Black power, nineties style.

Like the Clinton Administration, the new black leaders are veterans of the Sixties. It shows.

"ATORCH has been passed," declared Reverend Benjamin Chavis in July, in his first speech as the executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Chavis, 45, had in mind the passing of the civil-rights leadership from the old guard to his generation. After he spoke of black empowerment and the new political muscle of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), Chavis walked over to where the CBC's chairman, Representative Kweisi Mfume (D., Md.) was seated, and the two men embraced. The moment, said radical columnist Earl Caldwell in the New York Daily News, symbolized a "bonding between the two most powerful groups of the black community: the oldest and largest civil-rights group and the new 39-member congressional caucus." Caldwell credits Chavis and Mfume with the most significant change in black leadership since the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

In mid September, the leadership flaunted its militancy with its public embrace of Nation of Islam's Minister Louis Farrakhan--a separatist, anti-white racist, and anti-Semite--at the CBC's annual legislative meeting. Before a huge audience, Mfume announced a "sacred covenant" between the CBC and Farrakhan on legislative concerns; Chavis rhapsodized about "the spirit of unity"; and Reverend Jesse Jackson placed race above ideology, asserting that "People with different points of view can still have unity on racial issues." By embracing Farrakhan, the NAACP and the CBC snubbed white liberal House Democrats. "I represent the people of Baltimore, not the people of the Hill," Mfume shrugged.

Radicals and leftists welcomed the new militancy of mainstream black politics. The CBC "flexed its political muscle" by "publicly embracing" Farrakhan, cheered Lenora Fulani, cochair of the leftist and anti-Semitic New Alliance Party. But the new black leadership has among its allies not just the radical Left but also the Clinton Administration.

The New NAACP

WHEN CHAVIS was competing against Jesse Jackson for the NAACP directorship, Chavis's radicalism made him the Clintons' preferred candidate. Chavis supported the plan to lift the ban on gays in the military, and his obsession with "environmental racism"--which he defines as a "targeting of people-of-color communities for toxic-waste facilities"--struck a chord with Vice President Al Gore. Chavis was picked to devise environmental and land-use policies for the Clinton-Gore transition team.

A Sixties radical, Chavis has been the titular head of the legal arm of the Communist Party USA since 1973. In 1972, Chavis was convicted of leading the Wilmington Ten in fire-bombing a white-owned grocery store. (He was freed after four years in prison when an appeals court ruled that evidence had been falsified.) In 1987, he was arrested in New York, where he had joined Reverend Al Sharpton in a "Day of Outrage" demonstration against racism.

Prison experience, says W. Hampton Sides in The New Republic, has earned Chavis a "certain stature amid the gang culture of the inner cities," and has also "ingrained in him a deepseated victimology, a sense of the nobility of helplessness and suffering." Chavis called the L.A. riots a "people's rebellion" and rushed to Los Angeles in the tense days before the second Rodney King verdict "to be with those young brothers and sisters while they're being encircled right now."

By attending the Chicago gang summit in October, Chavis, Jackson, and Farrakhan gave some legitimacy to the twenty thousand gang members responsible for much of the city's drug dealing and drug-related murders. "This ain't no gang meeting," said Jackson. "We're having an urban-policy meeting."

Railing against "greedy capitalist imperialism," Chavis seeks "economic equality" in part by forcing corporations into "fair-share agreements" under which they must hire and promote blacks, and buy goods and services from minority-owned businesses. The NAACP's $1-billion accord with Flag Star Companies, Chavis said, "set a standard" for "relations between the civil-rights movement and Corporate America." The NAACP has strong-armed seventy other companies into similar accords.

At a press conference in August, the NAACP blasted Hughes Aircraft's record of minority hiring without even discussing its concerns with the company first. Although Hughes has one of the best records of work-force diversity in the field, it has responded with appeasement  rather than confrontation. "The NAACP is an important organization," says Dave Barclay, Hughes's vice president of work-force diversity. "We are interested in knowing how we might improve."

In late September, the NAACP targeted AT&T, which was vulnerable because of a racially offensive cartoon that had appeared in its in-house magazine. AT&T was guilty only in that its editors failed to spot the cartoon, which was produced by an outside design firm. AT&T promptly fired the design firm. In a letter to all employees, president Bob Allen apologized for the mishap and announced measures to "accelerate diversity" at AT&T. But the cartoon had given the militants an opening.

Despite AT&T's generous contributions over the decades to black educational, artistic, and advocacy organizations and its good record of minority hiring and promotion, the company was denounced and its New York headquarters were picketed by Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson's son. Allen vowed to work with the NAACP to "enhance [AT&T's] relationship with the African-American community, as well as with the African people in the Caribbean" and "Africa."

Chavis's radical politics has some critics. When Chavis was attending the Chicago gang summit, Congressman Mel Reynolds (D., Ill.) and fifty black professionals were holding a news conference billed as the "African American Male Anti-Gang Summit." Those "who support the gangs and attempt to legitimize them," said Reynolds, "do not speak for us."

In the conservative black-oriented magazine Destiny, John Parker called Chavis's agenda "the clearest departure from mainstream black America." "Environmental racism, embracing street gangs, and endorsing the homosexual agenda?" Parker mused. "The majority of Americans are more concerned with crime, the breakdown of the black family, and other social pathologies within their own communities."

