NAACP Wants To Pass Torch To A New Generation.
NAACP wants to pass torch to a new generation
By RICK MONTGOMERY and GLENN E. RICE
Social media, they had down. Social justice, that was another matter.
For 29 high school students of all backgrounds who gathered last month at a leadership camp addressing “social justice issues,” the phrase meant different things to different youth. To most, it meant nothing at all.
Equal opportunity, they understood. Dissent, they shared with Facebook friends.
But civil rights? Dominating that discussion were their views on sexual orientation, illegal immigration and the rich versus the rest — not race.
“Early on you heard, ‘Racism doesn’t affect me,’ ” said Andrea Pantoja, who coordinated the weeklong Youth Leadership Institute for Kansas City Harmony, dedicated to improving race relations.
The NAACP, trying mightily to win over the young, appears to be facing yet another struggle.
For area members Theodis Watson, Shannon Fields and Kendra Kemp, chairwoman of the Kansas City branch’s young adult committee, the challenge is uphill: How to reach a multicultural, individually minded generation — one that helped elect a U.S. president “who looks like you,” as Kemp points out — and educate it to the realities that remain in America’s poorest neighborhoods, schools, workplaces and prisons?
“It is up to us, the younger generation, to be the modern-day freedom fighters … and to erase those injustices that have plagued our country for so long,” said Kemp, 28.
Still, the name of the NAACP, the 101-year-old organization convening this week in Kansas City, speaks to a distant time of whites and “colored people” and, implicitly, little blending in between.
Even the parents of Americans younger than 30 may lack personal memories of the most searing events of a half-century ago — images of police dogs lunging at protesters, of a black church being bombed in Birmingham, Ala., and of President Lyndon B. Johnson signing away part of his political party’s future with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
All of it recalled in black and white, naturally.
“People my age are divided,” said Nia Webster, 28, a founding member of the campaign against the Power & Light District’s original dress code, which some groups criticized for discriminating against young minorities. “Some recognize race as an issue while others try to ignore it. I think they have a lack of knowledge of African-American history.”
The new leadership of the NAACP reflects a desire to pass the torch. At age 37, CEO and President Benjamin Todd Jealous, a Rhodes Scholar born to a white father and black mother, is the youngest ever to lead the organization.
Roslyn Brock, who just turned 45, is the group’s chairwoman, succeeding Julian Bond.
“It’s a question asked every year: Are we relevant not just to young people, but to anyone?” said Bond, 70. “We’ve been around for more than a century, and for the last third of it, someone’s asked that question.
“There is a sizable number of people of all ages vitally interested in what we do … but I’m sure some people look at the NAACP as just old people with gray on their heads.”
Bond noted that the board of directors in recent years has included members attending high school. And it was Bond who pushed for Jealous’ ascent to the NAACP presidency in 2008, against the wishes of some directors advocating more established candidates.
At last year’s national convention in New York, the adoption of a resolution supporting efforts to fight global warming was seen by many as an out-of-the-blue appeal to youth.
The California NAACP includes in its batch of civil-rights issues the legalization of marijuana, an upcoming state-ballot measure widely supported by young voters. The organization argues that, while federal reports conclude that white Americans smoke the most pot, blacks and Latinos constitute 56 percent of arrests for possession in California.
Convention goers at Bartle Hall this week will discuss, among other topics, revitalizing the organization’s 600 high school and college units, buffing up the website and making better use of social media — YouTube, MySpace and Facebook — to reach new blood.
“There is a stigma that we are old and irrelevant, but that has to change,” said Quentin James, 22, who sits on the national board. “Our generation has stepped forward.”
To many local African-Americans, the goals sound fine, but the NAACP’s actions will determine its fate.
•Webster, who is active in several community groups, said she was among young professionals who met with NAACP representatives and others in December to discuss how black patrons of the Power & Light District should combat the dress code, which the district’s owners recently relaxed.
“They asked what would young people think, and someone pointed at me and said, ‘We have a young person here.’… Some young people who want to get involved are discouraged because they are not being heard,” Webster added. “A lot of them want to do something, but they don’t know where to go.”
•Watson, a 28-year-old Commerce Bank manager who volunteers to lead NAACP “Wealth and Wisdom” seminars at the Bruce R. Watkins Cultural Center, helps people with personal-finance issues.
