NAACP aims to shake its stodgy image with Trump protests

Recent news that NAACP President Cornell William Brooks and five others had been arrested and charged with misdemeanor criminal trespassing for a sit-in at one of the offices of Sen. Jeff Sessions thrust the longtime civil rights organization to the forefront of a nascent resistance movement against President-elect Donald Trump, his policies and some of his Cabinet picks.

It was also a chance for the old-school civil rights organization to try to update its image and tactics.

“We are in the midst of a Twitter-age civil rights movement,” said Brooks, “which includes environmental racism, the battle against the corrupting power of money in politics, the ongoing struggle for voting rights and all that we traditionally associate with the civil rights struggle. This is an age which demands an NAACP that is policy savvy but street smart.”

Democrats, progressives and civil right advocates have expressed a litany of concerns at the prospect that Sessions, RAla., a longtime antagonist of civil rights advocates, will be the nation’s next attorney general. But it was the NAACP that launched the first civil disobedience against him. Brooks seemed to be everywhere talking about Sessions’s track record.

It was Brooks demanding greater scrutiny of Sessions in his confirmation hearing, scheduled to start Tuesday. And it was Brooks who repeatedly tweeted a six-person composite of mug shots or the arrested activists complete with hashtags like, “#ThingsIWontApologizeFor.”

Suddenly, it seemed, the NAACP was courting affirmation from the young; wanting to be seen as being woke and going viral.

Many NAACP critics say the organization is the embodiment of an outdated brand of suit-andtie activism that puts too much of a premium on respectability and etiquette. Even some of the organization’s backers use words like sleepy, senior and venerable to describe the 108-year-old organization.

But Brooks said, before explaining that his own mother had expressed support for the protest but disappointment that Brooks’s mug shot featured the NAACP chief with a five o’clock shadow, “We have to be prepared to sometimes engage in activity that some would describe as radical. And we certainly have to be prepared to let young people know what we are doing, make it clear that this is an organization where they can engage in the issues of the day, where they are. And that is Twitter.”