Donald Trump will not speak at the Cincinnati, Ohio, convention for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People next week due to an overlap of schedules with the Republican convention in Cleveland.
NAACP President Cornell Brooks told CNN Tuesday evening he had just been informed of the presumptive GOP nominee’s decision.
“Mr. Trump has declined our invitation so we will hear from Secretary Clinton, we won’t hear from Mr. Trump,” Brooks told host Wolf Blitzer. “[T]he explanation given was they’re holding their convention at the same time. We, of course, are in Cincinnati, they’re in Cleveland. We were hoping that he would make the short trip from Cleveland to Cincinnati.”
The Republican Party’s July 18-21 convention dates were announced in January 2015. Nine months later, the NAACP put out a press release with its June 16-20 convention dates, indicating the organization could have planned its event at a time when neither political party’s convention was scheduled to take place.
Still, Brooks said Trump’s inability to attend would cause the GOP to lose out on an occasion “to speak to the nation’s most political issues at a critical hour in this country.”
