The NNPA is reporting that sources close to the NAACP national board of directors say retiring President and CEO Kweisi Mfume had had enough of board chairman Julian Bond.
“Although this infighting has been going on for a while, you could tell that Mfume was getting tired,” one board source says. “You have two former politicians (Bond served in the Georgia House and Senate) with strong egos. And they both want to be the leader.”
The real problem could be that Bond refuses to end attacks on President Bush, even with an IRS audit of the NAACP looming because of Bond’s statements last summer about the president which could have violated tax-exempt status rules for not-for-profit organizations.
While the audit is obviously politically motivated, Bond has refused to play nice with the president. At the same time, Mfume was penning a conciliatory letter to the victorious Bush following the Nov. 2 election.
In the letter, Mfume requested a meeting to set aside past differences. Both Mfume and Bond had been extremely critical of Bush for not addressing the group’s annual convention while in office, something no sitting president had done since the early 1920s.
“Julian would have never written that letter to Bush,” one board member told George Curry and Hazel Trice Edney of the NNPA.
Several board members interviewed say they don’t know if Mfume would have agreed to serve another four years if he had been presented with that option.
“You have the unwieldy 64-member board [of the NAACP],” one board member notes. “But the organization is controlled by the 17-member executive committee. And Julian controls that. There was no way for Kweisi to get another contract unless that’s what Julian wanted.”
Intrigue and internal power struggles are not new to the NAACP. The infighting was so intense during the 1970s that then-chair, Margaret Bush Wilson, a St. Louis attorney who still practices here, suspended Executive Director Benjamin L. Hooks for insubordination. A divided board of directors reversed Wilson’s controversial decision during its next meeting.
Regardless of internal bickering at the national level, the strength of the NAACP has always been its local chapters, operated by volunteers.
“People bad-mouth the NAACP, but when they get in trouble, that’s the first place they run to,” one NAACP executive says. “Whenever there is a discrimination complaint or police brutality, they go to one of our branches. And that’s our strength.”
Birds of a feather are Brown, Peterson
t’s obvious that some Post-Dispatch columnists and reporters do not want to upset the newspaper’s owners or editors as a possible sale of Pulitzer Inc., is being discussed with several suitors.
First it was the journalistically challenged Sylvester Brown who obviously purposely omitted the Post in his awkward attack on St. Louis American Publisher Donald M. Suggs and the newspaper’s editorial outlook on the antics of the St. Louis School Board. He conveniently failed to mention that the Post backed four reform candidates in the 2003 school board election and also supported the hiring of a New York-based turnaround firm. He chastised Suggs for taking a similar stance, forgetting his employers’ decision to do the exact same thing.
Now, it is the high-browed gossiper Deborah Peterson who has set her sights on Suggs. She labels Suggs “a turkey” for his support of Democratic nominee for governor Claire McCaskill. She also childishly chided Mayor Francis Slay, Jr., Anheuser-Busch Cos., and others for siding with the state auditor in her primary battle against incumbent Gov. Bob Holden. The headline of the so-called column was “Let’s roast some real turkeys on this day after Thanksgiving.” What she forgot – wait, who are we kidding? What she purposely didn’t write in last Friday’s day after Thanksgiving piece of trash column is that her beloved Post also endorsed McCaskill for the Democratic nomination and then for governor in the race against Gov.-elect Matt Blunt.
While a busy-body gossip columnist should not be trusted to do any true reporting, she obviously failed to do any homework (like read her own newspaper) and learn that A-B’s endorsement of McCaskill had more to do with guns than candidates. August Busch III was riled by Holden’s veto of right-to-carry legislation in 2003 and since “he who has the gold makes the rules,” Busch ruled that A-B was with McCaskill. By the way, Peterson also placed the turkey label on supporters of charter reform and again neglected to name the Post as an unabashed backer of all four proposed changes on the Nov. 2 ballot.
Peterson wears two faces like most people wear two socks. The problem is it seems like it’s never rich, white people who are chatted up positively when it comes to parties, but then back-stabbed when it comes to dealing with the realities of St. Louis politics. The EYE figures Peterson is more concerned with staying in the good graces of editors and owners than she is with accurate journalism.