National Icon-in-the-Making?

The New York Hilton’s teak-paneled Grand Ballroom erupts with gospel music. Bodies are jostling toward the stage, where a man has just finished speaking. Kweisi Mfume bends at the waist, reaching toward outstretched hands, beaming and mouthing thanks. In a few hours he will be formally voted into office as the next president and chief executive of the NAACP. But at this moment, acknowledging the arms thrust plaintively toward him, he is like the hub of a wheel with countless spokes.

On this Saturday morning in February, the NAACP is eager to be reborn, to rise from the organizational turmoil and debt that has savaged the once-proud civil rights group. In his first major address to members, Mfume feeds a crowd starving for renewal with his rich oratory. “From this point on,” he tells them, “when they write against the backdrop of history, they will say that the NAACP found itself in New York. It dusted itself off and began a new and engaging challenge.”

As he stirs the crowd, Mfume--his adopted name is pronounced Kwah-EE-see Oom-FOO-may, Swahili for “conquering son of kings”--is once again reinventing himself. For Mfume, at 47, there had been so many new beginnings--orphaned street thug turned honors graduate; profligate father to proud patriarch of a “non-traditional family”; from Frizzell “Peewee” Gray to Kweisi Mfume; from radio personality to politician, from congressman to civil rights leader.

The hundreds of members of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People in the hotel ballroom are finding it difficult to rise above the past two years of disheartening scandal. Previous executive director Benjamin F. Chavis was fired after paying hush money to a woman claiming sexual harassment. Former board chairman William Gibson was unseated after allegedly pampering himself with $112,000 in NAACP money. Mismanagement drove the group near bankruptcy, with a $4.7 million debt.

Some credibility was restored, and a margin of debt eliminated after the election last year of board chairwoman Myrlie Evers-Williams, widow of the slain civil rights activist. But in the wake of scandal are questions about whether the NAACP matters anymore and what remains of a vision that once changed a nation. The organization is riven by bickering and dissension; its glory days of Thurgood Marshall, Medger Evers and influential lobbyist Clarence Mitchell, the so-called 101st senator, seemed seem nothing but a fading memory.

The air crackles with anxiety in the ballroom. Outgoing president Rupert Richardson tries to ease it by comparing the NAACP to the pink Eveready Bunny, both “still going.” The effort falls flat. Factional cross-currents flood the room. Some, like board member John J. Mance of Glendale, are die-hard supporters of Gibson and mentally exhausted by the infighting. Those ever loyal to Evers-Williams chant, “Myrlie, Myrlie” as she enters the room. Member Michael Meyers loudly demands that her record be debated before a routine vote approving her tenure so far. Someone yells: “Go home, Mike.” A minor revolt breaks out over the seating of new board members.

Mfume arrives late and quietly takes his seat at the dais of the room where John F. Kennedy made one of his last public appearances and Ronald Reagan declared his candidacy for president. Mfume is a freeze-frame in the midst of chaos. His mind is racing. He feels the disarray in the room. On his agenda: more financial belt-tightening, staff retrenchment, vital generational changes. But more than anything, he must convey his mandate for pulling them back together as a family.

Stepping to the lectern, a new face to old warriors, Mfume hits each core issue. When he launches into rededicating the organization’s fight against intolerance, Mfume feels as if he is almost levitating over his notes. This is good. After years of public speaking, first as Baltimore city councilman and later as U.S. representative and chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, Mfume can sense when he is bonding with his audience. The moment takes over and the words gush forth, the voice rises and falls, phrases punctuated by revival-style responses from the crowd in preacherlike rhythm.