“What I’d tell young people is to identify something you do well, to get involved in ways in which you can really perform. For me, it’s educating people about managing their finances. … One of the misconceptions of the NAACP is that it’s for African-Americans only, and it’s all about race.”
•Jermaine Reedis the 26-year-old ombudsman for Kansas City’s Green Impact Zone in the urban core. “I don’t see young professionals readily jumping to be active in those organizations unless the organization has a lot going on to get folks to jump aboard. … What happens is you get people who are ‘me, me,’ and not we as a team.”
•Panesha Goshon, 25, helped launch an NAACP campus chapter at the University of Central Missouri in 2005. She said sustaining the student body’s interest was difficult “unless something racial happened. … Besides membership drives, there was not a lot we could do. We had about five consistent members.”
Surveys dating back three decades show Americans increasingly indifferent to membership in broad-based organizations, political clubs and even churches.
“It’s true of the Elks, the Lions clubs and all structured membership organizations — young people are less likely to be attracted,” said Peter Levine, director of the Center for Information Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, a nonpartisan group funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts.
“That old social infrastructure, of joining up and going to monthly meetings, has been in decline since the 1970s,” Levine added. “It’s only been in the last 15 years that people have found a new world of electronic media to replace it.”
The NAACP touts a membership of a half-million — a little less than the 600,000 it claimed in the 1960s — but keeps details close to its vest. Not all are paying members, and at least 100,000 are worked into the mix for their “online membership.”
The group’s fortunes took their hardest hits in the 1990s, when the NAACP piled up debts and ousted two leading figures whose actions and comments cleaved the membership. It slashed staff by four-fifths to meet budget.
Ironically, that decade was far kinder to African-Americans as a whole.
Young black women, in particular, shot up the professional ranks in the 1990s as never before, and Kansas City saw an exodus of middle-class blacks to fresh subdivisions in the suburbs.
A 2000 study found that the number of black women who earned college degrees had increased by more than 70 percent over the previous decade, compared with a 47 percent increase for African-American men.
But the nation’s financial plunge of the last few years has disproportionately punished young adults of color, experts noted, and it could revive the cause for economic justice at the grass roots.
More than 30 percent of black Americans between ages 16 and 24 report being unemployed, compared with 18 percent of whites in that age group.
“What was in the ’90s looking like a golden age for African-Americans has very quickly lost its shine,” said researcher David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a think tank emphasizing social justice.
Bositis said the limping economy, the rise of the tea party movement and growing public disapproval of President Barack Obama’s performance in office “to some degree make race more of a matter of solidarity.”
Former chairman Bond concurred: “I believe it’s true that organizations like the NAACP do better in hard times. That’s when people feel they need us.”
Shannon Fields, 42, belongs to the NAACP’s Johnson County branch. He said the organization must continue to focus on issues that affect the black community but also collaborate with other groups — Latinos, in particular.
“It has been 50 years since the civil rights movement, and some people have forgotten the cause. And this is something that should be championed every day,” Fields said. “A lot of adversities that occurred during the civil-rights struggle are now pertinent to other cultures.”
For example, Youth Leadership Institute coordinator Pantoja, of Mexican descent, recognizes the false assumptions many carry when they ask her, “Where are you from, originally?” (Answer: Kansas City.)
Then, “Oh, really? And your parents?” (Answer: Kansas City.)
The 29 teens attending last month’s leadership camp represented about half the attendance of past summer gatherings.
But if many stared blankly when the facilitators first mentioned “social justice,” they came to appreciate the different viewpoints, biases and struggles unavoidable in a society so ethnically scrambled.
“By the end of the week, they had a more united perspective,” Pantoja said, “recognizing that each had a responsibility not only to his or her own community but to others.”
Elree Canty, 28, of Overland Park attributes some young people’s perceptions of a diminished NAACP to the way he and his peers learned about the civil-rights era in school.
“Our educational system and our whole culture tend to focus on individuals, the personalities — not the movements,” said Canty, an African-American who works for Southern Star Central Gas Pipeline Inc. as a project analyst.
“Far greater than the Martin Luther Kings, or a Malcom X, are the larger movements from which these characters emerged. You’ve got to look at and remember the role of these groups,” Canty continued.
“ … I hope and pray we can keep these large, communal efforts going. Society needs that back.”
