PHILADELPHIA—As the nation gears up for the 2016 presidential race, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is positioning itself to be a key player, with the announcement of an 860-mile march from Selma, Ala., to Washington, D.C., to train a spotlight on the issues that they want Republican and Democratic hopefuls to address in their respective campaigns.
The ambitious agenda for the “America’s Journey for Justice” march, which will commence on August 1 in Selma, Ala., will call on presidential candidates to lay out their positions on voting rights, high unemployment, declining schools, racial profiling and criminal justice reform—all central topics at the organization’s 106th convention that’s been meeting this week in the City of Brotherly Love.
“We want to leave this convention gearing up for America’s Journey for Justice,” said Cornell William Brooks, president of the NAACP. “The theme is that our lives, our votes, our jobs, and our schools matter. And certainly the lives of Black and Brown people matter, but also the life of our constitutional democracy matters.”
In an interview with Diverse, Brooks said that the organization is moving its members from the theoretical to the practical and has partnered with other groups such as the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, National Coalition on Black Civic Participation and the National Action Network to pull off the 46-day march.
“We are walking people through what ending racial profiling looks like; what are the elements?” he said, adding that the recent rash of police shootings of unarmed Black men across the nation is evidence that there is not a national standard for what constitutes excessive force by a police officer.
Brooks said that the march will begin in Selma to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the historic Selma to Montgomery march and to call attention to the Shelby v. Holder case that originated in Alabama.
In that case, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act that addressed the fact that racial discrimination in voting had taken place in the country and that remedies were needed to get rid of discriminatory voting practices such as literacy tests and voter identification laws. The Supreme Court ruling has now allowed jurisdictions to make voting changes without seeking pre-clearance from the federal government.