“Jim Crow is dead. But Jim Crow Jr. is alive and well. Unlike his father (“All right!” someone calls out), who liked to segregate (“All right!) and discriminate (“Uh, huh!”) and got joy from our lynching (“All right!”), Jim Crow Jr. is different. (“OK!”) Oh yeah, he likes to discriminate and he still likes to segregate because it’s in his genes. (“Oh, yeah!”) But he gets his joy watching us lynch ourselves. (“Oh yeah,” and the applause thunders.) So let me just say that there will be those in the NAACP who will counsel us to be silent in this reactionary time. (“Well?”) They will whisper in your ear to look the other way (“Yes!”) and hope for the best. (“Yes, yes!”) I refuse to stand mute when liberty is denied. (“Yeah!”)

“So when you leave New York today, and you go back across this country, the nation that we love, to every city, town and hamlet (“Praise Him!”), go tell it on the mountain (“Yes!”) that the NAACP is back. Go tell it on the mountain that one day we met the enemy and the enemy was us. Go tell it on the mountain that we will fight the forces of discrimination and we will chase them to hell and beyond, but we will change this America!”

The room is a bedlam of joy. Later, Mfume remembers only returning to his seat.

*

Fast-forward 72 hours to the Great Hall of the Justice Department in Washington, D.C. President Clinton rises and places his right hand over his heart. Beside him, Mfume follows suit as the choir of Morgan State University, Mfume’s alma mater in Baltimore, sings the “Star-Spangled Banner.” On hand for Mfume’s formal swearing-in as NAACP president and CEO are Vice President Al Gore, Coretta Scott King, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Cabinet officers, senators, Washington and Baltimore mayors and 300 other dignitaries and guests. A blue banner etched with gold letters spelling NAACP hangs as backdrop between the twin aluminum statues of the Spirit of Justice and the Majesty of Law. Clinton, in his remarks, praises Mfume as a “uniquely gifted man with a personal history that shimmers with the promise of America and the possibility of personal renewal.”

Before Mfume takes the oath of office, he invites four of his five adult sons to the stage (the fifth is taking a college exam), pulls them close so that they stand together in an awkward huddle, arms linked, and then says--his voice booming across the hall and onto the C-SPAN feed that will broadcast the event--”If God chose to give me nothing else in life, the five of you represent a gift for which I will be forever grateful.”

The young men--Donald, Kevin, Keith, Michael and the absent Ronald--are at once striking emblems of Kweisi Mfume’s long-ago weakness and redemption. The five were born out of wedlock to four women before Mfume turned 22, an era of his life others like to call “the dark time.” That he came to embrace and help raise them from childhood is what Clinton meant when he described Mfume’s “virtue of never giving up on yourself or your family or your common possibility.”

Julian Bond, an NAACP board member who was on the search committee that seized on Mfume last year, says months later: “If [Mfume] had done nothing more than father those children, that’s just irresponsible and it’s to be condemned.” That Mfume assumed responsibility for his sons as a young adult is seen as something both redemptive and commendable. “Forgiveness and a second chance are part of the black experience,” Bond says. “Particularly forgiveness.”

*

He was born Frizzell Gray in Baltimore in 1948, his mother a cleaning lady and devout Roman Catholic, his stepfather a truck driver and heavy drinker who earned the enmity of the slight, bookish boy they called Peewee. The family lived in what amounted to the black working-class township of Turners Station southeast of Baltimore, just blocks from the Bethlehem Steel plant, where many of the fathers in the community worked. The Grays later moved to the row houses of West Baltimore.

His mother, Mary Elizabeth, was the single stable influence in the boy’s life. She instilled religious values, introduced him to the world of books and became his best friend. “She was a good lady,” recalls childhood chum Carl Swann. “She loved her son. Her son loved her.” Swann remembers that Mary Elizabeth gave her son books on the great civil rights leaders, and Peewee would be absent from the playground for weeks soaking up the information. The story of the tragedy that followed--often retold by Mfume and showcased in an autobiography scheduled to be published next month--has come to define him in the eyes of his constituents.

When Frizzell was 12, his stepfather abandoned the family, and later Mary Elizabeth Gray was found to have cancer. Years later, Mfume would describe the moment, at age 16, when his mother literally collapsed in his arms and died.