Read more: http://www.kansascity.com/2010/07/10/2075242/naacp-wants-to-pass-torch-to-a.html#ixzz0tPGfbQMB
By RICK MONTGOMERY and GLENN E. RICE
Social media, they had down. Social justice, that was another matter.
For 29 high school students of all backgrounds who gathered last month at a leadership camp addressing “social justice issues,” the phrase meant different things to different youth. To most, it meant nothing at all.
Equal opportunity, they understood. Dissent, they shared with Facebook friends.
But civil rights? Dominating that discussion were their views on sexual orientation, illegal immigration and the rich versus the rest — not race.
“Early on you heard, ‘Racism doesn’t affect me,’ ” said Andrea Pantoja, who coordinated the weeklong Youth Leadership Institute for Kansas City Harmony, dedicated to improving race relations.
The NAACP, trying mightily to win over the young, appears to be facing yet another struggle.
For area members Theodis Watson, Shannon Fields and Kendra Kemp, chairwoman of the Kansas City branch’s young adult committee, the challenge is uphill: How to reach a multicultural, individually minded generation — one that helped elect a U.S. president “who looks like you,” as Kemp points out — and educate it to the realities that remain in America’s poorest neighborhoods, schools, workplaces and prisons?
“It is up to us, the younger generation, to be the modern-day freedom fighters … and to erase those injustices that have plagued our country for so long,” said Kemp, 28.
Still, the name of the NAACP, the 101-year-old organization convening this week in Kansas City, speaks to a distant time of whites and “colored people” and, implicitly, little blending in between.
Even the parents of Americans younger than 30 may lack personal memories of the most searing events of a half-century ago — images of police dogs lunging at protesters, of a black church being bombed in Birmingham, Ala., and of President Lyndon B. Johnson signing away part of his political party’s future with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
All of it recalled in black and white, naturally.
“People my age are divided,” said Nia Webster, 28, a founding member of the campaign against the Power & Light District’s original dress code, which some groups criticized for discriminating against young minorities. “Some recognize race as an issue while others try to ignore it. I think they have a lack of knowledge of African-American history.”
The new leadership of the NAACP reflects a desire to pass the torch. At age 37, CEO and President Benjamin Todd Jealous, a Rhodes Scholar born to a white father and black mother, is the youngest ever to lead the organization.
Roslyn Brock, who just turned 45, is the group’s chairwoman, succeeding Julian Bond.
“It’s a question asked every year: Are we relevant not just to young people, but to anyone?” said Bond, 70. “We’ve been around for more than a century, and for the last third of it, someone’s asked that question.
“There is a sizable number of people of all ages vitally interested in what we do … but I’m sure some people look at the NAACP as just old people with gray on their heads.”
Bond noted that the board of directors in recent years has included members attending high school. And it was Bond who pushed for Jealous’ ascent to the NAACP presidency in 2008, against the wishes of some directors advocating more established candidates.
At last year’s national convention in New York, the adoption of a resolution supporting efforts to fight global warming was seen by many as an out-of-the-blue appeal to youth.
The California NAACP includes in its batch of civil-rights issues the legalization of marijuana, an upcoming state-ballot measure widely supported by young voters. The organization argues that, while federal reports conclude that white Americans smoke the most pot, blacks and Latinos constitute 56 percent of arrests for possession in California.
Convention goers at Bartle Hall this week will discuss, among other topics, revitalizing the organization’s 600 high school and college units, buffing up the website and making better use of social media — YouTube, MySpace and Facebook — to reach new blood.
“There is a stigma that we are old and irrelevant, but that has to change,” said Quentin James, 22, who sits on the national board. “Our generation has stepped forward.”
To many local African-Americans, the goals sound fine, but the NAACP’s actions will determine its fate.
•Webster, who is active in several community groups, said she was among young professionals who met with NAACP representatives and others in December to discuss how black patrons of the Power & Light District should combat the dress code, which the district’s owners recently relaxed.
“They asked what would young people think, and someone pointed at me and said, ‘We have a young person here.’… Some young people who want to get involved are discouraged because they are not being heard,” Webster added. “A lot of them want to do something, but they don’t know where to go.”
•Watson, a 28-year-old Commerce Bank manager who volunteers to lead NAACP “Wealth and Wisdom” seminars at the Bruce R. Watkins Cultural Center, helps people with personal-finance issues.
