The Struggle Within The Struggle

Constance Baker Motley was ready to move up. By 1961 she'd spent 13 years as an attorney for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The first black woman to represent the NAACP in court, Motley helped try some of the era's biggest civil-rights cases, including Brown v. Board of Education. But when her mentor, Thurgood Marshall, stepped down that year as head of the NAACP's Legal Defense and Educational Fund, she knew she wouldn't be considered for the top spot. "That would have been too bold a move for them," says Motley, now a senior federal judge in New York. "It didn't matter that I'd been there the longest and served right under Marshall. They weren't going to give me a so-called "man's job'."

A generation later, some of the NAACP's women say they remain second-class citizens at the nation's oldest civil-rights organization. They've always dominated at the grass-roots level, outnumbering men 2 to 1 among the group's estimated 675,000 members. Yet men hold 10 of the 12 top national leadership posts and three quarters of the 65 seats on the board of directors. Until recently the issue of sexism in the civil-rights movement was seldom aired openly by African-American women. But the NAACP board's dismissal of executive director Benjamin Chavis for secretly earmarking NAACP funds to head off a sexual-discrimination and -harassment lawsuit has brought long-festering tensions into the open. Last week senior women at the NAACP's Baltimore headquarters staged a sickout to protest inequities in pay and promotions. Others say the organization is in the hands of a generation of aging, hidebound men who simply don't take women seriously. "Things have not really changed much in the last 80 years," says Hazel Dukes, head of the New York NAACP.

NAACP chairman William Gibson insists that the organization is committed to equal opportunity for women. "The president of the association [Rupert Richardson] is a woman," says Gibson. But some women argue that policy de-cisions large and small betray the group's insensitivity. Many were infuriated by Chavis's alliance with Louis Farrakhan, whose Nation of Islam bars women from leadership roles. Others protested the nomination of rapper Tupac Shakur for one of the NAACP's Image Awards last January. Shakur, who starred in the film "Poetic Justice," is facing felony trials in Georgia and New York, where he allegedly sodomized a woman in a hotel room. Women's groups also say his lyrics are offensive. Lucille Watkins, a 20-year member of the NAACP from Los Angeles, says she quit in disgust. "It's bad enough that these young rappers don't respect us," she says. "Must we also get treated the same way by educated black men?"

The few women who've made it to top posts say they received frosty treatment. Dukes, president from 1990 to 1992, says she was excluded from informal meetings where men made policy. And despite her administrative skills (she headed New York City's Offtrack Betting Corp.), she says her advice was ignored. "They would just give me this look like, "What do you know about money?' " she says.

Some senior women found Chavis's hiring practices especially offensive. Key staff positions were often filled by model-thin, twentysomething applicants with little administrative experience. They were "the traditional black male idea of beautiful," says one former office volunteer, "fair skin, long hair and light eyes." Chavis's penchant for beautiful women led to other tensions. Sources say his wife, Martha, often confronted staffers she believed to be romantically involved with her husband. The incidents became so disruptive that several women considered seeking a restraining order against her. Abbey E. Hairston, Benjamin Chavis's attorney, confirmed the women's move for an order but said they dropped the matter after discussions with Chavis.

The legacy of sexual discrimination runs deep in the civil-rights movement. While women like Ida B. Wells (a cofounder of the NAACP), Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer played historic roles in the struggle for equality, they were largely excluded from positions of influence. Their experience reflected the powerlessness of women across all racial lines. But black women, marginalized by both race and gender, were especially vulnerable. The civil-rights leadership, dominated by ministers accustomed to the patriarchy of the black church, kept most of them far from the spotlight. The sting of their isolation was compounded by accounts of womanizing on the part of some movement leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr. Other organizations devalued women as well, expecting them to supply sex to leaders -- "drawers for the cause" -- as a matter of course. Elaine Brown, former Black Panther Party chairwoman, wrote in a 1993 memoir that women who dared to assert leadership were considered to be "eroding black manhood."

Wives looked the other way as their men philandered. Female subordinates remained mute as they were hit on. While sexual politics in the white world was hardly more evolved, black women in the movement carried a special burden, observing a code of silence and racial solidarity to protect black men from a hostile white public.

Some black leaders hope Chavis's ouster signals a new beginning for men and women in the movement. "Hopefully this will wake some people up," says Rep. John Lewis of Georgia. "African-Americans have got to be even more sensitive to issues such as sexual harassment."

NAACP chairman Gibson promises that the organization will redouble its efforts to minimize sexual misconduct and may include sensitivity training for staff. Some observers think the best sensitivity training of all would be the appointment of a woman as the next executive director. No woman has ever held the job, considered to be the organization's most influential post, and none were mentioned last week. Jewell Jackson McCabe, founder of the National Coalition of 100 Black Women, a professional group, was a finalist in the 1993 search that ended with the hiring of Chavis. Most observers think that it will take more generational turnover before the tradition-bound NAACP will be ready for such a move. Parks, now 81, told Newsweek that women of her era never coveted power. "I didn't think in terms of credit," she says. But others say recognition is overdue. "If you hold up half the sky, you deserve half the credit," says Michigan State University history professor Darlene Hine. "And black women haven't got a fourth of the credit for what they've done in the civil-rights movement."

Women members outnumber men nearly 2 to 1.

The board of trustees is 73% male.

The board of directors is 75% male.

Out of 38 top state conference posts only 5 are held by women.