JACKIE HILL IS THE NEW PRESIDENT OF THE NAACP PITTSBURGH BRANCH.
The NAACP Pittsburgh Branch has a new president.
And it’s a familiar face.
The New Pittsburgh Courier has learned exclusively that Jackie Hill, born and raised in Homewood, where she still resides today, was elected NAACP Pittsburgh Branch president in a landslide, Wednesday, July 9. Out of 45 votes cast, Hill won 38, or 84 percent of the votes, over William Anderson.
TERRI MINOR SPENCER
Terri Minor Spencer was elected first vice president, and Brenda Tate was elected second vice president. Those were the only three elections on July 9.
Hill has a long history with the Pittsburgh NAACP. She was on the board of directors for 10 years in the ’90s under former leader, the late Harvey Adams. Hill said she was recruited to the board by the late, iconic Alma Speed Fox.
“I have benefited both professionally and personally from the efforts of the NAACP,” Hill told the Courier, July 11. “I think any progress that has been made in this city on a larger scale was due to the work of the NAACP. I lived in Philadelphia for about 12 years and when I came back and realized that the organization was not what it used to be and I knew what it could be, then I decided to get more involved.”
Hill said she had conversations with the past Pittsburgh Branch president, Daylon Davis, about becoming president, even while Davis was in the president’s chair.
“I don’t throw a rock and hide my hand,” Hill told the Courier.
The NAACP Pittsburgh Branch has been in a daze lately. On March 14, Davis turned in his resignation as president, after two years and three months in the position. The organization is down to about 100 members that can be accounted for. It doesn’t have the standing in the community that it had, say, in the Adams days, when he was president from 1976 to 1992. It’s had some glory days under Tim Stevens and in some instances, the late Constance Parker, but as it stands now, Stevens’ political advocacy group, the Black Political Empowerment Project, has a stronger impact in Pittsburgh than the NAACP.
“I decided to get involved to see if we could bring back the branch to its glory,” Hill said.
Hill said she has experience in the private sector, government and the non-profit arenas. She said it will help her to maneuver those systems, “while bringing out the change that we like to see.”
Hill, at one time, was a contractor with the U.S. Commerce Department for the state of Pennsylvania, and in a five-year period, secured $450 million in contracts and financing for Black businesses across the state, and helped to create 2,000 full-time jobs.
Now, she hopes to lead the NAACP Pittsburgh Branch back to the impactful, influential organization that it once was. First things first, she said the internal infrastructure of the organization has to be fixed.
“As you know, there has been no fundraising, no membership drives,” Hill told the Courier, “so the organizational infrastructure needs to be put back in place. That’s one of the challenges.”
But Hill also wants to see the NAACP be at the forefront of making safety a priority in Pittsburgh’s Black community. Across the nation, 33 percent of all missing children are Black. And overall, nearly 40 percent of missing persons in the country are people of color.
“I would like to host clinics, workshops so that people have the proper identification, and establish a task force on missing girls and women that includes law enforcement, the DA’s office, all of the legal mechanisms that would help us to make people feel safe and to identify the children that are missing, those that we can,” Hill told the Courier.
BRENDA TATE
Tate, the NAACP Pittsburgh Branch Second Vice President, told the Courier that she has been “very good friends in the political scene” with Hill, and that “our visions were very closely aligned as to what we thought needed to happen in this community at this time.”
Tate spent 40 years as a police officer and police detective in Pittsburgh. She said many of the Black Pittsburgh Police officers who became officers in the 1970s wouldn’t have had that opportunity without the support of the NAACP Pittsburgh Branch.
“I’m asking Pittsburgh to help move this organization back to where it should be in history,” Tate told the Courier, July 14. She said she’s even identified someone younger who may want to take over the organization in the coming years, as Tate is in her late 70s. Mentorship is important, Tate said, “to make sure that we move this organization in a way that we don’t die out, and there’s no one to step in that void.”
But for now, the task is solely to get the NAACP Pittsburgh Branch back to where it once was.
Can it get there?
“We can certainly get it moving in that direction,” Tate told the Courier, “the three of us (Hill, Spencer, Tate).”
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