Word: mfume
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...Mfume didn't get arrested, but he got the attention he wanted. The N.A.A.C.P.'s campaign to rectify the color balance in network TV has made headlines for months, most recently when representatives of three of the four major networks walked out of an N.A.A.C.P. "diversity hearing" on Nov. 29. (They were unhappy at being denied the microphone for hours following the testimony of Moonves, the only network top dog to show up.) But for all the verbal grenades fired, the N.A.A.C.P. campaign has sort of stumbled along. A network boycott originally planned for November was postponed, while some within...
...decades now, especially in the past couple of years, black actors have complained about being snubbed for starring roles on TV. So after the TV networks announced their fall lineups last spring, Kweisi Mfume arrived in Hollywood with his own script proposal. The N.A.A.C.P. president cast himself as the leading man, a swaggering yet politically correct Terminator of all things racist about Tinseltown. His first mission: to strong-arm the networks into hiring more minorities to work in front of and behind the cameras. Mfume's early salvos had the fire of civil rights rhetoric...
...bear at least some fruit. Following a series of meetings between network chiefs and N.A.A.C.P. officials in Baltimore over the past couple of weeks, the four networks are close to an agreement to implement a series of diversity initiatives, while the N.A.A.C.P. has all but dropped its boycott threat. Mfume seems to have realized that old-line civil rights tactics of boycotts and picket lines hold less sway on the Left Coast than power lunches and air kisses. What finally worked was the same back-room conciliatory politics that made Mfume a force on Capitol Hill for a decade. "Network...
...heartily agree with Kweisi Mfume, the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), who this summer declared television was "whitewashed." Quicker than you can say "tokenism," television honchos scrambled to add color to their casts...
...find it natural to collude with demagogic race hustlers in supporting a fantasy in which African Americans are no longer responsible for anything negative they do, even to themselves." Shaking down guilt-feeling whites, he says, has allowed "racial ambulance chasers" like Jesse Jackson and the N.A.A.C.P.'s Kweisi Mfume to live like millionaires. If blacks are really oppressed in America, he asks, "why isn't there a black exodus...