AMHERST, Mass. -- The Rev. Benjamin F. Chavis Jr. was right at home -- posing for snapshots with a clutch of University of Massachusetts honor students, just the sort of bright, young blacks he wants as NAACP activists.
Dr. Chavis, 46, has made rejuvenating the NAACP the central theme of his tenure since being named a year ago last weekend as the youngest chief executive of the nation's oldest civil rights group.
But generational change isn't painless. Cook up a new NAACP with black youth, and you add a hip-hop flavor -- from "gangsta" rap music's nasty lyrics to Louis Farrakhan's often anti-Jewish declamations -- that may spoil the sauce for older folks.
The leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has traversed a minefield in his first year on the job. He has trodden carefully between elders and youth, middle class and "underclass," the NAACP's traditionally integrationist principles and the Nation of Islam's frankly separatist ideology.
After Dr. Chavis spoke here Thursday night, a black UMass political science major came to him with a complaint. When Minister Farrakhan spoke on campus in March at black students' behest, the young man recounted bitterly, the local NAACP's middle-aged leadership condemned the Nation of Islam leader's message.
"Do not let that incident turn you away from the organization," Dr. Chavis said, enveloping the young man in a bear hug. "The NAACP has to be the one organization that brings us all together."
Dr. Chavis, a lesser-known civil rights veteran, won the NAACP board's nod to succeed the Rev. Benjamin L. Hooks as executive directorover the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, a national celebrity. A year later, the NAACP leader's name is still often mispronounced (it's CHAY-viss), and both Mr. Jackson and Minister Farrakhan draw bigger crowds.
But the North Carolina native, a serious but approachable
minister who spent more than four years in prison on a fire-bombing conviction that was later overturned, has spent a year crisscrossing the country to make his name synonymous with the NAACP.
The past week's itinerary: Atlanta; Jackson, Miss.; Charlotte, N.C. (to sit in President Clinton's skybox at the collegiate basketball championship); Chicago; Baltimore (NAACP headquarters); Charlotte again (to meet with the chairman of NationsBank); Amherst; Detroit (for a controversial private meeting with black nationalists); Greensboro, N.C.; and Washington (for a family dinner with Vice President Al Gore).
Dr. Chavis has often made the symbolic gesture. He lived for a week in a Los Angeles public housing project, and he organized three "summits" of youth gang leaders.
He has stumbled into unwanted controversy. He seemed to endorse rival Charlotte's bid for a National Football League franchise while Baltimore, the NAACP's home, pined for a team. He honored Rodney G. King as a "symbol of fighting injustice" just before the victim of the Los Angeles police beatings was again arrested for drunken driving. He met Friday with black radicals without letting his national board know.
But nothing has defined Dr. Chavis' attempt to reposition the NAACP so much as his dealings with Minister Farrakhan.
First, he disinvited the black separatist leader from the NAACP-organized 30th anniversary March on Washington last August.
But the next month, in the name of black unity, Dr. Chavis said he was wrong. Since then he has worked to bring Minister Farrakhan under the civil rights tent, even after a Farrakhan aide called Jews "bloodsuckers."
In search of diversity
Dr. Chavis insists that, by asserting the NAACP's need to talk with Minister Farrakhan, he neither endorses the black nationalist position nor abandons the NAACP's historical role of building multiracial coalitions for reform.
"The NAACP is the only national organization other than the black church that has the capacity to broadly represent the diversity within African-American people," he said in an interview. "The question is: Can you have that kind of diversity in one organization? For me, the answer is yes. In fact, I think it is necessary."
Dr. Chavis describes his reaching out to the young, the disaffected and the black nationalists as expanding the NAACP's base and responding to its "primary constituency," black America.
And black America has considerable regard for Minister Farrakhan. Nearly two-thirds of black Americans polled by Time magazine in February said the black separatist "speaks the truth" and is "good for the black community." Only a third labeled him "a bigot and a racist."
