From The New York Daily News…
President Obama, new NAACP president Benjamin Jealous star at centennial
A hearty Big Apple welcome to visiting delegates of the nation’s best-known civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which today kicks off an annual convention marking the group's 100th anniversary.
The celebration is a homecoming for a group that first convened in Manhattan, as well as a relaunch under the leadership of new President Benjamin Todd Jealous, a 35-year-old Rhodes scholar who fairly crackled with energy and ideas in a meeting with the Daily News Editorial Board.
It was from a headquarters here that the NAACP waged audacious legal and political battles that hastened the demise of formal racial segregation. During the darkest days of struggle, the group would hang a grim flag outside its Fifth Ave. offices after every lynch-mob murder.
Hardly could the activists of yore have imagined that their successors would be addressed by a black President, as will happen when Barack Obama appears at the conclusion of the festivities.
Today, the NAACP’s appeals to the nation’s conscience about the state of black America are more nuanced because the starkest injustices have given way to subtler issues of race and complex issues of poverty.
As the country’s social fabric has improved, bringing greater opportunity and better lives to many, the NAACP has struggled to define its mission. It also has suffered scandals and management shakeups.
Now, Jealous is shaping an agenda that, he hopes, will address the persistent ills that afflict too many blacks — in the process, serving also to lift the fortunes of others in poverty.
He plans to marry traditional protests and lawsuits with modern political tactics, using online social networks and a new cell-phone based rapid-response system to accomplish what his predecessors did via door-to-door canvassing. More importantly, he recognizes that many social problems have less to do with race than with economic inequality.
We wish him success in reestablishing the NAACP as a powerful voice for fairness and an advocate for those most in need of help in a nation that can always use more of both.
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