Posted in .

Philadelphia Inquirer: NAACP takes control over Philly chapter after president’s antisemitic Facebook post, backlash

  • August 26, 2020

By Chris Brennan and Oona Goodin-Smith

The NAACP will replace all leadership of its Philadelphia chapter — including its president, Minister Rodney Muhammad — after Muhammad posted an anti-Semitic image on his Facebook page last month, prompting widespread outcry and calls for his resignation.

First reported by the Philadelphia Tribune, the local NAACP chapter’s executive committee voted last week to dissolve itself and relinquish full leadership to the national office, which will appoint new leadership of the Philadelphia chapter next month, a spokesperson for the national NAACP said.

The national organization “will appoint an administrator for the Philadelphia branch to assume overall responsibility for the operation of the branch, its committees and staff, as well as shepherd a transparent transition to new leadership,” the organization said in a statement. “Moving forward, it is our continued priority to work with community leaders and faith leaders across Philadelphia and the country to strengthen the long-standing relationship between our communities.”

The national takeover will end Muhammad’s term as chapter president, a position he has held since 2014, and comes after a month of backlash from politicians and Jewish organizations over the social media post.

Muhammad, who worked a paid political consultant for Mayor Jim Kenney until earlier this year, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday. He initially told The Inquirer he didn’t realize the image — which included a caricature of a hook-nosed, yarmulke-wearing figure on the sleeve of an unseen person who is crushing a mass of people with a ring-bedecked hand — was offensive. Kenney was critical of the post and called on Muhammad to apologize.

”He came out explaining it and trying to justify it,” Bishop J. Louis Felton, the local chapter’s first vice president, said this month. “You do not justify anti-Semitism.”