African-American Group Boycotts NAACP By Seth Lewis CNSNews.com Correspondent July 23, 2001

(CNSNews.com) - Over the years, the NAACP has engineered boycotts against everything from segregation to the state of South Carolina's use of the Confederate flag in the name of civil rights.

Now the NAACP itself is the target of a boycott - and by one of its own.

The African-American group Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny (BOND) has asked blacks nationwide to protest the NAACP's left-leaning politics, which have thrust the group into the "socialist wing of the Democratic Party," says Rev. Jesse Peterson, BOND's founder and president.

"Pay the NAACP no money. Pay it no mind," Peterson wrote in announcing the boycott.

It's an ironic twist in the evolving civil rights movement, as conservative, pro-family African-American groups such as BOND and Project 21 break ranks with the NAACP they once supported.

While recognizing the civil rights victories the NAACP forged in the 1960s, critics say its current leadership has kowtowed to Democratic allies and lost touch with mainstream African-Americans.

A boycott, they hope, will reform that.

"Nowadays, the NAACP's caliber of work pales in comparison" to the earlier civil rights movement, Peterson wrote. "America's increasing equality and opportunity relegates the NAACP to complaining that there are no black characters on the television show 'Friends.'"

NAACP officials could not be reached for comment Friday.

The organization has long spearheaded boycotts, with recent action against South Carolina for flying the Confederate flag atop the state capitol and the Adam's Mark hotel chain for alleged discrimination.

"Flexing the black economic muscle has been something advocated a lot by the NAACP," Project 21 director David Almasi said.

BOND, which has adopted the slogan "Rebuilding the Family by Rebuilding the Man," is particularly disappointed at the NAACP's inaction against broken homes - the "real problems in the black community," it says.

"What are they doing about our schools, where our kids know more about condoms than mathematics?" Peterson said.

-- Anonymous, July 23, 2001