[2 articles]
Civil Rights Group Struggles To Remain Relevant
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126381259
by Debbie Elliott
April 29, 2010
Organizations led by civil rights leaders Dorothy Height and Benjamin
Hooks, who both died this month, were in the forefront of the fight
for equal rights, but they are now struggling to stay relevant. And
nowhere is that fight more evident than in the group founded by
Martin Luther King Jr.: the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Just answering questions about the SCLC is a challenge these days.
Take last week, when two factions of the group had dueling board meetings.
In Atlanta, board member Bernard Lafayette declared: "The meeting of
the board, the national board of the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, is here."
But hundreds of miles away, in rural Eutaw, Ala., board member Markel
Hutchins said: "This is the only official meeting of the national
board of directors of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference."
The venerable civil rights group has been embroiled in a power
struggle for months ever since it elected Bernice King to be
president of the organization her father helped form. That was in
October, and she has yet to be installed. She did not returned phone
calls from NPR seeking comment.
Two board officers, Chairman Raleigh Trammel of Ohio and Treasurer
Spiver Gordon of Alabama, are the target of federal, state and
internal SCLC investigations into whether some $500,000 has been
misspent. They were voted out by a special board meeting in Atlanta
earlier this month.
"We love them as our brothers and sisters," said Lafayette, a
spokesman for that group. "But we won't tolerate and will not stand
for the mismanagement of our funds."
Trammel and Gordon dispute the allegations.
"Not a penny has been mishandled, and they cannot prove that a penny
has been mishandled," Gordon said.
Meanwhile, both factions are going about what they say is the
organization's business sounding familiar themes that harken to the
words of Martin Luther King Jr. While opening the Atlanta group's
session, Bishop Calvin Woods said, "Where there is unity, there is strength."
Longtime SCLC members say the group plays a vital role in serving the
disenfranchised. But some question the organization's strength in the
post-civil rights era.
"Really the SCLC has struggled with being identified with one
larger-than-life figure for the past 50 years," said Andra Gillespie,
a political scientist at Emory University. "The lesson social
movement organizations can and perhaps should take away from the
SCLC's struggle is that an organization should not be so intimately
tied to one particular personality."
Gillespie said groups organized around the fight for civil rights are
not as relevant as they once were.
"In many instances, we downplay the importance of protest
organizations in an era where African-Americans have access to the
franchise and have access to elective office," she said.
The organizations that have moved away from protests and toward
lobbying have found success, she said. But those activities don't
necessarily draw a crowd. And neither do old-fashioned mass meetings.
Gordon had called for a mass meeting during the SCLC gathering in
Alabama, but only about two dozen locals showed up.
Among them was the Rev. Ernest Andrew Brooks, 24, of North Carolina,
who is a new SCLC member.
"What is our brand?" Brooks asked. "If you ask someone on the street,
'What is SCLC?' they might say it was an organization that Dr. King
used. But if you ask somebody, 'Is SCLC an organization that still
exists?' I guarantee you, the average person on the street doesn't
know what SCLC is doing."
Brooks said it's time for his generation to step up.
"I respect my elders, I respect the traditions of the movement," he
said, "but I understand that the same people who have been arguing,
fussing and fighting for 30, 40, 50 years, are the same people who
continue to argue, fuss and fight in 2010, really about stuff that
has no value when it comes to fighting the fights that SCLC was
created to fight."
They've been given a legacy, Brooks said, and they're going to have
to take the reins of the movement.
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Battle for SCLC control continues as disqualification of lawyer sought
http://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta/battle-for-sclc-control-509919.html
April 30, 2010
By Mashaun D. Simon
The battle for control of the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference took another turn Friday when one group asked a judge to
disqualify a lawyer representing the other faction in the case.
Thelma Wyatt Moore, the attorney representing the faction that backs
the chairmanship of Rev. Raleigh Trammell, filed a motion in Fulton
County Superior Court against attorney Charles Mathis Jr., who
represents the group that has sought to oust Trammell.
Moore alleges that Mathis has shouldn't be allowed to represent the
SCLC because he also has served as an attorney for Rev. Bernice King,
president-elect of the civil rights organization co-founded by her
father, Martin Luther King Jr. The petition claims that Mathis also
serves as the attorney for another SCLC board member.
"It is a conflict of interest," Moore said in a press conference
outside the Fulton courthouse. "You cannot represent members of an
entity and that entity at the same time."
Moore, a former Fulton County court judge, said she expects Mathis to
remove himself or be removed by Judge Alford Dempsey.
Mathis told the AJC the claims are groundless. Mathis represented
Bernice King and her brother, Martin Luther King III, in a recent
case against their brother Dexter King for control of their father's
estate. A settlement in that case was approved by a judge last month.
"[They] have taken the position that I have a conflict due to my
involvement in representing the Kings in a previous case," Mathis
told the AJC. "That action is no longer pending and I have no
conflict of interest."
Founded in 1957 and closely associated with Rev. Martin Luther King
Jr., the SCLC has been in a battle that pits two groups of board
members against each other.
The dueling boards came about when a group voted in December to oust
Trammell as chairman and Spiver Gordon, of Eutaw, Ala., as treasurer
because of claims the two had diverted SCLC funds for their own
purposes. A separate law enforcement investigation of those
allegations is ongoing.
In January, Trammell's supporters tried to reconstitute the board by
removing some members and adding 14 others.
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