Ending the Whitewash

For decades now, especially in the past couple of years, black actors have complained about being snubbed for starring roles on TV. So after the TV networks announced their fall lineups last spring, Kweisi Mfume arrived in Hollywood with his own script proposal. The N.A.A.C.P. president cast himself as the leading man, a swaggering yet politically correct Terminator of all things racist about Tinseltown. His first mission: to strong-arm the networks into hiring more minorities to work in front of and behind the cameras. Mfume's early salvos had the fire of civil rights rhetoric of the '60s, as he railed against the "virtual whitewash" on network TV. In private he was just as confrontational. "I don't like this diplomacy s___," he whispered to an aide before a meeting with CBS Entertainment president Leslie Moonves in August. "We should just bring out the picket signs, bar the doors, get arrested and make the 6 o'clock news."

Mfume didn't get arrested, but he got the attention he wanted. The N.A.A.C.P.'s campaign to rectify the color balance in network TV has made headlines for months, most recently when representatives of three of the four major networks walked out of an N.A.A.C.P. "diversity hearing" on Nov. 29. (They were unhappy at being denied the microphone for hours following the testimony of Moonves, the only network top dog to show up.) But for all the verbal grenades fired, the N.A.A.C.P. campaign has sort of stumbled along. A network boycott originally planned for November was postponed, while some within the N.A.A.C.P. leadership grumbled privately that Mfume's first high-profile campaign since taking the organization's helm in 1996 was ill-conceived.

Still, the campaign is about to bear at least some fruit. Following a series of meetings between network chiefs and N.A.A.C.P. officials in Baltimore over the past couple of weeks, the four networks are close to an agreement to implement a series of diversity initiatives, while the N.A.A.C.P. has all but dropped its boycott threat. Mfume seems to have realized that old-line civil rights tactics of boycotts and picket lines hold less sway on the Left Coast than power lunches and air kisses. What finally worked was the same back-room conciliatory politics that made Mfume a force on Capitol Hill for a decade. "Network TV will never again look like it did this fall," Mfume told TIME in an interview. "We're winning on this issue in a way most people thought impossible."