posted: October 26, 2015
By RYAN CORNELL
HARRISONBURG — The racial disparities of the past haven’t disappeared, Claudia Withers says.
The chief operating officer of the national NAACP told a crowd gathered at Capital Ale House on Saturday that people must remain vigilant in the fight for equality.
“We have an African-American president, but we have situations that are very reminiscent of post-Civil War reconstruction,” said Withers, 62, of Washington, D.C. “We had disenfranchisement. We had lynchings. We had discrimination. We had exclusion — the same things are happening now as was the case when the NAACP was founded in 1909.”
Withers, who’s also the sister of James Madison University football coach Everett Withers, spoke to about 70 people at Saturday’s forum, hosted by the NAACP Harrisonburg branch and JMU’s Beta Delta Delta chapter of the Omega Psi Phi fraternity.
City Mayor Chris Jones, president of the local NAACP branch, said the purpose of the event was to connect representatives from the national organization with community members and leaders.
“This was about the community, Omega Psi Phi and the NAACP partnering together,” he said.
Withers encouraged those attending to vote in the upcoming presidential election and to get involved in organizations, such as the local NAACP chapter.
“We’re at a time when people of color and progressive folks are doing really great things,” she said, “but we’ve had to have people remind us that black lives matter.”
Recent controversial incidents involving the deaths of black men at the hands of white police officers have sparked a nationwide debate on police use of force and race relations.
Activist movements, such as Black Lives Matter, have blossomed from the debate and campaigned against police brutality against blacks.
Activism goes beyond social media, said Gabriel Driver, citing the movement’s #blacklivesmatter tag on Twitter.
“It doesn’t stop with a hashtag, and it started before a hashtag,” Driver, 24, a JMU junior and member of Omega Psi Phi, said after the forum. “Action needs to continue to happen.”
Contact Ryan Cornell at 574-6286 or rcornell@dnronline.com
