THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF LIBERAL GUILT

The problems are not just financial. The NAACP remains a venue for the squabbles of a black elite. But that elite doesn’t speak for poorer blacks, who now have voices out of their own culture, most notoriously Louis Farrakhan. Mfume appealed as one who, with his origins in the slums of Baltimore and his comfort in the boardroom, could square the circle. His challenge — his unstated goal, even — will be to mediate between two indispensable and hitherto irreconcilable blocs: an angry black activist populace that now gravitates toward Farrakhan and a well-meaning, largely white donor base appalled by Farrakhan’s racism and anti-Semitism.

Born Frizzell Gray in Baltimore in 1948, Mfume was orphaned at 16. He joined a gang and had fathered five sons out of wedlock (by four different women) by the age of 22. In 1978, having established himself as a radio personality and taken on his new name, Mfume won a seat on the Baltimore City Council. Bruce Bortz, who edits a newsletter on Maryland politics, was a beat reporter at the Baltimore Sun at the time and thought Mfume a buffoon. ” He was provocative, and unbalanced,” Bortz remembers, “not a fair arbiter or broker of ideas, but always good for an outrageous quote. It seemed to me his raison d’etre was to cause as much fussing as possible if not necessarily accomplish anything.” But Mfume changed, Bortz says. “He became dignified, distinguished, thoughtful, and respected. He made people proud of him.” By the time Mfume entered Congress, Bortz was one among many Baltimore insiders hoping Mfume would someday return and run for mayor.

Iowa Republican Jim Leach called Mfume’s House Banking Committee work ” substantive” and “not reeking of political macho.” National Review Washington editor Kate O’Beirne, who has appeared with Mfume on television as both host (on Capital Gang) and guest (on Both Sides with Jesse Jackson, for which Mfume is the backup host), describes him as “always very cordial and tempered in tone, never adversarial. There’s something very classy about him.” He was extremely well received as one of the keynote speakers at Jude Wanniski’s Polyconomics conference in Boca Raton in 1994 — the bastion of latter-day Reaganomics. Such testimonials — for an inflexible liberal who was the most doctrinaire defender of affrmative action and Great Society welfare during his tenure at the Congressional Black Caucus — are evidence of a considerable charm.

His reflexive left-liberalism strikes a chord at the NAACP, of course. At his swearing-in — held in the Department of Justice and attended by President Clinton, Vice President Gore, Attorney General Janet Reno, and her civil rights deputy, Deval Patrick — Mfume condemned the “extreme ultra- right-wing policies of the Republican Congress.” Although he also attacked the “politics born of guilt or misdirected compassion of the ultra-left, that seek to maintain the poor,” there is no mystery about how rigid Mfume will be in defending federal programs as head of the NAACP “This organization believes there’s an important role for affrmative action in society,” Mfume says. Along with Charles Rangel, he was one of the few Black Caucus members who defended to the very end the tax-certificate policy for television- station owners that resulted in the notorious Viacom subsidies to black millionaires.

Nor is there much debate at the NAACP on welfare reform or any other policy measure. “In none of these fights is there any ideological component,” says board member Julian Bond, who served on the search committee that picked Mfume. The last major issue on which the board made a forceful stand — against backing Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court — saw a vote of 63-1, with only Ben Andrews, the sole Republican on the board, voting aye. (And Andrews pleaded days later that his vote be changed to an abstention.)

In a sense the NAACP is a victim of its triumphs: The civil rights agenda has become government orthodoxy. Affrmative action has become so widespread that the black upper-middle classes who make up the NAACP’s elite are now profoundly dependent on it. This pyrrhic victory has turned the NAACP, which still views itself as a vanguard organization, into a lackey of the state at a time when most blacks feel the state is failing them.

By contrast, Louis Farrakhan’s ability to throw the “gift” of affrmative action back in the government’s face sets his movement apart from the NAACP and gives him not only more maneuvering room but also more credibility among blacks — 59 percent of whom, according to a recent poll, say Farrakhan ” speaks the truth.” Arthur J. Magita, author of a biography of Farrakhan forthcoming from BasicBooks, thinks less-fortunate blacks see the NAACP as ” more bourgeois, stuffy, antiquated, ossified, from another era, composed of people who wouldn’t know what’s happening out on the street.”

Uniting the Farrakhanites and the Black Bourgeoisie is Mfume’s Job One, although no one at the NAACP will admit it publicly. Mfume has shown himself more than willing to traffic with Farrakhan himself. He not only addressed the Million-Man March but was even one of its Maryland organizers. He has cannily avoided condemning Farrakhan for his recent bile-filled tour of Iran, Iraq, and Libya.

