CLEARWATER - The voice mail sometimes has a backlog of 80 messages.
Some callers want to file lawsuits against their employers. A few complain about the way their children were treated in school. Others just want information about the group.
But for Clearwater's NAACP branch, returning all of the phone calls is an arduous task. The branch has no office, no secretary and relies on volunteers to check the phone messages.
Such problems are increasingly common locally and nationally as the NAACP deals with an aging, less active membership and a faltering national profile.
Since the organization was founded 95 years ago, it has been in the forefront of issues affecting the black community: lynching, segregation, affirmative action.
Now blacks head some of the nation's top universities. They lead Fortune 500 companies. And they hold three cabinet-level positions under a Republican president: Housing Secretary Alphonso Jackson, Education Secretary Rod Paige and Secretary of State Colin Powell.
But the NAACP has almost become a victim of its own success, said Derrick Bell, author of Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism.
One of its greatest victories was the landmark U.S. Supreme Court opinion Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, which outlawed segregation in public schools. Bell suggests the case may have been the worst thing to happen to blacks.
"Brown has been good for white folks," said Bell, a law professor at New York University. "They can now say, "We did it for y'all. Why don't you stop that bellyaching?' All it did was declare that segregation was unconstitutional. It didn't change patterns of segregation."
Talmadge Rutledge, who led the fight against segregation in Pinellas County schools in the 1960s, agrees.
"We thought if we got the schools desegregated, that would take care of education," said Rutledge, president of the Clearwater NAACP branch at the time. "We have the same problems we had in 1950s. The problems were more blatant then. Now they are more subtle."
But they persist.
Last month, the Zephyrhills City Council voted to rescind its decision to name a street after Martin Luther King Jr. In January, a black teenager had a noose placed around his neck at a Largo fast-food restaurant. And Pinellas and Hillsborough counties had the state's second and third highest number of hate crimes in 2002.
For NAACP leaders, the incidents show a need for the organization. The problem, they and others say, is that the NAACP has been slow to adjust to more subtle forms of racism.
"We haven't been creative in developing new strategies," said Paul Griffin, director of African-American studies at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. "We have sat back and rested on our successes and achievements of the past. That just will not work today."
Active members decrease
As the NAACP moves toward its centennial, people inside and outside wonder whether its mission is still relevant.
Membership is down. In 1995, the organization had about 650,000 members. Today the number is about 500,000, according to the national office. And some lifetime members may never attend a local branch meeting.
Across the Tampa Bay area, the four NAACP branches are so separate that their collective voice is mute. Hernando County's has no office and no general phone number. Only about a dozen people attend the meetings in Hillsborough County.
"People don't come to the meetings because they have gotten complacent," Hillsborough County NAACP president Sam Horton said. "They don't know the history of segregation in the South and what the NAACP had to do to break it down."
In St. Petersburg, however, branch president Darryl Rouson has had some success in raising the organization's profile.
Since taking office in 2001, Rouson has led several battles for change. He pushed for the appointments of African-Americans to the Times Publishing Co.'s board of directors and to the rank of captain at the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office.
Rouson also worked to calm community unrest after disturbances in Midtown earlier this month. He had several meetings with city and police officials and urged calm among those upset by the verdict for the city in a lawsuit by the family of TyRon Lewis.
"We've had people call and offer compliments on what we're doing to handle the situation," he said. "I do think we've raised the bar in terms of the NAACP's visibility, vitality and viability."
But no local branch is immune from the challenges that face the organization as a whole.
Although there are more than 500 high school and college branches cross the country, few members seem to remain active as they reach young adulthood.
"If we are lacking anywhere, it's in young adults, people 25 to 40," said civil rights pioneer Julian Bond, chairman of the national NAACP. "That's a population that is starting a family. They are establishing themselves in jobs, and those concerns, unlike those younger and older, are a top priority for them right now."
Exavier Johnson, 21, president of the University of South Florida NAACP branch, has organized voter registration and membership drives and an array of activities surrounding the Brown anniversary. Yet it still has only about 40 members.
"My generation is a very apathetic one," Johnson said. "What often happens is you kind of get a false sense of security and you stop fighting."
Some young people say apathy is not the problem. The problem, they say, is the NAACP doesn't take on issues.
Deveron Gibbons, 31, former board member of the St. Petersburg branch, stopped going to meetings, saying the group seemed too concerned with social events to make a difference.
"All these meetings for planning one dinner, I don't have time for that," Gibbons said. "If you're sitting there having meetings all the time, you ain't helping no one."
William Thomas, 41, sees no direct benefit from paying the $30 yearly dues.
"There's no carrot dangling in front of me," said Thomas of St. Petersburg. "We are successful because of what they have done, but giving back to something that has old leadership and old goals? Nah."
No unifying cause
Part of the problem, some say, is there is no single, unifying cause. The NAACP, they suggest, needs to use focus groups to determine what issues are most vital.
"When we were growing up, everyone knew what the community wanted," said Randy Lightfoot, social studies supervisor for Pinellas County schools. "People probably want some of the same things, but now we're so fragmented that the message is getting lost."
To make that message clearer, Rouson two years ago proposed merging the Clearwater and St. Petersburg branches. The idea was met with resistance, he said.
Under his watch, membership in the St. Petersburg branch has tripled to about 450, while Clearwater's branch has struggled to recruit members - even though it includes all of Pinellas north of St. Petersburg.
Rouson also suggested that the three Tampa Bay branches combine their annual fundraisers into a single Freedom Fund dinner.
That didn't work, either. Roslyn Brock, vice chairwoman of the national NAACP, spoke at the Clearwater branch's dinner last month. And next month, St. Petersburg's branch is bringing her back.
Gibbons, a lobbyist, said branches need to come together and work on economic empowerment and closing the income gap between whites and blacks.
"If we're not putting our money in places that give us loans in inner cities to build houses, that put bank branches in Midtown, then we're throwing our power away," Gibbons said. "The NAACP needs to go back, sit down and strategize and get the agenda of black folks and push that agenda."
The group has been active on the state level, said Leon Russell, a member of the national board of directors and the human rights officer for Pinellas County. It has protested use of the FCAT and lobbied against One Florida, which banned affirmative action in state colleges and universities, and worked to restore voting rights to convicted felons.
Russell concedes those battles have not resulted in significant victories. But nothing, he said, is instantaneous.
"The people who say, "They are not doing anything,' are the ones who are not involved," he said. "A lot, though, depends on leadership. A branch is only effective as its leadership wants it to be."
Despite its problems, the Clearwater branch says it's working to be more active.
In February, the branch called for a ban on the Confederate flag in public schools. Members are trying to revive the youth council and planning a public forum to address educational issues. And its education committee meets regularly to discuss the achievement gap.
They even have an idea for the voice mail problem - purchasing a cell phone. That way, when the phone rings, there's a voice on the other end.
