This past Tuesday, the NCCo County Council met for usual business, but ended with an extraordinary bit of public commentary directing actual threats at Councilwoman Lisa Diller. We talked about the original incident here. But the NAACP President, Richard Smith, read a letter into the record that you can hear via the County’s audio of the meeting. The full meeting is about 30 minutes long, but if you go to about the 26 minute mark you can hear from Mr. Smith and Mr. Roosevelt Nichols (not sure I heard the name correctly) who read the letter sent to Ms. Diller.
The letter recommends that Ms. Diller take Diversity Training and Anger Management Training. It also says that “…we will monitor your future County Council behavior from now on.” (my transcription of the audio). Mr. Smith then takes the mike to also recommend Diversity Training and ask for a meeting with Ms. Diller. And if that doesn’t happen, “We’ll do what we have to do — you can take that any way you want to.” ‘Refuse to take the black community for granted” and he’d have 14-18 NAACP states here to protest or something.
Got that? The Delaware NAACP suits up in County Council to defend the indefensible behavior of Bernard Pepukayi — that behavior being an inept dodge of a valid request from a Council Member for a briefing on a the status of an appeal of a recent court decision in the Pike Creek Golf Course case. They make various threats pointed at Councilwoman Diller (why would that provide an incentive to meet, I don’t get), and in the process pretty much endorse County Executive Gordon’s move to try to exclude Council (and the public) from any visibility into this case. Even though a couple of these Councilpeople actually have constituents directly affected by this. And here’s another thing — can anyone remember the NAACP taking on Council President Bullock or Tom Gordon or Pepukayi for denying Councilwoman Kirkpatrick the information she was entitled to? It seems awfully sexist to single her out for this treatment, and yet her we have the NAACP working to make this incident look like racism from Ms. Diller.
In the same meeting, there was an agenda item looking for approval of the development plan for the new Cooke Elementary School. Jea Street made an impassioned plea to council to stop approving these expansions while other Red Clay (especially those in the city) are basically ignored. One of the NAACP officials stood to agree with Mr. Street here — but certainly did not provide any of the threats of consequences that were pointed at Ms. Diller. Given that the NAACP is supposed to be working on social justice issues, I’m thinking that they have their priorities quite wrong here. How is it that defending one man who can’t manage the professional chops to defend himself is the business of the NAACP — that may results in marches and so on — but the ongoing shortchanging of high needs kids by Red Clay (and other districts) is not?
Outgoing NAACP President Ben Jealous has been focused like a laser beam on the big stuff — the issues of social justice that improve the entire community when successfully addressed. I can’t imagine that he’d be proud of this chapter that has decided to abandon any pretense of social justice and act like a boy’s club trying to bully one woman into submission over Tom Gordon’s attempt to not share information with the County Council.
Remember when I said that I thought that the City’s African American leadership needed to work on leveling up? THIS is exactly the kind of thing that I mean. Even though the NAACP isn’t just the City, this group of people certainly haven’t been inspired by the leadership of Ben Jealous. There are real and abiding problems for the minority and poor communities in this state and it is a damn shame that the local NAACP is squandering its heritage and its promise on bullshit like bullying this woman to get a meeting about Pepukayi. And seriously, if he’s such a qualified professional, how is heaven’s name does he actually*need* the NAACP to manage his business?