Politics
NAACP convention: Focusing on voter participation
“The effort to suppress the vote is not a new thing. It’s something that’s been around,” he said during a news conference Friday. “What we have seen in the last two years though is the most egregious effort to compound and collect every single method that anybody could think of that would discourage someone to vote and put it into a piece of legislation and inflict them on our communities.”
Russell said his organization’s efforts are not partisan. Voter ID laws are often passed by Republicans and opposed by Democrats.
University of Houston history professor Tyrone Tillery said the issue of battling voter ID laws is one that fits with the NAACP’s history of helping disenfranchised voters.
“It plays to their strengths,” said Tillery, who specializes in 20th century African-American history and was a former NAACP director in Detroit in 1989.
Russell said the NAACP is focused on working with other civil rights groups in the Hispanic, Asian and gay and lesbian communities.
“We can’t just work on behalf of one segment of the population,” he said. “Our focus will be the black community. But we can’t create anything that impacts only the black community. Our 103-year history shows that when we get legislation adopted, it is policy that has impacted all Americans. That continues to be our purpose.”
Other issues NAACP officials plan to discuss at the convention include the federal health care law that was upheld last month by the U.S. Supreme Court and efforts to repeal stand-your-ground laws around the country in the wake of the February fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin. George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer, is citing Florida’s stand-your-ground law in his defense in the teenager’s death.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.
