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Darrell Pope is still causing a ruckus.
Darrell Pope took over the Hutchinson, Kansas, branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1967, one year before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. In 2009, Pope was honored by the civil rights organization as its longest continuously serving branch president.
And he's still making waves.
Yesterday, The Hutchinson News reported that the NAACP, through Pope's chapter, was seeking a federal investigation into the mayor and City Council of neighboring Nickerson, Kansas. The city's leaders allegedly ordered the police chief to rescind a job offer made to a black police officer from Wichita.
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Darrell Pope is a Kansas civil rights legend.
April Addis, the Nickerson police chief, resigned last year after she was reprimanded by the City Council for hiring 18-year-old
John Bremby of Wichita. Addis had hired three white officers without any complaints from council members, but when she hired Bremby, her decision was overturned.
Pope requested meetings with Nickerson city leaders but was blown off by everyone except the city attorney.
Nickerson's mayor,
Bill Golding, called Bremby "disgruntled" and said the accusations were baseless.
But if it comes down to a battle of will and patience, Pope has the advantage. Pope remembers the separate-but-equal rules that relegated him to entering buildings through back doors and watching movies from theater balconies when he was a child. Since then, as the NAACP chapter president, he has made inroads with the city's mayors, police department and public schools, and led the movement to create Hutchinson's Human Relations Commission.
As Pope told
The Topeka Capital-Journal in 2009, "I know there's always things to be desired, and there's always room for
improvement. But we try to promote the goodwill and
interaction in the community, where we can all sit down and negotiate
and come to terms on things in a reasonable way."
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