I Never Had It Made (16 page)

After the Ball Game

X

New Horizons

W
illiam Black, a white businessman who was the founder-owner of the Chock Full O'Nuts Corporation, had started off in business selling nuts of various kinds. Business was so good that he moved to a larger location, one which had room for people to come in and stand at the counter. Soon Bill Black was in the restaurant business offering a limited number of rapidly prepared items at reasonable prices and with swift and polite service. The next step was to open chains of shops all over New York City and then to offer franchises and to sell his coffee and some of his other products in retail grocery stores. Bill Black became a millionaire with a flourishing business that eventually became a publicly owned company.

I was amused to learn that, in the minds of some bigoted people, Mr. Black was considered guilty of racial discrimination in hiring. The majority of his employees were blacks. A few racists referred to his company as, “Chock Full O'Niggers.” Mr. Black once faced the charge that he was discriminating against whites. He took out a full-page ad in some newspapers explaining in the ad that when he was organizing his business, he had serious problems hiring countergirls and other people necessary to a restaurant. Black men and women who were so severely discriminated against in employment areas were easier for him to get than whites. Since he didn't give a damn about skin color if a person could do the job, he had hired black people. The ad went on to assure whites that if they applied, they would not be mistreated.

At the time I joined Bill Black, Roy Wilkins, who was even then executive secretary of the NAACP, had asked if I would chair the organization's Freedom Fund Drive. This was a national drive to raise major funds for the organization's activities. Membership recruitment and other activities around the country were coordinated from the national office. I have a feeling that when Mr. Wilkins asked me to head the drive, he did so in the same spirit that many organization heads ask public personalities to participate in their work. Get these personalities to agree to the use of their names on the letterheads, attend press conferences and a couple of ceremonial events, take a few publicity pictures, but let the real work be done by others. I was determined it wasn't going to be that way with me. If my name was going to be involved, then I wanted to be involved as much as possible.

One issue that Bill Black and I saw eye to eye on right away was the NAACP Freedom Fund Drive. Mr. Black told me that if he were in my place there wouldn't be enough he could do for the cause of freedom for black people. He said he approved wholeheartedly of my participation and if it didn't interfere with my work at Chock, I was free to use company time to travel, work, and speak for the NAACP. In a gesture that put meaning behind his words, Mr. Black then gave me a check made out to the NAACP that was in five figures. I felt I had a debt to my people and I wanted to volunteer my services at the same time to the organization I believed was helping them the most.

I let Roy know how I felt and said that I would be available to be the national chairman but not just in name only. I was committed to the principles of the NAACP, but I didn't know much about the organization's history and its goals. I would need some guidance and I said so. I had never been the spokesman for a big fund drive either. I would do my part, but I would need a professional teammate. Roy asked Franklin Williams to take a couple of weeks out from his West Coast work to attend the NAACP's annual dinner and accompany me on the speaking tour.

Franklin Williams was a brilliant young lawyer who, in later years, became ambassador to Ghana and now serves as executive director of the Phelps-Stokes Fund. From 1945 to 1950 Frank had been Thurgood Marshall's assistant, handling all the NAACP's criminal cases. In 1950 he had been sent to the West Coast to take over that region for the organization. Frank and I met for the first time at the NAACP's annual dinner, the night before we were to begin our swing through several cities to speak at major fund rallies. The morning after the dinner, we met at Penn Station to take a train for Pittsburgh where the first rally was to be held the following night. Frank and I shared a bedroom with upper and lower berths, and during the first few moments of the trip, there was a great silence between us. Frank tells me now that I was kind of withdrawn, not talkative at all, and that he was riding along, overwhelmed by being with me because he had been a long-time fan. He says he kept asking himself, “How am I going to prepare this famous baseball star to become a civil rights spokesman?”

Finally, I broke the ice and asked Frank to tell me all he could about the NAACP. Frank came up with one of the most amazing performances I'd ever heard. He talked and talked and talked. He talked about the NAACP's beginnings. How it had been founded and by whom. He spoke of all the cases and decisions the organization had won in courts all over the nation and in the Supreme Court. He talked about NAACP personalities like Walter White, Dr. William E. B. DuBois, the Spingarn Brothers, Mary Ovington White and Thurgood Marshall. It was slightly after eleven o'clock that night when I glanced at my watch. I had become utterly fascinated by Frank's knowledge and by the clear and fluent way he had of communicating.

Frank and I worked out a format for the meetings we were going to address. He would be introduced by a local official. He would present me. I would talk about the NAACP, making a kind of general presentation about why people should support its work. Then Frank would move in again and make the professional money pitch. Anyone who knows anything about fund raising realizes that this is an art, and Frank was a master of it. Frank introduced me, referring to one of the recent cases which had a real emotional appeal. He praised me for being willing to participate in the drive. He said that many people who had achieved success didn't feel it necessary to help in the civil rights struggle. I began to speak, and Frank told me later that he was surprised at the many specific references I made. He was amazed that I was able to use so much of the material which he had given me for background—material he himself intended to use in the clinching fund-raising talk. This forced him to shift gears at the last minute.

Frank and I were greatly exhilarated at that meeting because we were proving that we were a team, that we had a good working spirit, and, between us, we evoked unusual audience re-sponse. After Frank's follow-up, people started literally marching from their seats to give whatever they could—ones and fives and ten-dollar bills. I got so excited that I forgot all about the script, forgot I was finished with my part of the program, and jumped up to stand beside Frank and urged those people on.

I started out talking for five or ten minutes at these meetings, and when I got going well I was doing half-hour speeches. Frank likes to tease me by telling people that I left nothing for him. Going back over it in my mind now, I remember the warmth and enthusiasm of those rallies. It was a thrill to learn that it is not true that black people are not willing to pay for their freedom.

