Has the National Action Network surpassed the NAACP in influence?
theGRIO REPORT - For now, those organizations are planning their next steps, separately and together...
The NAACP’s legacy – from its founding by whites and blacks partly in response to the horror of lynching – includes grueling battles for social, political and economic justice that resulted in precedent-making civil rights laws, part of the landscape of 20th-century America.
Mississippi Field Secretary Medgar Evers was murdered for his civil rights organizing in 1963; his widow, Myrlie Evers-Williams, became the third woman to chair the NAACP in the 1990s. Some say it is time for another woman to lead the group.
“Most people don’t understand what the NAACP has always understood, and that is that movements come from the bottom up, not from the top down,” Rev. Dr. William Barber, North Carolina NAACP president, told theGrio. The organization initiated and has led “Moral Monday” demonstrations — noted for the diversity of the thousands who participated — which continue to protest a conservative wave of legislation enacted by Republican super-majorities in the state legislature.
“When you become president of the NAACP, you don’t have to field an organization in North Carolina, you have one. You don’t have to field an organization in Mississippi, there already is one, with leadership that gives their lives to this work voluntarily. … That’s been the power and the consistency of it,” he said. “President Jealous was able to put forward a vision to expand on an already strong foundation.”
“Sometimes people mistake deliberation for slowness,” Barber said. “The NAACP is deliberate when it gets involved in an issue. We’re not a helicopter organization; we don’t just pop in and pop out. In North Carolina, we didn’t just have a march, we started a movement.”
He said the North Carolina group’s activism goes back years, when Democrats were in office, “pushing through same-day registration, early voting and Sunday voting and the Racial Justice Act, more money for education, standing up against voter ID when it first came up, suing over redistricting and building relationships with our coalition partners.”
After arrests at the first Moral Monday, “it sent a signal to people we already had relationships with — over 13 weeks, 1,000 arrested. That didn’t happen because a William Barber popped into North Carolina, gave a speech and popped out. It happened because the NAACP has a history of grassroots, branch-up work.”
Barber said, “No human organization is perfect. But very few organizations can look at its [sic] track record and say every major victory we’ve ever won on the national and the state level bettered America.” After Jealous, “whoever is CEO,” said Barber, “male, female, young, old, whomever God sends, first thing is they become not so much a CEO but the leader of the largest volunteer civil rights program in the world.”
In telling its history, which includes the names W.E.B. Du Bois, Rosa Parks and Charles Hamilton Houston, the NAACP acknowledges occasional friction with groups that advocated more direct action. “Although it was criticized for working exclusively within the system by pursuing legislative and judicial solutions, the NAACP did provide legal representation and aid to members of other protest groups over a sustained period of time,” the group’s website says.
Curry, of NAN in Miami, said, “I’m not naïve. I know back in the day, all of the civil rights organizations weren’t always on the same page. They were mature enough to put aside their difference for a greater cause.” He said, “I think it’s going to take all of the organizations working together in order to keep the powers that be [with their] feet to the fire.” He also said he is a big William Barber fan.
Barber, who has been a guest on Sharpton’s MSNBC show, said, “The true reality of the first March on Washington is that Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph insisted and demanded that people not be stuck in their egos — whether it be organizational ego or whether it be personality ego. What we must understand, particularly in the south, is you cannot have social, political and economic victories without fusion politics.”
As was the case 50 years ago, when leaders of a host of civil rights groups, from the National Urban League to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the NAACP and others shared the stage and the job of challenging the country to live up to its promise of equal rights for all, the job is still big enough to keep different organizations plenty busy.
For now, those organizations are planning their next steps, separately and together.
Follow Mary on Twitter @mcurtisnc3
