Effort urged to keep Va. NAACP relevant

As the NAACP marks 100 years, some young leaders seek to re-examine the group's mission As President Barack Obama was challenging the NAACP late last month to maintain its relevance on issues of national importance, a group of young leaders in the Richmond area was challenging the state chapter of the civil-rights organization to re-examine its place in a changing world.

The Virginia chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People needs to "broaden our perspective," said the Rev. Tyrone Nelson, the 36-year-old pastor of Sixth Mount Zion Baptist Church in Richmond and former vice president of the Henrico County chapter of the NAACP.

"Every organization has to sit back and say, 'Why am I here?'" he said. "We have some ministries here that we don't do anymore. They were good, but their time passed."

The sole discretion for shaping the future shouldn't rest in the hands of those who shaped the past, said Lamont Bagby, 32, a Henrico School Board member.

"The two major challenges they face," he said of the state chapter, "are illustrating they're still relevant at this point in time and illustrating what it is that they do."

He said the group needs new leadership. "It's like elective politics," he said. "Sometimes you have people who have been in power a long time who don't want to listen to people younger than them."

Virginia NAACP Executive Director King Salim Khalfani laughed at that idea.

"I'm ready to move on," he said. "They just have to step up. It always youth and students who spark any movement for change."

Attempts to reach State Conference President J. Rayfield Vines Jr. have been unsuccessful.

The national NAACP, which bills itself as the "the nation's oldest, largest and most widely recognized grass-roots-based civil-rights organization," is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year.

Antione Green, 30, the president of the Richmond Crusade for Voters, said younger leaders need to come forward to rejuvenate the NAACP. "It's time for our generation to step up," he said. "We need to assert ourselves."

Nelson, Green, Bagby and others said the big issues for the NAACP -- criminal justice, education and political representation -- remain, but the issues that once caused outrage now are mired in nuance.

"What was important 100, 80, 60, 50, 40 years ago, we have -- and I know I'll get in trouble for saying this -- I think we've achieved to a certain degree," Nelson said. "I think we've come a long way."

In the past, he said, the focus of national NAACP efforts was on "apparent, systemic" evils. Now, it's on "things you can't really see," Nelson said, such as inner-city schools that are inferior to suburban schools and jails that hold disproportionately black populations.

Those things are no less real, he said, but finding the outrage to fight them is the challenge. "We need folks stepping out of the box to achieve," he said.

Green agreed, specifically mentioning the way schools have become resegregated, particularly in Richmond. The city is about 38 percent white, but the school system is 88 percent black.

"We need to get rid of the de facto segregation in our society," he said.

. . .

Getting rid of that segregation will require more than latching on to the hot issues of the moment at the expense of a sustained effort, Nelson said.

"It can't all be about Powhatan," he said, referring to allegations of racial bias in a recent trial in which two young white men were found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the shooting death of Tahliek Taliaferro, a young black man.

"It has to have a vision, and it has to embrace [more] young leaders. It has to be men and women, black, white, yellow and purple."

After thinking about the topic for a few more days, Nelson wrote in an e-mail: "Today to openly deal with this type of challenge, an organization has to position itself to have leaders that understand global ideas, with local approaches. They have to be open-minded and know when to do what. Marches and public demonstrations are great tools, but they are not the only tools. We must be prepared to lobby our governmental officials, grass-root organize, develop policy, etc."

Green said he has witnessed the need for change as an insider with the state chapter and as an outsider.

He spent a year on the executive committee of the State Conference of the NAACP but resigned his post as treasurer last summer. "I just wasn't comfortable with the things they were focusing on," he said.

One of those things was a charter elementary school in Richmond, the Patrick Henry School of Science and Arts.

The idea of the school, which will become the first charter elementary school in the state when it opens next year, prompted outrage from state NAACP chief Khalfani. In a letter May 16, 2008, to the Richmond School Board written on state NAACP letterhead -- which included Green's name as treasurer -- Khalfani said: "We are prepared to do what is necessary to fight white supremacy and black capitulation!"

The same day, Khalfani appeared at a news conference in front of the school to voice his discontent. He was there with School Board candidate Art Burton and former School Board Chairman and longtime Richmond NAACP stalwart Melvin Law, among a few others.

He passed out an undated letter, again on conference letterhead, that said: "There is a nefarious battle being waged by a segment of the population to take back what was lost in the 1970s." In the letter, he said, "the white takeover is in progress."

Green took exception to the approach. For that reason and several others, he said, he resigned his seat on the executive committee. Several months later, he accepted an appointment to the Patrick Henry board.

"I'll continue to fight for issues where I think African-Americans are disproportionately affected," he said.

. . .

Fighting quietly but steadily long has been the strength of the NAACP, said Patricia Sullivan, an associate professor of history at the University of South Carolina and the author of "Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement." Billed as the first comprehensive history of the NAACP, the book will be published next week.

"The strength of the group historically has been its ability to operate on the local level," she said. "They didn't invent things in New York for people to do. The genius is in the ability to respond to issues. People on the local level very much shape the agenda."

The change through the years, she said, has been in the level of participation.

In 1951, a group of black students in Farmville demanded a better school. That protest became part of the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.

"When you think about Farmville, that was students who stood up and said, 'We want something better,'" she said.

"You can look back today and everything seems so clear," Sullivan said. "Don't forget, Brown took 20 years of sustained effort."

The problem, Khalfani said, is that many people today don't remember.

"I turned 50 this year, and I was just on the cusp of it," he said of the heyday of the civil-rights movement. "People born in the 1960s, '70s, '80s, they don't remember any of it. They never experienced the real, hard reality of it."

The lack of experience manifests itself in a lack of enthusiasm for the organization, he said. "The average member in Virginia is 65."

Bagby said that proves the need to work hard on creating relevance for younger people.

"Look around at individuals younger than 40 and see how many know where the NAACP meets," he said. "That's the answer to the question."

The goal, he said, should be "educating generations of the future to use the organization as a tool to ensure political participation, social justice, and educational and economic equality while eliminating racial hatred and discrimination."

Contact Zachary Reid at (804) 775-8179 or .