#Obama to Meet with Younger Civil Rights Leaders
February 17, 2016
President Barack Obama will host a closed-door meeting at the White House on Thursday, February 18, 2016 with leaders of the younger generation of civil rights organizers, according to administration officials. The session is scheduled for the Roosevelt Room and is expected to run roughly 90 minutes. The president is arranging the meeting, officials said, to hear directly from the activists who have driven the national conversation on police violence and criminal justice since the 2014 Ferguson, Missouri protests.
The expected attendees include DeRay Mckesson, the Baltimore educator and Campaign Zero co-founder who has used Twitter to broadcast from police confrontations in Ferguson, Baton Rouge and Baltimore; Brittany Packnett, executive director of Teach For America in St. Louis and a member of the president’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing; and Johnetta Elzie, the 26-year-old writer who documented the early Ferguson protests. Campaign Zero policy analyst Samuel Sinyangwe is also expected.
The meeting marks a break with the traditional civil rights establishment. Rev. Al Sharpton, who has served as an informal liaison to the administration on racial issues since 2009, is not on the list. Neither is Marc Morial of the National Urban League or Cornell William Brooks of the NAACP. White House officials described the session as a complement to, rather than a replacement for, previous meetings with the legacy organizations.
The agenda is expected to cover three areas: criminal justice reform legislation pending in Congress, implementation of the Task Force on 21st Century Policing’s recommendations, and the administration’s remaining 11 months of work on clemency and sentencing. The president commuted the sentences of 61 federal inmates on March 30, 2016, and White House Counsel Neil Eggleston has signaled more commutations will follow before the end of the term.
The politics of the meeting are not subtle. Obama is working to set a baseline for whoever wins the Democratic primary. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are both trying to win over the same younger activists ahead of the February 27 South Carolina primary. Mckesson was interrupted by a Sanders supporter at a February 10 campaign rally in New Hampshire, and Clinton was confronted by BlackLivesMatter co-founder Daunasia Yancey over mass incarceration at a New Hampshire fundraiser in August 2015.
The Congressional Black Caucus has a parallel interest. Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-LA) and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) have all pressed the administration to move the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act forward in the Senate. The bill, sponsored by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), would reduce mandatory minimums for non-violent drug offenses. Republican Senate leadership has slow-walked the measure for more than a year.
What the White House meeting will not include is a formal policy announcement. “This is a listening session,” one administration official said, asking not to be named. “The president wants to hear where the movement is going, not to deliver a speech.” Several of the activists said privately they intend to press Obama on the Department of Justice’s pattern-and-practice investigations, and on the pace of federal consent decrees in cities including Ferguson, Cleveland and Baltimore.
The meeting is one of a dwindling number of set-piece civil rights gatherings the president will convene before leaving office in January 2017. It is also one of the clearest signs yet that Obama, who has been cautious throughout his presidency about being cast as a spokesman on race, is now using the last year of his term to explicitly hand the microphone to a generation that did not wait for his permission to take it.
