National NAACP youth leader says US hasn't dealt with racial inequality

By Ed Runyan

runyan@vindy.com

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 past 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.”

He said it was wrong for police to confront unarmed protesters “in T-shirts and blue jeans” with AK-47s and military SWAT gear.

Participating in protests are “a big first step” for many people interested in civil rights, Dow said. “Then they can move into a spirit of advocacy, to talk to leaders in the community about policies.”

He says one of the best ways to get involved in your local community is to gather data to determine whether various groups are being treated fairly.

“We can’t expect young people to go from being not involved, to policy experts,” he added.

Dow is the head of a group of more than 20,000 young people in 600 NAACP youth councils and college chapters across the country.

He believes it’s been easier to get young people involved in civil-rights matters since President Barack Obama’s first election.

“For the current generation, the president gave young people hope that ‘We can win,’” he said.