By Mark Gruenberg and John Wojcik
CHICAGO: For decades, the NAACP has gone to court and combed the halls of Congress, defending and expanding voting rights for African-Americans. In its 117 years of existence, it has never been one to leave lobbying and pressure on elected officials to the racist corporate powers that have seen that as their exclusive domain.
Now, faced with an existential threat from the racist right to all the gains made since the Civil Rights Movement, the organization has decided to hit the streets in an unprecedented election effort. NAACP Board Chairman Leon Russell told the opening session of the group’s convention in Chicago Sunday about the new priorities.
As part of its focus on the elections, Russell announced the NAACP would undertake a record-breaking $20 million voter registration and mobilization drive “to motivate six million to 10 million voters” who did not cast ballots in the last two elections to do so. Russell said the NAACP plans to recruit “tens of thousands of volunteers to join the crusade to turn out millions of us this November.”
It will target voters in 14 states and 33 congressional districts, with the full list expected to be hashed during discussions by delegates at the convention over the next few days. The plan reflects the recognition by the NAACP as well as other civil rights organizations that drastically increasing Black voter participation through registration and other efforts is a critical step in defeating MAGA.
Many at the convention have noted that Trump may very well be planning to ignore the results of the coming elections in places where he disagrees with the outcome, and that is why he is promoting the use of military in cities, especially in Washington, D.C. The fear is that troops in the streets could be part of a plan to kill free elections or to deal with protests. The answer, they point out, is to counter with the biggest ever turnout of voters.
This is where Russell’s call comes in: “We must move 60% or more of all eligible voters to the polls” to overcome the offensive, he said, led by the Trump administration and aided by the courts against people of colour.
Russell’s declaration came in a keynote address full of sharp jibes again aimed at Trump. Other speakers, from Democratic Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker to local activists, issued similar warnings. What to accomplish—a progressive pro-civil rights landslide in November’s election—and how to achieve it dominated the session. And not just for 2026, at least one speaker added, but for 2028, too.
The NAACP has been active in the anti-Trump movement. It has filed more than 70 lawsuits to stop his grasping and often unconstitutional moves to grab total power. It opposes his denigration of people of colour and his effort to write them and their huge contributions to U.S. history out of the record. It still will, Russell said.
After all, as another speaker pointed out, Trump openly has his vicious and violent ICE agents detain, deport and often shoot to kill people in Black and Latino communities, along with white people who support them.
Shades of the freedom rides of the 1960s, with ICE taking the role of Southern white racists, were evident in the remarks of several. One speaker listed the names of riders whom white racists killed in that era, including a white woman from Detroit, Viola Liuzzo.
But more than Trump is the problem, Russell told the 1,688 delegates and alternates gathered in a great hall of Chicago’s McCormick Place for a convention whose theme, from the Constitution, is “We the people.”
“Today the authoritarian is restricting the administration of justice,” Russell declared. Trump’s Congress meekly agrees “and judges dependent on his whim alone have” let Trump “send a swarm of officers to harass and assault people” as well as fire tens of thousands of workers.
Russell called the perpetrators “disgraced DOGE”—Trump’s now-dead Department of Government Efficiency—“and oppressive ICE,” his Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
“Their acts may be considered just bad fruit from diseased trees, but when bad fruit is mixed with good fruit,” the good fruit is infected, too. The infected fruit are people who stand by and acquiesce. Russell urged attendees not to do that.
Using a New Testament analogy, Russell said, “We have the ability to remove the diseased trees and the bad fruit…from the executive and legislative garden just as the founders did 250 years ago.”
The authors of the Declaration of Independence did so, he noted, even though they didn’t live up to their own noble ideals. They were white men of property who shut out everybody else, including enslaved Black people and women. The history of the U.S., Russell proclaimed, is a constant struggle to bring more people—those groups plus immigrants—into the words of the Declaration about all people being created equal.
Illinois Gov. Pritzker provided contrasts between both Chicago and Illinois history and his administration’s anti-Trump actions on one side and Trump’s violent crusade against migrants and their allies on the streets of Chicago. That includes ICE helicoptering at midnight atop a building in Chicago’s South Shore and rousting out and rounding up the inhabitants. Most of them were citizens.
It also includes ICE shooting one Chicago woman driver seven times. Somehow, unlike the Minnesotans, Memphis residents, and Latinos in Boston and Houston whom ICE and other agents shot, she lived.
“Illinois has been at the forefront of the struggle for freedom and equality” ever since Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, a non-white, was the first permanent resident of what is now Chicago, Pritzker noted. The three-million-person city is now 29% Hispanic, one-third African-American, one-third white, and the rest every other race.
Illinois also gave the nation crusading African-American journalist Ida B. Wells, said Pritzker. It’s elected more African-American members of Congress than any other state. It will add its next U.S. Senator, Democrat Juliana Stratton, to that list. And it gave the nation the late civil rights leader Jesse Jackson and “a young community organizer” who eventually went from Chicago to the White House, Barack Obama.
“But such progress is not inevitable,” the governor warned. “It requires people willing to sacrifice. None of this is by accident. It is because Black America shows up, reminding us of the painful part of our history while giving us hope for the future.”
The NAACP is also stepping up its activity in another important area: building and strengthening its alliances with the labour movement. The agenda at the convention here will include discussions and planning with major unions and organizations, with particular focus during the Monday session. Claude Cummings, president of the Communications Workers of America, is expected to play a reading role. (IPA Service)
Courtesy: People’s World
