Gerald Stansbury wants to let people know the NAACP is there for them.
As a teen-ager in the mid-1960s, he carried signs promoting the organization in front of a house in Bacontown, believed to have been burned by the Ku Klux Klan. His father, the Rev. George A. Stansbury, was pastor of a church in the area, and the younger Stansbury was helping him recruit members for the NAACP. "I was young, but I was out there holding my sign," Stansbury said.
Today, Stansbury is president of the Anne Arundel County branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. And he again wants to display a sign.
This time, he will put the sign in front of the Annapolis building where he has opened an NAACP office, the organization's first in its 50 years in the county.
"We want the community to know we're there so they won't have any problem finding us," Stansbury said. "There are many young folks out there that haven't ever heard of the NAACP."
The office is little more than a cubicle behind sliding-glass doors on the ground floor of the Ganderco building at Forest Drive and Old Solomons Island Road. But to Stansbury, it marks an important step forward for the organization.
"We have got to move into the next millennium," he said in a recent interview there.
Along with office space, the branch has a telephone listing and a meeting room upstairs. And the state NAACP conference is considering moving its offices to the Parole building. Two years after he defeated longtime branch President Jean Creek in a contentious election, Stansbury acknowledges that the NAACP may seem quiet in the county.
"We're going through a rebuilding process," explained Stansbury, who won re-election in November.
Creek challenged those results with the national office, but state NAACP President Hanley Norment said he expects the complaint to be resolved soon in Stansbury's favor.
In the midst of the controversies, Stansbury has focused on recruiting members, bolstering the roster from 300 members in 1995 to 1,600; computerizing records; and building coalitions with black clergy, fraternities and sororities.
Self-sufficiency
He also talks of leading the black community to economic self-sufficiency. The NAACP is working on an initiative to encourage black churches in the area to patronize businesses run by members of their congregations. And Stansbury envisions a black-owned bank in the county and a black-owned events hall for banquets and large gatherings.
