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The Place Where the Rainbow Never Ends A brick, a beach, and a lesson that never stopped moving

By CNN

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    July 13, 2026 (Houston Style Magazine) — (TriceEdneyWire.com) – There is an old man in the movement who still brims with the courage and love forged on a Chicago beach.

His eyes do not work well anymore. It seems to bother him less than you would think. Norman Hill has always seen more with his head and his heart than most of us ever see with our eyes.

I met Norman in the summer of 1993, at the convention of the A. Philip Randolph Institute. He was its president. He and the labor leaders Bill Lucy, Richard Womack and Clayola Brown gathered two dozen young Black organizers who shared their vision. Lucy had helped lead the sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis the week King was killed.

Stacey Abrams was one of us. Derrick Johnson was one. Jena Roscoe was one. I was one.

They passed down what A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin had taught them. Civil rights and workers’ rights are one fight. Racism splits working people apart. Economic injustice profits from that division. Our answer has to take on both.

Norman learned that from those two men. He also learned it on a Chicago beach.

In 1960, Rainbow Beach was public by law and White by custom. Velma Murphy was 21 years old and president of the South Side NAACP Youth Council. She decided to test it. If students in the South could sit down at a lunch counter, young people in Chicago could wade into Lake Michigan.

Norman helped her build a group, Black and White together. Some wanted an all-Black action. Norman and Velma said no. Black leadership and Black and White people standing side by side were not rival ideas. Together they were the plan.

In late August 1960, they walked onto Rainbow Beach. They spread blankets. They read books. They played checkers. They walked into the water.

A White mob gathered. Rocks and bricks flew. A brick hit Velma in the head and knocked her out cold. Norman picked her up and carried her off that beach. It took 17 stitches to close the wound.

They went back anyway. Again and again, through the next summer, they claimed their beach. The papers carried Velma’s story, and the crowds that came to stand with them grew. The city was forced to protect them. Rainbow Beach became a beach for everybody.

That victory was a blueprint. Black-led. Black and White together. Built on working people standing as one. Brave enough to take a beating. Disciplined enough to come back.

The lesson did not stay on the beach.

Soon after that summer, Stacey, Derrick, Jena and I went to Mississippi. Governor Kirk Fordice wanted to be rid of the state’s three Black public universities. He had already threatened to call out the National Guard rather than spend another dollar on them. Now he wanted to shut down Mississippi Valley State and put a prison on the campus.

He wanted Alcorn State gone. He wanted Jackson State made over into something else.

Alcorn is where Medgar Evers met Myrlie Beasley. They married on Christmas Eve. They worked side by side in the Mississippi NAACP office until the night Medgar was shot dead in his own driveway.

Saving Alcorn meant saving the ground where that love began.

We organized. We pulled in White Mississippians who understood that a state that shuts down its Black colleges will not stop there. Norman’s theory, tested again, 700 miles from the lake.

The plan died. All three schools are open today.

Derrick stayed in Mississippi and went deeper into the place where labor, civil rights and politics meet. Today he is president and CEO of the NAACP. One of his early mentors down there was Charlie Horhn. Charlie brought Black and White workers at a Jackson factory into one union. He started the state’s first Randolph Institute chapter. In 1993 he ran the campaign that sent Bennie Thompson to Congress.

Charlie is 91 now. His son John is the mayor of Jackson.

Clayola Brown is the president of the A. Philip Randolph Institute now. She sits in Norman’s chair. She was there in that room too, already carrying the same lesson forward.

The women and men Norman trained across the decades will gather in Chicago at the end of this week. Legions from labor. Leaders in civil rights and politics as well. Our titles have changed. The bond has not.

The late Rev. Jesse Jackson built the Rainbow Coalition into a national force. In Chicago’s moral history, there is no Rainbow Coalition without Rainbow Beach.

And then there is the love story.

Velma Murphy became Velma Hill. They married the year after the brick. More than six decades of love, labor and civil rights.

But the marriage was never the point. It was the workshop.

Two dozen of us sat in that room in 1993 because Norman and Velma had spent thirty years building something strong enough to hold us. That is what a movement marriage does. Medgar and Myrlie did it in Mississippi. Myrlie carried the work for decades after they killed him, and went on to lead the NAACP herself. The love did not end in that driveway. It went out into the world and made leaders.

It is what Derrick and Letitia do now, pouring into the organizers coming up behind them the way Norman poured into us.

I once asked Norman how he and Velma lasted so long.

“Find a woman who is as much of a warrior as you are,” he told me, “and marry her.”

What he built with her raised us. Stacey. Derrick. Jena. Me. Legions more across the decades. We came to them as students and they sent us out as leaders, and every one of us is proud to count ourselves among Norman and Velma’s children in the movement.

The rainbow did not stop at the water’s edge. It ran through Randolph and Rustin. It ran through Medgar and Myrlie. It ran through Norman and Velma. It reached two dozen students in 1993. It runs through Derrick and Letitia. And it runs all through the NAACP family.

Norman’s eyesight has dimmed. His vision has not. At Rainbow Beach, and in every life it still touches, the rainbow never ends.

Ben Jealous is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and former national president and CEO of the NAACP.

Please note: This story was provided to CNN Wire by an affiliate and does not contain original CNN reporting. This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.