A risk to mission?
But critics say that by seeming to sympathize with the Nation of Islam leader, whose group calls whites devils, Dr. Chavis risks forfeiting the NAACP's moral authority to condemn racial prejudice when it appears in other guises.
"By courting and flirting with Farrakhan . . . the NAACP has become an accessory to bigotry," said Michael Meyers, an NAACP dissident who heads the New York Civil Rights Coalition. "This is not the NAACP of old. This is a new extremist course they're on, which I believe is self-destructive."
NAACP board member Joseph E. Madison, a Washington radio personality, gives Dr. Chavis credit for his youth movement but worries about his reaching out to the Nation of Islam: "I personally feel Louis Farrakhan has a lot to gain and the NAACP potentially has a lot to lose."
Mr. Madison and other board members were disturbed last weekend when they heard that Dr. Chavis met with black nationalists in Detroit without seeking board approval. It was a rare misstep in Dr. Chavis' relationship with board chairman Dr. William F. Gibson.
A weary Dr. Chavis calls the Farrakhan and black nationalist factor a "distraction" from more pressing issues such as curbing violence in black communities and increasing blacks' role in the economy. But he has ensured that such controversy won't go away soon.
Dr. Chavis is promoting an NAACP-sponsored black leadership summit (to be held as early as next month), and Minister Farrakhan is on the guest list. Moreover, the NAACP's annual convention this July will be in Chicago, the Nation of Islam's home base, raising the question of whether to bow to the black separatist or to snub him. (The site was selected before Dr. Chavis took the NAACP job.)
Financial concerns
On a more practical level, the NAACP must decide whether the presumed benefit of consorting with Minister Farrakhan and other radicals is worth the possible cost in lost contributions.
The NAACP took in a healthy $18 million in 1993, according to a recent financial statement. Most of the money -- more than $11 million -- came not from membership dues but from corporate gifts, foundation grants and individual contributions.
Gilbert Jonas, the NAACP's chief fund-raiser, said it was too soon to tell if the Farrakhan furor would hurt the NAACP financially in 1994.
Mr. Jonas said he hasn't received "a single institutional response that's been negative from a foundation or corporation" as a result of the Farrakhan controversy.
Most individual contributions to the national office and the branches come from black Americans, he said. Jewish support, while not insignificant, constitutes a small percentage of donations.
But Mr. Jonas said that more than 100 contributors had asked that their names be dropped from the NAACP mailing list, citing the group's relationship with Minister Farrakhan.
'Risky course'
"For us, that's a lot. I can't recall anything that big," he said. "I don't know if that's the tip of the iceberg or that's all there is."
Dr. Chavis conceded that the NAACP had embarked upon a "risky course . . . but it's also a risk not to expand one's base. The NAACP's grass-roots credibility has been enhanced." He said NAACP membership has soared from 490,000 a year ago to 650,000 today.
And so the NAACP chief executive keeps crisscrossing the country.
At the University of Massachusetts, Dr. Chavis walked almost unnoticed into a campus auditorium. Minister Farrakhan's controversial appearance there had drawn a packed house of more than 2,000, plus protesters outside the hall.
Dr. Chavis' mild talk to an ethnically diverse honor society for "people of color" and his appearance at a gospel extravaganza drew only 300.
"With the same passion we fought to desegregate schools, housing and voting, we must now desegregate Wall Street and corporate America," Dr. Chavis told the students. "We've got to integrate the money."
He urged them to become a "new generation of freedom fighters."
Some seemed willing.
"Chavis with his new vigor and reaching out to youth has revitalized the organization," said Shomwa Shamapande, a junior who heads the UMass Black Student Union.
Leaders such as Dr. Chavis and Minister Farrakhan should strive for unity wherever possible, Mr. Shamapande said, and work to solve black Americans' problems.
"If outsiders have problems with that," the student said, "it's none of their business. It's a family matter."