The petition and the clamor for a woman to lead the organization came almost within moments after current NAACP President Ben Jealous announced he was stepping down at the end of the year. This is hardly the first time thereâ€™s been a clamor and an even louder criticism of the dearth of female leaders at the top of the nationâ€™s major civil rights organizations.
The sole exception was in 2009, when the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which in its declining years finally elected the first woman head, Bernice King, Dr. Martin Luther Kingâ€™s daughter. But that breakthrough was short-lived when King could not reach agreement with the SCLCâ€™s male-dominated board regarding the terms of her presidency.
The men frequently denigrated and minimized womenâ€™s role and importance, or they pigeon holed them into so called womenâ€™s rolesâ€”typists, phone answerers, general gofers, and just plain flunkies for the men. In some cases, they sexually exploited and abused women.
The most blatant example of this was Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaverâ€™s frequent admonition that the only place for women in the movement was â€œprone.â€ This ignited a firestorm of criticism and condemnation from female Panther members and among women activists in various other civil rights organizations. Although Cleaver took much deserved heat for his insulting and outlandish digs at women, he reflected the quiet sentiment of far too many men that, aside from their views of women, their positions were some of the most advanced, forward thinking and progressive in their social concepts and activism.
The Achilles’ Heel of the civil rights organizations remained the quiet and destructive sexism within their ranks. This history burst into public in the run-up to the 50th anniversary commemoration of the March on Washington this past August. A number of women took dead aim at the marchâ€™s 1963 organizers for what they considered the deliberate exclusion of women from a major role in the planning, organizing and deliverance of any of the keynote speeches at the historic event.
Those women didnâ€™t stop with a nostalgic glancing, over-the-shoulder critique of the events 50 years ago. Instead, they openly wondered how much had really changed within the major civil rights organizations today.
NAACP has legions of women in local decision- and policy-making roles in their various chapters. Any one of them could step into the top presidential spot. There are also prominent women outside the organization that BlackAmericaweb.com named, who could assume the presidentâ€™s mantle.
NAACP has a golden opportunity to open the door of its male-only room at the top to women. Itâ€™s an opportunity that it and no other civil rights organization purporting to call itself a champion of civil rights should blow.
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