The New York Times is reporting that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) will be ousting their president on Friday.
It is believed that the organization will vote out their president, Cornell William Brooks, whose contract was ending in June, as a move to become more central in the supposed “Resistance” movement against President Trump by training their members to do more than simply protest.
“We are in a transitional moment,” Derrick Johnson, the vice chairman of the NAACP’s board, told the Times. “This is the opportune time to begin to look at all our functions as an association and see, are we the right fit for the current reality?”
Some other methods of activism that the NAACP is hoping to instill in their members include local litigation against policies that are antithetical to the organization’s cause as well as quickly spreading information.
“We have to be relevant and available for our people wherever they are,” Leon Russell, the president of the NAACP’s board, told the Times. “We need to speak to folks, find out what their needs are, and then work together to bring those needs to them on the local level.”
The issues that the organization finds the most troubling about the Trump administration are as follows:
Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s order to federal prosecutors to pursue the toughest possible charges and sentences against crime suspects crystallized the decision to press for change at the civil rights group. The order reversed Obama administration efforts to ease penalties for some nonviolent drug violations and was a 180-degree pivot even for the Republican Party, which had warmed to criminal justice reform.
Mr. Russell said he was also worried about Mr. Trump’s executive order to nullify President Barack Obama’s climate change efforts and revive the coal industry, as well as efforts by Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, to push for more school choice programs while cutting resources from public schools. The president’s budget, to be released next week, is expected to cut hundreds of millions of dollars from school-based mental health, advanced coursework and other services, and plow much of the savings into a $400 million program to fund vouchers for private and religious schools, and to expand public charter schools.
Brooks has been the president of the NAACP since 2014; during his tenure in that position he was arrested twice for refusing to end their sit-in protests: once in August when he and NAACP youth director Stephen Green wouldn’t leave Rep. Bob Goodlatte’s (R-Va.) in their calls for reviving the Voting Rights Act and again in January when they wouldn’t leave then-Sen. Jeff Sessions’ (R-Ala.) Alabama office.
Rush Limbaugh has for years referred to the NAACP as the NAALCP – National Association for the Advancement of Liberal Colored People – because the organization only supports left-wing causes and they never go to bat for conservatives. For instance, in October 2015 The Daily Wire‘s Michael Qazvini repeatedly pressed the NAACP if they would denounce the racist attacks leveled at then-Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson. The organization at first refused to comment but as Qazvini grilled them they admitted that the organization had zero “intention” to condemn the racist attacks toward Carson.
Qazvini later wrote in his piece:
The NAACP does have a history of condemning what they perceive to be racist statements against particular politicians, so long as those politicians are not conservative. For example, in 2010, the NAACP went out of its “non-partisan” way to pass a resolution condemning “extremist elements with the Tea Party,” specifically citing unverified racist treatment of Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver (D-MO) at the hands of Tea Partiers. The full text of the statement is available here.
“The resolution came after a year of high-profile media coverage of attendees of Tea Party marches using vile, antagonistic racial slurs & images,” stated the NAACP. The NAACP’s hypocrisy here is underscored by the fact that some of the very same language the NAACP condemned when allegedly directed at Democrats has now been ignored when it is directed at Carson. According to the NAACP, “…NAACP delegates passed a resolution to condemn extremist elements within the Tea Party, calling on Tea Party leaders to repudiate those in their ranks who use racist language in their signs and speeches.” No such statement of repudiation exists about the remarks of protestors in Harlem or the myriad of other instances of crude racial bigotry directed against Carson.
With the organization looking to become involved in the “Resistance,” don’t expect their left-wing bias to change, even under a new president.