Tillman resigns local NAACP top job, unusual replacement named

After nearly three decades as president of the Maricopa County Branch of the NAACP, Rev. Oscar Tillman is retiring.

In the news account of his torch passing, the 69-year old Tillman was quoted as saying, “I’m an old-school person who knows when to let someone else step up to the plate. Somebody else gave me that chance.”

For that reason we imagined a young black leader would have been chosen to lead the organization. Instead, his replacement will be Donald Harris, a local lawyer, with a libertine bent. At age 76, Harris is seven years older than the retiree. He is also white.

That fact should be enough to drag Al Sharpton protégé, Rev. Jarrett Maupin, II, out to hurl racially charged insults. Instead he was busy with a Tuesday press conference to announce his latest campaign, “Black Lives Matter,” which Maupin says ‘addresses the violence of systemic racism in America and Arizona.” Maupin says, “Black communities throughout America suffer untold violence at the hands of aggressive police. His not-so-veiled threat, “We are counting down to the Super Bowl, but who’s counting down to the next police killing? There are consequences.”

In January 2013, covering the Phoenix City Council race we noted that race-baiter Maupin reprehensibly referred to then-candidate Kate Gallego, a Harvard grad with an MBA from the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania, as “a white political patsy.”  He also called her “a power-hungry white…who not is openly campaigning as white.”

Maupin, who we still expect to hear from regarding the Harris appointment to the local NAACP post, momentarily dipped his toe into the congressional race in 2014, to replace retiring CD-7 Democrat Congressman Ed Pastor. But Maupin would have been unable to vote for himself due to a felony conviction.

Kate Gallego, the subject of Maupin’s vile invectives, had the last laugh.  She won the District 8 council seat and her husband Ruben has been elected to congress in the same race Maupin had a yen for. Both Gallego’s are Democrats.

As to Donald Harris, who has served on the NAACP executive board, the Gamma-Rho Chapter of the U of A Kappa Sigma fraternity has this bio of the Brooklyn-born Democrat. In 2004, the Phoenix New Times gave the loose cannon lawyer some less than flattering coverage during his unsuccessful bid for County Attorney. He had previously been a short timer heading that office in the 1970’s when he was appointed interim county attorney to complete the term of Moise Berger, who resigned.

Just days ago we posted, NYC officers murdered, Maupin crawls out of Phx rat hole. Of particular significance is the comment from ‘State Delegate,’ following the post, containing a letter from Rev. Clyde Bowen, Chairman of the Arizona American African Republican Committee (AAARC). exposing Maupin —- referred to by Rev. Bowen as “Kid Sharpton.”