In Black America; NAACP with Benjamin Todd Jealous

From the University of Texas at Austin, KUT Radio, this is In Black America. You know my 95-year-old grandmother is one of these folks, the same time, those faithful. The right to claim their membership took out their live membership and turned around to write checks of donation to the NAACP every single year. We've seen that grown from 16,000 people writing checks of donation four years ago to more than 125,000 writing checks of donation every year today. And I'm proud to report that for the last four years we have been in the black every year and grown our resources every year right through the recession. And we have been rewarded for our hard work. When the Tea Party said that we're going to take over a school board in Wake County, North Carolina, we introduced them to a different plan.

Benjamin Todd Jellis, President and CEO of the NAACP. The National Association for the Advancement of Color People, Recently Held is 130 National Convention in Houston, Texas. This year's theme was entitled NAACP, Your Power, Your Decision, Vote. The week long convention focused on voter participation and the organization's effort to fight what it sees as restrictive voting laws that have been passed by 17 states. Founded in 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Color People, is the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization. From a ballot box to the classroom, the thousands of dedicated workers, organizers, leaders, and members who make up the NAACP, continues to fight for social justice for all Americans. The convention featured keyed on the dresses by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, NAACP Chairman Emeritus Julian Baum, Reverend Jamal H. Bryant, NAACP Chairwoman Rosen Brock, and Dallas County Texas District Attorney Craig Wackens.

I'm John L. Hanson Jr. and welcome to another edition of In Black America. On this week's program, the NAACP 103 National Convention with NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jellis in Black America. When we mention those dreams, they may not be a one-year plan or a three-year plan or a five-year plan, but they are a plan that will happen. Because of the strength of this organization is that we have never in 103 years have to ask the question if we will win. We have only asked the question when we will win, because we are willing to go the distance until we win. And for that, we have batted 1,000 for 103 years and we ain't going to stop batting 1,000 now. Brothers and sisters, I am proud to report that the state of the NAACP is strong and getting stronger every day.

In 2008, Benjamin Todd Jellis was appointed the 17th President and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Color People at the age of 35. He is a Robes Scholar and the youngest person to lead the Century O organization. During this tenure, the NAACP's online activities have grown from 1,75,000 to more than 600,000. His donors have increased from 16,000 individuals per year to more than 120,000. And his membership has increased three years in a row for the first time in more than two decades. Jellis began his career as a community organizer in Harlem in 1991 with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund while working his way through college. In 1993, after being suspended for organizing student protests at Columbia University, he went to work as an investigator reported for the Jackson Advocate newspaper in Mississippi.

Born on January 18, 1973 in Pacific Grove, California, Jellis comes from a long line of freedom fighters. He is the graduate of Columbia and Oxford University as president of the NAACP. He is open national programs on education, health, and environmental justice. Also, he has greatly increased the organization capacity to work on issues related to the economy and voting rights. The following is an excerpt of this convention presentation. We at the NAACP have the privilege because we've been winning battles for 100 years to think long-term. In fact, we have a responsibility to think long-term. Because our founders, when they said that this country would end lynch mob justice, thought long-term, folks thought them foolish and a parlor in New York City talking about ending lynch mob justice. It took us 60 years, but we did it. And then our greatest lawyer Charles Hamilton Houston got some folks together and they said,

we're going to end Jim Crow. That one was rather quick. It took us 32 years and we did it. And then people like Megarevers and his fellow state field director Vernon Jordan and Georgia got together in the wake of Brown vs. Board and said, we will make sure that black men and black women win city council presidencies, when school board presidencies and even when the presidency of the United States. And it took them over 50 years, but we broke that color barrier too. Because of the strength of this organization is that we have never in 103 years have to ask the question, if we will win. We have only asked the question, when we will win. Because we are willing to go the distance until we win. And for that, we have batted 1,000 for 103 years and we ain't going to stop batting 1,000 now.

