The president and chief executive of the NAACP says the Trump transition team has reached out to the organization.
“We’ve heard from the transition office. They’ve reached out to the NAACP. We haven’t heard from the President-elect as of yet. I suspect we will,” Cornell William Brooks told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on “The Situation Room.”
“They just reached out in terms in terms of getting contact information, and that kind of thing. It wasn’t necessarily a message from the President-elect, but hopefully that’s to come,” Brooks said.
In July, Trump declined the group’s invitation to address its members at the NAACP Annual Convention in Ohio.
“The President-elect is charged with responsibility of working with a great variety of organizations and I would certainly expect the NAACP to be high on that list,” Brooks continued. “The NAACP is non-partisan. We work on both sides of the aisle. We work with anyone who is willing to work with us for the betterment and the advancement of civil rights in this country.”
The NAACP president said they are “willing to be truth-tellers” but “cannot ignore” some of Trump’s recent top-level picks, including Sen. Jeff Sessions for attorney general, former Breitbart executive Steve Bannon as chief strategist, and Betsy DeVos, “someone who is a great advocate for the privatization of public education,” for secretary of education.
“We are going to be honest, we are going to be forthright, we are going to be critical where need be, but we’re certainly willing to engage with anyone, certainly the President-elect, in terms of advancing civil rights,” Brooks said.
