middle of the room. They sported bright yellow jackets, and caps marked with logos that identified them as members of the South Carolina NAACP. Evers-Williams’ supporters surrounded them, waving hand-lettered signs that read “Gibson Must Go” or “Gibson Loves $$$$, Not NAACP.”

Several dozen print reporters roamed the hotel, and a bank of television cameras lined one wall. Usually, the NAACP’s annual meetings are private, reflecting the group’s bitter mistrust of the media. Unlike the ‘60s, when young white men from Northern newspapers and television networks encouraged NAACP leaders by broadcasting acts of racism in the South, nowadays, black reporters working for white-owned media were asking tough questions of the NAACP. To many of the organization’s leaders, this was not progress. Worse, it was a mockery of their struggle for integration--black reporters wouldn’t have their jobs if it hadn’t been for the NAACP. Now, these reporters seemed to relish feeding off the group’s misfortune.

At one point in the meeting, Gibson seized upon the enmity between the NAACP and media by asking that the session be closed to reporters. “No! No! No!” shouted many in the audience. “Let the media stay! Gibson must go!”

For Joe Madison, this was the moment that he allowed himself to believe that Evers-Williams might pull off the victory. “You know in the black community, among certain leadership, they tell you: ‘Don’t go to the press because the press is the enemy,’ ” he says. “I couldn’t believe it. And, I said then, ‘We’ve won. We’ve won.’ What that said is that we don’t trust the leadership to the point we have to have [reporters] to have it on the record. That doesn’t happen in the black community.”

Something else happened as well. For the first time, the NAACP’s membership was telling Gibson it had lost confidence in him. A wiry man with a bantam manner, Gibson had dedicated his life to the NAACP, sacrificing a dental practice in Greenville, S.C., to wind his way up the ranks from youth branches, the local chapter and the South Carolina Conference to--finally, in 1985--the chair of the NAACP’s board.

More than anyone else in the association, Gibson understood that for African Americans from small towns, being on the board of directors meant respect, prestige and a sense of power that they’d never have had otherwise. His awareness of the deeply felt anger and frustration of growing up in the segregated South and the projected beliefs of inferiority and thinly veiled contempt from whites and Northern, middle-class blacks pushed Gibson to fight fiercely for his stake in the NAACP.

And Gibson wasn’t wrong. The vitriol hurled at him did come primarily from a new generation of Northern urban professionals. They were people like influential New York State board member Hazel Dukes and union leader William Lucy, who believed strongly that the NAACP was too mired in its Southern past and had to become a more aggressive political organization. For Dukes, Lucy and their allies, Gibson’s fried chicken-and-biscuits style of political leadership was an embarrassment. When asked directly, they often found it difficult to describe precisely what it was about Gibson that bothered them on so emotional a level. What they dared not say aloud but whispered in private, was that he struck them as low-class.

“If there’s a White House meeting on issues that affect us,” says Lucy, “I am much more comfortable with Myrlie in that meeting than I would be with Dr. Gibson.”

As the membership meeting proceeded, speaker after speaker denounced Gibson. After about 2 1/2 hours, Enolia P. McMillan rose to urge the membership to vote a show of no confidence in Gibson. Ninety years old, McMillan is a longtime NAACP member and former president of the association, and her act--perhaps more than any other--was a signal to the board as to how deeply dissatisfied members were. The voice vote passed, and the meeting ended with Evers-Williams’ supporters shouting in celebration.

The rejoicing, as it turned out, was premature, because many on the board still remained loyal to Gibson. When the board meeting began an hour later, a strident cluster of Evers-Williams supporters crowded into the conference room and refused to leave. They sang protest songs and shouted slogans. “They said they didn’t trust the meeting to be conducted fairly,” says Bond. “They demanded they be allowed to stay and witness the vote. Gibson was not having that. So a stalemate occurred.”

Evers-Williams’ strategists began to fear that they had overplayed their hand. They were well aware that the election was far from won, and that some board members still had not made up their minds. If Gibson could brand her support as irrational, the election could be lost. It is unclear whose idea it was, but someone suggested that Evers-Williams go to the podium and ask the protesters to depart. “In the interest of unity, could you please leave and let us conduct business,” she told the group. They began to walk out of the room, singing “Only for you, Myrlie. Only for you, Myrlie.”

