Bush Opts for Urban League Over NAACP

The White House confirmed on Wednesday that President Bush, who angered black leaders by declining to address the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People last week, will speak next week to the National Urban League.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan, traveling with the president in Wisconsin, said Bush would make remarks July 23 to the Urban League convention in Detroit. Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts is scheduled to address the convention the previous day.

Although Bush spoke to the NAACP in 2000 when he was running for president, he has not done so since taking office.

“The current leadership of the NAACP has certainly made some rather hostile political comments about the president over the past few years,” McClellan said Friday.

At the NAACP convention in Philadelphia, chairman Julian Bond excoriated the president’s decision to skip that meeting and urged African Americans to mobilize voters against the president’s reelection.

“John Kerry accepted our invitation to speak to this convention; President Bush did not,” Bond said, according to text posted on the group’s website.

“Two days ago, President Bush made his 30th visit to the state of Pennsylvania, his most-visited state outside his home area of Texas, Virginia and Maryland,” Bond said. “Yet he couldn’t come to Pennsylvania to speak to us.”