Mfume's Black Caucus

`BLACK Caucus Comes of Age!" cheered Representative Charles Rangel (D., N.Y.), after the Caucus broke with the White House and Congress on a bill to give the President the line-item-veto authority.

When President Clinton withdrew Lani Guinier's nomination to the top civil-rights post in the Justice Department, the Caucus signaled its displeasure by rebuffing the President's request for a meeting and boycotting his barbecue. Rangel called Lani Guinier a victim of "high-tech lynching," and Mfume exacted a stiff penalty (the $500-million Child Immunization Act and the $17-billion Mickey Leland Hunger Relief Act) before he delivered 38 Caucus votes for Clinton's tax hike. The CBC also ostracized its lone dissenter, Republican Gary Frank of Connecticut.

The Caucus owes its new militancy largely to Mfume, its chairman since January. Mfume (originally named Frizzell Gray) grew up on Baltimore's West Side, where he spent much of his youth hanging out on the streets. He fathered five sons by three women, all out of wedlock. His adopted name, of Ibo derivation, means "conquering son of kings."

"Black people aren't important to the Clinton Administration," Mfume declared in the Nation of Islam's newspaper The Final Call, vowing to end the "days of second-class citizenship." His militancy has earned him praise from Farrakhan's New York representative, Minister Conrad Muhammad, who describes the 44-year-old congressman as "a star for black people,"a politician "who will not sell you out."

Another militant Caucus member who embraced Farrakhan was Maxine Waters (D., Calif.). She was "cast into the limelight"--as Ebony put it--by the L.A. riots, becoming a "new political star" and a "central advocate for urban renewal." Representative Waters alienated many by calling the riots an "uprising," but candidate Bill Clinton was not one of them. She served as co-chair of Clinton's presidential campaign, became his most visible urban-affairs advisor. She was the choice of Gloria Steinem and Al Sharpton for Vice President.

Miss Waters's sympathies for looters and gang members were shared by Mr. Clinton. The looters were "women who wanted shoes for their children and bread," she explained.

It "was heartbreaking," he echoed, "to see some little children going into the stores ... and stealing from their neighbors, but they live in a country where the top 1 per cent of Americans have more wealth than the bottom 90 per cent." Clinton invited two L.A. gang members to his inauguration and to his luncheon given to honor "outstanding individuals."

A "root causes" radical, Miss Waters holds "economic, social, cultural, and political" factors responsible for the urban crisis, and the government alone responsible for its solution. Full of sympathy for gangs and rioters, Miss Waters ignored their Korean victims in her congressional district; uninsured Koreans whose stores were burned benefited little from the aid dollars that flooded L.A.

Charles Rangel has also crossed the line between mainstream politics and militant activism. During New York's mayoral race, Rangel threatened that David Dinkins's Hasidic critics "would have a major problem" if Dinkins was defeated. Rangel also claimed that Rudolph Giuliani's white supporters were racist and that his "best asset" was that he was white.

Dinkins values his reputation as a "racial healer," but his administration was far from conciliatory. Its militancy is reflected best in its brochure inviting young people to join the Youth Commission for Human Rights. The brochure calls the Crown Heights riot an "uprising," and holds that there "won't be peace" until cops stop running "young men of color . .. off the streets." It promotes class warfare (only "good" schools in good neighhoods get computers), and it incites racial strife ("There won't be peace until New Yorkers stop . . . crossing the street to get away from Black and Latino youth").

The Leadership Divide

BLACK leadership's growing militancy has distanced it from its constituency. "Black people have more in common with Jerry Falwell, while black leaders like Jesse Jackson and Maxine Waters have more in common with white hippies," says Professor Walter Williams.

According to Milton Morris, a black think-tank research executive, black Americans "view themselves substantially more conservatively than we conventionally assume." Morris's poll shows that only 9 per cent of blacks feel the Rodney King verdict justified the L.A. riots. More blacks support the death penalty than oppose it, and 57 per cent oppose additional welfare benefits for single mothers who have additional children.

Conservative blacks--the ideological descendants of self-help advocate Booker T. Washington--call for personal responsibility and private enterprise, and they reject government dependency. More importantly, they do not separate blacks' interest from America's interest. "Black representation on Capitol Hill has all too often been too 'race conscious,' pulling the country toward political division," Emanuel McLittle and James White write in Destiny. "A different focus must emerge from black leaders that looks for what is good for the growth of America first, thereby benefiting their constituents."

Black conservatives condemned the L.A. rioters. While black militants rushed to claim the mayhem as their riot, conservatives like Thomas Sowell bristled at the notion that "the actions of hoodlums, thugs, and looters [represented] either the actions or the views of the black community."

Many blacks do not support Clinton-approved radicals and liberals. Lani Guinier, said a Destiny editorial, represented "Hillary's Brand of Civil Rights." Her writing revealed "a bitter enmity for America and democratic principles." Destiny suggests that the Clintons are using "black radicals as point-men" to execute their own "radical left agenda."

Sadly, the new militant leadership, heartened by a like-minded Clinton Administration, will continue the political conditioning that has kept inner-city blacks at the bottom of the economic ladder and impeded their rise into the mainstream.

Minoo Southgate, who writes mainly on race and black politics, is based in New York.