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The world’s oldest president left for a ‘brief stay’ in Europe. He hasn’t returned in two months

By CNN
(CNN) — When Paul Biya won his first presidential election in Cameroon in 1984, Nformi Bime was 23 and still a student.Bime is now 65 and retired from teaching. Biya is 93 – and still president. Last year, he won a disputed eighth term that could keep him in office until he is nearly 100.“The best is yet to come,” Biya said before the election, which his opponents called fraudulent and was marred by deadly clashes between protesters and police.For the past two months, however, the man who has ruled Cameroon since 1982, when as prime minister he assumed power following the resignation of the sitting president, has been thousands of miles away. He left on June 7 for what his office called a “brief private stay in Europe” — now his longest uninterrupted absence from the Central African nation in years.Last week, government spokesman René Emmanuel Sadi told French radio RFI that Biya was in Geneva, Switzerland and was not hospitalized, but did not give more detail on his whereabouts.A president who is rarely seenBiya is Cameroon’s second president since independence in 1960 and one of the world’s longest-serving leaders. He first won office in 1984 under a one-party system, then won six more elections after multiparty politics was introduced.He has spent extended periods abroad during his presidency. But his latest absence has revived questions about his health and who is running the country while he is away.Rumors about Biya’s health and whereabouts have long been part of public life in Cameroon, where he is rarely seen in public. His office has repeatedly had to push back against speculation that he was seriously ill or had died. In 2024, the government banned media discussions about his health, calling them a national security matter.Biya’s long rule also reflects a wider contrast across Africa. The continent has the world’s youngest population, but several countries are still led by aging leaders whose political careers began decades ago, including former liberation figures now governing in a different era.For millions of Cameroonians, Biya is the only president they have ever known.Bime’s children are among them. His oldest is 32, and his youngest is 18.Abit Riassai Acha, a 26-year-old doctoral student and community youth leader at the University of Yaoundé II, belongs to the same generation.“Growing up, President Biya was the only president I knew, so his presidency has been part of my entire experience of Cameroon,” said Acha, who voted for the first time in last year’s presidential election, backing the youthful opposition candidate Samuel Hiram Iyodi, 38.After more than four decades under the same president, questions about his leadership have only grown.“Because this has happened repeatedly over the years, many Cameroonians have become used to it,” Acha said of Biya’s long absences. “But becoming accustomed to something does not necessarily mean that people should stop asking questions about how the country is being governed.”Iyodi, who finished eighth in last year’s presidential election, which several candidates, including one of Biya’s main challengers, were barred from contesting, has called on parliament to ask Cameroon’s Constitutional Council to consider whether Biya’s absence amounts to a vacancy in the presidency. But such a move is unlikely to succeed, given the dominance of Biya’s ruling Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement.Despite being away, Biya has continued to make key decisions from abroad, including a major military reshuffle announced earlier this month. Yet questions about his prolonged stay overseas have left officials publicly assuring Cameroonians that their president is still alive.Government spokesman Sadi dismissed concerns about a power vacuum, telling RFI that “President Paul Biya is alive” and “will soon return.”From hope to frustrationBime is old enough to remember when Biya was the change. He first heard Biya’s name in the 1970s, when he served as secretary-general of the presidency under Cameroon’s first president after independence, Ahmadou Ahidjo. After Ahidjo resigned in 1982, Biya took over.When Biya first appeared on the ballot two years later, Bime saw him as a “representation of hope,” he said. “We believed he was young and dynamic – handsome too. He meant so much to Cameroonians.”Few imagined that the man they saw as a new beginning would remain in power for decades. For his critics, the disappointment is not just about how long Biya has stayed in office, but what they see as his failure to improve the lives of ordinary Cameroonians.Political analyst Collins Molua Ikome, a Cameroonian based in Germany, said he saw some of the country’s problems firsthand when he visited Cameroon in April.“Roads in Cameroon are extremely bad. I even witnessed a fatal accident,” he told CNN.Ikome also pointed to frequent power cuts, corruption and a lack of jobs for young people.Wilson Tamfuh, a public and international law professor at the University of Dschang in West Cameroon, said the country has institutions that can keep the government running when the president delegates responsibilities. Key duties, he said, can be handled by the prime minister, the secretary-general at the presidency and ministers.But the bigger question, Tamfuh said, is whether the government is solving the country’s longstanding problems.“People want the Anglophone crisis resolved, standards of living ameliorated, more good roads, fewer people on the streets with degrees, and more,” he told CNN, referring to the years-long separatist conflict in Cameroon’s English-speaking regions.Whenever Biya eventually leaves office, his successor will inherit a country also facing attacks by Boko Haram militants in the north and deep economic frustration among young people.Healthcare is another concern. Ikome said access to quality healthcare remains out of reach for many Cameroonians.“Life expectancy in the country is below 70 years. However, Biya has far outlived that due to access to medical healthcare abroad, which the ordinary Cameroonian cannot access due to poverty,” Ikome said.The divide is not unique to Cameroon. Across Africa, political elites have often sought healthcare or maintained homes abroad, even as public services at home struggle.For Bime, the question is more personal: Will he live to see another president?After decades of waiting for change, he worries he may not – and that Biya could outlive him and many others who are not part of the country’s elite.“Anytime they have a cold, they run overseas and are taken care of, but the other Cameroonians are dying because of lack of care,” he said.The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
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