A big crowd helped the Greater New Haven branch of the NAACP celebrate a year of renewed energy and activism at its office Monday night.
The office, at 545 Whalley Avenue, opened a year ago. It has given the century-old organization a public face and coincided with a new burst of organizational efforts to reduce the racial gap in educational achievement, the health disparities in the state, and other social inequities based on race, such as the disproportionate number of African-American males who are incarcerated.
Branch President Jim Rawlings noted some of the group’s recent accomplishments, such as publishing a report on racial health inequities and promoting civil rights. He said it’s a new day for the organization.
The New Haven chapter is the largest in New England. Rawlings said in the past year its membership has increased ten to 15 percent, to between 800 and 900. It’s also increased its youth membership, but he said someone needs to step forward to lead the youth council.
“I don’t think the NAACP can any longer be simply advocacy by itself,” he said. “We have to be about social impact: Are those we’re serving better off in terms of the quality of their lives?”
Rawlings said five committees have been created focusing on education, criminal justice, health, economic development, and legal redress, which responds to citizens’ complaints of racial discrimination. (Rawlings is pictured with a photo of Thurgood Marshall, who won the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education as counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and went on to become the first African-American to sit on the Supreme Court.)
The education committee will address the achievement gap between black and white students. Rawlings said, “So we looked around and we found the best person in the state to lead that. His name is Gary Highsmith.” (Highsmith is on the left in the photo with his longtime friend and fellow “Young Turk,” attorney Michael Jefferson, as they were described by this reporter in an article 20 years ago.) Highsmith is now principal of Hamden High School, which serves an increasingly diverse population.
After the official program ended, Highsmith said his committee is working on an action plan that will guide its work. “I think the most relevant thing [the NAACP] could do is to look at education as a social justice issue,” he said. “They started out that way, being concerned about education — Brown versus Board and so forth, but I really believe we have to push it up a notch. The NAACP has always been relevant, but I think it’s time to go in another direction and deal with some issues they haven’t dealt with in the past ten or 15 years. I think education is the most pressing social issue we have and that specifically the achievement gap is the most pressing social issue that America has right now.”
“We also have new partnerships,” Rawlings said, “and one of our new partners is ADL,” the Anti-Defamation League. “The issues of the ADL around hate crimes and social injustice are consistent with the issues of the NAACP. We’ve been meeting for the past eight months. We have lots of things in common,” he said, referencing the murder of a black security guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. almost a year ago. “That’s no different to me than the [civil rights-era] bombings in Alabama.”
To that, Jewish community activist Lindy Gold said, “Thanks for inviting us back in.”
Rawlings introduced many friends and NAACP members, including Mayor John DeStefano, Yale Vice President Bruce Alexander, State Sen. Toni Harp and several leaders of the business and faith communities. He said another priority is to revitalize the NAACP’s religious affairs committee.
Harp (pictured with Tony Dawson, newly appointed chair of the Criminal Justice Committee) thanked the branch for its collaboration with legislators, especially on health issues. “If it were not for the work of the NAACP — and it largely came out of this chapter — to work on health equity, we would not have our health equity commission,” she said.
Pictured are youth members Kevin Walton (on the left), a freshman at Notre Dame High School in West Haven, and his brother Kaleb, a fourth-grader at Wintergreen Interdistrict Magnet School in Hamden, with their mom, Karen DuBois Walton, who runs the Housing Authority of New Haven (and is also an NAACP member). She said the NAACP’s Youth Council teaches leadership skills. “For me it was a nice way for me to get them involved in something and be part of a real historical organization.”
Click here to view Tom Ficklin’s photo slide show from the event.