2. In the 1970s, a judge sentenced Benjamin Chavis to prison for his role in the firebombing a white-owned grocery store in a black part of Wilmington, N.C. A judge overturned his conviction on a technicality in 1980, with Chavis’s makeover so complete that the NAACP elected him chairman on April 9, 1993. A few months later, Chavis demanded the inclusion of the Nation of Islam in a 30th anniversary celebration of the March on Washington. He explained, “I want everybody here to know that the NAACP is standing with the Nation of Islam.” Angela Davis, Sister Souljah, and Leonard Jeffries were among the extremists Chavis extended an olive branch to during his short tenure as NAACP leader. Chavis, a former Christian minister, has joined the Nation of Islam since his firing from the NAACP.
6. For many, April 8, 1994 was the day the NAACP jumped the shark. The group invited a rogue’s gallery of crackpots, extremists, and racists to a secret meeting, dubbed (take a deep breath): “a deliberate mechanism for communication and interrelations between representative leaders of the progressive community and the NAACP within the inclusive mission of the Chavis administration and the African-centered self-determined program thrust of the ‘new’ NAACP.” Attendees included black supremacist Leonard Jeffries, famous for his “sun people”/”ice people” dichotomy to explain the differences between blacks and whites; Maulana Karenga, the originator of Kwanzaa who went to prison for torturing two women; and fringe presidential candidate Lenora Fulani.
5. Louis Farrakhan teaches that an evil scientist named Yakub created white people, claims to have been abducted in a UFO, and has made a mountain of anti-Semitic utterances. So it shocked many when the NAACP invited the Nation of Islam grand panjandrum to participate in a “leadership summit” on June 12-14, 1997.