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Cover Story: The Role of the Black Elite in Outreaching to the Black Lower Class And How It Relates to the National Leadership Level of the NAACP By Dr. Martin Kilson, PhD, BC Editorial Board

Recent events affecting the national leadership level of the NAACP brought vividly to my attention the question of the 21st century Black elite role in “outreaching-to-Black-lower-class-crises.”  After just under two years as executive officer of the NAACP, Bruce Gordon resigned from that office in December 2006. On March 6, 2007, Bruce Gordon presented a “Memo of Resignation” to members of the NAACP National in which he discussed the core reasons underlying his resignation.  A copy of Gordon’s memo was made public through a Black-affairs website named “Afro-Netizen”, in its issue dated March 10, 2007 and later in its issue dated July 16, 2007.

I received a copy of Bruce Gordon’s  resignation memo in mid-July and after reading it, I had no doubt about its significance to the issue of the role of the 21st century Black elite sector in “outreaching-to-Black-lower-class-crises.”  Or to put this matter in the conceptual terms that are implied in Gordon’s resignation memo, his memo relates to the issue of fashioning a new post-Civil Rights Movement leadership identity for the NAACP, an identity that interconnects that great organization’s historical “civil rights advocacy function” with a 21st century “Black social-crisis reformation function.”     

Bruce Gordon’s resignation memo also has a special significance owing to its intellectual candor, by which I mean the straightforwardness with which Gordon lays out issues surrounding his resignation.  It is also significant, therefore, in regard to what the memo reveals about the leadership character of Bruce Gordon. His leadership personality is not given to obfuscation or circumvention, not given to narcissistic pettiness of “one-upmanship behavior” vis-à-vis his professional peers in the institution of which he’s a part, in this case the NAACP — that great warhorse of Black people’s freedom and their struggle against the White supremacist juggernaut in 20th century American civilization.     

Furthermore, Gordon’s resignation memo is significant in regard to what it reveals about what might be called a “can-do ethos” that informed his decision-making while executive officer of the NAACP for two years. This “can-do ethos” aspect of Bruce Gordon’s leadership style caught my attention during the course of the Katrina Hurricane Crisis in 2005.  During the early weeks of watching the television reports on the events of that horrible Katrina crisis unfold — especially as the lives of working-class and poor Black families were being devastated — I remember saying to my wife Marion: “I hope Black national organizations like the church denominations, the Urban League, the NAACP, and professional associations mobilize relief efforts to assist Black families in New Orleans.”     

Within a week of saying this, we received an e-mail from the NAACP national office notifying people that it had set up an NAACP Katrina Relief Fund, and I returned the NAACP’s appeal message saying that the Kilson family would contribute $2000. Happily, I filed-away a copy of the pledge-letter, dated Sept. 8, 2005, I sent to the NAACP Katrina Relief Fund in which I remarked to the Fund’s director: “It is truly marvelous to have the NAACP under your new executive officer Mr. Bruce Gordon out-front in aiding the thousands of Black citizens, and White citizens too, whose lives have been smashed by the Katrina hurricane.” 

Deconstructing Bruce Gordon's Resignation Memo 

In his resignation memo Bruce Gordon discusses two plans stemming from what I call his “can-do leadership ethos”, or what also can be called Gordon’s “outreach-to-Black-crises-ethos.”  One plan responded to the horrific Katrina Hurricane crisis and especially to massively incompetent response by President Bush’s Republican administration to the Katrina crisis, a crisis that ravaged the lives of thousands of Black families, and White families too.  As Bruce Gordon informs us of his plans in his memo:

I convened a meeting of national high profile [black]leaders from across the country. The purpose of the meeting was to develop a unified position on post-Katrina government response.

Bruce Gordon also mentions in his memo a second plan that stemmed from what I call his “outreach-to-Black-crises” leadership mindset. Namely:                      

We initiated a Medicare Part D enrollment effort and enlisted Bill Crosby and Danny Glover to create public service announcements…

However, Bruce Gordon mentions that neither his plan for a “unified position [by black leadership groups] on post-Katrina government response”, nor his plan for a “Medicare Part D enrollment” ever got off the ground. Why?    

