Wickham: Why is Goodell ignoring these black women?

WASHINGTON — In the midst of professional football's lingering domestic violence scandal, MelanieCampbell is probably the last woman NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell wants to talk to — but she should have been the first.

Campbell is the quintessential voice of black women. A tireless advocate for the political, economic and social empowerment of this nation's 22.7 million black females, her roots run deep among black activist organizations. She's president and CEO of The National Coalition on Black Civic Participation and organizer of the Black Women's Roundtable Public Policy Network.

In a little more than two decades of work, Campbell has been honoredby a long list of black groups for her effort to uplift black women in a country that has too often neglected their issues and ignored their voices.

So you'd think Campbell would have been one of the first women Goodell called when the NFL domestic violence problem surfaced seven months ago. After all, the NFL's current crisis was sparked by the release of a videotape of then-Baltimore Ravens player Ray Rice dragging his unconscious fiancée, Janay Palmer, off of an Atlantic City casino elevator.

Both Rice and Palmer, who married Rice a day after a New Jersey grand jury indicted him on third-degree aggravated assault, are black. And violence against black women tops the list of problems Campbell has grappled with recently.

On the very same day Rice was indicted, the Black Women's Roundtable released a 76-page report on the plight of black women in the United States. While the overall rate of "intimate partner violence has dropped by more than half for all women since the early 1990s," it's increasing slightly among black women, Campbell's organization reported.

The document also offered this jarring bit of information: A black woman is more likely to be attacked by a stranger or someone she "loves and trusts" than other women in this country. "We have a special knowledge and understanding of this problem," Campbell told me last week shortly before holding a news conference in the Washington Convention Center to renew her call for Goodell to add some black women to the circle of outside domestic violence experts he has hired.

So far, he hasn't done that.

"Violence in the NFL is a reflection of the broader society," Campbell said during the news conference. "Since so many young people look up to athletes in the broader community, the NFL has an opportunity to help us all get it right."

Getting it "right" is something Goodell has struggled with. After announcing that he got it wrong when he suspended Rice for two games without seeingthe second videotape of the blow Rice landed inside the elevator, Goodell promised to do better.

But a request by Campbell and 19 other black female activists from the Roundtable for "an emergency meeting" to discuss the exclusion of black women from the team of outside experts the NFL assembled has been ignored.

Instead, the NFL responded by offering Campbell's group a meeting with members of his staff. Campbell said that though her group will go to that meeting, she plans to mount a social media campaign and online petition to ratchet up pressure on Goodell to see them.

If Goodell is looking for someone to rubber stamp the domestic policy the NFL comes up with, Campbell is someone he should continue to ignore. But if he's serious about addressing a domestic abuse problem that disproportionately affects black women — and has become the new face of the NFL — he should have talked to Campbell long ago.

DeWayne Wickham, dean of Morgan State University's School of Global Journalism and Communication, writes on Tuesdays for USA TODAY.

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