The Future of the NAACP

^{Full Coverage: Bruce Gordon Steps Down as NAACP President}

President Bush addresses the 2006 NAACP Annual Convention. Image courtesy of the White House.

It may seem strange to quote Barry Goldwater when talking about civil rights, but I'm going to do it anyway. His famous line from the 1964 Republican National Convention--"Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice"--is frequently quoted. But I'm more impressed with what he followed that up with: "And let me remind you also," he said, "that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

Goldwater was wrong about a great many things, and his opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act (for which he later apologized) should probably top the list. But he was right about one thing, I think: Moderation in the pursuit of justice is not a virtue. Moderation in the face of injustice is complicity in injustice. "I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion," Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his letter from Birmingham Jail, "that the Negro's great stumbling block in this slide toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate ... who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice."

Last July, Rick Gell wrote a stinging condemnation of Joe Lieberman. While I can think of much better targets for his criticism than Joe Lieberman (Bill Clinton, to name one), his definition of the "rational elitist" is worth quoting and quoting again:

A "rational elitist" revels in the gray area and the long view, sees both sides of virtually every issue, never gets angry enough to "blow his or her top," hates shouting and recognizes, as the mature and wise fellows they know they are, that compromise and slow change are the realities of the world. They are "elitists" because their acute self-knowledge, wise and thoughtful ways allow them to continually look down on those of us who just can't seem to control our anger and frustration at the injustice, greed and moral compromises we see around us ...

Rational elitists are never poor, so they can take the long view because they have health insurance, good paying jobs and probably don't have many personal friends dying in Iraq. It is not their life that is being destroyed. Of course, compromise is necessary and things take time to change, but just as every conspiracy theorist sees the world through a prism of paranoia, the rational elitist is pathologically committed to the finding the middle ground, the bipartisan approach and the long view.

I've been thinking an awful lot about this sort of thing in the wake of NAACP president Bruce Gordon's resignation. Gordon was not, I believe, a "rational elitist." He was, obviously, not one of the white moderates condemned in Dr. King's letter, either. But he believed in a friendly NAACP that provides social services more than it engages in political advocacy, an NAACP that embraces politicians whose policies grind the faces of the poor, and an NAACP that no longer scares anybody very much--an NAACP that the rational elitists and white moderates of the world would be much happier to see than the NAACP that active rank-and-file members represent.

But political analyst Earl Ofari Hutchinson makes the argument that this national leadership problem didn't begin with Bruce Gordon and may not end with him either. I was a fan of Kweisi Mfume's leadership--but did I, and others, mistake criticism of Republicans for rigorous, across-the-board activism on civil rights issues? Hutchinson writes:

The NAACP became the political springboard for this fast emergent black middle-class ... But these battles do not have the remotest bearing on the lives of the black poor. They have grown more numerous, more desperate, trapped in segregated or re-segregated neighborhoods plagued by crime, drugs, and gangs. They shuttle their children off to abominably failing public schools, or are stuffed into bulging jail cells ...

The NAACP can reclaim its cutting edge leadership and activism by mounting a no-holds barred assault on such problems as the glaring iniquities in the imposition of the death penalty, the racially skewed mandatory drug sentencing laws, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the lack of comprehensive health care for the poor, and grossly underserved, under-performing inner city schools, and chronic double digit black joblessness.

There is a great deal of room for the NAACP to take a harder line on advocacy, especially after the Gordon administration, but some have gone a few steps further than Hutchinson by suggesting that the organization has simply aged itself into obscurity. "[T]he organization," Where Most Needed writes, "seems destined to become a nonprofit media icon from another era, sort of like the Jerry Lewis Telethon for MDA." And DarkStar writes:

I've heard and read comments that some members of the board have stated it was a mistake to let Bruce Gordon lead the NAACP because he does not have a 'civil rights' background.

The NAACP has a declining membership count, so how long can 'get someone from a civil rights background' last? And, by their own admission, they need to get younger people in the organization ...

The slide down continuing irrelevance increases in velocity.

I suspect that "civil rights background" would include civil rights law firms and other forms of good old fashioned advocacy, and not necessarily pre-1970 civil rights activism. The Mississippi NAACP President, Derrick Johnson, is under 40, and he isn't alone--the organization has an entire division, headed up by a twentysomething activist named Carlos Watson, that is committed to recruiting more young adult members. All of these activists now, obviously, have a civil rights background. My personal experience with the NAACP is limited, but I would argue that the problem as I see it is not discrimination on the part of the old guard. The problem is more that efforts to recruit a new guard haven't been as successful yet, and there's a very good reason for that.

Part of the problem with the NAACP's perceived irrelevance is that it is and always has been a chapter-driven organization--as is reflected in its board structure. It was very easy to see a nationally visible NAACP in the era of school desegregation lawsuits because the Supreme Court is a federal institution, but national advocacy is a harder game now. There are more organizations doing the work (which means more organizations taking the credit), and there haven't been the kinds of dramatic national successes in recent years that there were in the 1950s and 1960s.

There is still room for huge dividends on the state and municipal level, though. Witness the work of the North Carolina NAACP, for example, which is organizing aggressive lobbying efforts, marches, and other initiatives in support of a 14-point public policy agenda that the North Carolina NAACP has drafted for the state General Assembly. These kinds of local initiatives, particularly when they are successful, turn ordinary people into committed activists--who are then in a better position to run a national advocacy agenda.

So is it any wonder that the NAACP was stronger during the civil rights era than it is today? Of course it was stronger--you had a group of young activists getting together building success after success in one of the largest and most inspiring social justice movements in American history. And of course you're going to see a dip in the number of committed young activists after a surge like that, maybe an increase in the median age, maybe an overall decline in membership. The way to mitigate that is not by bashing the NAACP, as if the NAACP were anything more than its constituent membership. It's through initiatives like North Carolina's--initiatives that create local activists, some of whom later go on to become national activists. I am aware of no successful national activist, in any organization, who just woke up one morning and decided to become a successful national activist. Like any other vocation, it involves hard work, preparation, and training. If half the law schools in the United States shut down, would we be surprised if there were a decrease in the number of young lawyers? If half the seminaries in the United States shut down, would we be surprised if there were a decrease in the number of young clergy? If our answer to those questions is no, then why are we surprised to see a decrease in the number of young civil rights activists 53 years after Brown v. Board, 44 years after the March on Washington, 43 years after the Civil Rights Act?

It is a mistake to criticize the NAACP for not being able to repeat the successes, including the recruitment successes, of the civil rights era. The NAACP is, whatever else it is, the NAACP of 2007--more relevant than the NAACP of 1930, less relevant than the NAACP of 1955. Like all advocacy organizations, it is a product of its time and should be judged by that standard--and like all advocacy organizations, it runs on people power. The NAACP has chapters throughout the country. People who don't feel that it's still moving ahead are perfectly capable of getting out and giving it a push. That kind of individual activism, in the final analysis, is what will determine the NAACP's success or failure--not the distant pontifications of television pundits, bloggers, and others in the media. Activists make activism. There is no substitute.

See also:

• The Modern Civil Rights Movement