6A
Wednesday, October 18, 1995
NATION/WORLD UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
NAACP still lacks leader
Committee searches for replacement a year after Chavis' firing
The Associated Press
BALTIMORE — WANTED: Skilled manager with unquestioned integrity and ability to be national spokesman and day-to-day leader of troubled national civil rights group.
More than a year after Benjamin Chavis was fired for secretly using NAACP money to settle a sex discrimination lawsuit against him, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People still is looking for an executive director.
The search committee that was supposed to submit one name to the board at tomorrow's three-day meeting in Baltimore still is interviewing candidates this week. And it may not choose someone in time.
"We had an unusually large number of applicants," said committee member Julian Bond. "It's just taking a long time."
But some critics said there was another reason the nation's oldest and largest civil rights group was taking so long to pick a leader.
"Nobody wants the job," said Michael Mey.
ers, a former assistant NAACP national director who now leads the New York Civil Rights Coalition. "The NAACP is dead, and everybody knows it."
Even some board members agreed the NAACP had slipped from its leading role in the struggle for civil rights. The NAACP refused to endorse Monday's Million Man March in Washington, which Chavis helped organize with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.
"We're a taillight," said Larry Carter, an Iowa banker who has been on the board for 6 1/2 years. "We've got to set the stage. It should be the NAACP putting together the Million Man March."
The NAACP is as much as $4 million in debt and struggling to repair an image damaged first by Chavis' ouster in August 1994 and then by allegations of financial improprieties by former chairman William Gibson. Gibson was replaced in February by Myrlie Evers-Williams, the widow of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers.
"I hope, I pray, that they will be able to bring a positive report to our board meeting, Evers-Williams said. "It is imperative, however, that we have the best possible person, a strong manager."
Financial problems have forced the NAACP to cut its staff in half. The national staff has
fewer members, 51, than the 64-member board.
The board has been careful to stay away from the kind of highly public yearlong search that occurred in 1993, when Chavis, Jesse Jackson and several other candidates sought to replace retiring executive director Benjamin Hooks.
"The last time around, it was a farce," said board member Joseph Madison, a Washington radio host. "People were almost running it like a campaign. You'd have thought they were running for president of Black America."
The NAACP hired an executive search firm to screen people and placed ads in newspapers across the country. A toll-free number was set up for those interested in applying.
More than 200 candidates have appended, according to board members. Among those who have been interviewed are Madison, acting NAACP director Earl Shinhoster and Wade Henderson, head of the NAACP's Washington office.
But missing from the list are the kind of prominent figures who in the past were eager to lead the NAACP. Jackson has said he was not interested this time around.
Shinhoster has served as acting director since shortly after Chavis' ouster and has instituted new financial policies, including the furlough of much of the staff last fall.
Four dead, three hurt in refinery explosion
The Associated Press
ROUSEVILLE, Pa. — The heat or the blast 150 feet away almost knocked Donnie Piszczek off the 50-foot structure he was helping to build. His first thought was to climb down, but there were five or six men and only one ladder.
Piszczek jumped, hit the ground and ran for his life.
He survived Monday's explosion at Pennzoil Products Co. without injury. Three other workers were killed and four were injured.
Tanks of naphtha solvent and fuel oil ignited in the main part of the Pennzoil refinery at 10:15 a.m., according to Steve Hickman, a company spokesman. The blaze was extinguished about two hours later.
The names of the dead men were not immediately released. One was a Pennzoil employee, and two worked for a company called NPS, which was working
The sequence of events leading to the fire had not been established, he said.
on a special project to enable the refinery to extract more high-grade wax from oil. Two of the injured were listed in critical condition yesterday.
A burned-oil odor filled the air near the refinery, and smoke billowing from the plant in Rouseville, about 75 miles north of Pittsburgh, could be seen from miles away.
Piszczek, an iron worker from Lisbon, Ohio, was helping to install a filter house, where wax is filtered from crude oil, when the blast came.
"I heard my foreman say, 'Get the (expletive) off the iron!' There was a flash, and the heat just about knocked me off," Piszczek said.
At the time of the fire, about 100 Pennzoil workers and 50 to 75 NPS employees were working at the refinery.
The company, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and state and local officials were investigating the blast. Plant operations ceased.
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