PERSONALITY IN THE NEWS : Mfume Gambles on Himself, NAACP : Congress: Rising lawmaker’s decision to leave House has some scratching their heads. But the moves may open doors to new prestige, influence.

Kweisi Mfume is a man who takes long shots, an easy mark for the kind of challenge that defies the expectations of those around him.

A self-described juvenile delinquent, an unmarried father of five by his 21st birthday, an underemployed high school dropout “headed to hell in a handbasket,” Mfume remade himself into a well-read, dapper and persuasive member of Congress by doing the unlikely and choosing the path of most resistance.

“You come into this world with nothing and you leave with nothing,” he is fond of saying. “All that matters is what happens between birth and death.”

But even some who know him best--from his old street-running buddies in Baltimore to his colleagues in Congress--are shaking their heads over his latest gamble: taking over as president and chief executive of the debt-ridden and dissent-riddled NAACP.

In the earlier gambits that vaulted Mfume from a petty street criminal to a six-term congressman from Baltimore, he had little to lose. But now he is a rising star within the Democratic Party--seemingly a man with a future in government and politics.

His new role with the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, which has brought tarnish to those in its recent leadership, appears to be a radical digression from his steadily upward course. Why, some are asking, would Mfume be willing to risk it all on such a daunting job?

Asked just that during a recent interview, Mfume, 47, smiled and looked around his spacious Capitol Hill office. “It’s not that much different,” he said. “The Congress of the United States, with all its personalities and politics is not that much different from the NAACP and its personalities and politics. This is an opportunity I can’t let pass.”

What Mfume left unsaid was the gambler’s creed: If played just so, he stands to gain more at the helm of the NAACP than he ever could by staying in Congress. If he succeeds at restoring the NAACP to its former glory, he will soar from being one among 435 members of the House to the most influential spokesman for the nation’s oldest and most respected civil rights organization.

For more than a year, the NAACP has been in a free fall. News reports in July 1994 disclosed that former Executive Director Benjamin F. Chavis Jr. used the group’s money to pay $330,000 to silence a female employee who had accused him of sexual discrimination. Since then, NAACP officials have grappled with internal leadership struggles, staff reductions, loss of financial support from long-time corporate and philanthropic donors and debts that continue to hover around $3 million.

His rare critics question whether Mfume has the managerial skills of the sort so desperately needed at the NAACP.

Yet, some say, managerial chores may not be as important as the know-how to build bridges across wide human gulfs. Mfume is an expert at that skill, having taken himself from life on Baltimore’s streets to a well-honed persona in public life.

Back in the 1960s, Mfume was a smaller-than-average street kid named Frizzell Gray. His family and friends called him “Pee Wee.”

He lived with his mother, stepfather and three younger stepsisters in the compact, all-black neighborhood of Turner Station, near the smoke-belching Bethlehem Steel plant. The family later moved to a west Baltimore neighborhood. Always close to his mother, Pee Wee despised his abusive stepfather, a truck driver who abandoned the family, plunging those left behind into hand-to-mouth poverty.

When he was 16, his mother fell ill and died as he cradled her in his arms. Pee Wee quit school. He blended in with a street gang that initiated him by commanding that he roust a drunk for whatever money was in his pockets.

“I had to come back with his wallet, but I didn’t want to hurt the man,” Mfume told the New Yorker magazine last year. “I had no desire to hurt anybody in my life. So what I did was grab him, push him down on the ground and rip his wallet out and hope that he didn’t jump at me.”

From that rite of passage, Pee Wee slid downhill, hanging out with neighborhood toughs, swigging sweet wine in alleys, siring five babies by four different women.

“Many years ago, when I was on my way to hell in a handbasket as a high school dropout, as a teen-aged parent, as someone who had given up on his society and had gotten away from his church and spiritual values that were a part of me as a child, I had become hardened and in many respects even heartless,” Mfume said during a recent news conference.

But before the ‘60s ended, Frizzell Gray renounced the thug’s life and dropped his corner-hanging gang for reasons that are unclear even to him.

An epiphany struck him one night, telling him to honor his mother’s memory and return to her strict Roman Catholic discipline.

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To symbolize his spiritual transformation, he adopted the African-flavored name--Kweisi Mfume, which in Swahili means “the conquering son of kings.”

He earned a high school equivalency certificate in 1968, then graduated with honors from Morgan State University and received a master’s degree in liberal arts from Johns Hopkins University. He read voraciously, perfected his crisp diction and, for a while, flirted with acting lessons in New York. He also continued to stay in touch with his five children.

To make financial ends meet, he leveraged a stint as an errand boy for one of Baltimore’s popular black disc jockeys into his own jazz program and radio talk show. His “Ebony Reflections Show” made the smooth-talking man with the unusual name a popular personality among Baltimore’s growing black electorate. With little more than outspokenness and the popularity from his radio show, he won a seat on the Baltimore City Council in 1979.

Later, against the wishes of the city’s black political establishment, Mfume set his sights on the U.S. House of Representatives, replacing the popular Rep. Parren Mitchell in 1986. He won the seat, beating the former congressman’s own nephew, Clarence Mitchell III, in the process.

Once in Congress, Mfume became a forceful advocate for civil rights legislation and minority business interests.

By the summer of 1992, Mfume glimpsed another opportunity to set himself apart from his colleagues in the House. As he saw it, Bill Clinton would capture the White House, becoming the first Democratic president in 12 years, and a record number of black politicians would ride his coattails into Congress. The larger, stronger Congressional Black Caucus would need a leader, someone telegenic and aggressive enough to make the nation pay attention to black federal legislators.

In the first hotly contested election for the caucus leadership, Mfume narrowly won and became the most recognized black person on Capitol Hill.

Mfume wanted the caucus to have a more visible voice, especially to demonstrate how it could be relevant to black Americans who did not track daily occurrences from within the Washington Beltway. As chairman, he was influential in pushing the administration to send troops to Haiti and led the caucus’ denunciations of the president for withdrawing the nomination of University of Pennsylvania professor C. Lani Guinier for the Justice Department’s top civil rights post.

Perhaps his boldest move came at the caucus’ 1994 legislative conference. Mfume announced a “sacred covenant” linking the caucus with Minister Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, a group that had support within inner-city communities but was under attack for its leader’s history of anti-Semitic and racist comments.

For Mfume, the covenant was one roll of the dice too many. He was forced to backtrack under intense pressure from within the caucus and from the traditional civil rights community.

“From that moment on, the caucus never regained its footing under Mfume,” said David Bositis, senior policy analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington think tank that tracks issues related to black Americans.

Indeed, the congressional elections later that year swept Democrats out of the House leadership.

“I’ve been a minority all my life,” Mfume said. “Being one in the House isn’t that unusual or the sole reason I’m leaving.”

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) said she initially questioned why Mfume would surrender his seat to lead the NAACP, but came to see that the move is not as great a gamble as it first seemed. “Kweisi also knows that he could always come back to Congress if this doesn’t work out,” she said.

But Mfume is not one to look back.

“I learned at an early age that the road less traveled is the road less certain because it doesn’t have goal posts and road signs and markers,” Mfume said in the news conference, previewing a message of personal redemption that he is likely to repeat in countless NAACP speeches to come. “But if you travel that road in an honest search of yourself and your feelings and your desire to make a difference in life, that road can lead you to the kind of personal satisfaction that you seek in life because you believe you have made a commitment.”