Imprisoned NAACP members want to help host 2010 Annual Convention

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The goal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is just what its name implies: to promote an agenda that defends and benefits the interests of people of color in America.

In deciding what policies to include on the association’s platform, the leaders of the NAACP consider resolutions authored by its 1,800-some official chapters, scattered all over the country.

The lopsided statistics regarding the incarceration of African-American men is a major civil rights issue. In 2004, 21 percent of black men in their twenties who were not in college were in jail or prison. That NAACP branches have sprung up behind prison walls should be of no surprise. 

Crossroads Correctional Center Branch #4003 in Cameron, Missouri, is the association’s most prolific chapter, not just among prison branches but of all of the branches. It has authored three of the six resolutions adopted to the NAACP’s criminal justice plank.

“Last year, this branch wrote a resolution that pledged the national NAACP’s support to ending prison-based gerrymandering, and the national NAACP’s support was critical to many of the gains made this year,” says Peter Wagner,  who heads an organization called the Prison Policy Initiative and communicates frequently with the members of #4003. “Watching how hard these incarcerated men worked to raise an issue of national importance — but which won’t benefit them directly — is a real inspiration.”

As soon as it was announced that Kansas City would host the NAACP’s 101st annual convention this July, chapter #4003 sent a letter suggesting that the prison act as a satellite stop for a convention seminar. Cameron is an hour’s drive from Kansas City, so the commute would be easy, but the convention’s organizers would have to navigate some big-time bureaucracy in order to get the Missouri Department of Corrections to allow a specific list of convention-goers inside the maximum-security facility. Time was of the essence.

In response, the Crossroads prisoners heard crickets.