Civil rights for a new generation

[Kevin Spidel]

By Wendy Koch, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — College freshman Simone Hall hasn’t joined a civil rights group, although her mother belongs to three of them. She says she’d like to sign up and wishes they were more active on campus.

Kendra Clark, a sophomore, says she joined a campus chapter of the NAACP, the nation’s oldest civil rights group, because racism still exists. Agbanyim Ugwuomo, a senior, teamed up with the Hip Hop Caucus, an activist group formed in 2004. He says he supports a fresh approach to racial problems.

The three black students at Howard University are exactly the kind of new members sought by civil rights groups. The students say activism is as necessary today as it was 40 years ago when Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday is Monday, led hundreds of thousands of people in marches for desegregation and blacks’ right to vote. They say, however, that the focus now should be on issues such as inner-city school funding.

Civil rights groups, beset by aging or stagnant membership, are recasting their messages to appeal to young people. They’re putting up discussion boards on youth-oriented websites and talking about jobs, education, housing, entrepreneurship and financial literacy.

“The role of civil rights organizations has evolved,” says Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League. He says their priorities in the 1950s and 1960s reflected a lack of black officeholders. Today, with more such elected leaders and victories that include the right to vote, he says the civil rights movement needs to focus on persistent racial disparities in income and education. “Now we’re at the stage of closing the economic divide,” he says.

Young people often don’t grasp “civil rights” but they understand “equal rights,” says Stephanie Brown, 25, national director of the youth and college division at the NAACP. “We try to put it in terms they understand,” she says, because students, unlike their parents or grandparents, may not fully comprehend what it means not to have equal access to education and jobs.

Still, “there are a lot of ‘a-ha!’ moments,” Brown says, such as when Michigan voters last fall approved a ban on affirmative action at public universities.

Brown has started a weekly blog hoping to attract students and help revive the NAACP’s membership, which exceeded 600,000 in 1945 but fell to 259,000 by 2000.

NAACP President Bruce Gordon says the group’s membership, which had been aging, jumped considerably last year. He says it increased most among young people.

New strategies

Civil rights groups are trying different approaches to attract younger members:

•Partnerships. Next month, the NAACP will join with the Hip Hop Caucus to promote a legislative agenda that includes job training, school funding and Katrina relief, says the Rev. Lennox Yearwood, 37, the caucus’ president. He says they’ll send e-mail alerts about pending bills to members of both groups. The caucus has 700,000 e-mail members.

•Web networking. The NAACP, which has been starting more high school councils and college chapters, has posted discussion boards on Facebook and MySpace, websites popular with students.

•Financial literacy. The Congress of Racial Equality, founded in 1942, is advertising in college newspapers, has a page on MySpace and is launching a campaign to teach young people how to manage money. “It’s not as sexy as police brutality or affirmative action,” but it may have more impact on their daily lives, says spokesman Niger Innis.

•Young professionals. The National Urban League, established in 1920, is expanding special chapters for people in their 20s to tutor and mentor the disadvantaged. Morial says membership in the 50 chapters, begun in the late 1990s, has doubled in three years.

•Conflict resolution. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which King founded in 1957 and led until his assassination in 1968, is training high school and college students in how to resolve conflicts peacefully.

“We’re developing a curriculum where we’ll go into schools all over the world,” says Charles Steele Jr., the group’s president. He aims to open 50 domestic and 10 international centers by 2010 to offer conflict resolution training.

Challenges ahead

Civil rights groups know they face obstacles.

“Sometimes success can be your biggest enemy, because it can breed complacency,” says the NAACP’s Gordon. He says many people think the civil rights struggle is over because basic rights have been won.

Some young people question whether the groups are still relevant, says Samuel Roberts, who teaches modern African-American history at Columbia University. He says many young blacks do not relate to the NAACP and turn instead to student groups for political action.

At Howard, one of the nation’s premier historically black universities, some students think the NAACP is for older people, says Sable Nelson, president of the college chapter, which has 123 members.

Yearwood says many older groups have become “institutionalized” and lack the flexibility of his Hip Hop Caucus.

Morial says young people, connected by cellphones and the Internet, may feel less need to join a group. “Young people aren’t joiners as much as their parents,” he says.

Gordon hopes to expand the NAACP’s membership to 1 million by 2009, its 100th anniversary.

That goal is lofty but possible, says Ron Walters, director of the University of Maryland’s African American Leadership Institute. “The organization still has quite a presence in our community.” He says the NAACP and the Urban League, both of which mobilized quickly to help survivors of Hurricane Katrina, have done the most to appeal to youth.

At Howard, students say they believe in King’s dream of racial equality and his call to action.

Christina Griffin, a sophomore from San Diego, says she has yet to join any groups on Howard’s storied campus. But she knows she wants to give something back to the black community. “Just being on this campus fills you with such an obligation,” she says. “We’re so much a part of what people in the ’60s fought for.”