With regard to Gordon’s first plan, he informs us that “I was faulted for attempting to ‘set policy’.”  This response by elements on the NAACP National Board strikes me as bizarre because what else should an executive officer of the NAACP with first-class managerial skills like Bruce Gordon do but “set policy”? His policies or programs-of-action may prove effective or ineffective, but surely it’s his basic function “to set policy”, or at minimum “to propose policy”.    

With regard to Bruce Gordon’s second plan (“Medicare Part D enrollment”), Gordon says that he was “told that this was a service initiative and we are an advocacy organization.”  Furthermore, some members of the NAACP National Board even sought to influence day-to-day operation in the executive’s office. As Bruce Gordon put it:

Some Executive Committee members want to be directly involved in how I manage the staff. They want to approve organization structure. They want to make hire and fire decisions. They want to influence the vendor selection. I view that as micromanagement.

Clearly, the former NAACP executive officer experienced what might be called a “condition of systemic disarray” during his two-year tenure.  Something equivalent to micromanagement-run-amok generated this “condition of systemic disarray” during Bruce Gordon’s brief reign as executive officer of the NAACP.    

When reading Bruce Gordon’s resignation memo, I took special interest in how the former NAACP executive officer evaluated his sometimes quite testy policy battles with the NAACP National Board.  In this regard, I was quite surprised to encounter in Gordon’s resignation memo evidence of something I would call “high-order gentlemanliness” about the man.  Rather than enter a kind of face-off defense of his policy initiatives and thus a face-off critique of the opponents of his policy positions, Bruce Gordon reports in a non-judgmental manner on the policy-fissure between himself and a majority on the NAACP National Board.  Here’s how Gordon put it:

I have come to accept that my view of my role and the association’s role is not aligned with the board. I am willing to accept that our points of view regarding governance and strategic direction are in conflict. This is not about right and wrong…this is about difference.

After this fair-minded and even-handed reporting of a serious policy fault-line between the NAACP executive officer and presumably the majority on the NAACP National Board, Bruce Gordon’s summary observation in his resignation memo sustained a fair-minded argumentative posture, one that was even self-critical. Here’s how Gordon put it:

We can agree to disagree. We also could have found a way to blend the best of our respective points of view but in 19 months that did not happen. It could be said that this is all about a failure to communicate. I agree. Maybe we can all learn something from this experience. I have written more than I intended. Hopefully you now know more about what happened and why.

The concluding section of Bruce Gordon’s presentation of policy differences between him and the NAACP’s National Board reinforced my view of him as a fair-minded administrator. First, he told the NAACP National Board that his “public statements [following his resignation] have not involved any “finger pointing”. He then made reference to his interview on the PBS Television Tavis Smiley Program, an interview which I saw and considered resplendent with evidence of what I view as Bruce Gordon’s “high-order gentlemanliness.”  Here’s how Gordon characterized his Tavis Smiley interview:

My public statements [since resigning] have not involved finger pointing. I have been consistent in my position that this decision is about “lack of alignment" and not about “right and wrong.”  My interview with Tavis Smiley and Soledad O’Brien have been balanced and accountable. My assessment was validated by an e-mail from Chairman [Julian] Bond regarding the Tavis interview that said: “By all reports, you were magnificent on the [Smiley] show tonight.”

The evaluation of Bruce Gordon’s interview with Tavis Smiley by Julian Bond (BC Editorial Board member), chair of the NAACP National Board, was right-on-target. I saw Bruce Gordon’s interview with Tavis Smiley and I can report that his performance and comportment were supremely magnificent.  There is another aspect of Bruce Gordon’s fair-minded leadership persona worthy of mention. Namely, nowhere in his resignation memo did Gordon identify the NAACP chairperson, Julian Bond, as part of the National Board members who opposed his policy initiatives.

