Taking Stock at the NAACP

...But he complains that the national board of directors is reluctant to increase his funding and that most of the local branches are unwilling to institute followup programs for his ex-offenders...

...Ironically, one major problem in waging the economic battle-According to conversations with community leaders, ministers, politicians, and civil rights movement veterans-has been the creation and depoliticization of a substantial black middle class from among precisely those elements that formed the vanguard in the '60s...

...Norman Hill, President of the A. Philip Randolph Foundation, summed up the changed attitude: "Social progress at a time of economic contraction eventually splintered the coalition and led to a backlash...

...Segregation tomorrow...

...If recent history has tarnished Martin Luther King Jr's "How long...

...Ron Evans, a key figure in the 1967 battle for community control of New York City's public schools and now a principal at P.S...

...During the mid-'70s, negotiations were opened with America's major corporations, in an effort to have them draw 1 per cent of their new employees from the ranks of unemployed young blacks...

...was completely preposterous...

...Their successors in the 1980s find the doors of society at least half open and leave the NAACP to do the best it can with the unschooled, unskilled and underprivileged...

...Nor does the NAACP cast any of its considerable human resources into fighting drug addiction, renovating abandoned buildings, finding big brothers and sisters for neglected children, or any number of activities that might both decrease its remoteness from blacks "on the street" and improve their lives in at least a small way despite the prevailing political climate...

...Last year, in response to a study indicating that 80 per cent of all new jobs in the '70s came from small businesses, the Association shifted its strategy and initiated Operation Fair Share...

...Beneath all the inevitable rhetoric focusing on "the solutions" lies adeep uncertainty about what those solutions are...

...Although the days when Bayard Rustin or A. Philip Randolph could appeal with fiery enthusiasm for a $185 billion "Freedom Budget" to eradicate America's social ills are past, the N AACP's approach amounts to returning to the hardly Utopian policies of the Carter years...

...The NAACP also seems hobbled by internal contradictions that go beyond the standard infighting and lack of communication between different branches...

...Both approaches have fallen victim to the faltering economy...

...With the shift to economic concerns in the '70s, poor blacks lost white allies as well...

...Some forces within the organization have urged a move to a more community oriented stance...

...Meanwhile, registration campaigns in the one-time Jim Crow states have, as Hooks told the delegates to the N AACP's 73rd national convention last June 30, "retired James Eastland out to the pastures of Sunflower County and brought John Stennis and George Wallace around looking for black votes...

...And although membership has declined somewhat since its peak in the '60s, it remains close to 400,000...

...This is the latest article in a year-long exchange on...

...Why should we always have to do better...

...Whatever its problems, in these hard times it is far from despair...

...The NAACP does continue to employ its time-honored tactics-litigation, lobbying and voter mobilization-much more actively than most people might think...

...The Association's strategy has not shifted substantially from what it was when most Americans seemed to believe that a combination of civil rights guarantees and massive transfers of funds to the needy could bring the black population to full social and economic equality...

...They want a demonstration, something for the front page, whereas we've got to concentrate on what gets the job done...

...Segregation forever...

...This aimed at getting conglomerates like Monsanto and ATT to guarantee a certain percentage of subcontract work to black firms, and chains such as McDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken to establish more black-owned franchises...

...I wonder what ever happened to that...

...At the same time, where Roy Wilkins, Hooks' predecessor, could in good conscience equate Stokely Car-michael's Black Power with Jim Clark's lunch counter, Hooks appears to have adopted some of Carmichael's assumptions: "I'm saying we're all out in the desert now, but if we reach the water hole and all the whites start crowding around it, we're going to make sure we get our place there, too...

...He has set up NAACP branches at 26 prisons around the country, runs evening classes and pre-release training through them, and claims a 21 per cent recidivism rate for his members compared with the national average of about 55 per cent...

...The organization is currently contesting 60 separate state and local legislative redistrict ing plans on the grounds of racial gerrymandering...

...The sit-in leaders and Freedom Riders were black college students whose education made them unwilling to accept segregation and legal discrimination...

...He vigorously rejected the notion that the black leadership in America today is ineffectual, blaming this perception on the media: "You see, reporters don't want to come around and ask questions...

...And it can derive confidence from battles won in meaner times...

...Not long," George Wallace has had to recognize that his "Segregation now...

...The NAACP membership's faith in the organization's resiliency is perhaps best expressed in a bumper sticker being distributed by the Mississippi chapter that reads: "Reaganomics-this Too Shall Pass...

...Since the main school desegregation battleground moved out of the South around 1970, it has sued for integration in over 100 Northern cities...

...blue collar workers saw a threat to job security...

...Yet today this may be more relevant to integrating blacks into the mainstream of American society than desegregated schools or fairly apportioned congressional districts...

...As other black organizations have faded into obscurity, it has won the respect even of many who have condemned its cautiousness...

...and the NAACP's efforts in this sphere have been unsuccessful...

...Many Jews-the group historically most sympathetic to the civil rights struggle-read affirmative action as quotas that would be used to exclude them from universities or employment...

...However deep the country's present disaffection with Reaganomics, it does not seem to have lessened the poor blacks' political isolation...

...Hooks talks of economic boycotts as a weapon at the NAACP's command, but when pressed finds it difficult to cite current examples: "Like this thing we used to do with the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) called Operation Breadbasket...

...Hooks commented diplomatically: "It's not that rich blacks have forgotten their brothers, but if you're not out there on the front lines, you don't feel it with the same immediacy...

...Quite effectively, to judge by this month's election results in Mississippi and Alabama...

...The speaker was Benjamin L. Hooks, executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, responding to a question about the failure of 35-40 per cent of eligible blacks to register to vote...

...Nonetheless, Hooks is optimistic about an alliance between minorities and organized labor that will bear fruit by the 1984 elections at the latest...

...92 in Brooklyn, was less kind: "It turned out that once these people got in, they had no commitment to anything except their Mercedes-Benz and their beach house in Sag Harbor...

...Leroy Mobley, the enthusiastic director of NAACP prison programs, is an example...

...A Baptist minister, lawyer, and former judge and board member of the Federal Communications Commission, he retains the sweet lilt and affable, anecdotal manner of his native Memphis, despite a work day that usually runs from 6 a.m . to midnight...

...former white supporters across the political spectrum complained of a new "reverse discrimination...

...Yet with a median annual family income of $12,613?0 per cent that of whites-And an unemployment rate of 20.2 per cent, the black Americans' most desperate need is economic...

...But he does not hesitate to bring the conversation up short when provoked...

...With all that said, the NAACP is still a unique and tenacious survivor...

...Catching a cab from the NAACP New York offices recently, on his way to a late afternoon fundraising consultation with a black executive at the Seagrams Corporation, Hooks stressed the need for building new coalitions, bringing pressure, educating the public...

...Fifty-two per cent of blacks voted in the 1980 election, and I think only 50 per cent of the whites...