In fact, Mfume and Farrakhan go back a ways. In September 1993, Mfume broadened the invitation list to the annual Washington meeting of the Congressional Black Caucus to include Farrakhan and others who had been excluded from a 30th-anniversary reenactment of the march on Washington. There, Mfume declared that he hoped to forge a “sacred covenant” with the Nation of Islam similar to the one the caucus had with the NAACP

The gesture alarmed Jews inside and outside the civil rights establishment, but the incident might have blown over had not Khalid Muhammad, a close ally of Farrakhan, given a speech at New Jersey’s Kean College in November 1993 in which he referred to Jews as “bloodsuckers on the black nation.” After Farrakhan himself offered an endorsement of the speech disguised as a condemnation — saying he deplored Muhammad’s manner of delivery but stood by the “truths” he spoke — pressure mounted on Mfume to renounce the “sacred covenant” and repudiate Farrakhan. Mfume condemned Muhammad alone, saying, ” Nowhere in America can we give sanctuary to such garbage.” But never, ever — then or since — has he condemned Farrakhan.

The equivocation went on for months, and the lengths to which Mfume went to avoid any denunciation were astonishing: Not until February 2, when the caucus itself repudiated the “sacred covenant” Mfume had made in its name, did Mfume address the issue squarely. Even then, at a long news conference called that day, he said only, “I think that Minister Farrakhan has had some problem in communicating exactly where he is and even what he is to the larger press in this nation.” Pressed for a clarification, Mfume was hardly more specific: “Do I believe he’s anti-Semitic? I believe that there have been things that have been said over the years by the Nation of Islam that, without clarity, have been by many people, including myself, questioned as to whether or not they were anti-Semitic in nature, either by happenstance or deliberately. And I think you will find that most people are going to continue to have those kinds of questions as long as there continue to be statements that are made that cause us to feel that way.”

Mfume participated later in meetings intended to mollify Jewish and white supporters. He was so convincing that one Jewish participant now apologizes on his own behalf for Mfume’s failure to denounce Farrakhan: “We had been defining black-Jewish relations the way the Nation of Islam wanted us to. The Jewish relationship with the Nation of Islam does not define black-Jewish relations.” Says Abraham Foxman, executive director of the B’nai B’rith Anti- Defamation League, “We do wish him well.” But when asked if Mfume had ever satisfactorily condemned Farrakhan in any speech, Foxman replies, “I don’t think you’re going to find it. But then again, I don’t think anybody’s really asked him to.”

Thus, what must be the central insight of Mfume’s career proves itself yet again, even in the wake of his cowardice toward (or, worse, support of) Farrakhan: that white liberals have a persistent desire to think well of black leadership, regardless of its message.

Mfume’s speech at the NAACP’s annual meeting in the New York Hilton in February was a perfect straddle between wooing Farrakhanites and allaying liberal fears. Mfume began by saying, “I pledge, as your president, to every American who believes in equal opportunity, who believes in equal justice under the law, who believes in racial tolerance, in religious tolerance, that I will work as your president to heal the drift. . . . Racism, sexism, anti- Semitism are wrong. As long as there is an NAACP, they will never endure a quiet and comfortable existence. Racial and religious intolerance will only continue to divide us as a nation. . . . Black bigotry is just as wrong as white bigotry. Both are divisive and wholly indefensible.” He left no liberal (or donor) misgiving unassuaged, appealing to Jews, Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans. He even mentioned sexual orientation.

Nonetheless, Mfume sounded the note not only of racial harmony but also of racial apocalypse, warning his listeners that “whether you’re at the bottom or the top of the well,. . . unless we change things in this nation, all of you will drown. All of you will drown.” Farrakhan went completely unmentioned, apart from one nudge-nudge, wink-wink overture. “Someone asked, ‘Did I have a holy, sacred covenant?’ Let the record reflect that I do.” Mfume coyly goes on to say he has three (with God, the NAACP, and America), but it’s the first allusion that draws the big cheers.

As the speech wound down, Mfume made it clear that some bigotries are more equal than others: “Let me say one more thing before I go to my seat: Jim Crow is dead — but Jim Crow Junior is alive and well. like his father, who liked to segregate, liked to discriminate, and got joy from our lynching, Jim Crow Junior’s different. Oh, yeah, he likes to discriminate, he likes to segregate because it’s in his genes. But he gets his joy watching us lynch ourselves. Our enemy today is not so much him as much as it is a reactionary Congress, that seeks to disenfranchise minority voters and to deny equal opportunity. Our enemy is a Supreme Court that has turned its back in the last decade of this century as it did in the first on then the American Negro and now on all minorities because it seeks to undo civil rights gains. Our enemy is inadequate housing that keeps us living in second-class citizenship.” Of those who would make America safe for discrimination, he said, with the crowd screaming in support, “We will chase them to hell if we must.”

After the speech, Julian Bond could be seen strolling down the hall towards a board meeting with a big smile on his face. “That,” he says, “was a barrrrrrn-burner.” It was also — in its (literal) damning of Congress as worse than Jim Crow — possibly a bridge-burner for Mfume. But he clearly knows what he’s doing. Time has run out on the Congressional Black Caucus’s ability to advance a race-based, redistributive grievance politics. Voters, even Democratic voters, are sick to death of it. But foundations have a longer fuse. The NAACP may be ideal for Mfume: It’s the last place possible to resuscitate through liberal gullibility a politics that can no longer sustain itself on liberal guilt.

By Christopher Caldwell