'No ordinary times:' NAACP convention returns to Cincinnati

Luke Skywalker · Jul 13, 2016

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Noah Sherman, 19, of Westwood, poses at the Washington Park gazebo in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood of Cincinnati on Friday, July 1, 2016. Noah is currently a sophomore at the University of Cincinnati and the current state president of NAACP Youth and College Division for Ohio.(Photo: Sam Greene)

CINCINNATI —*Noah Sherman is a big young man with a dark brown complexion.*He knows what that*means when he goes out into the world.
"I am perceived as scary," said Sherman, who at 19*stands 6-foot-7*and weighs 260 pounds. "I have to come into a room with a smile. I have to be jolly. Otherwise,*I am seen as the menacing and angry black man."
A second-year criminal justice major at the University of Cincinnati, Sherman has long-range concerns like "getting a job, having a future. I worry about it. It's scary. We have a lot of this going in with society."
Fear is all around him. He is feared. He fears how some people might treat him or what they think of him.
In terms of race relations in America,*Noah Sherman is not in a good place. As*a nation, neither are we.
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The NAACP comes to Cincinnati this week with an estimated 10,000 delegates for its 107th annual convention. Cornell William Brooks, its president and CEO, prefaced this meeting with the simple but clear declaration: "These are no ordinary times."
The NAACP last brought its national convention to Cincinnati*eight years ago – in 2008 – when one of the notable guest speakers was Illinois*Sen.*Barack Obama. "Eight years ago," Brooks said, "we were on the eve of a post-millennial civil rights movement."
The past eight years did not turn out as*many hoped. The recession hit African-Americans harder than everyone else. Recovery has been slower to reach the black community. Legislative victories won by*previous generations are under assault.
Following the police-involved shootings of*Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota, and the subsequent deaths by sniper of five police officers in Dallas, the country seemed to retreat*again to familiar poles. Many whites blamed Black Lives Matter and other activists for inciting racial tensions.*Many African-Americans say they are targeted by police.
It has been eight years since*the NAACP*was last in Cincinnati. Racial justice and race relations were front and center in the national consciousness then. And they are again.
"We are on the eve of the first presidential election in 50 years without the full protection of the Voting Rights Act," Brooks said. "It's a very significant moment. We are about to elect a president in a radically different political landscape than Barack Obama walked upon in 2008."
In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Shelby v. Holder that two provisions of the Voting*Rights Act of 1965 were unconstitutional. To date, 17 states – including Ohio, which has reduced the number of early-voting days and is purging inactive voters from its rolls*– will have new voting restrictions in place for the first time in a presidential election. The new laws*include strict photo ID requirements, early voting cutbacks and registration restrictions.
"Jim Crow 2.0," Brooks said.
Been here before*
The NAACP*had been to Cincinnati twice before 2008 for its national convention, in 1946 and 1970.
In 1946, the year before Jackie Robinson would break Major League Baseball's color barrier, fear looked like residential and school segregation. Whites had been moved out of the West End to public housing to the north. The Laurel Homes project in the West End would be converted to all-black residency. The Cincinnati Board of Education would cooperate by building new middle and high schools in the West End for blacks.

Black Lives Matter protestors chant in front of Cincinnati Police Station on Central Parkway Thursday, April 30, 2015 to support the recent Baltimore protests in response to the death of Freddie Gray.*(Photo: The Enquirer/Meg Vogel)

A generation later, in 1970, when the NAACP brought its national convention back to Cincinnati,*fear expressed itself in the form of white flight – a migration that left*African-Americans largely isolated in higher-crime neighborhoods and attending substandard schools. Avondale and other core black neighborhoods were in states of rapid decline, accelerated by*rioting in 1967, and again in 1968*in*reaction to the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Race-related fights would close two Greater Cincinnati high schools, Withrow and North College Hill, for days at a time. NAACP lawyers would not file the Bronson v. The Cincinnati Board of Education lawsuit seeking complete desegregation of public schools for another four years. The practice of prohibiting the sale of homes to black buyers – it's called "redlining" – was common throughout Hamilton County.
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Now a former federal judge, Nathaniel Jones*attended the 1970 convention as the national NAACP's general counsel.
"We heard from the outside in 1970 that we were irrelevant," said Jones, who will be honored at the convention's closing-night banquet June 20 with the NAACP's Spingarn Medal. "What's happening this year makes this year's convention of tremendous importance."
The divide gets wider
As dated as the concerns of the 1940s and 1970s might appear in retrospect, an ever-increasing number of signs point to a widening racial gap. The arc*of the Obama presidency from 2008 to 2016 has brought about its own brand of racial backlash.
The number of hate groups spiked with Obama's 2008 election before trailing off. The number dropped to 784 in 2014 but increased again to 892 in 2015, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center of Montgomery, Alabama.
Tea Party rallies, designed to protest "big government" and "high taxes," have featured increasing numbers of anti-black and anti-Obama messages, including some suggesting the president should be lynched on the White House grounds.
In the new book White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide,*author Carol Anderson tracks the*efforts of white Americans over the centuries to limit or reverse black progress.

