(miami.com) “The nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization is fighting to regain the membership it had in decades past.

South Florida’s black population has grown over the past two decades, but membership in the region’s two largest NAACP branches has plummeted, to the dismay of civil rights communities in Broward and Miami-Dade counties.

The Miami-Dade NAACP, which boasted 5,000 members in the late 1980s, now has 500 to 600, said Adora Obi Nweze, the state NAACP president who founded the branch.

Membership in the Fort Lauderdale branch was about 2,000 in the mid- to late 1980s, said Fort Lauderdale Commissioner Carlton B. Moore, who was branch president then. As of last month, membership was about 250, according to one member.” (more…)

COLUMBIA, S.C. (Kansas.com) – For Kitty Green, the NAACP’s call for an economic boycott of the state seven years ago was a “slap in the face.”

While the teacher-turned-entrepreneur supports the civil rights organization’s effort to remove the Confederate flag from the State House grounds, the sanctions hit her business hard.

Now some members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People are questioning whether it’s good policy to continue the boycott. In 2000, the flag was moved from atop the State House dome to a monument in front of the capitol, and there’s no plan to move it again…

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Green said it took years of building and grooming her business, Kitty Green Gullah-N-Geechie Mahn Tours, then more years of marketing it to tourists, to finally reach the brink of success before the boycott.

“We had come to such a good place with the state,” Green recalled, referring to the Lowcountry’s rich cultural heritage and the working relationship she had nurtured with the state tourism department.

When her business opened in 1992, Green’s tours of plantations, old praise houses and a number of structures built by slaves were competing for elusive tourist dollars with a surging interest in golf. Green said by 1999 her business finally had received much-needed support from those who pushed South Carolina tourism.

Under the boycott, major Lowcountry cultural events were spiked. The Penn Center’s Heritage Days Festival was canceled two years in a row, and Beaufort’s Memorial Day Gullah Festival was canceled one year.

Since African Americans African-Americans were only getting only a small piece of the tourism pie anyway, Green said, the boycott hurt them even more.

“I wish they had looked at the impact on businesses like mine” before calling the boycott, she said, adding her revenues are just now returning to pre-boycott levels.