Danatus King to step down as NAACP N.O. Branch president

14th July 2014   ·   0 Comments

Danatus N. King, president of the New Orleans Branch NAACP, announced July 5 that he is resigning as President of the Branch effective at the end of his current term. Mr. King announced that after serving as Branch President for the past 10 years, having twice been re-elected without opposition, he is resigning to devote more time to delivering the message that God Is Almighty.

For the past 35 years Mr. King has delivered that message as Messenger with the Church of God Almighty. For more than 10 years Mr. King has delivered that message via The Message television program that airs live, 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, Cox Cable Orleans and at www.livestream.com messengerdnk.

In announcing his resignation, King explained that a worldwide lecture tour is currently being planned to deliver the message. Planning and conducting the tour while at the same time expanding media and other outlets to deliver the message will require an amount of time that will not allow Mr. King to continue to devote the time necessary to effectively lead the New Orleans Branch NAACP.

“Right now, it’s time to step it up a notch, and the amount of time that’s going to be needed to finalize the tour and coordinate the tour and expand to other media outlets, it’s just that there won’t be enough time to devote to the NAACP,” King told Nola.com Monday. “The NAACP is family and stepping way from that as president was a difficult decision.”

King was first elected president of the New Orleans Branch of the NAACP in 2004 and successfully ran for the post four more consecutive times, the last two times unopposed.

Danatus King, an attorney, is a proud member of the Zulu Social Aid & Pleasure Club and was recently presented with the African-American Leadership Project’s Person of the Year Award last month for his tireless and selfless service to underserved communities and his commitment to fighting social, racial and economic injustice in the city of New Orleans.

King recently tossed his hat into the New Orleans mayoral race, placing third behind former Civil Court Chief Judge Michael Bagneris and incumbent Mayor Mitch Landrieu.

While he had little financial support for his campaign, King used his platform as a candidate to raise awareness about the myriad of issues facing the Black community in New Orleans like the DOJ’s bungling of the Danziger Bridge and Henry Glover cases, the racial profiling of Ferdinand Hunt and Sidney Newman in the French Quarter, the slow pace of post-Katrina recovery in communities of color, abuse of the NOPD paid detail system, the city’s failure to get a handle on violent crime.

King stood with the family of Henry Glover and about 200 supporters when they showed up at the Orleans Parish Coroner’s Office last December to demand that Coroner Dr. Frank Minyard re-open his investigation into the cause of Henry Glover’s death so that the NOPD officer who shot the 31-year-old just days after Hurricane Katrina, David Warren, could be indicted by the Orleans Parish district attorney after Warren was acquitted during his retrial last year.

Other issues King has been outspoken about over the years included police brutality, racial profiling and other forms of unconstitutional policing, housing discrimination, boost-Katrina blight in low-income communities and the exclusion of minority contractors from the City of New Orleans bidding process.

After being appointed to Mayor-elect Mitch Landrieu’s police chief search committee several years ago, King and several other members of the committee resigned amid protests that they were not being allowed to contribute to the actual search for a police chief. Months before Ronal Serpas was named police chief, King and others alleged that the Landrieu administration had already chosen a police chief and that the committee was simply going through the motions to make it appear as though there was a consensus to hire Serpas.

The mayor adamantly denied those claims.

King, who plans to remain president until his term ends on Dec. 31, said last week that he is proud of the work he has done as leader of the New Orleans Branch of the NAACP. “In my opinion, I have made a positive contribution not only to our branch, but to our city,” he told Nola.com. “I’m glad God put me in the position to do that.”

The New Orleans Branch of the NAACP will hold elections in October.

This article originally published in the July 14, 2014 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.