Sunday on MSNBC, former NAACP president and candidate for Maryland governor Ben Jealous said President Donald Trump’s decision to decline an invitation to address National NAACP Convention showed he has “very little respect for people of color in this country.”
Jealous said, “Most of us are very concerned about his entire administration. You have Betsy DeVos, the most anti-public education secretary of education we’ve ever had. You have Jeff Sessions, who seems to be out of some old film, who wants to take us way back to the failed war on drugs and act like it’s a new thing. And you have a president who has shown again and again that he really has very little respect for people of color in this country, for minorities of all types.”
He added, “Presidents typically come to the NAACP convention going back half a century or more. And this is a chance for any president to come forward and say he is absolutely committed to civil rights. That if he’s made something — that if he has done something wrong, he will make it right. But he’s chosen not to do that and that sends not just the wrong message to black people in this country, it sends the wrong message to the country as a whole.”
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