NAACP Expected To Remove Its Current President

Photo by Danny Moloshok/Reuters

The NAACP has decided to remove its president in an attempt at changing the organization's leadership to better combat civil rights issues during Donald Trump's presidency.

A source close to the organization confirmed the news to the Los Angeles Times, with the group outing its current president, Cornell W. Brooks, who will continue to serve until his contract expires in June. In Brooks' place, NAACP board chairman Leon W. Russell and vice chairman Derrick Johnson will run the organization during the search for a successor.

Several months back the NAACP had staged a sit-in outside of the office of then-U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions, petitioning his selection as Trump's attorney general.

"As attorney general, Sessions could undo years of progress," the organizers of the sit-in wrote in a statement. "He could crack down on immigration, stop investigating police brutality, revoke the current DOJ policy letting states legalize marijuana, roll back the DOJ’s enforcement of civil rights—and actively punish the people that civil rights laws and the DOJ are meant to protect: women, people of color, LGBTQ people, Muslims and immigrants.”

Ultimately, Brooks and 10 other protestors were arrested, while 30 people (which included Brooks and Bernard Simelton, president of the Alabama state chapter of the NAACP) were charged with trespassing.

Source via the Los Angeles Times