He's destroyed the sport of boxing. His coif looks as if his scalp is projectile-vomiting. He has murdered business associates and the English language with equal aplomb. But only in the America of 1997 could Don King have received a humanitarian award from the NAACP Last week, the civil-rights organization bestowed its President's Award on King -- not for fortitude in the face of his current insurance fraud charges, but for being, in President Kweisi Mfume's phrase, "a significant supporter of social causes" and an athletic pioneer comparable to Jackie Robinson.
King concurred, calling himself a "farmer in the field of civil rights." He said his accomplishments have gone unheralded since he has "never looked for any fanfare on this." Also unheralded at the ceremony were some of his other humanitarian efforts: Like how he insisted recently that Oliver McCall, who was undergoing drug rehabilitation, had to fight Lennox Lewis anyway (McCall ended up having a breakdown in the ring). Or the time he gave new recruit Pinklon Thomas a diamond ring, only to send him an invoice for the gift when Thomas hit the skids. And then there are the 25-plus lawsuits from former fighters saying they've been fleeced, the crack-addicted homeless proteges, the three grand jury investigations, the FBI undercover probe, the 23 counts of federal tax evasion he eventually beat, the 1954 murder of somebody trying to rob one of his gambling houses (it was ruled self-defense). And his crowning moment: As the biggest numbers runner in 1960s Cleveland, he stomped Sam Garrett, a drug-user with one kidney who owed him $ 600, until, as Jack Newfield put it, Garrett's "brain broke like an egg."
The outrageousness of the award to King commendably set Bob Herbert's teeth on edge. "The NAACP has lost its grip," Herbert writes in an extraordinary July 18 New York Times column. "There is a disoriented and at times paranoid quality about the organization that more than any other did the difficult, dangerous and noble work of desegregating America." Herbert went on to lash out at the muchlauded Kweisi Mfume, the former congressman who took over the NAACP last year to restore its reputation after a series of financial scandals. Contending that "the greatest threat to black children since slavery [is] their abandonment by their own fathers," Herbert then points out that "Mfume, unfortunately, is not well-positioned to lead [the] fight" on behalf of black children because he himself sired "five children by four women in 21 months."
What you are hearing is the sound of a once-great, once-unimpeachable organization losing its legitimacy.