WELCOME

The NEW YORK CIVIL RIGHTS COALITION (NYCRC) is unlike any other civil rights organization that exists today. We do not speak for or represent any particular “racial” group or ethnic constituency. Ours is an inclusionary organization, and those who associate with us are independent thinkers and unrepentantly separate from those who pursue ethnic and racial identity. People of every hue are welcome to join us and to support our efforts at reconciliation and with the reordering of the civil rights movement, transforming the civil rights effort forward with its roots, as an intelligent, fiercely independent force of people of good will who are opposed to racial idiocy and separatism. We pursue every person’s freedom from both racial prejudgment and invidious discrimination.

We proudly refute all manifestations of racial idiocy.

And we combat stereotyping that polarizes us into ethnic and racial camps.

The common purpose and resolve of our movement is to speak plainly about what is required to create a society free of racial prejudgments, and to speak up for individual freedom. We oppose bigotry and we help to defeat prejudices that deny any of us our dignity and humanity.

America is still becoming–but it is not what it used to be. America is not the sum of its ethnic and racial parts. America is a land of opportunity premised on the rule of law where we (everyone of us) should be able to enjoy the blessings of liberty and individual evaluation and accomplishment free of racial prejudgment and/or segmentation. We hold that people should look upon one’s skin color no differently than how we look upon one’s, say, eye color. Such a unifying philosophy, we realize, breaks with those stuck in the past, and separates us from those who are the guardians of the civil rights industry–they who make something of “race” that it is not, and should never be. Unlike them, we neither fete nor celebrate skin color. Our voice is different from theirs because we say there is no such thing as “race.‘ We say that all of us belong to the same race–i.e. the human race.

Those associated with the NEW YORK CIVIL RIGHTS COALITION do not hate or love anyone on the flimsy basis of skin color. This, also, puts us at odds and in perpetual conflict with those who salute our supposed skin color differences. We welcome that conflict and the debate that that ensues, because our movement is premised on replacing superstitions with truth, with our substituting their irrationality with a full measure of rational discourse, and with our refuting racial idiocy from any and every quarter it emerges.

Ours is the voice of sanity in the Civil Rights Movement.

At the core of our commitment to stamping out racial idiocy and defeating stereotypes is the life work of Lillian Smith, the now deceased civil rights crusader who worked tirelessly, at great personal sacrifice, to transform the South in which she lived. Lillian Smith urged individual and social action on behalf of fundamentally sane purposes and goals; she said:

“There are people who belong to the future, and people who turn their backs on it. Each person makes the decision whether he will live in the age he was born or keep catching at the apron strings of the past; whether he will hoard his ‘usefulness’ or spend it trying to help create a world that will be better, more secure, and perhaps more interesting for more people.”

We endorse Lillian Smith’s faith in humankind. We practice what she preached and lived.

We are led by one of the brightest lights and most eloquent, irreverent, fiercest voices on the public stage today–Michael Meyers. His voice is fresh and bold and candid and honest on the civil rights issues of our times. He was mentored by civil rights icons Roy Wilkins (who led the NAACP for 22 years when the NAACP was an interracial and respected civil rights group) and Dr. Kenneth B. Clark, the social psychologist whose studies were the support for the United States Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling in 1954 that outlawed “separate but equal” in public schools. The High Court opined that separate (on the basis of race) is “inherently unequal” when the government enforces classifications by skin color and so segregates pupils in the public schools.

You’ve come to a web site of a forward-looking, unique civil rights organization, an organization of people that employs fact-finding, analysis, intelligence, public information, educational efforts, advocacy, direct intervention and coalition efforts on behalf of civil rights, individual dignity, personal freedom, and social progress. As a tax-exempt not-for-profit charity–which does not seek and does not accept governmental funding–we welcome your tax-deductible donations in whatever size you can offer us financial assistance. We hope that your free-will gifts will be the size of your hearts.