Is There a Crisis in Black Leadership?

Gene Collins is speechless. One of Vegas' most cantankerous civil-rights activists, able to go from zero to wordy in no-time flat, has nothing to say.

We're in the National Action Network's office on Martin Luther King Boulevard talking about the state of black leadership in Las Vegas, a conversation cued largely by the political self-castration of double-dipping, influence-peddling Democrat Wendell Williams, as well as by Collins' appointment as NAN's global gaming diversity chair, a position he insists is more than merely ceremonial. It's a reward for being the local pinch hitter for the Rev. Al Sharpton's New York-based group. Says it gives him power to negotiate with the Wynns of the world.

But when asked to expound on today's black leaders—after reciting the names of yesteryear's vanguard, local pioneers like Prentice Walker, Dr. James McMillan, Dr. Charles I. West, Otis Harris and Ethel Pearson, people who helped topple segregation and championed equality—Collins clams up, flummoxed. He pauses, chuckles, looks down—his glasses slinking to the ridge of his nose—then up, fixes his mouth and says … nothing.

Which says something, considering his decades of vocal activism: as a state assemblyman, stumping for a local holiday honoring King; as co-creator of the Black Ministers' Alliance, impelling black clergy to help solve urban ills; as peevish head of the local NAACP, agitating for workplace equality and carping about the lack of managerial diversity in the casino industry; as NAN's mouthpiece, pooh-poohing MGM Mirage's diversity efforts during a February 2002 protest in front of the MGM Grand.

Finally, he pipes up on the leadership question: "There really ain't none."

Long pause. "And as much as I hate to say it," he adds, "I'm part of the problem."

Collins would eventually say more—much, much more—about the state of black leadership, but that's his M.O., running his mouth in an attempt to make change. If only all black leaders were as effusive. Other prominent African-Americans chose their right to remain silent. From politicians to civic leaders, businessfolk to commoners, many didn't return our calls for comment on the subject. In a message, a phone-tagging local NAACP official noted that the branch—revived last year after the national office closed it for mismanagement in 2001, it's undergoing a leadership change after its popular president was assigned to pastor a church in the Midwest—keeps infrequent hours.

That says something, too. For all that the NAACP is—the most storied of human-rights organizations, progenitor of trailblazers like King and Malcolm X, Thurgood Marshall and Roy Wilkins, the force behind the Strip's desgregation in 1960, the end of forced busing in the school district in the 1970s, champion of fair housing in the 1980s, voice against redlining in the 1990s, proponent of casino diversity this century—it's only a part-time freedom fighter.

Nor has the family tree spawned by the NAACP—whose local cousins include an alphabet soup of acronymed organizations, from NAN to WAAK-UP—come close to the group's cachet. Local NAACP chief Dean Ishman encourages patience: "We are a volunteer organization."

NAACP or no, a respected black businessman who requested anonymity says blacks and black organizations haven't learned how to work together, and likely won't until forced to by some drastic circumstance. "We're still suffering from the Willie Lynch syndrome," he says, referring to a slave owner who purportedly sought to use age, skin tone, status and other issues to create division among blacks.

Though he stops short of saying it's now or never for black unity, Urban Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Louis Overstreet—who's fashioned himself into a go-to guy of sorts by facilitating casino diversity (he's matched gaming companies with minority vendors and recently received $50,000 from Park Place Entertainment to build a new Chamber building) and sautéing the school district on its record of minority business procurement—does think it's crunch time. With more blacks moving here (a 75.3 percent increase in the 1990s, according to state demographic data), more blacks running for office (a black man ran for governor and a black woman for lieutenant gov in 2002), more in key decision-making positions (Fitzgerald owner Don Barden; Lynette Boggs McDonald and Lawrence Weekly on the Las Vegas City Council, black fire chiefs, etc.), more in the middle- and upper-classes (see the influx of black athletes), they've never been better positioned to address race-specific problems like high unemployment in predominantly black West Las Vegas, police profiling, redlining and workplace bias, or to, as the NAACP did, stump for issues that benefit the greater good.

