NAACP Where do we go from here?

In order to provide some perspective on Kweisi Mfume recent resignation from the NAACP I decided to provide some background history.

Combining the white philanthropic support that characterized Booker T. Washington's accommodationist organizations with the call for racial justice delivered by W. E. B. Du Bois's militant Niagara Movement, the NAACP forged a middle road of interracial cooperation.

The Niagara Movement was the pre-cursor to the NAACP

After the Niagara Movement disbanded in 1910.

Ida Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. DuBois, Henry Moscowitz, Mary White Ovington, Oswald Garrison Villiard, William English Walling led the "Call" to renew the struggle for civil and political liberty

The first president of the NAACP was a white man by the name of Moorfield Storey, a white constitutional lawyer and former president of the American Bar Association. The writer and diplomat James Weldon Johnson became the association's first black secretary in 1920. Louis T. Wright, a surgeon, was named the first black chairman of its board of directors in 1934.

And now we jump to 2004 and Kweisi Mfume stepping down as President of the NAACP. So where does the organization go from here?

Personally I feel the NAACP needs an over haul and a name change. The NAACP needs to make a lot of decisions as far as its direction is concerned. The NAACP must prove it's relevance to today's youth. There must be a bridge built between lower-income minorities and the middle-class. To quote Lester Kenyatta Spence "The NAACP is using mid 20th Century methods to deal with 21st Century problems."