WASHINGTON, D.C.—For as long as she can remember, Georgetown University junior Mikaela Ferrill has been an active member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Ferrill, 20, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, attended her first NAACP meeting with her mother when she was a child and eventually got active in the youth council of the nation’s oldest civil rights organization that was founded in 1909 by Dr. W.E.B Du Bois, Ida B. Wells and others.
When it was time for her to apply to college, she insisted on attending a university that had an active NAACP chapter. “I have a bias when it comes to the NAACP,” says Ferrill, who recently completed an internship in the D.C. office of the Baltimore-based organization under the direction of Hilary Shelton, a longtime NAACP staffer. “What we do and will continue to do in this country is really important.”
At a time when many have consistently argued that the message of the old guard civil rights groups no longer resonate with young people of this generation, the surge among NAACP college chapters across the country tell another story.
The due-paying memberships in the nearly 300 college chapters of the NAACP have doubled over the last five years. The upswing in participation among student leaders is likely a direct result of the organization’s aggressive efforts to target college students and its decision in 2008 to appoint Benjamin Todd Jealous as the president and chief executive officer of the organization—the youngest person to lead the 104-year-old group.
At the time, the 35-year-old Jealous, a former Columbia University student organizer and Rhodes scholar, was viewed as the answer to an aging membership, but last month he announced that he was stepping down after five years on the job, to spend more time with his family.