Working with Frank was responsible for a lasting friendship between us. Frank later confessed to me that he had been pretty nervous about the outcome of our working together. He had worked with national chairmen before, he said, but this was the first time a national chairman had come out on the front lines with him and served as the central personality in the rallies. He had shuddered when he thought about how I could have blown the whole deal. Suppose a newsman had asked me in public what the NAACP's attitude was on this or that issue and I stood there with my mouth open. But it hadn't been like that and we were a great team. To this day, Frank likes to kid me because after we had run out of all the gimmicks we could think of, Frank was shamelessly selling kisses—not his, mind you, but mine—to coax ladies to come down the aisle and give some money. What a painless way to sacrifice for the cause.

Our NAACP fund-raising tour was only the beginning of a protracted drive for the organization. We were gratified to learn that the year of our tour was the first year the NAACP had ever raised a million dollars, and we were determined to continue working as a team. We had gone to Detroit together to speak at a $100-a-plate dinner spearheaded by a socially prominent and wealthy black physician, Dr. Alf Thomas, the head of the Detroit organization. During that era, $100-a-plate dinners held by blacks were virtually unheard of.

One morning afterward, I said to Frank, “Why can't the national office sponsor an annual hundred-dollar-a-plate dinner? Do you believe it could be done?” Frank agreed that it was a good idea and we planned a dinner honoring one black and one white person who had made an unusual contribution to the civil rights movement or to racial progress. The $100 admission could be applied—most of it—toward a down payment on a $500 life membership for those who attended. Roy Wilkins listened to our proposition and promptly said it wouldn't work. It would fail because it was too expensive. The reason the dinner in Detroit had worked was that the rich black doctors there had pressured their affluent friends into making it a success. We persisted with strong arguments. Working on it together, Frank and I were sure we could make it a success. Finally Roy reluctantly agreed to let us try it. At the first dinner we honored Marian Anderson and Rudolph Bing, who had given Marian her chance as the first black diva at the Metropolitan Opera. Frank worked like a demon. I put in the maximum time I could, but it was limited because I was heavily involved with my work at Chock. We were very proud when the first national office $100-a-plate dinner brought in a profit of $75,000. That dinner, inspired by the Detroit affair, was the start of the yearly national and branch $100-a-plate dinners around the country which have brought in millions of dollars to the NAACP. Through these dinners, NAACP President Kivie Kaplan re-ceived tremendous impetus for his pet idea, the life membership drive.

In January, 1967, I made a decision that I wouldn't have considered possible in 1960. A New York
Times
story stated that Mr. Wilkins' Old Guard had once again crushed the young turks in national board elections. After a great deal of soul searching, I sorrowfully announced that I could no longer be silent and appear to condone what I viewed as the dictatorial administration of Executive Director Wilkins.

I had traveled thousands of miles and made dozens of talks and speeches and raised important quantities of money for the NAACP. I regret none of this, for it remains today the oldest and the strongest civil rights organization we have. It has a proud history of achievement in the protestation of the rights of black people, and it has fought strongly for those principles on which America was supposed to have been founded. In spite of this, in 1967, I had reached a climax of disappointment with the NAACP. My deep doubts about its future, which my associates and my family shared, led me to resign from the national board. I still have my doubts about the NAACP. However, I now believe I made a grave error in resigning rather than remaining on the inside to try to fight for reform.

My disenchantment stemmed mainly from my realization that Roy Wilkins and a clique of the Old Guard under his domination had become a reactionary and undemocratic political group. Up until the most recent conventions, Roy and the Old Guard had stifled the efforts of the younger, more progressive forces within the organization to become meaningfully in-volved. I am not referring to hotheads who want to come in and take over. I am speaking of qualified, thoughtful insurgents already in the ranks, who want to inject new blood and new life into the association.

Realistically, I recognize that the NAACP is so structured constitutionally that the executive director is given tremendous control and power, and I feel that during the Wilkins' years, the administration has been insensitive to the trends of our times, unresponsive to the needs and aims of the black masses—especially the young—and more and more they seem to reflect a refined, sophisticated “Yassuh-Mr.-Charlie” point of view.

The determination to keep things as they have been instead of the way they ought to be may help to gain more Ford Foundation money, but it is not going to gain respect from the younger people of our race, many of whom feel the NAACP is archaic and who reject its rigid posture completely.

One of the conditions then existing that many believe has hampered the progress of NAACP was its inflexible position on constitutional provisions which made it impossible to bring younger members onto the board. The age issue has caused much polarization within the rank and file of the organization, on the board itself, and among young black people throughout the nation and within the organization. This state of affairs has improved little over the years.

At the time of its 1971 convention, there were only seven youths on the sixty-four-member board. Ten members were under forty years old. Two-thirds of the board members are over sixty—including ten members who, like Mr. Wilkins, are over seventy.

I do not think age should be held against anyone. I am not opposed to Roy Wilkins because he is over seventy. I am opposed to him because I believe he can no longer relate as effectively to the current problems of black people and black-white relations. I do believe he still has much to give—in terms of experience and wisdom—but that he should become senior statesman, perhaps at board chairman level. He would be able to become more mellow and speak and think with greater effect if he were not forced, by his ego and personality, to remain constantly on guard, an insecure man, despite his great talent and prestige.

Twenty years ago, if someone had suggested to me that Roy Wilkins should move out of the front ranks of civil rights and black leadership, I would never have agreed. For me and, I suppose, for many, many black people of all ages, Roy Wilkins was an idol, a hero, a truly great man. Roy earned the admiration and respect that he was given. He earned it long before black leaders and black youth were putting their bodies on the line for the cause. Roy Wilkins exposed himself to dangerous missions in the South at a time when the South was noted for lynchings and mob brutality against anyone who even thought about opposing its repressive system.