Essay 1551

From USA TODAY…

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Civil rights for a new generation

By Wendy Koch, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — College freshman Simone Hall hasn’t joined a civil rights group, although her mother belongs to three of them. She says she’d like to sign up and wishes they were more active on campus.

Kendra Clark, a sophomore, says she joined a campus chapter of the NAACP, the nation’s oldest civil rights group, because racism still exists. Agbanyim Ugwuomo, a senior, teamed up with the Hip Hop Caucus, an activist group formed in 2004. He says he supports a fresh approach to racial problems.

The three black students at Howard University are exactly the kind of new members sought by civil rights groups. The students say activism is as necessary today as it was 40 years ago when Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday is Monday, led hundreds of thousands of people in marches for desegregation and blacks’ right to vote. They say, however, that the focus now should be on issues such as inner-city school funding.

Civil rights groups, beset by aging or stagnant membership, are recasting their messages to appeal to young people. They’re putting up discussion boards on youth-oriented websites and talking about jobs, education, housing, entrepreneurship and financial literacy.

“The role of civil rights organizations has evolved,” says Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League. He says their priorities in the 1950s and 1960s reflected a lack of black officeholders. Today, with more such elected leaders and victories that include the right to vote, he says the civil rights movement needs to focus on persistent racial disparities in income and education. “Now we’re at the stage of closing the economic divide,” he says.

Young people often don’t grasp “civil rights” but they understand “equal rights,” says Stephanie Brown, 25, national director of the youth and college division at the NAACP. “We try to put it in terms they understand,” she says, because students, unlike their parents or grandparents, may not fully comprehend what it means not to have equal access to education and jobs.

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