Annotations for People: Flynn-john

The new Cesar Center for Chicano Studies will be part of UCLA Center for Interdisciplinary Instruction, which the university says has been in the works now for several years.

In New York City, a group of Dominicans, Puerto Ricans and Panamanians is forming the first ever Latino chapter of the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. From New York, Mandalit Del Barco has more. [nat sound, music]

Discrimination was not the first worry of the Latinos who joined to form the first Hispanic chapter of the Civil Rights Organization, crime was. Reverend John Flynn, who is part of the group, says since 1989 he's presided at the funerals of more than 30 young people who have been killed in the streets of Crotona, one of the poorest communities in the country. The young people there live in despair, he says. There are no jobs and the only money they can get is in the streets selling drugs.

It was the perception that no one in high places listens to the problems of people in the Bronx that led area resident Austin Jacobs to call on his brother-in-law, Ben Chavis, the NAACP's executive director. Chavis cheered the efforts of the first Latino NAACP chapter and said he would like to expand the organization even farther into Latin American and Africa. The NAACP was founded in 1909 to fight discrimination and to empower people on a grassroots level. For Latino USA, I'm Mandalit del Barco in New York.