NAACP leader appointed to draft board

More than 42 years have passed since anyone in the Bayou Region – or the U.S. as a whole – has received the notice that begins with the word “greeting” with the return address of their Uncle Sam.

But the U.S. Selective Service System still requires registration from young men 18 years of age and older, and in the event that a military draft is reinstituted, selective service boards meet regularly, preparing for the potential that members will have to make decisions on who goes and who remains at home.

Locally, the most recent member of the Selective Service Board is Jerome Boykin, more familiar to people in Houma and surrounding communities as president of the Terrebonne Parish Branch of the NAACP.

Boykin’s appointment to the regional board that includes Terrebonne Parish was confirmed last month by the agency’s director, Lawrence G. Romo, on behalf of President Barack Obama.

“I can serve up to 20 years on the board, it still exists just in case Congress and the president sign in to start the draft process again,” Boykin said. “It is an honor to be chosen for this very important task. It’s not every day that a person gets a presidential appointment to a board. I was honored to receive the call.”

Boykin had to undergo a three-month vetting process.

He acknowledges that draft boards today are more diverse than they were when the nation had an actual draft, which ended in 1973, and he is pleased to be reflective of that diversity.

“Every board should represent the community which it serves,” Boykin said.

A Selective Service local board is a group of five citizen volunteers whose mission, upon a draft, will be to decide who among the registrants in their community will receive deferments, postponements, or exemption from military service based on the individual registrant’s circumstances and beliefs.

Local board members are appointed by the Director of Selective Service in the name of the President, usually based on gubernatorial recommendations. Board members must be 18 or over, a U.S. citizen, registered with Selective Service unless exempt due to certain exempt years, and must not be a judge or a member of a law enforcement agency.

Approximately 11,000 volunteers serve on local boards throughout the U.S. Members must not be an active or retired career member of the Armed Forces or Reserves or National Guard, and must not have been convicted of any criminal offense.

The current registration program is for men born on or after January 1, 1960.

“By registering with Selective Service, every young man is reminded of his potential civic obligation to serve our nation in an emergency,” the agency’s annual report states. “Registration is important to a man’s future because Congress, three-fourths of the nation’s state legislatures, and scores of county and city jurisdictions have conditioned eligibility for several government programs and benefits upon a man being in compliance with the federal law – registration with the Selective Service System. These include student loans and grants, security clearances, government jobs, job training, driver’s licenses and identification cards in most states, and U.S. citizenship for immigrant men.

At the present time, although women have now been approved for combat positions in the armed forces, the draft has not been extended to females. •

Jerome Boykin