There were two big stories coming from the recent NAACP annual convention. The first was that George W. Bush didn’t accept an invitation to appear. He made up for it by attending the Indiana Black Expo and getting plenty of good photo ops with brown faces. Bush sent Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman to the NAACP convention in his stead. Mehlman wept crocodile tears and swore that his party really, really wants our votes and is sorry for being mean in the past.

The other big news was the installation of a new NAACP president, Bruce Gordon. Gordon was a marketing executive at Verizon for many years. Marketing, a fancy word for selling, works by convincing us to buy things. Sometimes marketers sell us things that we really need. That is on a good day. On a bad day they get us to buy junk food and tell us that gas guzzling SUVs are safer when just the opposite is true.

What is Mr. Gordon selling now that he is at the helm of the NAACP? He says that “economic rights” will be the focus of his efforts. If he is talking about economic justice then his voice is a much needed one. Economic justice has been getting a hard way to go in recent years.

The income gap is widening in America. The wealthy are getting much wealthier and the rest of us are holding our own, if we are lucky. Those of us who aren’t are in bigger trouble now than ever before. Congress passed a bankruptcy law that was written by credit card companies. Lo and behold, the new legislation benefits them quite a lot and us not at all. Big business decides that we need tort reform, a dubious conclusion to begin with, and then proceeds to write the legislation that they have been dreaming about for years.

Where does Mr. Gordon stand on these issues? What does he think of the effort to overhaul, that is to say decimate, Social Security? Social Security is the only safety net that Americans have. It is the retirement plan that black Americans depend on more than any other. Now that the guaranteed benefit pension system is both less common and on shakier ground than ever, Social Security is even more important.

It isn’t necessarily bad that the new NAACP president is a salesman. The GOP uses marketing techniques to keep themselves in power. Their marketing-based focus groups turned the inheritance tax into “the death tax.” This linguistic change, and outright lies, convinced struggling Americans to support letting the wealthy pass on large amounts of cash that their heirs didn’t earn.

The Democrats act in the opposite manner. They can’t sell ice cream on a hot summer day. If they knew even the basics facts of marketing John Kerry would be president now instead of George Bush.

It is not only important to know how Bruce Gordon feels about the pressing justice issues of our day, and what it is he wants to sell, we need to know how he feels about the NAACP. His comments have been cryptic and troubling, for example:

“(Kweisi) Mfume belongs to yesterday, and this is a new day.”

Mr. Gordon’s brain appears to be wired with commercial circuits. He seems to view the NAACP as a brand name.

"People recognize that it (NAACP) has shaped life in this country as we know it today. Having said that, every organization has a need to reinvent itself. That's how brands survive."

It isn’t clear what Gordon is trying to say. It may mean that Gordon, unlike his predecessor Kweisi Mfume, won’t have ill advised relationships with subordinates. That would be good. On the other hand, Kweisi Mfume took the Republican party to task when he needed to do so. Does Gordon mean that he won’t attack the Republican party? That would be very bad indeed.

Advocacy organizations aren’t “brands” and it would be very dangerous for the NAACP to act like a household product company when we desperately need it to fight the increasingly powerful right wing. Mr. Gordon isn’t selling soap. He is supposed to advocate for the advancement of all colored people. If he helps some black people get jobs or contracts that won’t be a bad thing, but it won’t be all that Gordon’s position requires of him.

NAACP chairman Julian Bond so ruffled Republican feathers that the IRS is threatening the organization’s tax exempt status. The NAACP has stood firm in the face of this baseless, politically motivated witch hunt, and refused to turn over documents to the IRS.

Mr. Gordon has said in several interviews that he looks forward to working with the White House. If Mr. Gordon gets his meeting will he demand that this trumped up investigation end?

Mr. Mehlman cried tears over GOP race baiting that made them the majority party in the South. He didn’t say anything about present day vote theft. In November 2004 more than one million votes in African American district went uncounted. In the state of Ohio voting machines mysteriously stayed in storage on Election Day when they were sorely missed by mostly black voters who waited hours to vote, if they got the chance to do so at all. Will vote theft be on Gordon’s agenda when he gets his meeting with W?

Does Mr. Gordon know black history? Does he understand the necessity to fight the powers-that-be? Judge for yourself:

"If you had a choice to try to protest and to push and to picket against somebody to implement a policy you believe in versus sitting in the room at the table where the policy is being designed and being decided, which would you choose? I say let's go inside."

Perhaps he missed that day in school, but black people have always made the most progress when we have followed Frederick Douglass’ advice to agitate, agitate, agitate. No one gets inside to sit at the table unless there is agitation first.

The president of the NAACP is an influential person and is automatically deemed to be a leader of the black community. Surely Mr. Gordon would not have taken this job if he weren’t going to speak to the concerns of the masses of African Americans. It does us all little good to have an NAACP president in the White House who won’t speak truth to power when he sits down to talk.

Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BC. Ms. Kimberley is a freelance writer living in New York City. She can be reached via e-Mail at [email protected]. You can read more of Ms. Kimberley's writings at freedomrider.blogspot.com.