Symposium

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Sept 2, 2002 | by Armstrong Williams, | Sheila Jackson Lee

Q: Is the NAACP too partisan an organization to maintain its federal tax-exempt status?

YES: It's time the IRS investigated the NAACP for advancing a clearly partisan agenda.

Nonprofit organizations such as churches and educational institutions give value and hope to individual lives. That's why the government exempts them from paying taxes. But, to maintain their tax-exempt status, nonprofits are strictly prohibited from endorsing political candidates or parties.

So why is the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) allowed to endorse the Democratic Party agenda and savage the Republican Party with frightening regularity?

That's the question I put to David Almasi, the director of Project 21, a black-American leadership organization. "The NAACP has a special ability to engage in partisan activity because no one wants to take on the NAACP," says Almasi. "If you take the NAACP to court, you're going to have the media coming at you saying how dare you go after a civil-rights organization." This tear, explains Almasi, has neutered the IRS, the media and the Justice Department. Consequently, the NAACP can advance an agenda that is clearly partisan, despite the tax codes that regulate nonprofit entities.

Let me take a moment to clarify what I have just written. I am a friend of the NAACP. I am deeply sensitive to the work this organization has done to facilitate racial equality between white America and descendants of its former slaves. As a black American, I want the NAACP to live up to its original mandate of securing those basic civil rights that we associate with happiness. That is why I am saddened to see this great American institution hijacked by partisan Democrats who appear intent on plunging the NAACP into precisely the kind of political entanglements it used to eschew.

Prior to the appointment of Democratic former congressman Kweisi Mfume as president in 1995, the NAACP was foundering amidst charges of sexual harassment and economic improprieties. With characteristic zeal, Mfume promised to re-energize the organization along overtly political lines. "The extreme ultraconservative policies of the far right are draconian and punitive," he said during the time period he was mapping out a new agenda that would energize black voters for the Democratic Party.

Along the way, the organization's rhetoric has become increasingly shrill even by political standards. During a speech last year at the NAACP national convention in New Orleans, NAACP Chairman Julian Bond snorted that President George W. Bush has "selected [political] nominees from the Taliban wing of American politics, appeased the wretched appetites of the extreme right wing and chosen Cabinet officials whose devotion to confederacy is nearly canine in its uncritical affection."

For obvious reasons, Bond did not mention that more than half of the appointees Bush made as governor of Texas were minorities or female. Bond's strategy is straightforward: shock people into paying attention by making the Republican Party seem as racist as possible. Along the way, the NAACP can energize large pluralities of the black voting populace for the Democratic Party, which in turn can divert Democratic donors to the NAACP.

Amazingly, the NAACP's legislative director, Hillary Shelton, steadfastly maintains that they run a nonpartisan organization. Does Shelton mean nonpartisan such as when, during a 2000 speech to the NAACP national convention, Bond implied that Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) is chummy with the Ku Klux Klan and referred to opponents of affirmative action as "neo-fascists?" Or, perhaps, nonpartisan such as when Bond dismissed President Bush as a "snake-oil" salesman during the NAACP's 93rd annual national convention in July.

Maybe he just means nonpartisan, such as when Mfume boasted during a 1999 fund-raising event that "We helped defeat anti-civil-rights incumbent senators in New York and North Carolina [in the 1998 elections], and helped pick up five Democrat seats in the House."

Or maybe he means nonpartisan such as when Bond recently ridiculed conservatives at the National Press Club in Washington, calling the Republican Party "a crazed swarm of right-wing locusts" that has sought to "subvert, ignore, defy and destroy the laws that require an America which is bias-free." Bond went on to dub the Republicans "the white-people's party," a charge that he has employed on previous occasions. No whiff of partisanship there, eh?

Of course, racial hyperbole plays well at the conventions. Just one thing: Painting Republicans as redneck racists is not only horribly reductive, it is criminal.

The NAACP is incorporated under Section 501(c)3 of the Internal Revenue Code, which shields nonprofit organizations from paying taxes as long as they neither endorse nor oppose a candidate for office. The tax code exists to prevent tax-exempt dollars form being used for political purposes. Plainly, the NAACP is using tax dollars for just that purpose. After all, images of lynching and labels such as the "Taliban wing of American politics" leave little room for interpretation. They are designed to solicit a knee-jerk partisan response.