"Previous leaders were never ingratiated with power brokers, but that needs to happen now," says Overstreet, whose Black Steps in the Desert Sand chronicles the history of African-Americans in Las Vegas. "Individual success stories seem to be enough for us ... but we have no sense of unity, economically or politically, or sense of the need to be politically and economically empowered. Now's the time. We'd better capture it."

At the moment, we're mid-story in Williams' freefall from grace. Canned from his $85,000-a-year city job as an analyst for drawing pay during the legislature (he's an assemblyman) and ringing up $1,800 in personal charges on his city-issued cell phone, the telltale sign of his cachet will come during reelection—he's enjoyed a 17-year lock on his Assembly seat.

If that seems like a pretty good reason to survey the state of black leadership in Las Vegas, it's not good enough for State Sen. Joe Neal, a North Las Vegas Democrat who's served for 30 years.

Tying Williams' troubles to the state of black leadership presupposes that African-Americans are monolithic, he says. Williams is no more the voice of black Las Vegas than ethically challenged former City Councilman Michael McDonald was for white Las Vegas.

It's foolish, he says, to think there's one person who can lead the black race—or any race. Except for broad issues, such as opposition to another Bush term or hot-button topics like racial profiling, Neal says, unanimity among blacks is rare.

"What's most difficult about the Williams situation," Neal says, "is that [Henderson police chief] Richard Perkins drew his full salary while serving in the legislature and claims to have worked from Carson City. If we are going to allow governments to make a decision about employees from municipalities working in the legislature, it has to be unilateral. There seem to be different standards."

Williams' fashioned his own demise, says veteran activist Marzette Lewis, head of the Westside Alliance Action Korps-Uplifting People (WAAK-UP), by being the antithesis of what she thinks is the American icon of a black politician: seldom seen, rarely heard and morally incorruptible. Everything Williams wasn't.

She surmises that people were upset when he became Speaker of the House in 2001. "We, as black folks, we just can't play on the same playing field as white people. We can't do the same things they do, even if what they're doing is wrong."

Under the gaze of a bronze statue of King, protestors massed on a November morning to support Williams and assail a purported campaign to discredit black leaders. Most of the censure was aimed at the Review-Journal—or, as demonstrators rebranded it, the Redneck-Journal.

Ishman sees the press' hate affair with Williams as an attack on Democrats, not on blacks, noting the political corruption travails of Dems caught in Operation G-Sting (although GOPers have also been ensnared).

But Lewis says accentuating the negative is media credo when it comes to embattled black leaders. The more cocksure the leader, the more attack-dog the reporters. She blanches at assertions that the media-as-the-Axis-of-Evil argument is a convenient scapeboat. The press makes a point of flogging troubled black leaders. She can prove it:

• They did it with former City Councilman Frank Hawkins. (Although he was involved in a comedy of ethics problems.)

• They did it with City Councilwoman Lynette Boggs McDonald. (Although she flew to a Notre Dame football game on a Station Casinos corporate jet and holds a $50,000-a-year seat on the company's board.)

• They did it with Yvonne Atkinson Gates. (Although she was hit with ethics complaints for Daiquirigate—trying to land a lucrative airport concession for for friends.)

• They did it with the NAACP. (Although the group succumbed to tabloidy circus of boo-boos that included money mismanagement, sexual-harassment allegations, malfeasance, election tomfoolery and lost its charter.)

• And they did it to her.

"They've made me look like a crazy woman," Lewis says.

Of course, she's given them ample material to work with. Among her more infamous outbursts: orchestrating a funeral dirge at a school board meeting to protest Edison Schools' takeover of predominantly black West Junior High; allegedly hawking a loogie at a Library Board trustee. She's even worked Mayor Oscar Goodman's nerves enough to warrant a bailiff escort out of council chambers.

"There's an all-out war on black leaders, let alone politicians."

