PROVIDENCE — The website is down, the office is vacant, and the president was just suspended. The election for new officers was canceled, and has not yet been rescheduled.
That’s the current state of the 112-year-old Providence branch of the NAACP, the national civil rights organization that fights for diversity and equal rights for people of color.
The Providence branch of the storied organization has been in turmoil since late 2022, when Gerard Catala won the presidency while he was under investigation for violating state campaign finance laws.
Catala was convicted following a trial last year, and is appealing. Despite calls for him to step down, he stayed on and continued to lead the organization until his suspension.
“Until recently, NAACP was a leader on civil rights in the community,” said Ray Rickman, a Providence civil rights leader who runs a nonprofit called Stages of Freedom. “And it’s important that it get back there.”
The crisis within the civil rights organization comes as diversity initiatives are under attack in the United States under President Trump, said Jim Vincent, who was president of the organization for 12 years until the end of 2022.
“There’s been a lot of efforts over the last few months to roll back civil rights,” Vincent said. “It’s important for the NAACP Providence to speak out.”
“I’m pretty heartbroken to see that the branch is in the situation that it’s in,” Vincent added.
Rickman, who was an NAACP member for 40 years but did not renew his membership under Catala, said Catala “should have stepped aside on day two when he got in trouble.”
“I’ve told the president ever since he got elected that the branch is more important than he is,” Rickman said.
Over the past two years, numerous members have told the Globe they either left the organization or refrained from being active under Catala’s leadership. Some executive committee members resigned, and a group of members quietly launched an effort to remove Catala from the presidency.
The branch failed to file annual financial reports for the past two years as required, according to a Feb. 10 letter from the national office obtained by the Globe, potentially threatening its tax-exempt status.
A challenger emerged to run against Catala for the presidency last year, but the November election was canceled by the national office.
“Unfortunately, at this time this election will not run for this unit,” the national office wrote to members in December. “We have concerns about memberships, and we need to ensure that no member is disenfranchised during this process.”
At a virtual meeting last week, New England Area Conference president Tanisha Sullivan told the Providence branch members Catala has been suspended, according to multiple members who attended the meeting, and the national office has placed the chapter under administrative control. Regina Clement was named temporary state director for Rhode Island, and Nicole Tingle, who was first vice president under Catala, is the interim president.
The meeting “raised more questions than answers,” said Vincent Marzullo, the former assistant treasurer, who was on the call. “We don’t have an election for new officers scheduled, we have no explanation about why the election was the suspended, let alone the suspension of Mr. Catala.”
Sullivan did not respond to multiple requests for comment. It was not immediately clear if Catala was suspended because of his criminal conviction, which happened more than a year ago, or for another reason. The national office has never commented on Catala’s criminal issues over the past two years.
Catala did not return phone calls seeking comment.
“It’s a very unfortunate situation, in my judgment, for a historic civil rights organization to sort of be in limbo and not active and present where there’s so much social and active civil rights concerns right now,” Marzullo said.
Tingle, the interim president, did not respond to a phone call or email seeking comment about the future of the organization. The national NAACP office in Baltimore also did not respond.
The branch is basically “defunct,” said La’Juan Allen, who was running for president against Catala last year until the election was canceled.
“Essentially there’s not a branch right now,” said Allen, who also attended last week’s meeting. “Two years ago this branch was alive, thriving.”
The organization’s website, naacpprov.org, was not online as of Tuesday. Social media accounts list Catala’s cellphone number as the primary contact, and the organization has vacated its most recent office location on Broad Street in Providence.
NAACP began renting the office from The Center to Advance Minority Participation in the Construction Industry, a nonprofit, in March of last year, after leaving the organization’s previous office at the Cambridge Innovation Center in downtown Providence.
The Broad Street nonprofit’s president, John Cruz, said the NAACP was six months behind on rent for the 1,200 square-foot space when he sent an eviction notice to Catala in November, which he showed to the Globe.
Cruz said he did not file a formal eviction case in court, in hopes of resolving the back rent without making the situation public. He feared at the time it would harm the historic organization.
“I thought maybe we could work something out,” Cruz told the Globe. “I thought as a national organization, it shouldn’t be an issue.” He noted he had previously agreed to temporarily decrease the rent from $1,500 to $1,000, but he said Catala only paid for two months before stopping.
Catala quietly moved out over a weekend, Cruz said, and never paid the $6,000 owed in back rent.
Vincent told the Globe there was roughly $130,000 in the organization’s bank account when he left office at the end of 2022.
Marzullo said he resigned as assistant treasurer of the branch after Catala’s arrest in 2023, where Catala was accused — and later convicted — of failing to file dozens of campaign finance reports in multiple runs for Providence City Council. The reports are required by all political candidates to document how exactly campaign donations are being spent.
Attorney General Peter Neronha withheld a Department of Justice grant from the NAACP at the time, expressing concern about Catala’s stewardship of money.
Allen said rather than being bogged down with internal problems, the NAACP Providence should be fighting back against Trump policies.
“Every executive order, every appointment to the court, every attack on higher education and affirmative action, is a reminder of the importance of the NAACP, and particularly the local branches that are here on the ground,” he said. “The fact that we don’t have a seat at the table right now is a huge disservice to the community.”
Rickman said after Catala’s suspension was announced last week, he agreed to rejoin the NAACP and will try and recruit new members.
“NAACP has been important in this country for 100-plus years, and probably will always be,” he said. “What is need now is for people to rally.”
Steph Machado can be reached at steph.machado@globe.com. Follow her @StephMachado.