Gordon's Resignation Viewed in NAACP Historical Perspective 

On the basis of my reading of Bruce Gordon’s resignation memo, it appears that he came to the NAACP executive post with a keen — and I believe correct — understanding that the NAACP’s historic “civil rights advocacy function” did not preclude it from performing what I call a “social-crisis reformation function.” I use the term “correct” in characterizing Gordon’s understanding of the interconnectedness between an NAACP “advocacy-cum-social reformation function” for a very basic reason. Because it was the progressive leadership strand — not the centrist-minded leadership strand — during the activist development phase of the NAACP in the 1930s who exhibited an understanding of an interconnection between an NAACP “rights advocacy-cum-social reformation” leadership paradigm.  That progressive leadership strand in the 1930s NAACP revolved around James Weldon Johnson (who retired in 1932 to teach at Fisk University and died in a car accident in 1938) and W.E.B. DuBois, while the centrist leadership strand in the 1930s  revolved around Walter White (who succeeded Johnson as executive secretary) and his assistant Roy Wilkins.    

An interesting account of the 1930s NAACP progressive/centrist leadership strands can be found in David Lewis’ second volume on DuBois’ biography — W.E.B. DuBois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century ,1919-1963 (New York: Henry Holt Co., 2000).  As Professor Lewis informs us, by the middle 1930s when the NAACP’s twenty-odd years of challenging the American White supremacist juggernaut did not have many viable successes to celebrate, W.E.B. DuBois began rethinking the basic ideas that informed the NAACP integration civil rights leadership paradigm.

He settled on what might be called a one-step-backward-two-steps-forward political vision for the leading ethnic-bloc organization among Black Americans. Recognizing that White ethnic groups such as Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, and Jewish-Americans used their ethnic-bloc patterns to generate what might be called intra-Irish or intra-Jewish ethnic agencies for social advancement of their communities — a kind of “ethnic-communitarian advancement”, let’s call it — DuBois, a keen student of American society in general, suggested a somewhat similar vision-and-strategy for Black people.    

In late 1933 and early 1934, W.E.B. DuBois put forth this suggestion in a series of articles in The Crisis — the NAACP’s official journal which he founded and edited. He proposed that Black American civil rights leadership might place less emphasis on its integration or desegregation strategy, on the one hand, while on the other hand mobilizing Black ethnic-bloc resources (churches, civic associations, trade unions like A. Philip Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, women’s organizations, etc.) along the lines of intra-Black communitarian social advancement.

In an article titled “Segregation” that appeared in The Crisis (January 1934), W.E.B. DuBois expressed a deep pessimism on when viable interracial or integration concord would evolve in what was then a rigidly White-supremacist delineated American civilization.  “It is impossible to wait for the millennium of free and normal [integration] intercourse,” DuBois lamented in regard to the tenacity of Negro-phobic White behavior in American life. Accordingly, DuBois suggested that Black Americans’ eventual social advancement would increasingly depend upon “the race-conscious black cooperating together in his own institutions and movements,” the purpose of which would be especially “to organize and conduct enterprises.”    

W.E.B. DuBois observed — correctly I think — that such an intra-Black communitarian thrust was nothing new. Why? Because, as DuBois put it, “the vast majority of the Negroes in the United States are born in colored homes, educated in separate colored schools, attend separate colored churches, marry colored mates, and find their amusements in colored YMCA’s and YWCA’s.” (This sentence, by the way, sounds familiar to the post-Civil Rights Movement era African-American ear, save the phrase “find their amusements in colored YMCA’s and YWCA’s”, a situation now replaced — sadly — by Hip Hop entertainment).  And it should be remarked that W.E.B. DuBois had a cogent understanding of the tenacity of the Negro-phobic ethos, nay virus, in American civilization.  Research on the history of racist segregation in housing, for example, reveals this tenacity of Negro-phobic White American behavior.

For instance, in the study American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), Professors Douglas Massey and N.A. Denton uncovered that whereas what they termed the “segregation index” for housing patterns stood at 46% in the city of Philadelphia between 1860 and 1910 (a city in which the young DuBois undertook his first sociological research between 1896 and 1899 resulting in the classic study The Philadelphia Negro (1899) ), by 1940 the “segregation index” increased massively to 88.8%, and forty-odd years later in the 1980s the “segregation index” fluctuated between 77% and 79%. (Massey’s and Denton’s “segregation index” of 0% is equivalent to no segregation, while 100% represents total segregation).     

