State's NAACP chief urges students to lead
BY WILLIAM F. WEST : The Herald-Sun, Nov 3, 2006 : 11:07 pm ET
DURHAM -- The state's chief civil rights leader on Friday issued an emotion-laden plea at N.C. Central University urging students to get off the sidelines and become leaders.
"Let me speak to my young brothers and sisters who are here. It's your turn. It's your time," said the Rev. William Barber II, president of the state conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
"Rosa is not coming back out of the grave. Coretta is not going to get back up. Martin is not coming off that 'mountaintop,' " Barber said, referring to civil rights icons Rosa Parks, Coretta Scott King and Martin Luther King Jr.
"The Lord needs you. The cause of justice needs you," Barber said.
Barber, 43, and himself an NCCU graduate, spoke at NCCU's Founder's Day Convocation, which honors the university's creator, the late James E. Shepard.
Barber next turned to NCCU Chancellor James Ammons and, with a bit of wit, told him: "I need to report something to you because as a pastor I hear a lot of conservations. Some folks think you're crazy. I'm sorry to report that in front of your wife."
Barber said that is because the chancellor -- like an "eagle" looking at the sun -- dares to do what others have not dared to do and has visions for the university, whose athletic teams are known as the eagles.
Ammons' visions include infusing a new spirit in NCCU students, increasing enrollment, recruiting national scholars and calling for educating more blacks and Hispanics for high-tech jobs, Barber said.
"You're just strange, man, strange like Dr. Shepard," Barber said with a roar in his voice, to the delight of the audience. "You want us to lead in bio-tech. You want us to win in sports -- and on top of that, you want us to lead in the way of community service."
Barber earlier in his speech went into great detail about the difficulties blacks faced when Shepard opened what would become NCCU in 1910.
Not until the pinnacle of the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s would the federal government finally crack down on white suppression and pass laws guaranteeing rights for blacks and ending segregation.
Despite the precarious position blacks found themselves in nearly a century ago, Barber pointed out that NAACP was formed in 1909 and a year later Shepard organized the future NCCU, both moves displaying audacity and a determination to trample racism and defy the forces intent on degrading and destroying blacks.
"And to stand here today as president of one and an alumni of another is a humbling state of being," he said. "I tell you, these verdant greens and sloping hills are historic and holy grounds.
But Barber said much remains to be done today.
He expressed deep concern about what he said are the overwhelming majority of the state's worst-performing schools being predominantly "re-segregated," non-white facilities.
Black children are disproportionately poor, are denied a fair chance in life and face a life of crime, he argued.
"Imprisonment is a new slavery," he argued, adding the state spends more on a prisoner than a public school student.
And, he added, "HIV/AIDS is ravaging us and killing more people than Jim Crow and the Klan ever killed."
Barber drew applause when he condemned the spending of billions of dollars on the U.S.-led war in Iraq when the expenditures could have been directed toward public housing and schools.
Barber told the audience they must act by going to the polls.
"We can't sit out any election, first of all, because it's disrespectful to all those who died that we might have the opportunity," he said.
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