Overstreet asks: "Was there a crisis in white leadership when [former County Commissioners] Erin Kenny and Lance Malone were indicted in Operation G-Sting?"

While he argues that the media speeded Williams demise with above-the-fold treatment of his case, Overstreet says one black leader's downfall does not a leadership crisis make. Williams' apologists are using headlines to manufacture turmoil. He says there's no crisis.

Partly because there ain't no real leadership.

"Blacks don't have power in Las Vegas," he says.

Call it integration's aftereffect.

Where West Las Vegas once housed the city's black population—the Union Pacific railroad tracks serving as a Mason-Dixon line—Overstreet says nearly 75 percent of blacks now live outside the area. A 2001 study by the University of Albany's Lewis Mumford Center notes that blacks in Las Vegas integrated with whites at a higher rate during the 1990s than in 20 other major cities. Here, blacks live everywhere. And they span the socioeconomic strata. Millionaire athletes (Mike Tyson, Gary Payton, Floyd Mayweather, Jonathon Ogden) and entertainers (Jamie Foxx) living in Green Valley, Anthem and Summerlin, rich retirees holed up in Sun City or MacDonald Ranch, white- and blue-collar workers living in mature neighborhoods and those in government subsidized housing.

As blacks united on civil rights in the '60s, the de rigueur issue of modern times—political and economic muscle—hasn't created similar fervor. In addition, there's no single locale that lures the factions, and other races, as the Apollo Theater does in Harlem, the King Center does in Atlanta, the Blacks in Wax museum does in Baltimore. Everyone does their own thing. So far, Overstreet has been unable to organize an African-American summit to patch the disunity.

Neal says police have treated him worse than the media. Shortly after being elected, he caused a stir by opposing legislation that would have made it a special crime to kill a cop—he saw it as a move toward a police state—and urging violent resistance to police abuse.

"In the '70s, black people were being stopped, racially profiled, handcuffed and told to put hands on the top of hot hoods," Neal says. "And I said that they had the right to match the force of unjust cops with force."

Some construed this a call to arms, evoking images of the gun-toting Black Panthers. His reward, he says: police intimidation

"People just were not used to a vocal black politician," he says.

The ensuing decades have seen Neal repeatedly press for—and fail to get—higher state tariffs on casinos, nearly get unseated by Gonzaga law graduate and Harrah's Entertainment attorney Uri Clinton and mount an unimpressive gubernatorial run. He attributes neither his vulnerability at the polls nor his inability to push higher gaming taxes to impotent leadership.

"The casino industry just has everyone fooled."

"Yes," Collins says, "Las Vegas will have a black mayor in the future. We just need the right candidate to run."

It's not so far-fetched a notion considering there are no majority black districts in Las Vegas, yet blacks have had success on the ballot.

According to the state Legislative Counsel Bureau, five blacks have won races in districts populated by whites. Williams' has a percentage mix of 44-30-35 whites to Hispanics to blacks in his North Las Vegas District 6; Neal's district is 42 percent white, 35 percent Hispanic and 33 percent black; and North Las Vegas Democrat Assemblyman Morse Arberry's district is 41 percent white, 40 percent Hispanic and 32 percent black. (Up north, Sparks Sen. Bernice Matthews, D-Reno, represents a district that's 76 percent white, 19 percent Hispanic and 3 percent black; and Sen. Maurice Washington, R-Sparks, has a district that's 75 percent white, 26 percent Hispanic and 3 percent black).

At the municipal level, County Commissioner Yvonne Atkinson Gates, North Las Vegas City Councilman William Robinson and Las Vegas City Council members Lynette Boggs McDonald and Lawrence Weekly each serve wards with white majorities.

Ironically, Neal thinks prospects of a black mayor were better decades ago, when most blacks lived in West Las Vegas and could, theoretically, at least, pool support behind a candidate. Of the current crop of politicians, he sees only one who could seriously contend for mayor: "Lynette Boggs McDonald. She has lots of support in the white community."

