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 Welcome to the NAACP Milwaukee website. Our goal is to have this form of communication be your gateway to knowledge about the NAACP's position on various topical issues facing our community; update you on our activities, and give you a way to get involved.
There are several items of importance to me as we work to make 2008 a successful year for the Milwaukee NAACP:
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Economic Development remains one of our most complicated service areas. Quite simply, there are never enough job leads or entrepreneurial opportunities. Our greatest challenge involves inspiring people to receive training for jobs that do not exist. Somehow, someway we must start job training programs inside industry so that trainees can go into stable employment at the places they receive the training. When employees are trained for employment where there are opportunities for advancement it serves to motivate workers, and in the end employers have more productive employees.
The criminal justice system also presents a great challenge. We continue to fight police brutality, unjust charging and bail decision, all-white juries, record setting incarceration rates; while at the same time doubling our efforts to decrease street violence. Current crime fighting methods are not having the intended results of reducing crime. Furthermore, unjust practices and biases within the system weaken its integrity.
As I recall the great work we have done as an organization in removing barriers imposed upon us as a people. I can’t help but lament over the self-imposed restrictions we have placed upon ourselves that prevent us form taking advantage of the opportunities we have gained through past victories, many victories which involve the shedding of blood. We have helped to remove barriers of race, gender, and religion. We have helped to strengthen the right to vote, the right to assemble, etc. We have come a mighty long way. Even, I’ll be the first to admit, we are not where we deserve to be! We take so many things for granted. There was a time when slavery and racial prejudice were the obstacles that nullifies and retarded our effort, but now some of the obstacles are self-inflicted.
We must place greater emphasis upon removing self-imposed restrictions such as dropping out of school before graduating, teenage pregnancy, getting caught up in the criminal justice system, not enrolling in training programs, not investing in our future, spending too much of accrued wealth, not passing on to others what we have learned, not loving enough, not expecting enough of each other, no making room at the top for others, not sharing wisdom, strength and wealth.
To eliminate some of those self-imposed conditions that are keeping us in bondage we are proposing that we initiate the principles inspired by W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the founders of the NAACOP.
"The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men [and women]. The problem of education, then, among Negros must first of all deal with the Talented Tent; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races. Now the training of men is a difficult and intricate task. Its technique is a matter for education experts, but its object is for the vision of seers. If we make money the object of man-training, we shall develop money-makers but not necessarily men; if we make technical skills the object of educating, we may possess artisans but not, in nature, men. Men we shall have only as we make manhood the object of the work of the schools intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it this is the curriculum of the Higher Education which must underlie true life. On this foundation we may build bread winning, skill of hand and quickness of brain, with never a fear lest the child and men mistake the means of living for the object of life." (quoted form, a collection of articles by African Americans (New York: James Pott and Company, 1903)).
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Things to do and
see while visiting
Wisconsin
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Protect the hard-earned civil rights
gains of the past four decades.
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| Milwaukee NAACP Branch |
| National NAACP |
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