That same night, a longtime friend of his mother’s revealed to the grieving Frizzell that he was his true father. But the man was adrift in drug abuse and of little help to a boy trying to support three younger stepsisters. After the family was divided among relatives, Frizzell dropped out of high school and worked odd jobs, but hard times and unforgiving circumstances drove him into the streets.

“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 would later say.

To prove his worthiness among other teenage troublemakers, Frizzell one night mugged a drunk, ripping his wallet from his pants. “That was referred to as a yoke, strong-arming somebody,” recalls Swann, who had worked for Mfume when he was a congressman.

What followed was a true epiphany in the glare of street lights: among the wine-drinkers and dice-shooters on the street corner, a voice spoke to Frizzell Gray. It called to him to honor his mother’s memory and return to her strict Roman Catholic discipline. In the months that followed, despite the disapproval of his peers, some of whom protested by beating Frizzell bloody, he reinvented himself.

With the help of friends and surrogate parents like “Diamond” Jim Sears, then manager of WEBB radio in Baltimore and the father of one of his childhood friends, Mfume obtained his high school equivalency degree, took a series of jobs at the radio station, was married briefly and eventually hosted a popular jazz program called “Ebony Reflections.” He also assumed financial and weekend responsibility for the children that he fathered from the time he was 16.

“He had to get it right, you know,” says Sears. “The street is a hell of a teacher for black kids. You had to get Kwa out of those places. Because if Kwa [continued to go] to those places, he never would have gotten to this place.”

During a period of political awakening and Afrocentrism in the early 1970s, Frizzell Gray took the name Kweisi Mfume, a name suggested by an aunt after she returned from Africa. He wore the requisite dashiki, Afro and African jewelry. Mfume graduated magna cum laude from Morgan State in urban planning--he jokes that he would have won summa cum laude honors but for a C he received in, of all things, public speaking--and obtained a graduate degree in literature from Johns Hopkins University. In 1978, at age 30, he ran for a seat on the Baltimore city council, and won by three votes.

As a councilman, Mfume matured and developed skills building coalitions and political allies. He bucked the black political establishment in 1986 by challenging Clarence Mitchell III, nephew of outgoing Rep. Parren Mitchell, in the race for the 7th Congressional District representing Baltimore. The Republican opponent publicly attacked Mfume for bearing five sons out of wedlock. But because people knew how Mfume had for years worked at being a father, the tactic backfired and Mfume won by a landslide.

Despite his liberal voting record during his five terms, his skill as a conciliator won him respect and put him on the path to leadership. Mfume was elected chairman of the Black Congressional Caucus when it was at its peak of power and influence after the 1992 election (membership rose from 26 to 40). “He’s a salesman, he’s a diplomat, he’s articulate,” says Rep. Charles B. Rangel, (D-New York). “He was able to harness, encourage and to drive the caucus members to produce success in every field that we were in.”

As head of the caucus, Mfume clashed with Clinton over provisions of the 1994 Crime Bill, such as the issue of race as it applies to the death penalty, and the president’s failure to appoint C. Lani Guinier, University of Pennsylvania Law School professor, head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division. “I had become almost emotionally dependent upon [Mfume] being in the Congress,” Clinton mused during the NAACP swearing-in, “supporting me when I needed it, reprimanding me when I needed it, whether I knew it or not.” Most dramatically, Mfume led the caucus in successfully pressuring the administration to focus more aggressively on restoring democracy in Haiti.

Certainly there were blunders. When Mfume pledged to work with Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam to help urban-core blacks, he declared during a 1993 legislative conference that there was a “sacred covenant” between the caucus and the Nation. This occurred despite Farrakhan’s reputation for anti-Semitic rhetoric and just weeks before a Farrakhan aide slurred Jews, Catholics, and homosexuals in a speech. “There was no covenant,” says caucus member William “Bill” Clay, a Democratic representative from Missouri. Mfume eventually issued a statement saying as much.