Neal himself ran an unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign against Kenny Guinn in 2002, failing to capture support from the Democratic National Committee's Black Caucus, led by Yvonne Atkinson Gates, who explained the diss to the R-J: "We try to go into states where we can pick up another Senate seat or another congressional seat. Our philosophy is to work from the bottom up, help those candidates who can help the top of the ticket."

In other words, Neal got no support because he had no chance.

Portraits of civil-rights icons commandeer the southwest wall of NAN's office. Particularly noticeable are depictions of the movement's most venerable figures: Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad amid clouds; race-baiter-turned-racial-healer Malcolm X teaching youth and reading; utopian dream-seeker Martin Luther King Jr. appearing pensive. Just a few feet away, on the northern wall, hangs a white sign, the size of a handkerchief, touting in red letters the presidential aspirations of the movement's current, most vocal, visible and vitriolic leader: "Rev. Al Sharpton for President in 2004, the Solution to Our Foreign Policy."

That NAN's office was previously home base for the local NAACP before it closed highlights another problem in black leadership: repetition.

Several ousted NAACPers work for the NAN. Others have scrambled to different African-American groups. Former local NAACP president, the Rev. Jesse Scott, is among those seeking to establish a local outpost of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow/Push Coalition. (Williams has also signed on.) Others are trying to build a chapter of the National Urban League. Ditto a branch of the College Fund (formerly the United Negro College Fund). Add these to an already large civic flock—the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, I Have a Dream Foundation, Nation of Islam, New Black Panther Party, Westside Alliance Action Korps-Uplifting People (WAAK-UP), Westside New Pioneers, 100 Black Men of Las Vegas, Committed 100 Men Helping Boys, fraternities, sororities, Masonic lodges and nonprofits—and the question becomes how many organizations is too many? Blacks comprise 9 percent of the population (140,000), giving these many organizations a relatively small pool to tap for support and money.

Each's mission is a variation of uplifting people. Joining a group is essentially a flavor-of-the-month selection.

At the time of NAN's arrival in 2001, James Tate, executive director of the National Alliance for Racist and Political Repression, welcomed the group, saying every similarly styled organization is valuable. No one entity can uproot racism alone.

"When things happen, groups are formed ... at one time [in response to the 1992 riots in West Las Vegas following the Rodney King acquittals], we had a group called Unity in the Community and it was successful for a time," Tate says. "But over time, it came apart and that's common. Winning is a matter of perseverance."

Rosetta Jordan, executive director of the Westside New Pioneers CDC, a nonprofit group dedicated to the economic development of West Las Vegas, expressed skepticism, saying at the time, "It's going to take time to change the minds of the people in power."

"You have to show them that the changes you want are feasible, needed, and that you're willing to work for them. I'm not sure how the people in power will welcome a new group of activists."

Back in his office, Collins says there can be never too many civil-rights groups, provided each is advocating for the community. He questions the "11th-hour" entry of new organizations, many populated by NAACP expatriates, but defends his switch to NAN.

"I didn't leave the NAACP, I was thrown out."

The NAACP's national office snatched the local charter and deposed Collins' administration in 2001, citing mismanagement. Among other things, the branch was booted out of its West Owens Avenue office for missing rent payments, getting mired in internal election controversies and malfeasance. The final straw, he says, was a push to get MGM Mirage to invest $100 million in West Las Vegas. Casino officials called it "extortionary." NAACP brass claimed Collins went over their heads. Fearful of forfeiting comps, Collins alleged, they lowered the boom. Both national NAACP and MGM Mirage officials denied the claims.

Then there's the question of credit. Who gets it? Who gets too much? Who, not enough?

Collins chest-thumps his role in goosing casinos on diversity. The kicker: He praises NAN for work he started while in the NAACP.

The Urban Chamber's role is begrudged too. It puzzled together minority- and women-owned businesses with casinos.

"They helped a little," Collins says.

