All this – the saga of Chavis’s martyrdom in North Carolina and his subsequent rise to national influence – may now be ending in disgrace. Chavis is the defendant in a much-publicized lawsuit alleging sexual discrimination and harassment, and his stewardship of the nation’s most venerable civil-rights organization is being criticized as profligate and inept. His future, after 16 bumpy months as the NAACP’s CEO and chief spokesman, will almost certainly be decided at a special meeting of the NAACP board on Aug. 20, and there is no good way to predict the outcome. Although some of the organization’s elders seem determined to stand by him, others are clearly ready to give Chavis the boot. “The recent allegations of sexual harassment and financial impropriety against Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis . . . shock and embarrass all who have contributed emotionally and financially to the NAACP,” federal appeals Judge Damon Keith of Detroit wrote to board members. “On Aug. 20, please preserve this great and once-proud organization and restore its credibility by voting to remove Dr. Benjamin Chavis. . . .”
That restoration effort may be too late. Newsweek’s investigation of the NAACP’s financial records and internal politics reveals an organization that may be on the verge of self-destruction. The NAACP has a large and growing deficit and faces critical scrutiny from major financial backers, including the Ford Foundation. Its governing board is deeply split over the organization’s philosophy and mission, and dissidents say its current leadership is prone to cronyism and lavish spending for the favored few. The problems go far beyond the lawsuit against Chavis – but the negative publicity is reportedly scaring off corporate donors and individual supporters alike. To make matters worse, there are published reports that another woman is accusing Chavis of sex discrimination as well.
Chavis took the job promising to breathe new life into an organization that had grown moribund. He says he has succeeded in building membership from 490,000 to 675,000 and that these gains are mostly among younger African-Americans who tended to see the NAACP as irrelevant to their lives. But his attempts to reach out to separatists and extremists, like Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam, have offended many blacks as well as whites. This strategy seems to be a departure from the NAACP’s longstanding integrationist goals, and some critics think that the NAACP board did not fully understand his radical views when he was hired. Veterans of the civil-rights movement are dismayed that the NAACP, which always stood for interracial understanding, now seems to be moving in ways that exacerbate racial tensions.
None of this could have been remotely foreseen on May 19, 1993 – the day that Chavis fired a 49-year-old woman NAACP staffer named Mary Stansel. Stansel is a lawyer with a decided penchant for suing on her own behalf (page 26). She is also, according to one acquaintance, a “real tough gal” who played a major role in Chavis’s campaign to become NAACP director. Chavis’s attorney says that Stansel, once hired for a job at the organization’s headquarters in Baltimore, seemed to take a large view of her own importance, made outsize salary demands and antagonized other staffers. But whatever the reason for her falling-out with Chavis, she was fired after only five weeks on the job.
Stansel then chose another black attorney – Rose Sanders, a friend and supporter of Chavis’s – to pry a negotiated settlement out of Chavis and the NAACP. Although Sanders says she never intended to file suit against anyone, she did her job rather too well: among other items, the complaint she composed says Chavis “intentionally wooed and pursued [Stansel] to achieve [her] consent and involvement in his campaign, and [her] termination came after the adulterous relationship.”
Sanders says this sentence was merely “an attention grabber” designed to “encourage” Chavis to settle. Chavis himself insists he has “done nothing wrong,” and an aide, Terhea A. Washington, says Chavis’s relationship with Stansel was nothing less than “professional.” Nevertheless, Chavis and his lawyers agreed to an out-of-court settlement that gave Stansel two lump-sum payments totaling $50,000, six monthly payments of $5,400 and the promise of up to $250,000 more if Chavis was unable to find Stansel a comparable job. The effort to out-place Stansel didn’t work, and she filed suit June 30 to collect the rest.
It was this lawsuit that made the settlement public and set off the dispute that is shaking the NAACP. The feud, in part a reflection of distress with Chavis’s attempts to remake the NAACP along new ideological lines, is also a rebellion against Dr. William Gibson, the Greenville, S.C., dentist who since 1985 has been chairman of the NAACP board. Gibson is depicted by insiders as tough, aloof and very determined to control the 64-member board. Sources say his ruling faction, based on a cadre of board members from the South, rejected Jesse Jackson for the directorship because of fears that Jackson might overshadow the organization with his own celebrity. And it was Gibson, according to many in the NAACP, who singlehandedly chose Chavis from among the other candidates. (Gibson denies this.)
Stansel’s lawsuit was filed two weeks before the board’s July meeting in Chicago. Chavis had never informed the board about Stansel’s claim or the settlement agreement, and he had been represented by an outside law firm rather than the NAACP’s chief legal counsel. Stansel had already been paid $82,400 of the initial settlement, and the NAACP was now apparently obligated to pay $250,000 more – a big issue for any governing board, but particularly so for a charitable organization with a large and growing deficit. Board member Leroy Warren of Silver Spring, Md., says he pointedly asked whether there were “any outstanding legal issues or concerns.” According to Warren, Chavis said no.