Brothers and sisters, I'm proud to report that the state of the NAACP is strong and getting stronger every day. In the past three years, we have increased membership three years in a row first time in over 20 years that we have done that. In the past four years, our online activists have grown from a little over 175,000 now more than 650,000. Our Facebook followers have grown from 5,000 to 135,000. And this year, in even August yet, and we have already registered 75,000 people to vote, put it into the van system, added that to the more than 500,000, we already had registered and in the van system and we will push up towards 1 million before we get to November. And at the same time, those faithful, who claimed their membership, took out their live membership,

and turned around and write checks of donation to the NAACP every single year, we've seen that grown from 16,000 people writing checks of donation four years ago to more than 125,000 and writing checks of donation every year today. And I'm proud to report that for the last four years, we have been in the black every year and grown our resources every year right through the recession. And we have been rewarded for our hard work. When the Tea Party said that we're going to take over a school board in Wake County, North Carolina, we introduced them to a different plan, a different plan called high quality constitutional universal public education for everybody.

And they lost in every single school board district this last time around, including the so-called conservative district. We closed down two coal plants in Chicago that topped our list of environmental justice offenders, shut down prisons, including in states here like Texas, that's online to shut down its first prison ever, worked with allies on both sides of the aisle to introduce policies that are shifting us from failed, tough on crime policies, allies like Governor of Connecticut, Daniel P. Maloy. And if we tell the truth, you know, those while he will never sign an in-ideft penalty bill, Rick Perry, the Texas State Conference, helped push the Texas criminal justice coalition to sign 12 progressive criminal justice reforms this fall. Now, we can clap for that.

No permanent friends, no permanent enemies, just permanent interests. That includes Rick Perry. It does. And we have won key battles against employment discrimination and discrimination in lending. And as we do all of that, we are preparing today to launch a national crusade to pull the black church fully in with the NAACP to end this scourge, the virus called HIV. And we are also announcing today that the chairman of our corporate campaign isn't just the first African American to be the chairman of our corporate campaign. The first HIV survivor to be the chairman of our corporate campaign. But also the first former youth and college president to be the chairman of our corporate campaign. And that is none other than Magic Johnson himself. Ladies and gentlemen, these are tough times in our democracy.

Our democracy is literally under attack from within. We have wealthy interests like the Koch brothers seeking to buy elections and when that end enough, suppress the vote. And to be honest, each and every one of us is on the front line. That new front line our chairman talks about every single day. From redistricting battles in states like Georgia to fighting attacks on voter suppression across the country. And literal government takeovers by governors in states like Michigan. There is no battle more important or urgent to the NAACP right now than the battle to preserve our democracy itself. Let me be very clear. Our right to vote is the right upon which our ability to defend every other right is leveraged. And while you might count yourself as an education person or a health person or a criminal justice person or an economic development person,

you can be all of those but you won't win on any of those if we let our votes go. Today I would like to give special acknowledgement to our activists in Florida, to our voting rights workers and our voter registration volunteers in Florida, who risk exorbitant fines, threats of jail time, for registering people to vote indeed as far as we can tell, who are the only representatives of any major national organization who kept on registering people to vote in the face of those threats. And throughout all of that kept Florida as one of our most productive centers of voter registration in the country. People ask me why the NAACP just won't back down with stakes get high and stakes like Florida or Georgia or so many other places.

And I tell them that we act differently because we is different. We have endured the more done of more of our leaders than any other civic organization in this country. And when you take out political parties like the ANC possibly in the world, we know their names indeed many of us knew them personally. Love them, we're led by them, and we honor their memory by not just seeking to emulate their courage in our lives, but in continuing to defend and extend the very democracy they gave their lives for. This falls, we push to do everything we can do to encourage people to vote. We are also preparing to mark the 50th anniversary of the assassination of mega-revers in Jackson. You're wondering where the Jackson came from, Jackson, Mississippi, as well as the murders of four little girls when white supremacists blew up the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.