“What I’d tell young people is to identify something you do well, to get involved in ways in which you can really perform. For me, it’s educating people about managing their finances. … One of the misconceptions of the NAACP is that it’s for African-Americans only, and it’s all about race.”
•Jermaine Reedis the 26-year-old ombudsman for Kansas City’s Green Impact Zone in the urban core. “I don’t see young professionals readily jumping to be active in those organizations unless the organization has a lot going on to get folks to jump aboard. … What happens is you get people who are ‘me, me,’ and not we as a team.”
•Panesha Goshon, 25, helped launch an NAACP campus chapter at the University of Central Missouri in 2005. She said sustaining the student body’s interest was difficult “unless something racial happened. … Besides membership drives, there was not a lot we could do. We had about five consistent members.”
Surveys dating back three decades show Americans increasingly indifferent to membership in broad-based organizations, political clubs and even churches.
“It’s true of the Elks, the Lions clubs and all structured membership organizations — young people are less likely to be attracted,” said Peter Levine, director of the Center for Information Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, a nonpartisan group funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts.
“That old social infrastructure, of joining up and going to monthly meetings, has been in decline since the 1970s,” Levine added. “It’s only been in the last 15 years that people have found a new world of electronic media to replace it.”
The NAACP touts a membership of a half-million — a little less than the 600,000 it claimed in the 1960s — but keeps details close to its vest. Not all are paying members, and at least 100,000 are worked into the mix for their “online membership.”
The group’s fortunes took their hardest hits in the 1990s, when the NAACP piled up debts and ousted two leading figures whose actions and comments cleaved the membership. It slashed staff by four-fifths to meet budget.
Ironically, that decade was far kinder to African-Americans as a whole.
Young black women, in particular, shot up the professional ranks in the 1990s as never before, and Kansas City saw an exodus of middle-class blacks to fresh subdivisions in the suburbs.
A 2000 study found that the number of black women who earned college degrees had increased by more than 70 percent over the previous decade, compared with a 47 percent increase for African-American men.
But the nation’s financial plunge of the last few years has disproportionately punished young adults of color, experts noted, and it could revive the cause for economic justice at the grass roots.
More than 30 percent of black Americans between ages 16 and 24 report being unemployed, compared with 18 percent of whites in that age group.
“What was in the ’90s looking like a golden age for African-Americans has very quickly lost its shine,” said researcher David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a think tank emphasizing social justice.
Bositis said the limping economy, the rise of the tea party movement and growing public disapproval of President Barack Obama’s performance in office “to some degree make race more of a matter of solidarity.”
Former chairman Bond concurred: “I believe it’s true that organizations like the NAACP do better in hard times. That’s when people feel they need us.”
Shannon Fields, 42, belongs to the NAACP’s Johnson County branch. He said the organization must continue to focus on issues that affect the black community but also collaborate with other groups — Latinos, in particular.
“It has been 50 years since the civil rights movement, and some people have forgotten the cause. And this is something that should be championed every day,” Fields said. “A lot of adversities that occurred during the civil-rights struggle are now pertinent to other cultures.”
For example, Youth Leadership Institute coordinator Pantoja, of Mexican descent, recognizes the false assumptions many carry when they ask her, “Where are you from, originally?” (Answer: Kansas City.)
Then, “Oh, really? And your parents?” (Answer: Kansas City.)
The 29 teens attending last month’s leadership camp represented about half the attendance of past summer gatherings.
But if many stared blankly when the facilitators first mentioned “social justice,” they came to appreciate the different viewpoints, biases and struggles unavoidable in a society so ethnically scrambled.
“By the end of the week, they had a more united perspective,” Pantoja said, “recognizing that each had a responsibility not only to his or her own community but to others.”
Elree Canty, 28, of Overland Park attributes some young people’s perceptions of a diminished NAACP to the way he and his peers learned about the civil-rights era in school.
“Our educational system and our whole culture tend to focus on individuals, the personalities — not the movements,” said Canty, an African-American who works for Southern Star Central Gas Pipeline Inc. as a project analyst.
“Far greater than the Martin Luther Kings, or a Malcom X, are the larger movements from which these characters emerged. You’ve got to look at and remember the role of these groups,” Canty continued.
“ … I hope and pray we can keep these large, communal efforts going. Society needs that back.”
Read more: http://www.kansascity.com/2010/07/10/2075242/naacp-wants-to-pass-torch-to-a.html#ixzz0tPGfbQMB
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