2023-10-26 22:23:00
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The Virginia NAACP Conference’s annual three-day convention, planned for this weekend, is not going forward as scheduled, according to an email sent Thursday followingnoon by its leadership. The news arrived at a crucial moment for the historic civil rights organization as the convention was scheduled to host leadership elections and serve as a springboard for get-out-the-vote efforts in Virginia’s consequential state and local elections next month.
In the email, President Robert N. Barnette Jr. announced that the meeting will now be a single-day event on Nov. 11, four days following the state elections in Virginia
The announcement followed days of uncertainty and frustration for many Virginia NAACP members who had heard the convention was canceled but had not received official confirmation. The lack of communication and the uncertainty it created rankled some NAACP members who said it was a result of mismanagement by the organization’s executive board and that it might have been easily avoided.
“You have to be kidding me. While we are up once morest it, the State NAACP can’t get enough delegates to hold a convention?” Phillip Thompson, former president of the Loudoun County branch of the NAACP and former member of the Virginia State Conference’s executive committee, wrote in an email Tuesday to reporters and some NAACP members, among others. “Nobody saw this train wreck coming? How embarrassing!”
Barnette did not explain why the postponement was needed in his email other than to say “it was necessary to make changes so that every voting delegate might be seated.”
In an email sent to some members earlier this week and forwarded to The Washington Post, Everett Lewis, chair of the organization’s armed services and veterans affairs committee, said the convention would be canceled because a number of the local branches of Virginia’s NAACP had not submitted their annual financial report forms and were thus not allowed to send authorized delegates to the convention. “Because there are not enough authorized delegates who signed up to attend the convention the convention scheduled for Oct 26-28 is canceled,” Lewis wrote.
The gathering was the first in-person convention planned since the pandemic and was intended to set policy positions for the organization and to hold elections for executive board members and a new president. Without enough delegates in attendance, there would not be a necessary quorum to conduct elections for the officers of the executive committee.
In an interview Wednesday, Thompson said the decision was particularly concerning because the organization’s internal elections were supposed to be held and also because this is a state and local election year in Virginia, in which all 140 General Assembly seats are on the ballot and control of the legislature hangs in the balance. The convention was expected to help generate energy and enthusiasm for get-out-the-vote efforts in the November elections, including races that might determine which party controls the Senate and House of Delegates.
Tavorise Marks, a member of the NAACP’s Chesterfield County branch who had planned to attend the convention, was unhappy regarding the postponement and the late notice given.
“It’s just so unfortunate that this is occurring,” he said. “We’re still not going to have a full convention. A lot of people aren’t going to be able to change course and make their way back to the convention on Nov. 11.”
Marks lamented the missed opportunity for state and local candidates to make a pitch to get more Black voters out on Election Day. He blamed organizational issues at the state conference for the postponement and said the people running it “clearly should not be there, and particularly don’t understand how to run an organization such as the NAACP.”
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“There’s a lot more to the convention than just dinners and photo ops,” Marks said. “There’s a lot of advocacy work that should be going on that won’t be going on.” He said he would not be able to attend the conference on the rescheduled date.
Since its founding in 1935, the Virginia NAACP has played an outsize role in battling discriminatory laws and practices in the commonwealth, including leading desegregation efforts and helping bring an end to Jim Crow laws. It also fought efforts in Virginia to keep schools “separate but equal” long following the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that state laws allowing for segregated public schools were unconstitutional.
Last week the organization filed a lawsuit alleging that Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s administration failed to turn over public records to explain how it decides whether to restore the voting rights of felons who have completed their sentences.
Pastor Michelle Thomas, president of the NAACP’s Loudoun County branch, said that it was too soon to place blame on the state leaders and that concern regarding a resurgence of the coronavirus was also responsible for keeping members, many of whom are older, from committing to attending the convention.
In an interview Wednesday morning, Thomas said she still had not received official word that the convention was canceled but expected there would be a solution so that elections for executive offices still might be held this year. She said that postponing the election so all delegates might vote was the right call and that nothing would be resolved by criticizing leadership at this moment.
“There’s always people that’s looking for the dog in the fight. What’s the point of that?” Thomas said. “We work so hard fighting the challenges of the day, there’s no point in that. That’s ridiculous.”
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