Equality is not a threat to anybody
The quest for equal rights has a new ally in North Idaho.
Welcome, NAACP.
The vast majority of citizens are glad you’re here. There are some holdouts, of course.
On Saturday, a public event heralded the arrival of the nation’s newest chapter. The NAACP — National Association for the Advancement of Colored People — is the oldest and largest civil rights group in the country, which makes it somewhat surprising that it did not find a home in Coeur d’Alene until now.
Then again, the reaction of some readers on cdapress.com and the newspaper’s Facebook page explain both the need for the NAACP here and perhaps the reason that its local chapter was so long in coming. By the reaction of some commenters, you’d think the Black Panthers, led by Louis Farrakhan and Colin Kaepernick, were organizing an armed invasion of North Idaho.
Part of the flak probably was fired by folks upset that the NAACP shared its first public stage with Paulette Jordan, a Native American and a Democrat who hopes to unseat popular Republican Sen. Jim Risch in November if she wins her party’s primary this spring. Jordan was booked as the keynote before she declared for the Senate race. In her speech Saturday, she tactfully avoided campaigning.
Still, the guess here is that the NAACP is not what some locals think or fear it is. To that end, Press columnist Sholeh Patrick will highlight some of the organization’s history, its goals and its principal objectivesin Thursday’s paper. A salient point that should threaten nobody — but obviously does — is that the NAACP seeks only the same rights as anybody else, not more. And those are based strictly upon a document most Americans fully embrace: The United States Constitution.
Sholeh will explain more tomorrow. Today, we extend best wishes to James McDay, director of Coeur d’Alene-based TOC (The Other Choice) Diversity Resource and the local NAACP chapter’s first leader. McDay has lived here 20 years, so he’s witnessed firsthand the blight of Richard Butler and the region’s ongoing recovery from that sickness of the soul.
The NAACP will only help in that path to full health.