NAACP lists priorities for Obama’s 1st year in office

As the NAACP prepares to celebrate its centennial on Thursday, the nation’s oldest civil rights organization has outlined a list of priorities for the first year of the Obama administration.

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Benjamin Jealous, the organization’s president and CEO, said there is still work to be done during Obama’s presidency, even though his inauguration represented a major victory for race relations.

“At the end of the day we are not an organization who is here to celebrate any milestone too much,” Jealous said. “On January 20 we celebrated Obama as the first black president. On Jan. 21 we were aware that he was the 44th president of the U.S. And we are out there making sure that his agenda is our agenda.”

Jealous said that the organization has full and unfettered access to the White House.

“That is the beauty of this moment, we aren’t relegated to the office of public liaison,” Jealous said.

In the organization’s internal report, released to Politico, the NAACP outlines its priorities as follows:

• Urging for the creation of policing standards that support a goal of effective law enforcement in all communities.

• Elevating the standards of education to ensure that all children have full access to an opportunity to complete a high quality education.

• Urging uniform federal measures to assure that economic policies (particularly the bailout and stimulus funds) are administered in a manner which does not violate important civil and human rights;

• Establishing a study to explore the development of a uniform federal unemployment insurance benefit, as we do with social security;

• Establishing an immediate moratorium on foreclosure, and judicial loan modifications prior to the occurrence of a foreclosure;

• Adopting policies that provide health care to the uninsured in an effort to begin reducing health care disparities.

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