The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is 100 years old this week. It is the nation’s oldest civil rights organization and can lay claim to fighting the battle for civil rights on the streets, in the schools, in the boardroom
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is 100 years old this week. It is the nation’s oldest civil rights organization and can lay claim to fighting the battle for civil rights on the streets, in the schools, in the boardrooms and in the courtrooms.
The achievements of the organization are unquestioned.
But too often, the NAACP is spoken of in the past tense. Too often the venerable organization is relegated to the history part of Black History.
That must change.
It must change because the NAACP is needed, right here, right now. It is needed to continue to fight for civil rights, to continue to address wrongs that law enforcement, the courts, the schools and the government simply won’t right.
The NAACP has a new, young executive director in Benjamin Jealous, who is a veteran of the Black Press. Jealous has a tremendous job ahead of him. He has to restore the confidence in the organization at a time when it has been wracked by infighting, continuous turnover at the top and a moribund membership that has been dwindling for decades. When the organization was forced to admit that for years it had padded its membership numbers by nearly half, it reached a new low.
The organization is also saddled with an unwieldy board of directors, with five dozen members who all think they know what is best. It also is burdened by too many branches (units) whose volunteer base is not enough to keep those individual units viable. The calcification has gone on so long that for too many Black citizens, the NAACP is an afterthought.
In Chicago, at least three different chapters operate at diminishing levels of dysfunction. Calls to the Southside and far Southside branches go unanswered.
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