What a windfall for Chavis, who inherited America’s most venerated, if waning, civil-rights organization last year, and has been casting about for ways to make himself relevant ever since. If the end is notoriety, as it appears to be with Chavis, Louis Farrakhan (whom he publicly acknowledged as ““his holiness, a prophet, a freedom fighter’’) is the shortest distance between two points. Without Farrakhan, the ““leadership summit’’ gets about as much ink as the annual meeting of the National Taxidermists Association (especially if its only accomplishment is the announcement of future ““summits’’).
None of this should be a surprise, or cause for much outrage, but it is sad. Chavis has signaled his intentions from the very first. In an interview with Newsweek last year, the reverend said his goal was to bring a new generation into the NAACP. How would he do that? ““I have connections with Public Enemy,’’ he said, referring to the virulently anti-Semitic rap group. ““In my prior job at the Commission for Racial Justice, Sister Souljah was on my staff. I consider her a close friend.’’ Oh. Chavis, at times, will talk a good game about reconciliation and use words like ““empowerment’’ and ““entrepreneurialism.’’ Most of it doesn’t mean much; the reverend is an indiscriminate rhetorician. He claims to be an integrationist, but supports self-segregation by black college students; he claims to abhor anti-Semitism, but cleaves to Farrakhan. He attends ““summits’’ that grant prestige and respect to gang leaders, but last week he spoke of the ““majority of young African-Americans who are not in gangs, not on drugs, not doing self-destructive things, but nobody lifts them up.’’ And then Chavis added a precise but unwitting description of his own modus operandi: ““You’ve got to do something negative to get attention in America.''
That is the sadness. Even the NAACP, always a bastion of courageous heterogeneity, finally has to do something negative to get attention. ““Roy Wilkins must be spinning in his grave,’’ said a well-known civil-rights leader who did not attend Chavis’s show. Wilkins is, of course, remembered as something of a milquetoast – not nearly the firebrand that Martin Luther King was in the 1960s. But listen to Wilkins speaking about the rising tide of criminality in the ’60s, and compare it with Chavis’s nauseating coddling of gangbangers in the ’90s: ““The teenage Negro hoodlums in New York City are undercutting and wrecking the gains made by the hundreds of Negroes and white youngsters who went to jail for human rights,’’ Wilkins said. ““They are . . . cutting and slashing at the race’s self-respect, something they can never rebuild with their knives, their baseball bats, their brass knuckles and their filthy language.''
Such moral clarity is missing from Chavis’s varied rants, from our public discourse on racial matters in general. And the straight talk is missed. The NAACP is said to be irrelevant because de jure segregation has been defeated, the great civil-rights legislation passed – and it’s true, the struggle for equality is now more a matter of individual achievement than group entitlement. But there is an abiding need for a charismatic integrationist – a passionate advocate who can teach a new generation, resegregating itself on college campuses, just exactly what the civil-rights movement was all about.
The problem isn’t that Khalid Muhammad or Louis Farrakhan wanders about the country spewing bile, but that there is no one compelling to rebut them. The problem isn’t that blacks and Latinos and Jews and Croatians choose to live in separate dorms (white fraternities and sororities have long been bastions of odious exclusivity); it’s that there are few dorms and eating tables specifically devoted to interracial living. Indeed, I called various colleges and collegiate associations last week and found that there were no active groups devoted to such causes. Rick Morgan of the National Conference on Student Services said, ““I haven’t bumped into it . . . We do a lot of diversity and consciousness-raising, but I’m not sure that people want to hear that message yet.’’ He added (ironically, I hope): ““How would you do grievance politics around that?’’ Far more chilling was a conversation with Stacey Shears of the United States Student Association, who said simply: ““Most students don’t think about or believe in integration.''
Now, there’s a mission for the NAACP! If Chavis were bold, and not merely publicity-hungry, he would travel the country, exhorting student leaders to establish interracial Martin Luther King eating tables or Frederick Douglass houses. He would be refuting the haters, the racists and separatists – they, in fact, would be the ““external forces’’ trying to bust up Chavis’s revival of Martin Luther King’s ““beloved community’’ of enlightened individuals, people of character (not merely ““of color’’). It would be easy to organize grievance politics around that: the grievance would be bigotry. But it would require a spokesman able to see past the arid, trendy, group-based entitlement politics of the moment. Ben Chavis, clearly, is not that man.
