PORTLAND, Ore. — On this Martin Luther King Day, it’s important to recognize how the civil rights leader’s legacy has impacted leaders in our own community and the fight for racial justice that continues today.
Portland’s NAACP chapter has not just one new face, but several new Black women who are leading the charge with a new vision in the pursuit of justice.
“They told us, never forget who you are and whose you are,” Portland NAACP President Sharon Gary-Smith said. “Not just my immediate family, not just my mother and my father; my community, my people, my history, my ancestry.”
Gary-Smith is looking toward the future, but our nation’s history and her own history are always in clear view.
“You do it for the next and you do it to elevate those around you, and that was a challenge and a charge for me,” she said.
Gary-Smith is a Portland native and second-generation Black female leader. She is the eldest of four daughters born to a community organizing, racial justice-organizing mother and Tuskegee-trained father.
Gary-Smith has more than four decades of leadership but will be the first to tell you that she hasn’t done it alone.
“I wanted to create a space where I can be safe, and I realized I couldn’t do that just for myself. I had to do that in concert with others. So, that has been the work,” she said.
That drive she’s brought to her work for the past 40 years is the same in her new role as the president of the Portland NAACP. It is a position she says she did not seek out, but rather one that found her and the group of mostly women now leading the organization.
“We came together with different skills, with different talents, with a different sense of what matters in a historically powerful organization fighting for racial justice and we saw what wasn’t happening to us; I think each of us as individuals,” she said. “How we were treated, how we were not represented, how we were misrepresented. And what we realized, is that together we were so powerful in forms and effectiveness. And then we were forced to say, ‘Okay, I’ll lead.’”
By her side in that leadership are Vice Presidents Tamia Deary and Donovan Smith, Secretary Natalie Rush and Treasurer Ryan Hills.
“Organizations that need to change -- women are often the ones that get in there and do the work,” Gary-Smith said.
Together, they have a vision of transparency. It is something they themselves called for when former president E.D. Mondaine eventually resigned after allegations of sexual and physical abuse.
Accountability and accessibility are their focus in the organization’s pursuit of justice.
“Intentionally inclusive and intentionally accessible,” Deary said. “I think it’s really important that we’re amplifying and elevating women and fem leaders, not just here in the NAACP, but all of the Black women and fem leadership in Portland.”
“I think the greatest thing that Dr. Martin Luther King put forth was the establishment of unity in the community,” Hills said.
“History is important. It plays a piece. It’s not to be forgotten and it’s not to be overlooked,” Rush said. “And that piece is what’s helped shape us as a people for who we are today and why we’re pushing so hard – just to be on the same platform: equal footing, equal rights, recognition, promotion, and so on – versus us just sitting behind.”
The Portland NAACP has a history of giving young people the power to lead and that’s something the new local NAACP leadership hopes to bring forward into 2021.
“Those were younger folks who got about the business of organizing and educating. We are part of a really precious history and a precious movement and I like to think Dr. King would have said, 'Carry on. I may not be with you when we get to the promised land, but we’re going to get there,'” Gary-Smith said.
To learn more about the Portland NAACP; join or donate visit www.pdxnaacp.org.