WASHINGTON, D.C. – Its first 100 years were about civil rights and achieving equality between Blacks and Whites.
But as the NAACP celebrates that milestone anniversary today 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 yesterday 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.