In a few cases, he doled out accolades. To Lewis, for being an education hawk: "She built West Middle School." To City Hall gadfly Beatrice Turner for, well, her mouth: "She puts her neck on the line [fighting for quality-of-life issues in West Las Vegas]." To Tate for speaking his mind.

What about elected officials?

On Assemblyman Morse Arberry: Moved out of the black community.

On Boggs McDonald: She's OK.

On Atkinson Gates: Has done nothing. (She opened a much-needed day-care center in West Las Vegas.)

On Neal: Accomplished little. (He championed creation of a police review board).

On Weekly: Closed neighborhood office in West Las Vegas (He orchestrated a $10 million renovation of the historic Doolittle Community Center and millions in road improvements).

On Williams: "I have a personal reason to dislike him."

Collins interrupts me before I can finish the list and admits that colleagues probably view him similarly.

Since fire claimed H&H Barbecue last summer, several soul food restaurants in West Las Vegas have enjoyed the customer runoff. I'm inside one with a friend and trying unsuccessfully to eavesdrop on a prominent black businessman and a preacher who helped develop an affordable housing complex—tough to hear with Marvin Gaye over the PA system jockeying with claptrap from All My Children on the tube. They leave. My associate arrives. A management-level employee at a notable nonprofit, he's worked for two high-flyers: an elder statesmen who can move government mountains with a phone call and a young up-and-comer with significant sway in the city's largest industry.

From his stewardship under both, he's arrived at this conclusion: Blacks can derive more power working behind the scenes than in office or aligned with a civic organization.

"You can get just as much done when no one knows who you are" he says. "Why run for office? Who wants all the aggravation and to be held accountable?"

The voting booth is the key. The NAACP's Ishman is convinced.

"Until we get people out there, we as blacks aren't going to be taken seriously," he says. "Politicians look at those votes and they govern themselves accordingly."

As the influx of other races to affordable housing projects slowly erodes the Westside's reputation as an mostly black province, Ishman says organizations have an opportunity to unite the black community on issues of mutual agreement. From there, they can form coalitions with other influential groups. The American Civil Liberties Union. The Culinary. To date, Ishman has placed feelers to the Latin and Asian chambers of commerce and the Mexican American Political Association. Response has been positive.

"We can all help each other."

Stretching several city blocks on Spring Mountain, Chinatown stands as testament to the influence of Asians. In certain portions of East Las Vegas, Spanish signs outnumber English billboards—the Latino economy is flourishing.

What does West Las Vegas have to show?

Minimal signs of improving life—fast-food restaurants, police station, affordable housing.

Which reflects the lack of sway black leaders have, Lewis argues. Which makes it a perfect time for a protest.

Collins offers a glass-half-full assessment. Despite traditionally higher-than-average unemployment, despite being ensconced in a federal empowerment zone, despite being a hotbed for gangs and despite its reputation (undeserved he says), the Westside isn't in bad shape. There aren't any slums, in the Cabrini Green sense of the blight, crime is higher in other parts of town, it rarely floods and it's overrun by churches (there are more than three dozen), a once-relied-upon-but-now-untapped source of power.

"The black church used to be our White House," Collins says.

Overstreet says a true test of the state of black leaders will be marshalling the black community's estimated $4 billion in economic power to start businesses on the Westside and support projects that improve the city. He's not optimistic, citing an us-first mentality—everyone wants to be the new NAACP.

"And we need to start grooming the next generation," he says.

This has been Collins' failure. Not energizing youth to fight for economic equality as he and others did for human rights. Not showing them how three-strikes laws and mandatory minimum sentencing have disenfranchised a whole generation. Not explaining how politics dictate every facet of your life, nor how, by becoming involved, you can change the system.

"I didn't get into politics because I liked it. I was coaching kids and saw a need that wasn't being met," he says, while his daughter, Sheila Collins, a civil and political activist answers phones. She periodically chimed in during the conversation.

"In the '60s, young people marched to bring about change, and I was influenced by that. I haven't influenced the next generation, but I'm working on it.

"You interested in running for office?"