Civil Rights Groups Seeing Gradual End of Their Era

JoAnn Watson, a Detroit City Council member who ran the local NAACP office in the 1990s, said the organizations are living off their reputations. "They benefit from the name that has been earned by the blood of the ancestors," she said.

Michael Meyers, a former NAACP executive, recalled when the group's initials inspired fear. "People answered the phones; they thought they were going to be sued," he said. "But not now."

The drop in stature may have been inevitable, said Roger Wilkins, an assistant attorney general under President Lyndon B. Johnson who advised the groups. "Black people didn't have opportunities in the '30s and '40s and '50s," he said. "They couldn't be mayors, so they became presidents of black colleges or leaders of civil rights organizations. But at the end of the '60s, all kinds of pathways opened up, and civil rights organizations had to compete for leadership."

With advances in education, employment and buying power, some have argued, civil rights organizations have become passe. But group leaders bristle at the notion.

A report released this week by the Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal think tank, said that black America remains troubled. Despite marginal advances in education and jobs, the income gap between black and white Americans has grown so large since King's death that it would take more than 500 years for black people to catch up under the current pace of change, the report said. The divide between black and white wealth is so wide that achieving parity would take more than 600 years.

Organization leaders said that they have made mistakes since King's death but that they were also weakened by outside forces. As the White House was enacting civil rights laws, the FBI was infiltrating organizations under the secret Counter Intelligence Program known as COINTELPRO. After the 1970s, media attention turned away from the civil rights movement, the group leaders said.

Ineffective marketing and the lack of coverage led to public apathy, Innis said. "The lessening of attention and accurate reporting of our activities made it difficult to point out our civil rights victory and the new direction we were moving in," he said.

Charles Steele, president and chief executive of the SCLC, acknowledged that squabbling nearly doomed his organization. But, he said, the SCLC is coming back. The group says it has 150,000 members at more than 70 branches, but a 2004 analysis by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution showed that only 730 members paid the $25 membership dues.

"We moved into a brand-new $3.3 million building," Steele said. "We're the only civil rights organization in history to build from the ground up and own its own building."

At the NAACP, Chairman Julian Bond said the future "looks good."

The group helped lead efforts to reauthorize the voting rights and civil rights acts, and provided relief for victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005.

NAACP officials say that their voter registration drives led to a surge of black voters in the past two presidential elections and that the group continues to fight discrimination in the courts, as it did with Brown v. Board of Education.