Nevertheless, some thought Mfume might become the first black Speaker of the House. “He’s clearly driven,” says longtime mentor Earl G. Graves, publisher of Black Enterprise magazine. Mfume’s political base was all but assured with every victory won by better than 80%. Syndication of a Baltimore-based TV talk show, a kind of Phil Donahue knockoff, was expanding. And he was witnessing the prospering of his sons: Donald has opened a restaurant in the trendy Adams-Morgan area of Washington, brother Ronald is developing the gourmet dishes; Keith will follow his father to graduate work at Johns Hopkins; Kevin is a married Marine Corps veteran, and Michael has a budding career as an independent filmmaker. Meanwhile, their father was ranked a few years ago by political commentator Mary Matalin as among Capitol Hill’s 10 most desirable bachelors. A frequent companion has been actress Lynn Whitfield.

So even when the GOP took control of Congress last year, it surprised many that Mfume was considering resigning from the House. “Quite honestly, I discouraged him from taking this post at the NAACP mainly because I didn’t really think he was serious about it. I knew that he was one of the people who could easily be identified as moving up the [congressional] leadership ladder,” Rangel says.

Word that the glamorous ex-chairman of the black caucus (New Jersey’s Rep. Donald M. Payne succeeded him) was eyeing their organization set the NAACP search committee abuzz. A nationwide search--one that included a toll-free number to broaden the scope for candidates--narrowed hundreds of hopefuls down to nine finalists, who were interviewed by the committee. Mfume was last. “He dazzled,” Bond says.

Mentor Graves counseled that Mfume push for paring down the huge NAACP board of directors, whose 64 members outnumber a national paid staff of 47. Mfume even toyed with the idea of changing the words represented by the group’s famous initials, to broaden its meaning and lose the anachronistic reference to “colored people,” perhaps to something like the National African-American Coalition for Progress or the National Assn. for the Advancement of Coalitions and Progress.

“I hear people stand up and say, ‘Yes, we’re the NAACP, the oldest-and-largest-civil-rights -organization in the country.’ And that brings with it a certain amount of credibility,” says Mfume on a stormy summer day from his office at the Baltimore headquarters. “But it doesn’t mean anything if we’re not, at the same time being the oldest-and-largest-civil-rights-organization, working toward real and meaningful change, changing the lives of young people, creating a future for ourselves, making life better for families.”

The conventional wisdom surrounding Mfume’s jump to NAACP suggested he was making a sacrifice and the organization was lucky to have him--that there was a void of black leadership nationally that an adept NAACP president could effortlessly fill.

“Too many of us gave up on the NAACP,” Rangel says. “And if people like him are willing to make the sacrifice to turn it around and to bring it back as a national force for African Americans, then I, along with many others, have reaffirmed our commitment to be of assistance to him.”

*

Kweisi Mfume displays mock disapproval as the tiny audience for his talk show, “Bottom Line,” practices its applause. He’s casual-formal for the taping in a Baltimore studio: black turtleneck shirt and pants, tasseled loafers and sports jacket. “If I was home watching this crowd doing this, I would not be impressed,” Mfume tells them, shaking his head. “Now remember, it’s 11 o’clock in the morning [when this airs], you’re happy to be here. See, I look like I’m happy to be here.” He mugs.

Two weeks as head of the oldest-and-largest-civil-rights-organization and he still has other irons in the fire. The talk show has run for three years and will continue. A product in some ways of radio programming, Mfume relishes the exposure that broadcasting brings.

The show follows a familiar formula: Panelists answer audience questions as Mfume runs up and down aisles with a microphone. Tonight’s topic is child custody. Oddly, for a man vested in shaping opinion, he does none of that here, only moderates.

After the taping, people stroll up to shake his hand. A teenager in T-shirt and jeans asks about the NAACP. Mfume’s attention focuses. He warms to the boy, gets his name, chats and urges that he contact the headquarters in the morning. This is life-blood for the future and promoting that future is central to Mfume’s vision. He knows that for a vast segment of minority youth, generations beyond the civil rights era of the 1960s, the NAACP holds little meaning. Besides expanding educational and scholarship programs, Mfume hammers the need for greater outreach (reasons why he began a weekly radio address and established a site on the World Wide Web) and youth involvement. “When I talk to young people all over this country, they’re still trying to come to grips with the definition [of NAACP] that works,” he says.