The vote was then conducted by secret ballot. Pieces of paper were torn from a legal pad and distributed around the O-shaped table. Fifty-nine board members marked their ballots and handed them to monitors at the back of the room. According to a monitor, the vote count went early for Gibson. “At one point, the vote was 29 to 10 in Gibson’s favor,” the monitor said. “Then the next 20 votes were for Myrlie.”

When the vote was announced, Evers-Williams smiled broadly, and Gibson offered his congratulations as he passed the gavel to her. Someone on the board then called for another vote, one that would be recorded as unanimous in Evers-Williams’ favor. One year after she had witnessed the conviction of Medgar Evers’ murderer, she was at the command of the NAACP.

“This is the second time in just over a year that I’ve been able to put my fists up and say, ‘Yay!’ ” Evers-Williams said in an emotional victory speech. “I have said Medgar died for the NAACP. I will live for the NAACP.”

*

Two generations have matured since Medgar and Myrlie Evers first organized the NAACP’s Mississippi field office. In many ways, their job back then was simple and easy to define. They wanted to change the culture of segregation or, as Evers-Williams told the jury that convicted Beckwith, “to integrate the schools, to open swimming pools, use libraries, to go to the department stores, and to be called by name instead of just ‘boy’ or ‘girl.’ ”

Medgar Evers died to bring about those changes. But since those dangerous days, the NAACP has had precious little to attract a new generation of Americans except memories and history. What most people in the post-civil rights era know about the NAACP is that it was their parents’ organization, outdated and beset by an internal malaise.

It’s impossible to underestimate the NAACP’s “long period of disorientation,” says Georgetown University Law Center Professor Emma Coleman Jordan. Assigned to the Justice Department as a White House Fellow in 1980 and 1981, during the transition from the Jimmy Carter Administration to President Ronald Reagan’s first term, she met with a delegation of NAACP members who had come to talk with the new Administration.

“I was disappointed about what they came to talk about,” Jordan says. “They came to discuss contracts with the [Justice] Department, not real civil rights issues. Even so, the Reagan Administration let them know they were not welcome and not needed by the new guys in town. It was clear they were not players anymore and had become, as the Reagan people used to call them, ‘so-called civil rights leaders.’ They were out of the game and had no plan to get back in it.”

Six months after her election, Evers-Williams still has not been able to answer Jordan’s implied question: Can the NAACP get back into the game? But before she can provide an answer, she has to resolve so many others: Can she untangle the NAACP’s financial affairs and professionalize its operation? Can she mend the fractious relationships on the board and, by extension, within the organization itself? And can she find a new executive director who can effectively administer the association while helping to formulate a new mission?

All of these questions hovered in the air during the elaborate Mother’s Day ceremony to swear in Evers-Williams. Her supporters organized the glittering affair at the Metropolitan A.M.E. Church in Washington to symbolize what they hoped would be the rebirth of the NAACP. Never before had a board chair been sworn into office in so dramatic and public a fashion, highlighted by a group of seven current and former federal judges who administered the oath of office. “But for the NAACP, not one of us would have been federal judges,” said A. Leon Higginbotham, one of the judges who spoke during the ceremony.

The event provided an opportunity for the aging civil rights leadership--Rosa Parks, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Coretta Scott King and Vernon E. Jordan Jr.--to gather together one more time. In the audience were U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno and retired Gen. Colin L. Powell, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but noticeably absent at the invitation-only ceremony were the young black professionals that Evers-Williams will have to persuade to “come home” to the NAACP.

If Douglas Price is typical, it will be a hard sell. A 31-year-old regulator for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in New York, Price can’t decide whether he wants to belong to the NAACP, regardless of who is in charge. “The contradiction is just too obvious,” Price told a reporter. “You want someone young, black and progressive to join your organization, and you’re throwing something that’s invitation-only, folks-under-45-need-not-ask.”

Sitting in her hotel room in downtown Washington, Evers-Williams acknowledges that running the NAACP is more taxing than she had ever realized. The Gibson faction on the board continues to view her with suspicion, and the devastating cuts at national headquarters have crippled the organization and its ability to raise money.

“There are times that I feel as though I have this huge, beautiful cake with frosting all over it and hundreds of candles all on the top,” Evers-Williams says, spreading her arms out in wide arcs to show the enormity of responsibilities. “I take a deep breath and blow out all the candles. Then I smile and turn to take a bow. But when I look around again all the candles come back to full flame. That’s what this job is like.”