Not surprisingly, a rather taut ideological fissure surfaced in the NAACP’s leadership circle following DuBois’ public proposal in 1934 to supplement the organization’s official integration policy with what might be called a two-tier or dualistic Black social advancement program.  A program combining the historic “civil rights advocacy” function with a “intra-Black communitarian uplift” function. Not only did W.E.B. DuBois’ critics among the NAACP leadership circle — especially Walter White and Roy Wilkins — vigorously oppose a two-tier policy strategy for the NAACP (what today I characterize as a “civil rights advocacy-cum-social reformation” strategy). They went from policy opposition to maneuvering to have W.E.B. DuBois dismissed from his longstanding editorship of The Crisis (since 1910), an outcome that was officially effectuated as the year 1934 closed down.     

In W.E.B. DuBois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963 (1993), Professor David Lewis’ treatment of the policy fissure between DuBois and the NAACP centrist-minded leaders like Walter White and Roy Wilkins in 1934 is, from my perspective, rather problematic.  Lewis relates in a favorable tone the Byzantine maneuverings by Walter White and Roy Wilkins that closed the door on W.E.B. DuBois’ intellectually and politically outstanding role in the official ranks of the NAACP as founder-editor of its great journal The Crisis. For David Lewis, DuBois’ embrace of an intra-Black communitarian policy perspective for the NAACP marked the nadir of DuBois’ leadership career.   

 

Lewis, for instance, refers favorably to an insulting commentary on DuBois’ intra-Black communitarian proposal by the conservative Black columnist for The Pittsburgh Courier, George Schuyler, who remarked: “Imagine the Top Sergeant of the Talented Tenth [W.E.B. DuBois] fouling like a punch drunk pugilist despairing of victory.” For David Lewis, George Schuyler’s infantile, tacky, and profane commentary on DuBois’ Black communitarian ideas “was [an] apt judgment.” (p.104)    

In proposing a two-tier NAACP leadership perspective, W.E.B. DuBois was not indulging in typical one-dimensional separatist “black nationalism nostrums”, as Professor David Lewis claims.  Nor was he throwing-in-the-towel on the historic “civil rights advocacy” NAACP role against American racism.  Quite the contrary. Rather, DuBois’ Black communitarian ideas were premised on an insightful understanding by DuBois about Black American’s generic socio-cultural attributes in American life.     

Namely, that Black Americans are both a “racial group” and an “ethic group”. As a “racial group” Black Americans can be thought of as a defensive ethnic group, which is to say as a group shaped in part by oppressive White supremacist dynamics in American civilization.  As an “ethnic group” Black Americans can be thought of as an offensive ethnic group, which is to say as a group like Irish-Americans and other White ethnic groups who are fashioned by organic historical-cultural patterns, such as religion, folk beliefs and heritage, cultural-expressive practices, familial authority practices, and linguistic patterns.    

Accordingly, when W.E.B. DuBois promulgated his two-tier policy perspective (civil rights advocacy-cum-Black communitarianism) in his famous essay titled “Segregation” in The Crisis (January 1934), he introduced what might be dubbed a “new civil rights rhetoric”. This new civil rights rhetoric sought to place the plight of the dark-skinned working-class majority of African-Americans in the pre-World War II era at the center of the mainline civil rights organization’s policy agenda — the NAACP’s agenda.  After all, by the 1930s — despite a quarter-century emphasis on integration policies by the NAACP and its allies among liberal White Americans — the plight of the dark-skinned working-class Black masses in cities and in agrarian areas remained one of precarious jobs when they had jobs, poor education opportunities, and poverty-level living conditions. U.S. Census Bureau data for 1940, as World War II commenced for the United States, reported some 90% of African-Americans classified as living at poverty-level.

