NAACP Holds Education Summit to Address Resegregation

NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous, Photo Credit: CNN
For the first time in three years the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) will gather in Raleigh, North Carolina for an education summit.
The summit will last for three days (Thursday, December 2, 2010 through Saturday, December 4, 2010) and is named after the honorable Daisy Bates. Bates, the former president of the Arkansas State Conference of the organization, is the adviser to the student group, the Little Rock Nine. The Little Rock Nine were African-American students who attended the Little Rock Central High School in 1957. The student group is considered to have contributed greatly to the African-American Civil Rights Movement as they were successfully integrated into a previously all-Caucasian school on Wednesday, September 25, 1957, although the group had to be escorted in by United States Army troops of the 101st Airborne Division to ensure their safety.

Now, over a half-century later, the group is meeting to discuss their latest problem: resegregation. According to TIME, resegration is defined as a circumstance in which a historically all-Caucasian school becomes integrated but after a few years inevitably becomes 100 percent African American.
According to the NAACP, resegregation reached its most effective peak in America in 1988, but now about 40 percent of African American students are still in segregated educational institutions.
The summit will open with a keynote address from NAACP President and Chief Executive Officer Benjamin Todd Jealous. Jealous is a member of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, attended Columbia University and holds a master’s degree from Oxford. At Oxford he received the prestigious Rhodes Scholar award. Jealous is also interracial, as his mother is African American and his father is Caucasian and is the youngest national leader of the NAACP.
Educational reform is on the agenda for the summit as well.
Via CNN