Pittsburgh’s New NAACP President Aims To Revitalize The Chapter

Jacqueline Hill, the brand new president of Pittsburgh’s NAACP, is prioritizing rising membership and defending voting rights in the important thing swing state.

Elected in July and formally put in on Aug. 2, Hill, 75, a Homewood native, has lengthy devoted her life to group service. Since returning dwelling in 2012, she’s been pushed by a dedication to revitalize the NAACP chapter she grew up admiring.

“Having some mates who saved making an attempt to speak me into it and having an trustworthy discuss with myself, I made a decision to run for the workplace of president of the department,” Hill instructed The Pittsburgh Publish-Gazette, noting the “obligation” she felt to tackle a management function to revive the chapter.

Hill’s activism dates again to her youth, graduating from Westinghouse Excessive Faculty in 1968 amid the Homewood and Hill District riots that erupted after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.

The tense local weather was when Hill “started to grasp the significance of equality, combating for one’s rights,” she mentioned.

Her daughter, Megan, has childhood reminiscences of serving to her mom marketing campaign for Pittsburgh’s college board, making posters, passing out flyers, and tagging alongside to group occasions. Now 46, she remembers how “politically lively and charged” their dwelling was, along with her mom staying busy in tasks that served the “larger good” of the group.

“I’ve by no means recognized her to not be this manner,” Megan mentioned. “That is who she’s all the time been.”

Hill has spent most of her life in Homewood, except for the ten years she spent in Philadelphia as director of the African-American Chamber of Commerce and the Pennsylvania Minority Enterprise Growth Heart. Throughout that point, she helped safe hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in contracts and financing for minority-owned companies by way of a U.S. Division of Commerce initiative in Pennsylvania.

“Being a Black lady in Pittsburgh is a heavy carry,” Hill mentioned. “We’re not extremely regarded and loads of instances disrespected, but we deliver excessive worth to any scenario after we sit at a desk. We deliver an perception that different folks shouldn’t have as a result of they haven’t had our experiences.”

With a lifelong dedication to activism and group service, Hill brings each expertise and robust native assist as she takes the lead of the Pittsburgh NAACP.

“I simply assume it’s time for our group to get again in step,” mentioned Marcella Lee-Wilson, a 35-year member of the Pittsburgh NAACP. “I’m so excited that Jackie is on the helm.”

Brenda Tate, elected second vice chairman alongside Hill, shared that for the reason that election, folks have been reaching out to rejoin the chapter.

“[She] has accomplished loads of work on this metropolis and it has gone unnoticed,” Tate mentioned. “I signed on due to that, as a result of I do know her work.”

As president, Hill is prioritizing points like closing racial gaps in employment and safeguarding voting rights. Talking at Metropolis Corridor, she warned that some Pennsylvania residents may very well be stripped of their voter rolls if the U.S. Division of Justice succeeds in acquiring the private knowledge it has been requesting from states nationwide.

“If these folks get their fingers on the database for voters in Pennsylvania, we’re sure that they may start to purge Black voters,” she mentioned.

Hill additionally hopes to extend assist from locals past the Black group and remind them that the NAACP is “involved not solely with African American folks, but in addition all others which can be low-income” and “disenfranchised.”

“All of us have one thing in frequent,” she mentioned. “Poverty isn’t fairly in Black or white.”

RELATED CONTENT: NAACP Suing Texas Over Congressional Map It Says Strips Black Voters of Energy