New NAACP leaders bring growth, fresh approach

On move-in day, the new office for Spokane’s NAACP was humming with activity.

Two young men in the corner of the room had a wide-ranging conversation about everything from Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman to the Black Lives Matter movement, while other members put together a bookshelf or dropped in to see the new space.

The one-room office on the second floor of the Saranac Building signals a fresh start for Spokane’s chapter of the national civil rights organization. NAACP members elected Rachel Dolezal, the police ombudsman commission chair and former director of the Human Rights Education Institute in North Idaho, to be their president in November, beating out incumbent James Wilburn.

Since her election, attendance at meetings has grown from the single digits to more than 50 people. Membership is rising too, Dolezal said.

“That kind of energy and momentum is symbolic of where we’re headed. It’s going to be a building year,” she said.

The NAACP is a national civil rights organization formed in 1909 in response to a race riot in Illinois. It’s been involved in many legal battles for black civil rights, including the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, which desegregated American schools in 1954.

Spokane’s chapter received its charter in 1919. Wilburn served as president from 2013-14 and focused on education issues, holding regular meetings with Spokane Public Schools leaders. During his time in office, membership dwindled and the chapter had trouble keeping committees active.

Wilburn said he’s happy to see numbers growing.

“She’s bringing in some fresh people, that’s good. The change is good,” he said.

Sandra Williams, who’s been involved in the chapter on and off since college, said Dolezal’s work has gotten many young people involved in revitalizing the organization.

“I think there’s energy in the NAACP that I haven’t seen in a while,” she said. “This feels sort of like a rebirth of the black community … I’m excited about what that will produce.”

Some of that energy, members say, is because of a national conversation about race in the wake of several high-profile police killings of unarmed black people.

Kyle Norbert joined the NAACP a few weeks ago, largely because of a conversation with a friend in which several such cases came up. He hadn’t known Spokane had a chapter of the group.

“After going to the first meeting and hearing about some of the issues that are important to … the organization, I decided to get involved,” he said.

He’s now involved in communications, helping to run social media sites and revamping the chapter’s website, and hopes he can contribute to a productive dialogue about the experiences of black people in the area.

“You have very progressive thinkers here of every color, creed and race, but the fact is that it’s a very, very white-dominated area of the country,” he said of Spokane. “I come across a lot of people here where I’m the first black person they’ve ever talked to.”

Right now, Dolezal’s focus is on increasing member involvement by revitalizing committees within the chapter. Some of those committees will focus on specific policy issues, while others will tend to organizational tasks like membership, finances and communication.

Charles Thornton, the chapter’s newly appointed first vice president, said the focus on member involvement has modernized the group.

“The only way we’ve had success is to do it that way. It has to be all of us involved and collaborating,” he said.

The chapter will also begin working on the five “game-changer” issues identified by the national NAACP as being critically important for black Americans. Those are education; public safety and criminal justice; health and health care; voting rights and political representation; and economic sustainability.

Whitworth University professor Lawrence Burnley plans to be involved with the education committee, building on the work done by former president Wilburn. That means working with Spokane Public Schools officials on issues like the achievement gap between students of color and white students, as well as black students being disproportionately disciplined at school.

The district is studying its use of suspension and other forms of discipline, including looking at disproportional outcomes along socioeconomic and racial lines, district spokesman Kevin Morrison said, and plans to involve the NAACP in those deliberations.

“It’s an exciting time for Spokane. It’s an exciting opportunity for us to grow and to have significant and measurable impact on students,” Burnley said.

Treasurer Dorothy Webster said she’s excited to work on health issues, including programs to encourage lifestyle choices that prevent diseases that commonly affect African-Americans.

Many people, she said, think the NAACP only exists to react to events and don’t understand the work the organization does to empower community members.

“I think it’s important to educate the community about who we are and what we do,” she said, echoing a sentiment expressed by other members.

That also means working with other community groups to address a broader spectrum of civil rights issues, said Andre Dove, the chapter’s second vice president.

“The NAACP is not just about black people,” he said. “It has to be inclusive.”

Dove’s background is in education, and he said he hoped the chapter would involve groups like the Native Project in addressing achievement gaps in school, since those issues also affect native students.

Williams is hopeful Dolezal and the young leaders of the group will be able to bring a more intersectional lens to civil rights issues, incorporating issues of race, sexuality, class and gender into their work. She said she would have liked to see the group publicly support gay marriage when Washingtonians were voting on the issue, as the national NAACP did.

“It would have been nice for me, as an African-American person who’s also a lesbian, to have the local NAACP take a stand on marriage equality as a civil rights organization,” she said.

Though committees are still being formed and leaders confirmed, many NAACP members have already gotten involved in local projects.

Dolezal and other members were involved in a Jan. 16 teach-in about the Black Lives Matter movement at Eastern Washington University, organized by the university’s Black Student Union.

Williams started a community newspaper, Black Lens, which published its inaugural issue in January.

The chapter will have an open house for its new office today at 5:30 p.m., followed by a swearing-in of officers.

“I just really want to get to work,” Dolezal said.