Mitt Romney's Long, Troubled History With the NAACP

"Corporations Are People My Friends"

The GOP presidential candidate spoke to the nation's oldest civil rights organization on Wednesday. Here's what you need to know about their relationship.

—By Adam Serwer

| Wed Jul. 11, 2012 3:00 AM PDT

 

UPDATE: Romney was booed during his speech as he promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

 

Mitt Romney deserves a bit of credit for his decision to address the NAACP on Wednesday, given that he's running against Barack Obama, the most visible symbol of the NAACP's success. Conservatives generally view the group as a excessively partisan. But given Romney's antagonistic relationship with the local NAACP chapter when he was governor of Massachusetts, he may receive a particularly unpleasant reception.
Leonard Alkins, the former head of the Boston NAACP, has few fond memories of Romney's tenure. "There was no relationship between the NAACP in Boston and Gov. Mitt Romney and his administration," Alkins says. "The only time that the NAACP had any interaction with the administration and the governor was to protest when he eliminated the affirmative action office."

In one of his early acts as governor, Romney dumped the state's office of affirmative action and replaced it with the office of diversity and equal opportunity. In doing so, he invalidated a half-dozen executive orders establishing affirmative action policies for women, minorities, veterans, and people with disabilities; diversity training programs; and equal-opportunity standards for state contractors. Romney's executive order replaced all of this with what was essentially a broad—and, Alkins says, "toothless"—commitment to "diversity."  READ MORE