Barack
Obama and the African American Community:
A Debate with Michael Eric Dyson and Glen Ford
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 5, 2008; A01
Forty years after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis , the storied organizations that propelled the modern-day civil rights movement alongside him are either struggling to stay relevant or struggling to stay alive. In Atlanta, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) which was founded in 1957 after Alabama's Montgomery bus boycott and was led by King through the most difficult days of the movement clings to life. Three years ago, utilities shut off the lights and the phones when the group did not pay its bills. In New York, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which helped shape the movement's philosophy after adopting Mohandas K. Gandhi's doctrine of nonviolent protest, is scarcely known outside Manhattan. CORE conceded that it now has about 10 percent of the 150,000 members it listed in the 1960s. In Baltimore, the near-century-old NAACP , which tore down racial barriers with deft layering in the courts, recently cut a third of its administrative staff because of budget shortfalls. For decades, the NAACP asserted that it was the largest civil rights group, with about half a million dues-paying members, but one of its former presidents recently acknowledged that it has fewer than 300,000. Full Story.................
