Myrlie Evers-Williams, the widow of an NAACP martyr, declared her candidacy yesterday for the chairmanship of the troubled civil rights organization.
Ms. Evers-Williams poses the strongest challenge yet to Chairman William F. Gibson, whom NAACP critics accuse of lavish spending and financial mismanagement. The Baltimore-based National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has a $4 million deficit.
"We need new leadership," said Ms. Evers-Williams, a longtime NAACP activist whose first husband, Medgar Evers, the group's Mississippi field secretary, was shot to death in 1963 by a white supremacist. "We need honesty, integrity, accountability and responsibility from the leadership of the association."
Through a spokesman, Dr. Gibson declined to comment yesterday
The annual election of officers will be held at a Feb. 18 board meet ing in New York that is expected to be a showdown between Dr. Gibson and his critics.
Ms. Evers-Williams, 61, has been courted for months by board members seeking to oust Dr. Gibson, 62, a South Carolina dentist who has headed the board since 1985.
"I'm thrilled she's stepped up to the plate, and I hope other board members have the same courage to step up and do what's right," said board member Joseph E. Madison.
Mr. Madison said he urged Ms. Evers-Williams to run for the chairmanship as they stood with her second husband, Walter Williams, at Medgar Evers' grave in Arlington National Cemetery on June 12, 1994, the 31st anniversary of the civil rights worker's death.
"I remember telling her, 'Your husband died for the NAACP, and you can't let the NAACP die. You're the only one who has the credibility and reputation to get us out of the trouble we're in,' " said Mr. Madison, who was 14 when Medgar Evers was killed. "I remember her smiling at me and saying, 'You ought to be ashamed of yourself.' She wasn't that convinced," he said.
Ms. Evers-Williams, who spoke from her home in Bend, Ore., said her husband's health was a major factor she had to consider in deciding whether to run. Mr. Williams, 76, a retired California longshoreman and union organizer, has prostate cancer.
"He has been there for me through every part of the 18 years we have been married, and I am here for him," she said. "Walter has encouraged me to go forth. It's his fight, too."
Born Myrlie Beasley in Vicksburg, Miss., she was 18 and in college when she married Medgar Evers. They had three children.
When he was gunned down in the driveway of the family's home in Jackson, Miss., she was a "painfully shy" woman of 30 "always known as Mrs. Beasley's granddaughter, Medgar's girlfriend, Medgar's wife, Medgar's widow," she says.
"Being Mrs. Medgar Evers was a wonderful security blanket."
Ms. Evers-Williams said she began to develop her own identity after moving to California, finishing college and becoming an administrator at the Claremont Colleges.
She later ran unsuccessfully for Congress and the Los Angeles City Council, became an oil company executive and served three years as a commissioner on the Los Angeles Board of Public Works.
She has been on the NAACP board since 1984 and a vice president since 1990.
"She was a very subdued and shy young woman, but she's come into her own," said Hazel N. Dukes, a former NAACP president.
"People shouldn't take her softness and her demeanor for weakness. She pulled herself up by her bootstraps."
Ms. Evers-Williams pushed for the retrial last year of Byron De La Beckwith, who was sentenced to life in prison for Medgar Evers' murder. Two earlier attempts to prosecute him ended in mistrials.
T. H. Poole Sr., a Florida NAACP board member who calls himself Dr. Gibson's "speaker of the House," called Ms. Evers-Williams' candidacy the final step of an "orchestrated campaign" against Dr. Gibson by a small group of vocal critics on the 64-member board.
"I don't think there's any support for it," Mr. Poole said. "The same crew has been bellyaching and whining all the time in an effort to take over the NAACP."
Mr. Poole said Mrs. Evers-Williams' civil rights experience can't compare with that of Dr. Gibson. He said the chairman has been a local branch president, still heads the South Carolina NAACP and has headed the NAACP for almost a decade.
"She's been an administrator, a speaker, memorializing her husband -- a whale of a man -- but when you speak to her record in civil rights, there's nothing there," Mr. Poole said. "She was ceremonially on the board. . . . I wasn't surprised she would be used to run."