The state chapter of the NAACP wants to halt a bill moving through the General Assembly, calling it and the state audit of Rocky Mount that prompted the legislation an attack on Black leaders.

The NAACP released a statement Monday calling Senate Bill 473 racist. The measure, which has passed the Senate and is pending in the House, would allow cities to garnish the compensation of officials who owe money and make it a felony for elected officials to financially benefit from their positions.

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"When I have information that leads me to believe that there is an ulterior motive for the penning of certain legislation that goes against the principles that may seem to be written in the legislation, I tend to take an opposite position," Rev. T. Anthony Spearman, state NAACP president, said Tuesday.

Sponsor Sen. Lisa Stone Barnes, R-Nash, said the reasoning behind the bill is simple.

"This legislation addresses a need that clearly exists at a local level – so that local government officials are not able to operate above the law without consequences," Barnes said in a statement.

The bill is in response to a state audit of Rocky Mount's government last year that found, among other things, that City Councilman Andre Knight avoided paying more than $47,000 in utility bills from 1999 to 2013.

Spearman contends that the audit was motivated by white nationalists looking to unseat Black elected officials in Rocky Mount, but he couldn't provide WRAL News with any evidence to back up that allegation, other than "a gut feeling."

"We’ve seen this before," he said. "We’ve been there before, we’ve done this before, and we have the T-shirt to prove it."

The NAACP statement linked the Rocky Mount audit and the pending bill to the race riots in Wilmington in 1898 and in Tulsa, Okla., in 1921, saying officials are targeting the growth of Black-owned businesses and the power of Black officials in the eastern North Carolina city.

"[We need] to alert people and to bring people’s attention to sound the alarm, to have people begin looking at things with more of a serious nature than they tend to do," Spearman said when asked about the Tulsa reference.

State Auditor Beth Wood has repeatedly defended the findings of the audit, even going on a television talk show in Rocky Mount to refute claims made by Knight.

But Spearman said Wood couldn't answer some questions posed by the NAACP last year, leading him to suspect "malicious" intent behind the audit.

"The responses that we were receiving were quite frivolous," he said. "From our guts, we sensed that there was something else occurring."

Knight never knew about the utility bills, Spearman said, but he couldn't provide any evidence to back that up.

"I don’t have any really personal evidence, except to say that I have faith and trust in Andre that what he has shared with me is the truth," he said.

Knight is president of the Rocky Mount NAACP.

Neither Knight nor Wood responded to WRAL's requests for comment. Wood said she wasn't aware that WRAL News was trying to reach her.