The Enquirer/Carrie CochranKimberly Thomas of Clifton holds a photo of Sam DuBose at the Hamilton County Courthouse after last year?s arraignment for Ray Tensing, the former University of Cincinnati police officer charged with murder for his shooting death.Kimberly Thomas of Clifton holds a photo of Samuel DuBose outside the Hamilton County Courthouse after the arraignment for Ray Tensing, the former University of Cincinnati police officer charged with murder for his shooting death.*(Photo: File/Carrie Cochran)

The Pew Research Center in late June released a report on the state of race relations in America. It shows that 88 percent of blacks say the United States needs to continue to make legal and social changes in order for African-Americans to have equal rights with whites. Just 53 percent of whites say the country needs to make those improvements for blacks to achieve equality.
The Pew report also reflects the nation's political polarization: "About six in 10 (59 percent) white Republicans say too much attention is paid to race and racial issues these days, while only 21 percent of white Democrats agree."
The NAACP will be in Cincinnati on July 19, the one-year anniversary DuBose's death at*the hands of white University of Cincinnati police officer*Ray Tensing*during a traffic stop for a missing front license plate in Mount Auburn. Tensing faces a murder charge when he goes to trial Oct. 24.
The NAACP comes to a city enjoying a rebirth that, statistically, is benefiting white residents far more than its black population. Government-funded redevelopment of The Banks and Over-the-Rhine is generally out of reach of the city's African-Americans.
The 2016 National Urban League State of Black America report shows that median household income for the region's African-Americans is less than half of that for whites – $28,600 compared to $58,000. Meanwhile, the black unemployment rate is double that for whites.
The national Urban League report followed a 164-page local Urban League publication, The State of Black Cincinnati 2015: Two Cities, that documented race-based disparities across the board in education, income, incarceration, health and life expectancy.
"Until and unless we allow everyone the opportunity to realize their full potential, our region will never be as vibrant or as rich as it could be," said Donna Jones Baker, president and CEO of the Urban League of Southwestern Ohio, which covers the Cincinnati and Dayton, Ohio, areas.

People protest outside the Cuyahoga County Justice Center on Tuesday in Cleveland. Ben Lindy writes to say the Tamir Rice case and other non-indictments in police shootings of African-Americans should serve as a wakeup call that the justice system is flawed and needs reform.*(Photo: AP Photo/Tony Dejak)

Cincinnati is the nation's fifth most residentially segregated metropolitan region. African-Americans have not shared in economic growth nationally and locally. As efforts*at racial integration have fallen apart, blacks have been nearly quarantined in economically-deprived, higher-crime neighborhoods that its residents say offer only a small bridge out.
Michael Eric Dyson, author and Georgetown University sociologist, spoke of this ghettoization during a June speech in Cincinnati.
"The masses of black people do not do well," said Dyson, whose latest book, The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America,*examined the complicated relationship between the nation's first black president and the black community over the past eight years.
"They suffer in poor housing and poor schools. They are disproportionately put in prison. They are disproportionately expelled from kindergarten through high school. It's the best of times for some upper- and middle-class African-American people and the worst of times for the masses stuck at the bottom."
One barrier down, many to go
Noah Sherman sees plenty of people stuck*on the bottom of the city's economic ladder in his home neighborhood of Westwood. He also remembers what he, even as an 11-year-old boy, felt at the dawn of the Obama presidency.
"He broke down barriers, but I remember being afraid that he wasn't going to be able to*get stuff done," Sherman said.
As he aged through the Obama years, issues of race became more pronounced in the young man's life. As a student at DePaul Cristo Rey High School in Clifton, Sherman recalls a conversation with a white classmate who said race didn't play any role in society.
"I've learned from my life experiences that race plays a part in everything," he said.
That's one of the reasons Sherman became involved in the NAACP at age 13 when he joined the local youth council. Today he is president of the NAACP's Ohio state Youth and College Division and a full voting member of the Cincinnati branch.
He is interested in how the law works.*Knowledge is power, he said. He wants to know his legal rights. He wants to educate other African-Americans who either don't know their rights or don't make the effort to know them. He sees many people in his community who are "tormented" by job discrimination or by interactions with police*in which*their civil*rights are violated, he said.
For the most part, Sherman avoided the trapdoors of growing up black and male in this society. He talked in 2014 at a town hall meeting in Evanston about a white police officer in a cruiser following him slowly for no reason as he walked home on foot.

Vice President of Cincinnati NAACP branch Nicole Taylor, 36, of Westwood poses with her son Jordan Stephens, 9, poses at her home in the Westood neighborhood of Cincinnati on Tuesday, July 5, 2016.*(Photo: Sam Greene)

"How can I feel safe from the police?" Sherman asked a panel that included former Cincinnati police chief Jeffrey Blackwell and councilman Chris Seelbach.
That fear motivates Nicole Taylor to invest a great deal of her time in the NAACP as its third vice president. The 36-year-old mother of three from Westwood also chairs the Cincinnati NAACP's criminal justice and public safety committee.
Taylor has two daughters, 6 and 18, the oldest a 2016 Dater High School graduate who will attend Tuskegee University.
Her 9-year-old child is a son, Jordan Stephens.
"In a few years, he is going to be a young black man and looked at as a threat," Taylor said.
She knows details of cases in which black men and boys have died. John Crawford III, 22,*was shot and killed by police in a suburban Dayton, Ohio, Walmart store while holding a toy BB gun. "Tamir, Trayvon, none of them deserved to die."
In March 2012, Taylor took her son, then 5, to a rally on Fountain Square that protested the death of Trayvon*Martin, the Florida teenager gunned down by neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman. Taylor blinked back tears*that evening and said, "While I can't imagine that he will be looked at and feared, I know he will be."
In her role with the NAACP, Taylor helped to craft a resolution that will go to the entire national delegation for a vote. It calls for mandatory increases in*police de-escalation training equal to hours invested in firearms and self-defense education. If approved, the*resolution would become part of the NAACP's national platform. That resolution takes on greater urgency in wake of the killings of black men at the hands of police during the past week.
"It happens over and over and over, unarmed black men being killed by police. It hurts," Taylor said. "It's so overwhelming that you feel helpless, but I reject that. We have the right to live in a society that is not racist."

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'No ordinary times:' NAACP convention returns to Cincinnati

Luke Skywalker

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