The NAACP board of directors fired Executive Director Benjamin F. Chavis Jr. last night in a special meeting called to discuss his management of the civil rights group and his use of organization funds to secretly pay a former aide who has accused him of sexual harassment.
In a five-hour, closed-door meeting, the board voted overwhelmingly -- in a show of hands -- to ask the 46-year-old minister to resign the post he has held for 15 months. Earl T. Shinhoster, the NAACP's national field secretary, would be named interim executive director, according to board sources. Those sources also said that an oversight committee would be appointed to monitor the operations of the nation's oldest civil rights organization.
Mr. Shinhoster, a former NAACP southeast region director, was one of four finalists with whom Dr. Chavis competed for the job last year.
The vote on Dr. Chavis' tenure took place while he was outside the NAACP headquarters' Roy Wilkins Auditorium, where the board began meeting at 1:36 p.m.
Dr. Robert W. Gilliard, a board member from Mobile, Ala., described his colleagues as "very thoughtful, very pensive." He said the board meeting "went quite smoothly."
"I came here with an open mind. I reached my conclusion based on factual information," he said. "There were no voices raised in anger. There was no shouting."
When asked what Dr. Chavis' defense was, Dr. Gilliard said, "What it always is: 'I didn't do it.' "
"You reap what you sow. That's what happened here," said Dr. Charles M. Butler, a board member from Coatesville, Pa. "He reaped what he sowed. They're going to be some changes made. We learned a lesson from this one."
Board Chairman William F. Gibson called the emergency meeting after it was reported that Dr. Chavis, who has headed the NAACP since April 1993, made a secret deal to pay Mary E. Stansel up to $332,400 to avoid being sued on sexual discrimination and harassment charges.
The revelation touched off one of the greatest internal crises in the 85-year history of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Rodney Orange, the president of the Baltimore NAACP branch, said a report on Dr. Chavis' handling of the Stansel lawsuit prepared by the NAACP general counsel was very critical of the executive director.
Dr. Chavis and most of the board members had not left the headquarters building at 9 o'clock last night, even though the vote appeared to have been taken before 6:30 p.m.
Earl King, president of the No Dope Express Foundation in Chicago and a Chavis supporter, said he spoke with Dr. Chavis after the board made its decision.
"Dr. Chavis will still continue to be in the struggle for the little people because he's not given up and because he's a man of courage and a man of God," said Mr. King, who came to Baltimore to back his friend. "Dr. Chavis is in good spirits. His family is there. He is sending out peace and love, to maintain and be calm, and continue to live life. His life will not end because he's not executive director at this point."
Soon after the board vote, the lobby of the NAACP headquarters was jammed with Dr. Chavis' most ardent supporters, the youth members. Some were angry. Some had tears in their eyes.
"We are upset, we are outraged," said Darnell Armstrong, a youth member from New York state. "We're going to clean house."
Holding up his NAACP membership card, Glenn Dowling of New York said, "As of next week you're going to see these returned to the national office."
Youth members from South and North Carolina were so upset that they crowded at the front door of the NAACP headquarters, hoping to get inside and persuade board members to keep Dr. Chavis, said Mr. Orange, the Baltimore branch president and a supporter of Mr. Chavis'.
"We had to block the entrance to the room so they wouldn't charge in," he said.
But, he added, the reaction of the young people was "more sad than anything."
National assessment
As word of Dr. Chavis' ouster began spreading, supporters and critics across the nation offered their assessment of the events.
"This is a particularly difficult time for many of us who are members of the NAACP," said Rep. Kweisi Mfume, chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, who had worked with Dr. Chavis on several leadership issues in the past year. "Ben and his family are in my prayers in this, the hour of their great disappointment. . . . Ben may have erred in judgment, but he never erred in his commitment to people. For his contributions to the struggle, equal rights and civils rights, we are eternally grateful."
The board's closed-door meeting made it difficult to judge the evidence or the panel's conclusion, Mr. Mfume said. "It is clear, however, that the NAACP board apparently wanted a change believing as it does that the good of the many outweighs the good of the few," he said.
Michael Meyers, a former NAACP official and an arch critic of Dr. Chavis, said the board's decision had saved the organization.
"It was absolutely necessary that Ben Chavis be fired for the organization to have survived," said Mr. Meyers from New York. "Had he survived this vote, he would not have been able to lead or govern. The organization would have been helplessly divided. The funding for NAACP would have dried up virtually overnight."
As the controversy built over the past few weeks, Dr. Chavis kept up a constant counterattack.
He charged that opponents of his "new direction" for the NAACP -- reaching out to young and alienated African-Americans, including followers of black separatist Louis Farrakhan -- had seized upon the controversy to "defame the NAACP, to defame me and to defame my leadership."
He vowed at a news conference Friday to give the board yesterday a complete report of the "orchestrated campaign" against him, "inclusive of documents, evidence, names, addresses, telephone numbers and fax numbers."
If he survived as executive director, Dr. Chavis said Friday that he wouldn't seek to purge the board members who opposed him.
Some board members, who asked not to be identified, said before yesterday's meeting that they had the votes to oust Dr. Chavis. According to the NAACP constitution, a two-thirds vote of those present and voting was needed to remove the executive director.
They said the executive director's credibility with the board -- already frayed before the Stansel case by a financial deficit of more than $3 million, Dr. Chavis' disputed claim of large gains in NAACP membership and other issues -- was damaged beyond repair.
But Chavis supporters were confident that once alone with the board, the fiery minister could sway members whose first impressions of his handling of the controversy came from what they considered negative reporting in the press.
Mr. Orange said that the dispute is taking a toll locally as some corporate sponsors of the annual Freedom Fund banquet, scheduled for Sept. 21, awaited the board's decision on Dr. Chavis before committing to support the fund-raising event.
A pro-Chavis rally outside the headquarters yesterday -- aimed to show board members the executive director's ability to attract young members -- produced a small crowd, composed mainly of students. Nation of Islam members, followers of Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. and family members of Dr. Chavis' wife, Martha, also attended.
The pro-Chavis forces marched past a battery of television cameras chanting, "If Chavis goes, we go," "No Chavis, no membership" and "Get them Negroes off the board!"
Kobi Little, 22, a past president of the NAACP chapter at the Johns Hopkins University, told supporters, "Ben Chavis has been able to mobilize the heretofore complacent masses.
"If Ben Chavis goes, the NAACP doesn't have to worry about anything else because it will be over," he said. "The next brothers and sisters who take his place will be enslaved, beholden to the media, beholden to the corporations, a few egotistical, individualistic, self-centered board members who wish they were executive director."
A daring choice
Dr. Chavis was a daring choice to be the NAACP's seventh executive director. He spent four years in prison in the 1970s in the firebombing of a white-owned Wilmington, N.C., grocery -- a conviction that was later thrown out -- and stood to the left of the mainstream civil rights movement.
NAACP sources say that Dr. Gibson originally favored the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, whom he had known since childhood but backed off when board members complained that Mr. Jackson's strong personality might put too much of his personal stamp on the NAACP. They also distrusted his management ability.
Ironically, those very issues have dogged Dr. Chavis. While his dialogue with Mr. Farrakhan, beginning in the fall of 1993, made him controversial with white Americans, Dr. Chavis' reputation VTC among board members suffered most after it was disclosed in May that the NAACP had accumulated a hefty deficit.