NC NAACP Partners with NCBPA to Suppress Voter Suppression

By FRAN FARRER

DURHAM, NC – NC NAACP President, Rev. Dr. T. Anthony Spearman joined members of the North Carolina Black Publishers Association (NCBPA) for their first quarterly dinner meeting of 2019 to discuss how the two long-standing associations could partner to work against voter suppression.

Dr. Spearman applauded the publishers and noted that Black publishers were the “Guardians of the Truth” in a free society. He added, “We know, generally speaking, that this profession and its association, the Newspaper Guild, has been under attack by Mendacity and Denial from the White House for almost three years, but I come honoring you in this time of crisis in our democracy, and if you have to, forgive me for expressing my (Explicit bias, but to me), Black Publishers and News Reporters Particularly Matter. To me you always have and always will. I'm certain that Fran Farrer, Afrique Kilimanjaro, Cash Michaels, Peter Grear and maybe even Ben Chavis will confirm that.”

Dr. Spearman joined the publishers for one primary issue facing people of color across the states today; voter suppression and all of the tactics and diabolical strategies that it has spawned down through the years. He particularly spoke on the old Slave and Jim Crow Region, where the Tea Party funders focused their attack on our Voting Rights taking enormous energy to deplete and suppress, as well as dilute the Black vote.

He shared that about 10 months ago he stumbled on a report that chronicles in thirteen volumes, a plethora of the atrocities that people of color have had to endure. The voluminous text is the report [and Testimony] of the Joint Select Committee to inquire into the condition of affairs in the late insurrectionary states. He went on to say that the report revealed that two houses of Congress met February 19, 1872, and it was also known as the Ku Klux Conspiracy. Laughingly he said, “I paid $450.00 for the report which is perhaps the best buy I've made in a long time for although the report was 146 years ago, to investigate the effects of the Fourteenth Amendment in the former Confederates states of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida, as I read through some of its pages, there are painfully striking similarities to events still going on today. Blacks Voters have to be nice, when we register to vote, go to polls and even cast our votes in some polling places.

Dr. Spearman went on to say, “I realize that we have been taught that we are the minority, and that to win we must depend on some white votes to ever get a majority, but I also know the story of the biblical Gideon, who God taught the strategy of what it takes to win with a minority and I believe that if we too strategize as i know we are capable of strategizing that we can turn things around. Together we can build power; for when see ourselves as a community and not as just a whole lot of individuals who have not been acting collectively, we'll be able to create a new story that will take this world by storm.

During this successful first meeting a bond was formed between two successful associations with one committed goal; to suppress voter suppression.