Little Miss Addy May Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carol Robertson, and Denise McNair. This year we carried pictures of these martyrs and others in marches to the North Carolina State Capitol where voting rights were under attack. To the South Carolina State Capitol where voting rights were under attack. To the Alabama State Capitol among gumbery and even, and Brenda Williams was there, even the UN itself. Because we are committed to defending the freedoms they died seeking to secure for future generations, and we are also committed to ensuring that future generations know who exactly died for their rights. What their names were. I mentioned this special role that we play in defending our democracy, and the murders who we remember for the sacrifices made in that struggle, for three reasons. One, we are living through the greatest wave of legislative assaults on the right to vote in more than a century. In 2011 and 2012 we saw more states pass more laws pushing more voters out of the ballot box than in any legislative cycle in more than a century.

Second, I mentioned it because we must understand what those who are attacking our rights understand. Our voting rights are the right upon which our ability to defend all of our other rights is leveraged. And if you let someone diminish the power of your vote, you will have already lost a battle that you will wake up one day to feel like was more important than that voting rights battle, and realize in that instance that you lost that battle that you really cared about when you lost the voting rights battle. Voters in Mississippi voters who turned out and stood with us to end to make sure that birth control wasn't outlawed by the passing of the so-called personhood bill, and then turned around and voted against us, passing a voter ID measure will figure out one day that we should have stuck together on both. And I'm proud to say that Planned Parenthood and National Organization of Women and others are committed to making sure that that never happens again.

Now, unless you need any more convincing on the point I would, that one fight is connected to the other fight, I would introduce you if you have a method to the organization known as the American Legislative Exchange Council. I'll talk more about them later, but Alec, as it assaults the right to organize, as it has pushed in your ground laws, as it has pushed to pass the meanest most racist immigration laws we have ever seen, has pushed voter suppression laws three dozen states across this country. One greases the skids for the other. Finally, we must focus on defending our democracy because for 103 years, we at the NAACP have focused on pushing America towards that great providence described by Frederick Douglass in a speech, our composite nationality, his tirade against the Chinese Exclusion Act, the SB-1070 of his day, when he said the destiny of America is defined by its geography, unique in the world. Border by a oceans on two sides, nations have different colors on either end to be the greatest example of human unity that the world has ever seen.

See, we say that we followed W. B. Du Bois and ought to be well as a Mary White Ovington, but they followed Frederick Douglass. Let us make this clear. Let us make sure that each of us understand what our ancestors like Frederick Douglass understood. When our communities' voting rights are attacked, as the voting populists become browner and blacker, when we see the forces of regression seeking to push immigrants of color out of the country, as the country becomes browner and blacker, this is the flip side of the strategy by the would be oligarchs in this country to buy our democracy wholesale. Because they understand that the great coalition for justice in this country has always been people of color and poor white folks and people of good conscience of all colors, and they cannot defeat us democratically.

So they have to defeat us by hook and by crook and by voter suppression and by buying votes and by pushing out children who have lived their entire lives in this country, who know no country but this country and but for a piece of paper. They would deny them, not just in order to deny them their ability to vote, they would deny them their very citizenship. We will ensure that our nation continues to practice free and fair elections. We will ensure that our nation continues to follow the creed etched into the Statue of Liberty itself, give me your tired, your poor, your huddle masses yearning to be free. And we will ensure that the opportunity to run for office and represent your community remains open to all of our nation's children, rich or poor, black or white, and that our elected representatives are beholden to the people who voted for them and not the oligarchs who invested in them. Because we still define people as people, the way it was defined by the abolitionists who victorious push for the four-tea amendment and not as chief justice Roberts and citizens united.

So creatively misinterpreted the word people as to include corporations, memo to justice Roberts. We will concede that corporations are people too when your court treats one of them like Troy Davis and let's estate like Georgia or Texas wrongfully execute one. Now in 2008, the nation saw the same thing. We saw the largest, most diverse electorate in the history of presidential politics. But the country didn't respond in the same way. Some of us said, oh yes, finally, finally we are approaching that day that Frederick Douglass prophesied the greatest example of human unity of the world has ever seen. And some of us said, oh no, we are finally realizing that Frederick Douglass prophesied the greatest example of human unity of the world. That is bad for us.

