Winston-salem, NC -- The nation's Colleges will be the incubators for new soldiers in America's civil rights struggle, Kweisi Mfume told a group of students.
"I believe the NAACP has got to go where the future is and the future clearly is on college campuses throughout this nation," said Mfume, the new president and CEO of the NAACP, the nation's oldest civil rights organization.
"I made a commitment to the organization and a very serious promise to myself that if nothing else this organization would reinvent itself by understanding and embracing generational change."
Mfume spoke at the Winston. Salem State University recently as part of the 51st Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association tournament, one of his first speaking engagements after being installed as the new head of the NAACP.
The CIAA tournament brings together men's and women's basketball teams from more than a dozen historically black colleges and universities in North Carolina, Virginia and Maryland. This year, an estimated 20,000 alumni and student athletes attended the week-long tournament.
Mfume told the students that it was no coincidence that he spent his second official day on the job at a college to create support among young people.
"The NAACP is back, but more importantly, it's all right now to come back home to the NAACP," Mfume said.
The sentiment expressed by the young people present was one of welcome.
"We are tired of the regression. We are ready to progress," said Karen Taylor, president of the university's NAACP chapter.
An official at NAACP's national headquarters in Baltimore said the organization has chapters on about 100 campuses. Mfume, who became politically active in college, challenged students not only to get involved with local and college NAACP chapters, but to bring new ideas to national leaders.
While the NAACP was at the forefront of ending discriminatory laws and practices in the 1960s and 1970s, it recently has been dogged by criticism and has appeared impotent on major issues affecting African Americans. In addition to internal squabbles with former NAACP executive director Ben Chavis and a $3.5 million deficit young people say the group is out of touch.
