Kweisi Mfume, the President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), who kicked off Quinnipiac’s Black History Month, summed up his ideology on the importance of education in his speech by saying, “Education is not a gurantee of success, but a pre-conditioning for survival.”
Mfume mainly spoke of two topics during his speech given on Thursday, Feb.1 in Alumni Hall. He raised the issues of how public education should be the top priority for Congress to reform, as well as the “ridiculousness” of racial profiling.
Mfume said that he would like to see everyone, whatever their ancestory or their genetic cloth, to pull together and create positive change for our future happiness and justice.
He then went on to describe how the Justice Department has many loopholes which contribute to negativy. To illustrate his point he said, “If our justice department can go down to Florida and get involved with Elian Gonzalez, then surely the Justice Department should have gone to Florida making the recent election their first priority.”
Mfume explained that the NAACP received many phone calls regarding claims from people in Florida saying that they were being called on the phone and told to vote for George W. Bush by the NAACP. Mfume justified the falsehood of this statement by saying that this in fact was not true, because the NAACP doesn’t side with any party.