NAACP Evolves To Include Latino Leadership

The NAACP — National Association for the Advancement of Colored People — which bills itself as the oldest civil rights organization in the country, is growing and changing to include Latino leadership, as well as including gay and white leadership. This shows an incredible flexibility on the part of the NAACP, and it’s commitment to its core mission: “to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate race-based discrimination.”

The Associated Press reported:

The NAACP’s newly revived Worcester chapter elected a 28-year-old openly gay black man as its president this month. In New Jersey, a branch of the organization outside Atlantic City chose a Honduran immigrant to lead it last year. And in Mississippi, the Jackson State University chapter recently turned to a 30-something white man.

NPR did a story with Victor Diaz, 32, the president of the Greater Waterbury chapter in Connecticut:

I’ve always had a great respect for the organization, what it has done for – to benefit a lot of minorities in the past. And I just had a passion for it. I got involved about six years ago. And I just fell in love with the organization, what it stands for and what it does for the community…

I actually I was invited to a meeting and some of the issues that the organization was facing were some of the same issues that I was sitting down in other organizations of Latino heritage, such as the Hispanic Coalition in the Greater Waterbury area. And I noticed that we are facing the same issues, but nobody was really linking those two communities together and addressing the issues together. And I just started mentioning some of the stuff at both meetings, and then I decided to take a more leadership role and tried to address some of the issues.

Long story short, and as we wrote about earlier this week, African-Americans and Latinos need to work together to solve the issues that plague us all:  inequality, racism, discrimination, poverty, etc.

Follow Sara Inés Calderón on Twitter @SaraChicaD