I was shocked by the Nov. 3 article airing an internal NAACP national-local dispute as “news.”
A retired Portland teacher and NAACP member, I’ve also volunteered with another national nonprofit’s local group for decades.
While national and local units share a mission, their priorities often differ. National organizations, sometimes lacking sensitivity to conditions local volunteers face, can strangle urgent work on the ground with unreasonable bureaucratic demands and high-percentage cut of local income.
Where volunteers may themselves experience discrimination and economic inequality, these barriers are especially problematic.
NAACP’s 50-member requirement, designed for urban areas, is unrealistic in our low-population rural state. Further, fundraising with a national cut of 10 percent is hard enough; 25 percent may be insurmountable. Still, Maine NAACP units have achieved critical human rights advocacy for nearly a century.
Who profits by highlighting national-local tensions? Would Maine be better off without its small NAACP branches (in Portland and Bangor and at the state prison), their consistent public voices and human rights programs?
Rather than attack, NAACP should examine itself for lack of appropriate support to rural units. When over half of black millennials nationwide know a victim of police violence, every local NAACP branch is needed.
Maine NAACP leader Rachel Talbot Ross has consistently shown up not just for African-Americans, but for refugees and asylum seekers; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning people; and the poor, sick, hungry, homeless and incarcerated. She’s a champion of young people of all races and backgrounds, creating empowering pathways for them to understand and address oppression.
The timing and content of this article undermining local NAACP work strongly suggest a personal agenda rather than news. If such negative attention came to every tiny all-volunteer Maine unit of national organizations, we’d lose much essential work for a safer, healthier populace.
Black Lives Matter, and Maine NAACP units matter.
Betsy Parsons
South Portland
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