Brigitte Bowers: NAACP’s mission in Merced continues to evolve

Editor’s note: This is the second in a two-part series on the NAACP in Merced.

Merced did not have a local chapter of the NAACP until 28 years after its national founding.

The year was 1937, 10 years after a catastrophic flood along the Mississippi River helped spur an unprecedented number of African Americans to leave the South in search of better opportunities, in a phenomenon known as the Great Migration.

In the late 1920s, those African Americans were fleeing not only the Jim Crow laws of the South, but also the overwhelming poverty that had hounded them generation after generation.

Many of them headed north to Chicago and New York, and while they still faced de facto segregation and racial prejudice – the famous Cotton Club in Harlem, where Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Lena Horne and Louis Armstrong performed, was restricted to white patrons only – they generally found a better way of life in the big cities of the North.

But in 1937, as the nation struggled through a depression that had lagged on for seven years and would not end for another three, opportunities might have seemed at least slightly better in the West than North.

Though African Americans had been settling in Merced County since its incorporation in 1855, many of them in the Snelling area, the overall population of the county grew faster than ever in the 1930s.

This might have been due, in part, to Highway 99, which had been paved in 1914 and had improved travel and thus agricultural production in the Valley.

In the community of Red Top, about 10 miles south of Merced, thousands of acres had been planted to rice by the 1920s, and by the 1940s, cotton had become one of the more lucrative crops in the area. In the 10 years between 1920 and 1930, the population of Merced County had grown by more than 10,000, from 24,579 to 36,748.

Obviously, though the nation was mired in the Great Depression in 1937 when Daniel Hill became the first president of the NAACP in Merced, the period leading up to the ’30s was also a time of growth for the county. But some things had not changed. Merced was then, and still is in many ways today, a community divided literally in half, with underrepresented minorities residing on the south side and more affluent neighborhoods, many of them predominately white, on the north side.

Merced’s less privileged half needed representation, and over the years, the NAACP became a voice for South Merced. But just as important, the organization’s influence would affect the city as a whole.

Sarah Brown Porter, who was elected president of the local chapter in 1946, would go on to be the first African American elected to Merced’s City Council, running on a platform that opposed the re-directing of Highway 99 to the route between 13th and 14th streets.

She lost the battle, but was noteworthy for being not only the first African American on the council, but also its only woman in 1955, 100 years after the county was incorporated.

In more recent times, the Merced NAACP campaigned successfully to change the name of the previous J Street to Martin Luther King Jr. Way in 1993, though the organization received letters threatening various acts of violence if it did not abandon the project. But the NAACP does not cave in to intimidation.

Though the NAACP in Merced is still involved in promoting racial equality in social and educational institutions, its primary focus is really the development and progress of all residents.

The agenda at January’s NAACP meeting included items ranging from a presentation by Yvonnia Brown, the director of Merced County Mental Health, who talked about her plans to house all of Mental Health under one roof and to centralize intake at Mental Health, to a discussion of recent books and films relevant to human rights in general.

The newly elected president of Merced’s NAACP, Darryl Davis, spoke about his mission for the year, which included improving awareness about human trafficking in the sex trade, an exploitation he likens to slavery.

He is most concerned, however, with youth in Merced and works on various levels to improve relations between teens and law enforcement.

As a UC Merced campus police officer, Davis has a unique perspective and opportunity to foster better communication between police and young people in Merced. During an interview in which he discussed his childhood, job and hopes for the NAACP, Davis mentioned that a primary focus of his role on campus is to help form positive connections between his department and students at UC Merced, many of whom come from urban settings where they have been taught to avoid contact with the police.

“A lot of these kids are from Oakland and L.A. and they don’t like cops,” Davis said. “I enjoy mentoring and relationship-building and breaking down some of those barriers.”

Davis is himself the product of mentoring and relationship-building. Born and raised in Ansted, W.Va. – a town of 1,400 in the middle of the state – he played football in high school, where he was influenced by his coach, whose encouragement and guidance Davis still draws on today. Though Davis wanted to be a policeman from the time he was young, his path to that profession was circuitous.

Growing up, he worked as a bagger and stocker at a grocery store in Ansted. (“New River Foodland,” he stated promptly when I asked if he remembered the name of the store.) After playing football at West Virginia Tech, he entered the Air Force, which brought him to Castle Air Force Base in Atwater, where he served as an aircraft mechanic for four years.

Eventually, he married and his wife helped support him while he worked his way through the police academy in Modesto.

Davis hopes to build an NAACP chapter at UC Merced, one that will supplement the city’s chapter but also address concerns particular to the campus. And so the mission of the NAACP in Merced continues to evolve, still working for a community that began in 1855 while embracing its newest settlement.

This story was originally published February 6, 2015 at 3:15 PM with the headline "Brigitte Bowers: NAACP’s mission in Merced continues to evolve."