Atlanta -- IT'S NOT a good day for black institutions. The King Center in Atlanta is risking its family's reputation on a nasty fight with the U.S. Parks Service over an $11 million visitor's center commemorating Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. A recent report also alleges financial irregularities brought out by a federal audit.
Worse, the organization's goal of teaching and preaching civil disobedience seems at odds with what most Americans think it should be: to help the poor and black people fare better in the real world. This is reflected in the fact that, according to recent disclosures, the public isn't helping to fund the institution. The King Center gets just 11 percent of its budget from private contributions.
Meanwhile, the NAACP hasn't recovered from the controversial departure of the Rev. Ben Chavis and the reign of board chairman William Gibson.
Seven board members and fund-raisers have sued Mr. Gibson, claiming he improperly spent $1.4 million in pension and tax-exempt funds. The NAACP has finally consented to an audit, but the auditor, Coopers and Lybrand, has reportedly backed out because Mr. Gibson wanted to keep them from looking at a $3,000 monthly stipend he receives and $10,000 the organization lent him.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People will elect a chairman or chairwoman Saturday at the 64-member board's annual meeting. Mr. Gibson is among the candidates.
Back at the King Center, Dexter King, youngest of the four King children and the center's new executive director, dreams of building a $60-million, for-profit, interactive museum featuring his father. No details about financing have been released. As he was being criticized for attempting to profit from the King name, a report surfaced from Boston that the King estate, separate from the King Center, sought payment from the producer of a civil rights documentary, "Eyes on the Prize," and from USA Today for reprinting a King speech.
In 1995, what are the missions of both organizations?
The NAACP continues to struggle with a post-civil-rights identity, grasping for an effective message to young people. A King Center aide, Zee Bradford, called recently to remind that amid the calls for the King Center to get involved in the impoverished communities that surround it, the mission of the King Center remains to teach and preach principles and methods of nonviolent civil disobedience.
There's scant need and little market these days for lessons in civil disobedience, but the needs of black America are great. Black children are slaughtering each other in a slow and tragic holocaust. Murder is their chief cause of death. Seven times as many blacks are injured and maimed in America's urban civil war.
Sixty-three percent of black children live with a single parent. They are the poorest of American families and the families most likely, according to recent studies, to produce teen criminals.
And though African Americans make up just 12 percent of the U.S. population, Bureau of Justice statistics show that blacks, for the first time ever, make up more than half the nation's prison population.
It's really the wrong time to fuss with the parks service over a visitors center, or to proclaim that one's primary mission is to teach lessons in nonviolent civil disobedience.
It's really the wrong time over at the NAACP for William Gibson to fight with Coopers and Lybrand over his monthly stipend, or for that organization to be unsure of which direction in which it should march.
There are bigger fish to fry. There are lives to save.
Jeff Dickerson is a member of the Atlanta Journal's editorial board.