This time the fun centers around the decision of Chairman Randy Voller to fire Robert Dempsey as executive director with the intend of then hiring Ben Chavis as Dempsey’s replacement. The party’s executive council didn’t sign off on hiring Chavis, who’s past would immediately be an issue. From WRAL-TV:
Chavis was a popular leader of the national NAACP, but he left the organization under a cloud, accused of improperly paying a former employee to not come forward with sexual harassment allegations. He then went on to help lead the Million Man March in 1995, a project lead by the Nation of Islam.
He helped lead one of the Nation of Islam’s biggest temples in New York but again left that organization amid what court documents showed was another sexual harassment scandal.
Voller said “it does not make me happy” to see members of the party and the executive council discussing those past allegations. Among the material circulated by Chavis’ detractors was a newspaper story that detailed a lawsuit in which a former employer said Chavis “strong-armed the company to hire two of his friends and committed the company to a Miami expansion that it could not afford.”
A Los Angeles Times story questioned Chavis’ activities with the Nation of Islam.