Five months into Mfume’s $200,000-a-year tenure, faint outlines of a revitalized organization are becoming visible. Fifteen staffers have been replaced by seven new ones. A debt of $3.2 million was to have been pared to less than $1 million by this month, with an eye toward eradicating it by year’s end. Immediately after taking office, Mfume worked the telephones and visited corporate boardrooms, met with ministers and appeared at church meetings, where collections were taken. Early this month, he and his staff were working feverishly to secure a $500,000 grant from the Ford Foundation. “I beg a lot,” he says, smiling.

Mfume insists that he is on schedule despite the surprise of a well-entrenched bureaucracy (the NAACP has 2,200 chapters) and suffering two herniated discs in May. He was hospitalized for two weeks and bedridden for two more. Most members got their first chance to meet him at the annual convention in Charlotte, N.C. earlier this month.

In August, he plans to attend the Republican and Democratic conventions and hopes to address the delegates.

While the image of a new NAACP is crystallizing, Mfume’s future as a charismatic civil rights leader is fuzzy. “I don’t presume to speak on behalf of all African Americans,” he said recently, and his position on issues has been anything but forceful.

--Some black leaders viewed with skepticism efforts by Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed to condemn the burning of African American churches and help raise money for rebuilding. Mfume said he “welcomes” Reed’s efforts, but he also believes the skepticism “makes some sense.”

--The Supreme Court’s decision striking down race-based redistricting has been roundly criticized by many black leaders. Mfume found it “interesting because it cuts both ways,” making it harder for minorities to get elected, but easier for them to affect newly drawn districts.

--When a black-majority school district near Washington uninvited conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to an event, only to reinvite him after being attacked for being close-minded, pundits fiercely took sides in the public debate that followed. Mfume took no position, saying simply, “Thomas has found himself stuck in another messy controversy.”

On NBC’s “Meet the Press” not long after his back injury, Mfume seemed “tepid, cautious,” in the words of Ronald Walters, chairman of the political science department at Howard University. Mfume was on a panel with Reed and family values guru William Bennett, who both dominated discussion. For nearly half the show, Mfume sat silent, virtually ignored by the show’s host. The performance did not go unnoticed.

“I think in some ways he is trying not to alienate the people he would work with in the African-American community and also in the white community,” Walters says, who calls Benjamin Chavis’ previous NAACP administration “bold to the point of recklessness” at times. But Walters fears that Mfume is moving too slowly to assert himself. “He is charismatic,” he says. “For him to waste that amazing asset would be a mistake.”

Dan Willson, media spokesman for the NAACP, says that critics may be confusing a lack of leadership with an emphasis on building coalitions. Mfume “is not the kind of person to write anyone off and he believes in the broader view that even if you don’t agree with someone, there are things that you can agree on and work together on,” he says.

Mary Francis Berry, chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, speaks for many when she says the decision to hire Mfume was a “stroke of genius.” But she also says, “He must become recognized as a national leader. A year from now he ought to be well into a leadership role. If he isn’t, we’re in big trouble.”

The question of whether African Americans should invest their hopes and dreams in a central national leader--Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, Colin Powell, Kweisi Mfume?--divides many within the black community. “In America we love to have the one,” Bond says. “That’s not true for any other group of people. But it’s true for us. There is in America a desire on the part of others, and I think our own, to have a leader.”

In the future, Mfume may come to stand with those leaders; Bond isn’t alone in his belief that he certainly has the potential. But right now, it is more vital to make the NAACP matter once more. After the civil rights organization’s ruinous pattern of the last few years, Mfume’s vision is simply to do away with the question: What is the NAACP and what does it stand for? If he succeeds, no one need ask again.