So let's divide and let's split and let's pull the most powerful playbook of voter suppression that we have off the shelves where it's been for a hundred years. And rather than breaking the law to suppress the vote, we will use the law to suppress the vote. But let us be clear, the most that those forces of evil can ever hope for is to hold off the future a cycle or two more. So you can hold off the future a little bit, but the future is going to catch up with you. The future is going to catch up with you. And we at the NAACP for 103 years have made it our specific business to hasten the arrival of the future and a better day for all of America's children. And we're still here on the battlefield, winning important victories, turning the tide towards common sense and righteousness every day. Right now, in this moment, with 120 days left until the election, we have a choice to make.

We can allow this election, Jerry Montezar, to be stolen in advance, as politician from Pennsylvania recently bragged about when he thought no one was listening, talking about his state's voter ID law, or we can double down on democracy. And overcome the rising tide of voter suppression with a higher tide of voter registration and mobilization and activation and protection. While the challenge is significant, let us be clear that we have overcome more significant hurdles before. While it will require sacrifice, let us be clear we have witnessed even greater sacrifices before. So, in this year, we must each be prepared to make great sacrifices of our time and our talent and our treasure. We must be prepared to defend voting rights and defend our democracy and turn out voters on every corner and at every ballot box so that we can overcome those who would otherwise seek to buy our country wholesale.

I wish everyone in the audience could have the view that I have from here right now. See so many faces of champions of voting rights and voter participation and people who are winning victories right now. Folks like our leaders from North Carolina and Michigan who have convinced governors to veto voter ID laws and even organize an override in North Carolina and got a Republican governor to veto strict voter ID bills in Michigan. Our leaders from states like Texas, Mississippi, South Carolina and Florida who have helped convince the Department of Justice to attack some of the nation's most outrageous new voter suppression efforts, such as the law in this state that sought to allow you to vote using your gun license. But youth and college, not your student ID. And great freedom fighters like Kempis Smith who is here with us today, who traveled with us to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva this spring.

To speak on behalf of millions of formerly incarcerated people in this country for whom voting rights continued to be denied based on Jim Crow era statutes like that in her home state and my family's home state of Virginia. Which a delegate to that state's constitution in 1906 where it was embedded into the state constitution where it still stands said plainly because of this plan the dark will be eliminated as a factor in our state's politics. As long as that law is there we will fight that law until we eviscerate that law because while history may have forgotten why it has put what's put there in the first place, the NAACP has not. Last Wednesday y'all excuse I have a slept like a week although you remember what the first week of a new baby is like but I apparently had forgotten which is why we have one. Edge and I was I was holding my little baby boy there cradle in my arms on Independence Day. It occurred to me I'm not the first father in my family to be there with his wife as she get birthed to a baby boy on the 4th of July.

The first was my grand dad's grandfather man named Burl Todd who had been born a slave in 1849 and like me had a baby boy he was about 40 in 1889. The name Edward Jerome Todd senior. Now I didn't know my great grandfather Edward Jerome Todd senior who was born in 1889 but I knew his son my grandfather Edward Jerome Todd junior. Junior they said was a lot like Jerome senior I guess through one I knew the other. He was a hard working man he was a patriot he had spent 30 years on law enforcement in Baltimore and he was a man of very few words. I can remember one of the last conversations I ever had with him. He was approaching his 90th birthday and I was packing up preparing to head to Oxford as a road goler.

I was wrapping up 4th July festivities at his house and I was getting in my car heading to DC and then off to England a couple of weeks later this would be the last time I saw him and I had my bag on my shoulder and he looked at me and he said grandson stood there in his driveway. He said grandson you know if I had this life to live all over I would leave this country when I was young. Benjamin Todd jealous president and CEO of the NAACP. If you have questions comments or suggestions ask your future in black America programs email us at jhenton H.A.N.S.O.N. at kut.org Also let us know what radio station you heard us over the views and opinions expressed on this program and not necessarily those of this station or of the University of Texas at Austin. You can hear previous programs online at kut.org Until we have the opportunity again for technical producer David Alvarez. I'm John L. Hanson Jr. Thank you for joining us today. Please join us again next week.

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