NAACP's national youth leader says recent protests are decades-long wounds rising to surface

GIRARD

When Sammie Dow was in eighth grade in North Carolina, he received an NAACP youth leadership award. He was part of a family that was active in the organization.

Those early influences encouraged him to continue to work toward equal opportunity in American society for all people.

It’s a goal Dow, 27, has continued the last two years as national youth and college division director for the NAACP.

On Friday night at the 96th Annual Freedom Fund Banquet for the NAACP’s Youngstown Unit, he urged other young people to become involved.

“Any social movement is led by young people,” he said in an interview before the banquet, at Mahoning Country Club.

Fifty-one years after Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington, “we still have a nation that really hasn’t dealt with racial inequality,” Dow said.

Young people have been drawn into civil rights protests in recent years because of several slayings of young black men — Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla., in 2012; Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., this August; and Vonderrit Myers Jr. in St. Louis this week.

Dow said the protests that have occurred in Ferguson and St. Louis after police-involved killings have resulted from “decades-long issues coming to the surface” and “literally being oppressed by the people that are supposed to be serving them.”

Read more of his comments in Saturday's Vindicator or on Vindy.com.