Chavis and Gibson both say that Chavis was entitled under the NAACP constitution to handle Stansel’s settlement without consulting the board. Gibson also told Newsweek he had no knowledge that Chavis had retained outside counsel and denied he ever authorized the settlement. As for Judge Keith’s demand that Chavis resign, Gibson used a dentist’s analogy when Keith first broached the subject months ago. “I said when you have a bad tooth . . . you can fill it, you can put a crown on it, you can do a root canal [or] you can extract it.” He said he told Keith he “didn’t think an extraction was called for in this case.” But now Gibson seems to be taking his friends’ advice to distance himself from Chavis.
The larger problem, sources say, is that the NAACP has fallen into desperate financial staits since Chavis took over. In May 1994, treasurer Jerry Maulden reported a $2.7 million deficit: sources close to the budget committee say the total is now somewhere between $3.3 million and $4 million. Worse, Chavis is having trouble with the foundations and corporations that have long been the organization’s primary source of financial support. Dissidents say he has been less than diligent in wooing corporate CEOs for donations, and that the Ford Foundation, a financial mainstay for years, has cut back its support because of its concerns over the NAACP’s management. In an Aug. 3 letter to Chavis, Ford Foundation vice president Lynn Huntley warned that Ford would not release a promised $250,000 grant until “questions about your financial management and governance practices” were resolved.
Sources say this unrestricted grant is urgently needed to meet payroll for the headquarters staff. Some NAACP suppliers – printers, direct-mail specialists and so on – reportedly have not been paid for months. One source says circulars for a planned fund-raising campaign have been sitting in a warehouse for weeks because the NAACP has not paid the postage.
Newsweek has obtained documents indicating that the NAACP also has potential problems with the federal government – in this case, oddly enough, with the Environmental Protection Agency. The issue involves a $250,000 grant to the NAACP to educate black Americans about environmental hazards in their communities. Chavis has spoken out about “enviro-racism” for years. He is cofounder of an environmental lobbying group called ASAP, which is partly supported by donations from companies like Shell and Texaco. EPA officials say the agency wants more documentation that the NAACP is actual-ly conducting the educational campaign it outlined in its grant agreement. They also say that the EPA asked its lawyers to “review” the NAACP’s participation in ASAP for any possible conflict of interest stemming from ASAP’s alliance with the oil industry. (An ASAP official, Larry Wallace, denies such a conflict exists.)
Other NAACP sources are critical of Chavis and Gibson for what they see as cronyism and expense-account junketeering. They cite the board’s annual NAACP Image Awards, a televised extravaganza, as a big-ticket boondoggle that has allowed Gibson to reward his allies with a gala week in Hollywood. Similarly, critics charge that Gibson and Chavis spent up to $125,000 earlier this year to send Gibson and 13 NAACP board and staff members to observe Nelson Mandela’s election campaign in South Africa. They say the NAACP is paying $1,600 a month to lease two Lincoln Town Cars used by Chavis and his top deputy, Lew Myers – and that though Myers’s car was put in storage to deflect criticism, the NAACP is still paying the monthly fee.
Chavis himself denies everything – that the fund raising is going badly, that the leased cars are “limousines,” that the NAACP’s financial problems are in any sense a crisis. The deficit, he says, is real – but he claims he inherited about $2 million of the organization’s current budget shortfall from his predecessor, Dr. Benjamin Hooks. Chavis also says the allegation that the deficit has grown to $3.3 million since April is “a deliberate misstatement of fact.” Harry Maragh, the NAACP’s director of finance, backs Chavis by contending that the organization had a “hidden” deficit of $1.3 million at the end of 1992, before Chavis took over. Former director Hooks, now in retirement, told Newsweek that the Chavis-Maragh version is “utterly false” and that he left the organization with a $600,000 surplus. “It’s not a matter of Chavis versus Hooks,” he said. “It’s Chavis versus the books.”
Chavis says he is “looking forward” to the Aug. 20 meeting and insists he has no intention of resigning. He says he has “full confidence” the board will support him on his handling of Stansel’s lawsuit and, more broadly, on the current direction of his administration. “I have not done anything wrong,” he says. “I have not been convicted of any crime. The detractors get a lot of media coverage, but they don’t have support within the NAACP.”
But it’s not that simple. The board, blindsided by Chavis’s secretive dealings on the lawsuit and still unsure of his political direction, could impose more stringent controls on his freedom to act as NAACP director. Or it could let him go – and abandon his divisive attempts to make common cause with separatists and extremists. Either way, the NAACP and all who support it must face uncomfortable truths about the future of the organization. The day of fighting racial injustice with lawsuits is over, and the old warhorse of the civil-rights movement must somehow change with the times – if it can survive its deepening internal divisions at all.
