NAACP leader speaks at Oakland Museum

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) celebrated its 100-year anniversary in February. As this country's oldest multi-racial civil rights organization begins its second century, many have asked if it is still relevant.

On April 25, NAACP National President Benjamin Todd Jealous outlined the organization's "Visions for America" to a packed audience--and overflow room-at the Oakland Museum of California and answered that question with a resounding "yes."

"What makes the NAACP different than any other civic organization is that for 100 years, we've done one thing really well," said Jealous, 36, who took the helm of the national civil rights organization nearly a year ago. He is youngest to ever lead the NAACP nationally. "We have dreamt big dreams and have turned those dreams into big victories."

Jealous then outlined some of the NAACP's goals and accomplishments over the past 100 years from its founding in 1909 to the 30-year struggle from World War I to World War II to desegregate the military; and the 20-year struggle to outlaw Jim Crow--American apartheid, or segregation.

"Playing on Jim Crow's courts, with Jim Crow's refs, by Jim Crow's rules," Jealous said, "took us 22 years, but we did it.

"In 1954, we said we were going to desegregate this country from the neighborhood school to the global corporation." Referring to Brown v. Board (of Education)--the landmark Supreme Court decision that desegregated public schools-he said "it may have worked everywhere but the schools."

Jealous noted that the NAACP would have to shift focus from civil rights to human rights in order to serve the next generations.

"The struggle of the NAACP in the 21st century is very different from the 20th," he said. "In the 20th century, we fought principally to enforce civil rights, the social contract (that) had been amended, extended in the 19th century."

It was "a great moment for human rights that culminated in the 'Civil Rights' amendments to the Constitution, the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments," These were amendments that outlawed slavery, afforded all "equal protection" and granted the formerly enslaved the right to vote.

'In the 20th century, we fought principally to enforce civil rights...but in this century...what we're talking about is not enforcing civil rights being our leading edge, but realizing human rights.'

"And the struggles throughout the 20th century were principally to enforce a contract that had already been signed--ultimately a century before," Jealous said.

"But in this century, when the struggles are for good jobs, for good schools, for a day beyond this terrible moment we've been in for decades, when we use prisons to solve social problems like drug addiction. What we're talking about is not enforcing civil rights being our leading edge, but realizing human rights," pronounced Jealous.

Jealous long advocated for human rights. While a student at Columbia University--also working in Harlem as a community organizer for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund--he was suspended with three other students for boycotts and pickets for homeless rights and a campaign for full-need financial and need-blind admissions.

Jealous said he cut from the cloth of former NAACP leaders as anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells and W.E.B. DuBois--the father of sociology.

"I come from a tradition of leaders in the NAACP…the tradition of Black journalists," said Jealous, a former managing editor of the Jackson Advocate in Jackson, Miss. He previously served as the executive director of the National Newspapers Publishing Association (NNPA), a 67-year old federation of over 200 Black newspapers also known as Black Press of America.

"What we have to do now is what we did in the beginning, when we failed to pass the laws to end lynching, but we succeeded in building the consensus to end lynch mobs.

"We must organize, we must communicate," said Jealous, referring to the NAACP's vision to building an Obama-like force utilizing social networking and new media, coupled with classic community organizing tactics such as door-to-door canvassing. He also plans on strengthening the NAACP's Youth and College Division.

Oakland NAACP Branch President George Holland, a local attorney, said that he initially didn't know who Jealous was, but became excited about the opportunity to reinvigorate the organization when he came to understand Jealous' past credentials.

"We need a change," Holland said. "We're faced with issues we have not been faced with before."

Jealous added, "We're doing all of this because we have great optimism that this is the century to finish the work we started.

"The only way it is possible is if we do the hard work in a way that is disciplined. We must put out the visions of the what the American Dream really looks like and we must lay claim to it."

The event ended with Jealous taking questions from the audience. One attendee noted that--besides this writer--only one other young person was there.

Others complained that the local branch had been unresponsive to their calls and concerns. Local branch volunteers in attendance rebutted the criticism and encouraged them to speak privately with them following the event.

For more information about the NAACP, visit naacp.org.

This article originally appeared on the The Black Hour Internet Radio Show's blog.