Those who know Enrico "Rick" Callender don't find it a stretch that in a disagreement between blacks and Latinos, he would seek to balance both groups' perspectives. Since becoming NAACP president in early 2001, he has taken on issues confronting all ethnic groups, including the controversial police shooting of Bich Cau Thi Tran, a Vietnamese woman in San Jose, and hate crime prevention efforts in San Jose schools against students who are Muslim or of Middle Eastern descent.
His chapter's membership has increased from about 1,000 to 2,500, and the group has gone from nearly all black to 72 percent black, with 10 percent Asian, 10 percent white and 8 percent Latino membership. Nearly half of the members of his advisory board are not black. He said people are surprised to walk into the NAACP office and see it staffed with Asian-Americans.
"We have the most diverse board in California," said Callender, son of a black activist and a Panamanian immigrant. "The same thing I ask of the corporations, to reflect the community, we should do as well."
But some local NAACP members say they find themselves at odds with his positions, saying they run counter to traditional black concerns.
Ken Stewart, who is black, spearheaded the effort to rename King Road in East San Jose for the slain civil rights leader, only to withdraw the proposal because the mostly Latino residents argued that the road symbolizes the Chicano movement of the 1960s.
Callender helped kill the name change, Stewart said, by opposing it publicly in the San Jose Mercury News rather than privately with Stewart.
But Callender, who said he talked to Stewart before contacting the newspaper, said he could not support a proposal that split blacks and Latinos.
Callender also opposed a proposal from a group of black leaders earlier this year requesting that the county Human Relations Commission condemn the use of the word "nigger," citing instead a national NAACP resolution condemning all racial epithets as equally offensive.
"He's not connected with our community anymore," said Dawn Spears, an African American who says she won't renew her San Jose NAACP membership, electing instead to join only the national organization. "He's diluting what little power there is" for blacks, who are only 3.5 percent of San Jose's population, Stewart added.
But supporters say Callender's work fits with the original mission of the NAACP. In California, state NAACP President Alice Huffman defended American Indians in then-gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger's attack on Indian gaming, and said she is using her seat on Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante's Commission for One California to reach out to Latinos.
When Spears questioned Callender's position on King Road to the state organization, Huffman told her the NAACP needs to consider both blacks and Latinos as its constituents.
| Continue Kathleen Corcoran's San Jose Mercury News (via Contra Costa Times) article "San Jose's NAACP head reaches out to minorities"
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