Education expert to lead Pennsylvania NAACP

(Washingtron, Pa)—Joan Duvall-Flynn, PhD, was elected as the new president of the NAACP Pennsylvania State Conference at its annual convention entitled “Pursuing Liberty in the Face of Injustice” held, this year, in Washington, Pa.
A life member of the NAACP’s Media Pennsylvania Branch, Duvall-Flynn is only the second woman ever elected to head the State Conference. The first Pennsylvania Conference president was Sophie B. Nelson, a school teacher and civil rights worker from Pittsburgh, elected at its founding meeting in 1934,  attended by Daisy Lampkin, also from Pittsburgh, who was an NAACP field director, a member of the NAACP National Board, and vice president of the Pittsburgh Courier newspaper.
Duvall-Flynn has a 40-year career as an educator and education policy advocate. She aims to strengthen the NAACP and hoist activism in education reform across the Pennsylvania Commonwealth and the nation. Environmental racism and criminal justice are also among many critical issues that will draw her focus.
“I plan to start moving on establishing an environmental task force immediately,” she said after the election in response to members’ health and economic concerns related to the use storage, transportation, and extraction of fossil fuels.
The highlight of the 2015 NAACP Pennsylvania State Conference Convention was the keynote speech delivered before 112 guests at the Freedom Fund banquet by Cornell William Brooks, who became the NAACP national president and CEO in May 2014. A fourth generation ordained minister and an attorney with a Master of Divinity degree from Boston University School of Theology and a law degree from Yale Law School, Brooks is what some might call a double threat.
Brooks spoke passionately about the thousands of marchers he led from Selma, Ala., to Washington, D.C., over six weeks during the summer of 2015 in a trek that began in 100-plus degree heat and included the participation of marchers as young as age 7 and as old as 94, including a Vietnam-era veteran who passed away while participating in the march.
Under the banner “America’s Journey for Justice”  the NAACP march was a redemptive call for civil rights to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the March from Selma to Montgomery and 1965 Voting Rights Act. The journey was extended from 867 miles to 1,002 miles after being rerouted around Spartanville, S.C., to avoid threatened violence. Brooks described the march as a bold act of leadership and redemption, recalling a bitter legacy of racial injustice: from the forced march of millions of Africans to endure Middle Passage into bondage as enslaved people, the Trail of Tears by which thousands of indigenous and African people were uprooted and forced to travel on foot from the lush and fertile southeastern US to a region that today comprises mostly Oklahoma, the forced eviction of thousands of Japanese Americans from their homes and businesses to isolated concentration camps during World War II, and historic marches for justice and freedom led by Mahatma Gandhi and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Brooks called for a renewed commitment to the mission of the NAACP of W.E.B. Dubois, Rosa Parks and King.
Born and raised in South Carolina, Brooks was cited by news media as the first national leader to call for the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the State Capitol in the wake of the June 2015 shooting massacre of nine people in Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston.
Mon Valley Freedom Fighters
Two Monongahela Valley civic leaders were honored during the convention. Gwendolyn G. Simmons was presented with the Business Leadership Award by the Monongahela Branch, which hosted the Convention at the Double Tree by Hilton  in North Strabane Township.
In their statements about her significant contributions and achievements, presenters George A. Simmons and Washington County Commissioner Larry Maggi cited her long marriage to the Judge Paul A. Simmons, who was a federal judge on the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania Court, as well as service as a member of numerous advisory boards and boards of directors, and as a member of the University of California Board of Trustees.  In accepting the award, Gwendolyn Simmons said of her distinguished career of public service, “I have always worked to support the improvement of human kind.”
California University of Pennsylvania Interim President Geraldine M. Jones presented the NAACP Spirit Award posthumously to former California University professor Burrell A. Brown, who served as an NAACP Pennsylvania State Conference president and led the NAACP Clairton branch for many years. Jones reminded the audience that he passed away in his office in January 2015 beloved by “hundreds, perhaps thousands of students” and colleagues who valued his common sense, unique insights, and his laugh.
“We are much richer for having known and shared time with Burrell,” said Jones before presenting the award to his wife, Anita Brown.
 
 
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