Posted on 05/27/2005 3:05:36 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Florida's beaches will be the draw this weekend as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People hosts a swanky retreat at a Destin resort to help boost its membership among affluent 30- to 40-year-olds.
With registration starting at $325, a golf tourney on Sunday and massages i n between, the National Leadership 500 Summit that started Thursday and runs through Sunda y likely will be an exclusive gathering of the country's young black elite.
And that's exactly what the NAACP is hoping for.
"I have issued a call to my peer group," said Roslyn Brock, 39, summit creator and vice chairwoman of the NAACP board of directors. "We want to reach in and pull them back into the organization and into the movement."
The NAACP has long been aware of a generation gap in its membership, with few members between 30 and 50. These "tweeners," as described by Brock, are lawyers, doctors, bankers and engineers who live a middle-class lifestyle and tend to have the disposable income, clout and power that could be harnessed to help effect social change as the NAACP approaches its 100th anniversary in 2009.
This weekend marks the kickoff of an initiative to recruit "tweener" members.
"We're talking middle class right now because these are the people benefitting," said Brock, a native Floridian. "We make no apologies for it. This is not an exclusive middle class event, but these are folks in corporate America who have cousins, family and friends who are falling through the cracks."
"Tweeners" work so hard at their jobs, families, churches and other professional groups that the NAACP falls by the wayside, said Hillsborough County NAACP member Curtis Stokes.
Still, membership tends to grow once people send their kids off to college, Brock said.
The NAACP's charge this weekend is to create an image inviting to people who have lived with more subtle forms of racism, like the glass ceiling or the illegal denial of housing loans.
The summit, held at the Sandestin Golf and Beach Resort, has been sold out with 400 registrants. If successful, organizers may make it annual.
Relaxation, however , will take a back seat to the workshops on reaching out to younger members, entrepreneurship and economic self-development.
U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek and political strategist Donna Brazile will be panel speakers. Minister Ava Muhammad, spokesman for Louis Farrakhan, and Earl Graves, the president and CEO of Black Enterprise magazine, will speak as well.
The Panhandle location might not be familiar to those traveling from Los Angeles or Detroit, but unlike Orlando or Miami, Brock felt the serene location would help members relax and clear their minds as they got back to the basics.
Plus, organizers say, the resort atmosphere is deliberately familiar to summit registrants. NAACP members pay $300 and non-members pay $375, which also covers the first $75 of a lifetime membership. The event is targeted at non-members, Brock said. It is unclear how many non-members signed up.
"From the outset it does seem like it's attracting a different type of a person," said Stokes, 36, first vice president of the Hillsborough County NAACP and one of two active Hillsborough members under the age of 40. The Hillsborough branch boasts at least 1,000 members, he said.
He plans on driving his Mercedes to Destin, but he's not caravaning with anyone else because there is no one else. Nationally, only 14 percent of the NAACP's 500,000 membership are between the ages of 35 and 45, NAACP officials said. The majority are 50 and older.
Local chapters say their membership figures are private, but the NAACP has known for years that young adults need to be recruited to carry the torch.
"If more younger people get involved, you'll attract younger people," said Stokes, community affairs director for Fifth Third Bank.
At 49, Nate Patterson isn't a young adult, but he's still part of the NAACP's new target market. His goal for the conference is to return with ideas on how to keep the civil rights group relevant for his generation.
"I'm real excited about this because these are the ages we're missing in central Florida in the NAACP," said Patterson, spokesman for the Clearwater/Upper Pinellas branch, which claims 15 percent of its membership is in the target category. "I'm interested in seeing why they joined and how we can recruit."
Look at what I found buried WAY down in the article. It's the TRUTH! If this BS article was written about a conservative organization, the cited sentence would lead the article and the title would be something dire about the organization's future.
Wonder if the first seminar will be about why private SS accounts are no good for these fine people...
I bet OJ is already on the golf course... Trying to find the "real " killers.
Is everyone invited or just coloured people?
The rub for the NAACLP is the very people they are targeting here, got to where they are without the NAACLP and they tend to actually resent the organization and race baiters in general.
Is the NAACP still boycotting South Carolina?
And guess what age group the bulk of the new black conservatives are coming from...[g]
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That's a good thing!
Reminds me of the "barrel of crabs" analogy...
Destin? Luxurious? Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!
.........."Tweeners" work so hard at their jobs, families, churches and other professional groups that the NAACP falls by the wayside, said Hillsborough County NAACP member Curtis Stokes. ............***
But they have time to belong to other organizations.
Lame excuse for lagging membership by Stokes IMO.
A motorcycle mecca stirs up questions of race***Twenty-five years ago, the Atlantic Beach Motorcycle Club sponsored its first "Black Bike Week" in Atlantic Beach, one of the country's few historically black beach towns. In the late 1990s - when black festivals were exploding, from Atlanta to Daytona Beach - it swiftly grew from its four-mile stretch of Atlantic Beach southward into Myrtle Beach proper. In 1999, police made Ocean Boulevard a one-way street for the event and beefed up their presence on the roads.
The NAACP filed its suit against the city in 2003, on the heels of a successful campaign to have the statehouse lower its Confederate flag. Traffic restrictions, the lawsuit alleged, were discriminatory, as were aggressive police tactics that bullied black tourists. The NAACP has also filed lawsuits against several restaurants and a hotel that close down during the weekend.
Black bikers won their first victory when a 4th Circuit judge granted an injunction, barring the city from making Ocean Boulevard a one-way street - unless it did the same for the Harley riders. Last week, however, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., overturned that injunction, allowing the city to set up its barricades. (The trial is set for 2006.)
.....For Anthony Anderson, a leather-clad black biker here from Chicago, it's not that simple. The lawsuit is less about race and more about economics and social perceptions, he says: Discrimination is based on post-9/11 attitudes and what kind of bike - American vs. foreign - a given biker rides.
"When I rode a [Japanese Kawasaki], I used to get hassled a lot more by police," he says. These days, when truckers see his bike is a Harley, "they give me the road."***
So, in other words, the NAACP still doesn't get it. I guess they figure that these affluent and successful people can't possibly disagree with the NAACP's politics, so all they have to do to win them over is to throug a fancy party and -presto!- they'll join.
In it's own way this is one of the most condescending things I have seen in a long time.
They're working their way into middle and upper classes ("benefiting" as the article describes), so the NAACP wants to put them on a guilt trip to open their wallets.
The first thing I thought on reading this was they were targeting lower Middle class black people for this rally, because we all know once a black man becomes successful the NAACP refers to them as Uncle Toms.
How true.
But only if he takes on conservative airs.
I guess fund raisers in the projects didnt go so well?
Yes.
Maybe, if the NAACP had encouraged prosperity instead of applauding dependency,....but then, where would that have left those who profit from generational misery?
Guess that's the fatal flaw in their plan of creating a underclass dependant on them, they have no money to give back. But I guess that's what the goverment is for.
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