Alice Huffman
President of the California State Conference of the NAACP
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) celebrated its 100th anniversary on Feb. 12, and Alice Huffman, president of the California State Conference of the NAACP, said she is proud of the organization’s long and distinguished legacy of service.
Huffman said the venerable organization continues to forge ahead on timely issues that affect African Americans, whether it’s civil rights, education, or legislation.
“I’d like to work long enough to end discrimination in our public schools,” said Huffman, who was elected for the fifth time as president last October. “That’s our number one agenda. We’re also working to obtain a turnaround in the treatment of African Americans in the criminal justice system by addressing disparities in sentencing. We’re advocating the early releases of inmates to obtain better ways to stop the recidivism rate and for upgraded training before the prisoners are released,” she said.
Huffman said that controversial cases that challenge African American’s civil rights are still a priority with the NAACP. “Right now we are also involved in the case of the Clearlake Three, where several young African American men were shot in the back. The Caucasian suspect who allegedly shot them was completely exonerated.”
The leader of the NAACP North Carolina State Conference, Rev. Dr. William Barber II, was handcuffed and taken to prison last week along with six other leaders for attempting to speak in the North Carolina state house against attempts by right wing, Tea Party-backed legislators to push through draconian cuts that would dramatically affect the poor and middle class.
The cuts are the latest in a coordinated move in the state to advance a radical agenda including resegregating schools, eroding voting rights, and cutting back on education funding.
Forty-five years after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was felled by an assassin’s bullet in Memphis, Tenn., the city and various civil rights and labor groups will commemorate his “advocacy” of the 1968 sanitation workers strike with a panel discussion, the renaming of historic Beale Street and a march to the infamous Lorraine Motel where King died. The motel is now part of the city’s National Civil Rights Museum.
WASHINGTON—The NAACP and the National Education Association (NEA) are teaming up to register hundreds of thousands of voters before the 2012 elections.
Over the past weekend, NAACP field organizers engaged local NEA activists in a two-day training with workshops focused on voter registration/activation tools. Participants also attended a session on such new voter suppression laws as cuts to early voting and strict government-issued voter photo ID requirements that could prevent millions of eligible voters from casting a ballot.
LOS ANGELES, Calif.—The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors went behind closed doors today to discuss funding for investigations into Section 8 housing fraud in Lancaster and Palmdale amid allegations of racial discrimination.
The county stopped funding for the probes in June, instituting a 90-day moratorium when allegations of racism were raised.
After months of meetings, public hearings and sometimes heated back and forth, the California Citizens Redistricting Commission on (CCRC) submitted its final redrawing of lines for state and congressional districts to the Secretary of State on Monday, and while African Americans are basically satisfied with the results, others do not feel the same way and have vowed to fight the new lines.
