Houston NAACP at crossroads: New direction or old vanguard?
Challengers push to unseat branch leadership in bid to shift priorities
This was to be a year of celebration for the NAACP’s Houston office, a prominent chapter that was launched just nine years after the civil rights organization’s New York headquarters opened its doors.
But instead of coming together to mark its centennial, the Houston chapter has been enmeshed in a bitter fight for control that will be decided by officer elections this week.
Three challengers, all of whom are in their 30s and have been branch members for one to two years, are seeking to replace longtime members as top officers. They say the chapter has become out of touch and that they want to make it more relevant by prioritizing the black community’s economic health.
Lloyd Ford, 30, who joined the group two years ago and is challenging 74-year-old James Douglas for president, said he decided to run because he felt the NAACP was becoming a figurehead of Houston’s black community. He then recruited three others — Ciara Suesberry, Eddison Titus and Richard Bonton — to join the chapter a year ago and seek officer positions as well.
“I can’t say (incumbents have) done anything to really effect real, sustainable change,” he said. “The fight has changed on civil rights, and I feel like they haven’t changed with it.”
But longtime members say the newcomers are too inexperienced to lead and would take the orga-
nization in the wrong direction.
On the day they threw their hats in the ring to become the new leaders of the NAACP, one woman shouted out, “Teach them millennials to sit down.”
“When we talk about leaders, they have to have the intellectual knowledge of social justice issues and be articulate on those issues in a school board room, courtroom and in a CEO’s office,” executive director Yolanda Smith said. “Don’t think because you joined by April 3, you can run for office and become president of NAACP without having the knowledge of our social justice activities.”
‘A storied history’
Whoever emerges victorious in voting Thursday will lead a chapter with a long record of civil rights accomplishments.
“The richness of the (NAACP) is that it has chapters all around the country. They reflect particular places in the community, and leadership emerges in the context of those communities,” said Patricia Sullivan, a professor at the University of South Carolina who specializes in the history of the civil rights movement. “(The Houston branch) has a storied history and remarkable leaders who shaped the movement there, but also really had an impact on the national struggle.”
Lulu White, the branch’s president from 1939 to 1943, for example, was one of the leaders who fought against the Democratic Party’s whites-only primary voting, which eventually led to the landmark Supreme Court ruling Smith v. Allwright in 1944.
Over the years, the 5,500-member organization has achieved other victories for black people in Houston. The group filed a lawsuit that integrated the school district, served as a founding member of the task force to establish the public defender’s office and worked with former Mayor Bob Lanier to save the city’s affirmative action program when it was at risk of being dismantled.
“The NAACP is probably the most organized of any civil rights group. The current leadership is always fair, and they’re there,” said Michael Adams, director of the political science department at Texas Southern University. “To get a young Turk or somebody to come say the leadership is irrelevant … if I were to measure all the accomplishments, it’s always been a vanguard.”
New directions
When Ford thinks about the black fight, he thinks about money and how to direct more resources into the black community.
“I see the NAACP to be at the forefront of (addressing) the new black economic plight,” said Ford, who served on the chapter’s economic committee for two years. “It’s already got that gold star for civil rights. Now, here, the fight has changed to economic development. The only way you receive justice is to be economically sound.”
The challengers want more accountability for how the organizations spends the money it receives from donations, dues and grants. Current leadership says it does plenty for the community, like the “Homes for Christmas” program, which provides a free, eight-hour homeownership course layered with lending and real estate guidance designed to move families into housing that builds equity.
But that’s not enough for the young candidates, who envision programs that would focus on the community’s economic prosperity.
Titus, for example, suggested a program that would connect college students in the region with individuals working in their dream profession. Then small businesses in the community looking for services — such as public relations — would connect with the professional, who would provide a discounted and supervised service performed by the student.
For Suesberry, the Houston NAACP is failing at connecting with its members.
“A lot of members are saying, ‘We don’t know what the NAACP does or has done for us’ because there’s no information being put out there about what they actually do, if they are doing anything,” she said.
Despite their differences, the current officers and their challengers agree on the needs for criminal justice, bail reform, black homeownership, civic engagement and education. The division, rather, is due to the challengers’ focus on economics, their relative newness to the organization and their aggressive recruitment of new members to support them in the coming elections.
Generational lock?
At a recent NAACP meeting held in Harris County Judge Zinetta Burney’s courtroom, the atmosphere grew increasingly tense. The room was so full that attendees funneled into the hallway, standing.
Some of the challengers shifted on the bench as the committee presentations dragged on, texting each other throughout the meeting that the leadership was trying to stall. They started proposing and seconding motions to move to the next agenda items, eager to get to the nominations. Other members threw glares at them with each motion, and eventually shouting matches erupted in the room over nominations, disagreements over bylaw interpretations and people talking for too long.
Amid shouting, one older man closed his eyes and slowly shook his head.
“This ain’t right,” he muttered.
Ford, Suesberry and Titus emphasize age when discussing what they believe to be the current leadership’s weaknesses, and their own strengths. They use terms like “youth,” “trends” and “modernize,” and say the NAACP needs to do a better job connecting with younger people in the community.
Some academics say this discord is a reflection of the mood in national politics.
“There’s this generational lock, almost, in many parts of our political life,” Sullivan said. “And when we look at the history of the civil rights struggle, younger people have been so important to keeping it vital and connected to how they see the current challenges, which is not to discount the importance of people who have been in the struggle and their wisdom.”
There comes a point in any community, at any level, where younger people feel it’s time for them to step up to the plate and lead. The more senior leadership, Adams said, should embrace and make room for the new energy and ideas.
The younger candidates say they don’t feel that they’re taken seriously and that some would prefer they keep silent.
That sentiment intensified when the NAACP Houston filed a lawsuit against Ford just days after the contentious membership meeting. According to court documents, the lawsuit alleged that Ford — who had been hired by the NAACP Houston to build its website — violated the AntiPhishing Act by linking to the NAACP Houston website on his nonprofit organization’s web page, and was trying to get “business and membership providing the impression of being affiliated with the NAACP Houston branch.” The branch dropped the lawsuit on Nov. 2, and its website was out of service for weeks.
In addition to Douglas, other officers vying for new terms are Claude Cummings, Carroll Robinson and Belinda Everette.
The current leadership and its supporters say this isn’t a generational fight. Smith and Douglas point to their chapter’s youth committee as evidence of their support of — and from — youth.
Rather, they said, the tense election is about the direction in which to take the NAACP — a direction that Douglas claims the candidates won’t be able to achieve because of strict guidelines from the national branch.
“On one side, these are people who have not really been in the organization, bringing in new people with the goal of taking over and not understanding the mission,” Adams said. “They’re trying to monetize, and the NAACP is not about that.”
The conflict in the last meeting, Douglas said, is not proof of a generational divide.
But he lamented, “We’ve never gone public with these kinds of issues.”