Cincinnati NAACP to host convention

The national event is set to start Saturday.

CINCINNATI (AP) — The NAACP’s Cincinnati chapter sagged to a low point a few years ago, its membership the smallest it had been in decades. Some outside the chapter questioned its relevancy.

Since Christopher Smitherman took over after a disputed election a little more than a year ago, membership has nearly tripled, from about 750 members to about 2,000. Now, with a unified and revived chapter, the branch is set to host the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s national convention from Saturday to July 17.

Presumptive presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama are expected to address the more than 8,000 delegates from the nation’s oldest civil rights organization, which in 2006 selected Cincinnati as this year’s site.

Former president Edith Thrower, who lost to Smitherman last year in a contentious election that required a runoff supervised by the Baltimore-based national organization, said there are no hard feelings over her ouster.

“That’s water under the bridge,” she said. “We’ve all moved on from the election and we’re all looking at the bigger picture.”

Smitherman, 40, has since pushed for appointment of blacks to a steering committee for riverfront development and joined an unlikely coalition of anti-taxers, environmentalists and the Libertarian Party to defeat a proposal to build a new jail.

This year, he’s heading a petition drive fighting deployment of red light cameras, and a movement to create proportional representation on the city council.

Smitherman is engaging and animated. He makes faces, waves his hands, pounds his chest and makes circles in the air as he talks.

He was viewed by some as a loose cannon when he was on the city council, although he believes people who remember him as angry and confrontational during a tense racial period have him “100 percent wrong.”

Smitherman was elected to one term in 2003, two years after three nights of riots crippled the city after the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man by a white police officer trying to make an arrest. Days before Smitherman was sworn in, a black man died while in police custody in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant.

Smitherman took the police and the chief to task and was turned out after one term, thanks in part to opposition by the Fraternal Order of Police. He said he thinks he got falsely labeled and maligned because police officials were not used to having their account of events questioned.

“I thought my questioning was very appropriate,” Smitherman said. “The subject matter, often times, made people in Cincinnati uncomfortable.”

Then-Hamilton County Prosecutor Mike Allen, a former police officer, once called Smitherman a “smart-mouthed little punk.”

“That’s one I wished I had back,” said Allen, now in private law practice. “About two years ago, I saw him on the street downtown and I apologized to him for it. I have been following what he’s doing, and although I do not agree with everything he does, he’s a fine young man.”

Smitherman calls himself a political independent and fiscal conservative molded by his dad, a chemist with Procter & Gamble, and his mother, a teacher and administrator in Cincinnati Public Schools.

Smitherman graduated from Ohio State University, worked at Bowling Green State University while earning a master’s degree and went to Wheeling Jesuit University as director of campus life, summer conferences and adult education.

He returned to Cincinnati in 1997, moving his family to the same neighborhood where he grew up, and established a business as a financial adviser and estate planner.

“I don’t define myself as a rabble-rouser,” Smitherman said. “I grew up in an upper-middle class family; I am upper-middle class. I’m very proud of that success. I’ve built this business from scratch, and it’s been able to take care of my family. My financial independence allows me to be independent politically.”

Smitherman knew some people had doubts about where he would take the local NAACP, but he said he thiks he has allayed fears that he was interested only in bombast and boycotts.

“I’m not just an attack dog,” he said. “My time is spent on the phone negotiating with people, explaining our position.”

Longtime activist Marian Spencer, 88, who helped lead the integration of Cincinnati’s Coney Island swimming pool in 1952, is a sometimes ally. Like Smitherman, she was president of the local NAACP and a member of city council, both in the 1980s, and supported him in his takeover of the chapter.

“He was absolutely right in the concerns he had,” Spencer said. “I differed with him on the jail tax issue. We do not agree on everything. I’ve found him exceedingly capable, personable, though not always in the same place I am with the issues — and he doesn’t have to be.”