Opinion: Earl Ofari Hutchinson

I found an interesting opinion piece from Earl Ofari Hutchinson, a local Los Angeles activist and radio show host in regard to the dying NAACP. This is not the first time, Hutchinson has criticized or gone against the grain from popular opinion. As a matter of fact, he'll write something like this and be found supporting something like King Medical Center, demanding that it remain open, despite it's latest tragedies and continual mismanagement.


Opinion: Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Bush Is Not The NAACP's Problem

One thing is certain President Bush won't be back at the NAACP convention this year. NAACP chairman Julian Bond made sure of that when he dumped every ill from the Iraq war to the Katrina aid flop on Bush's head in his opening speech to the NAACP's 98th convention in Detroit this week. This was the sort of kick Bush in the teeth slam that Bond has virtually held a patent on since Bush took office. In fact, before Bush graced the organization's dais last year, the NAACP had made Bush's snub of the group a ritual. The NAACP would formally invite Bush to speak. And Bush would quickly beg off with either the politicians' standard excuse of a scheduling conflict, or simply ignore the invite. Bond would then brand Bush as insensitive, uncaring, and an enemy of civil rights and blacks.

[to read more, please paste or click on link]
http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20070709/cm_huffpost/055424

Interesting Quotes: "NAACP officials have talked incessantly about attracting young, fresh faces and talent to the organization. There's good reason. The rap against the organization is that time has passed it's aging, staid, old guard leadership by, and that it needs a youth shot in the arm. There's a problem with that too. The majority of young blacks were born after the titanic battles of the 1960s against legal Jim Crow segregation. They weren't forced to drink from colored only water fountains, attacked by snarling police dogs, and cattle prod welding sheriff's deputies, kicked and spat on at lunch counters, and had doors slammed in their face when they tried to get a room at a hotel. That experience and the civil rights activism that swept away those barriers is a foreign concept to them. But that activism is precisely what made the NAACP the nation's best-known and respected champion of civil rights for nearly a century. The clash between the organization's past and where young people are at today is probably too great to overcome."

Hutchinson further states: "The NAACP is at yet another crossroads. It is ridiculed by young blacks as irrelevant, criticized by activist blacks as too conservative, and ignored by the White House. Yet, despite its flaws it's still the only true national civil rights organization going. It can reclaim its cutting edge leadership and activism by mounting a no-holds barred assault on the towering social ills that still torment poor blacks.
While Bond's opening speech Bush bash was a good stem-winder, it won't do much to bridge the gulf between the two black Americas, one poor, frustrated, and alienated and the other prosperous, and upwardly achieving. That's what has to happen if the NAACP doesn't want to become what many already say it is, namely obsolete. "