Cincinnati NAACP tries to put in-fighting behind it; long-awaited election set Wednesday

The Cincinnati NAACP is trying to move past the years of in-fighting and headbutting that derailed last year's elections and sparked a pair of lawsuits with the national office.

The group's first order of business: getting members to the polls Wednesday to choose a chapter president and executive board.

The road to this election has been pocked with drama and finger pointing, but officials on both sides told The Enquirer on Monday that they're setting aside their differences. To reach this point, the local chapter and national office agreed last month to settle their respective lawsuits – one in state court, the other in federal – though the terms of the settlements weren't released.

"We want to move forward with whomever is elected and hold a general membership meeting very soon thereafter so we can start getting back to the work of the NAACP," said Janaya Trotter Bratton, a Cincinnati-based lawyer representing the national NAACP organization. "There have been so many issues in the past few months in which the NAACP should have had a voice. All parties really want to get it back and running."

Wednesday's election will be at the Greater New Hope Missionary Baptist Church, 3655 Harvey Ave., Avondale. Ballots can be cast from 3 p.m. to 9 p.m.

The vote's been a long time coming, said Milton Hinton, a past local president and lifelong member of the NAACP, the nation's oldest civil rights organization. "It's been so messy, it's hard to describe," he said.

Here's the gist:

Hinton and some other past presidents started getting concerned a few years ago that the local branch wasn't focusing enough on civil rights issues. Instead, the group had been aligning itself with the local anti-tax group Coalition Opposed to Additional Spending and Taxes, better known as COAST.

COAST and the NAACP became allies in a fight to defeat a proposed Hamilton County sales tax. They also protested the installation of cameras at red lights, and they successfully lobbied for the passage of a city charter amendment banning garbage-collection fees. The alliance was less successful in its efforts to halt the Cincinnati streetcar.

Hinton said he considered the dearth of civil rights-related objectives out of sync with the objectives of the NAACP, so he and other past presidents wrote letters to the national office asking that it intervene.

It eventually did when it delayed the 2012 election after presidential challenger Robert Richardson Sr. and his supporters filed complaints about alleged rules violations. Richardson lost to Christopher Smitherman, who won his fourth consecutive term. Then Smitherman resigned in December 2013, which left first vice president Ishton Morton in charge.

Morton finished Smitherman's two-year term and was to run for re-election against Richardson in 2014. But by then, the fissure that had been forming within the group morphed into an impassable divide.

The national office got involved again, delaying the 2014 election. Some local members were upset at the meddling, which they thought was tantamount to voter suppression. That's because the national office halted the election with just 20 days' notice, then moved it from its usual location to one it deemed more accessible to voters. It also truncated the voting hours, which historically had been 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.

"If the political government ran an election like that, the NAACP would be leading the cry of 'voter suppression,' " said lawyer Curt Hartman, who represented local NAACP members in one of the lawsuits. "If we don't want the government doing that, why would we want the NAACP doing it?"

That led to back-and-forth lawsuits. Morton and his wife incorporated Cincinnati NAACP in Ohio without the national office's permission, and then the couple sued the national chapter and members of the local branch's own election committee on allegations of voter suppression.

The national office responded with its own lawsuit that claimed the Mortons violated its trademark by incorporating. Branches are not allowed to incorporate under the national office's constitution, according to the lawsuit.

The case remained in legal limbo until last month, when the sides reached their undisclosed settlements.

"The big picture is that they've worked things out, and the bigger purpose of the organization needs to continue to be advanced," Hartman said. "Yes, there was a squabble, it was a mess, but that's water under the bridge."

Voters on Wednesday will have just one presidential option: Richardson. Morton has resigned from the NAACP, as has his wife. Voters will decide between two first vice-presidential options: Edith Thrower, who'd previously campaigned as Morton's running mate, and Joe Mallory Sr., who is aligned with Richardson.

Voters also will choose who will be on the executive committee.

Anyone who was a member as of Oct. 24, 2014, even those who didn't renew their memberships in 2015 because of the ongoing chaos, can cast ballots. Bratton recommends that would-be voters bring their NAACP membership cards or other documentation to help head off any voting delays.

Hinton said he's eager for the group to get back to work.

"Sometimes you don't appreciate what you have until it's gone," he said. "The absence created a vacuum in the community. It's a terrible time to be without the NAACP."

Editor's note: This story has been corrected to reflect that Ishton Morton is no longer a candidate for president of Cincinnati NAACP.