NAACP president pitches 'human rights' focus

Its first 100 years were about civil rights and achieving equality between blacks and whites.

But as the NAACP celebrates that milestone anniversary next week and begins its second century of activism, its newest and youngest leader ever says the organization must shift its mission from achieving civil rights to attaining human rights for all.

"Same schools are a civil right," NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous said Tuesday in an interview with The Associated Press, discussing as an example the Supreme Court's 1954 decision striking down segregation in public schools. The goal then, he said, was access to educational equality.

While there are no laws on the books to keep blacks and whites from learning together in the same classrooms, the quality of the schools many black pupils attend today often doesn't compare to the schools where many whites do their learning.

"The aspiration of the case was being able to go to the same GOOD school ... that good schools are a human right," Jealous said.

Not only good schools. But good health care and good jobs, too.

"Our agenda as we head into our second century as a civil rights organization is also to revive our legacy as a human rights organization," he said.

One of Jealous' predecessors agreed with the mission shift, calling it a "logical extension of the civil rights movement."

"As long as we have disparities in educational attainment, in income, in health, in the things that we measure ourselves by in this society and they are, unfortunately, too many times determined by race, then you never get around to doing the things you ought to do," Kweisi Mfume, a former Maryland congressman who was president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People from 1996-2004.

Jealous, 35, also said he intends to hold Barack Obama accountable for his promises on civil rights, regardless of Obama's status as the first black president.

"The president being black gives us no advantage," said Jealous, who took over in September, adding that Obama's background as a community organizer and civil rights lawyer may make him more receptive to the NAACP's agenda.

Jealous outlined several issues for Obama to address his first year in office: ensuring fair distribution of federal bailout funds, programs and contracts; reducing double-digit black unemployment; dealing with lenders who push minorities with good credit into subprime mortgages; reducing the disparity between unsolved homicides in minority and white communities; and ensuring that minority children have access to good schools.

The NAACP also has prepared a list of judges, from the federal bench down to the local level, for consideration when vacancies arise.

NAACP chapters are investigating deaths in police custody in at least five states, Jealous said. And he referenced street protests in Oakland, Calif., after the fatal New Year's Day shooting of a 22-year-old unarmed black man by a transit police officer. The shooting was caught on cell-phone videos and replayed on the Internet. Jealous said rioting in winter is rare, and added, "We should be concerned about what the summer will look like."

Questions have been raised for years about the NAACP's relevancy and the need for such an organization in a time when blacks have made progress on several fronts, including in corporate boardrooms, sports, Hollywood and now the White House. Mfume said organizations risk extinction if they don't adapt and refocus why they do what they do. He said he was hopeful the NAACP would do that under Jealous' leadership.

"You want to become more than just an asterisk in the history of the 21st century," Mfume said in a separate interview. "As long as there is a need, and there is a need for the NAACP to articulate, agitate and to crystallize real issues, then the organization in my opinion has to continue to do that."

Jealous said he expects "the traditional relationship" between presidents and the nation's oldest civil rights organization: "We will be the people at the end of the day who help make him do what he knows he should do. We will help create the room for (Obama) to fulfill, I think, his own aspirations for his presidency."

"If he aspires to be the next Abraham Lincoln, I aspire to be his Frederick Douglass," Jealous said, referring to the slave-turned-abolitionist who pressed a cautious Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.

Jealous said he has not met with Obama since becoming NAACP president, but enjoys "a very fluid, high-level relationship" with some of Obama's aides and advisers.

The lifelong activist and organizer said that while he counts many of the old-guard civil rights leaders as mentors, "at the same time, if there was a mistake by the previous generation, for instance in politics, it was to be too content with symbols."

NAACP members today are not satisfied with simply having a black president, he said. "What they want to know is: 'What problem in my life will he be solving? Dad's out of work, Mom's not getting paid enough, the kids' school is an embarrassment. What is he doing for me?'"

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