Unique Social Crises Facing Today's Black Lower Class - The Crisis Context     

Returning our discussion to present-day circumstances, in our early 21st century contemporary era it has become indisputably clear that the multi-layered social crises plaguing  the African-American lower-class sector have impacted the affairs of the NAACP in unique ways. In fact, these crises impact the affairs of Black leadership in general.  After all, the social crises plaguing lower-class African-Americans are systemically and culturally tenacious crises.

Among them are the following:

  • joblessness crisis
  • family breakdown crisis
  • school dropout crisis
  • unwed motherhood/fatherhood crisis (over 60% of Black children are born to single parents!)
  • macho-male violence/homicide crisis
  • Hip-Hop influenced macho-male “gansta-culture” crisis
  • and, last but not least, the high incarceration rate crisis

These post-Civil Rights Movement era social crises that are now ravaging the life-cycle and life-chances of lower-class African-Americans have brought forth a new type and range of claims upon the mainline African-American leadership institutions, and especially on the premier of these  leadership institutions — the NAACP. I for one have enormous faith in the leadership resilience and innovativeness of the great warhorse of Black people’s freedom that the NAACP has been and remains today. So I am in full concord with the “can-do leadership ethos” that former  NAACP executive official Bruce Gordon demonstrated during his all-too-brief two-year tenure.  

  

Be that as it may, in order to gain a sharper understanding of the current depth-and-range of social crises now plaguing the life-chances of today’s weak-working class and poor African-American families, let me discuss several facets of these social crises that have been cogently portrayed in articles by one of the major columnists writing today in top-rank national newspapers — namely,  The New York Times columnist Bob Herbert.                  

Bob Herbert’s Cogent Discourse On Black Social Crises     

It is clear that from the early 1980s onward, African-American society has experienced a kind of two-tier bifurcation of its social class pattern. Within this bifurcated class pattern entailing a “static-stratum” sector (e.g., weak working-class and poor families) and a “mobile-stratum” sector (e.g., middle-class and professional-class families), what might be termed a “troubled Black America dynamic” can be found.  For example, while middle-class and professional-class African-Americans inhabiting the “mobile-stratum” (around 60% of Black Americans) have advanced up the American social mobility ladder, those African-Americans inhabiting the “static-stratum” (weak- working-class and poverty-level ranks) seem to dwell in a “vegetated state-of-social-crises”, so to speak. What the articles by the African-American columnist for The New York Times have uniquely provided over the past decade is a cogent and sharp vista on the “troubled Black America dynamics”.   

Bob Herbert’s cogent and sharp vista on contemporary Black American social crises can be found especially in his New York Times columns that appeared March 5 and March 15, 2007.  These articles (one titled “Education, Education, Education" — March 5 — the other “The Danger Zone” — March 15) discuss the nitty-gritty details of contemporary Black American social crises, especially the Black-youth social crises.  The Black-youth social crises probed by Bob Herbert are:

    1. The crisis in education opportunities and thus in education performance and outcomes.
    2. The job-market and job-opportunity crisis.
In his March 5 column “Education, Education, Education”, Bob Herbert details in graphic ways the education status of Black males, showing first the education benefits among Black males associated with education achievement, and then showing the horrible downside associated with high dropout rates.  Herbert summarizes new research from a study produced by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston as follows:
For males in each of the three race-ethnic groups (blacks, Hispanics and whites), employment rates in 2005 increased steadily and strongly with their educational attainment. This was especially true for black males, for whom employment rates rose from a low of 33 percent among high school dropouts to 57 percent among high school graduates, and to a high of 86 percent among four-year college graduates. 

From here Bob Herbert discusses the consequences of poor educational attainment among Black males. Here his tone is dire and foreboding:

The fact that only one of every three young black male high school dropouts was able to obtain any type of job during an average month n 2005 should be viewed as particularly distressing, since many of these young men will end up being involved in criminal activities during their late teens and early 20s.  [They’ll face] severe economic consequences for convictions and incarcerations over the remainder of their working lives.

…For anyone deluded enough to question whether education is the ticket to a better life for black boys and men, consider that a black male who drops out of high school is 60 times more likely to find himself in prison than one with a bachelor’s degree.  Black males who graduate from a four-year college will make, over the course of a ifetime, more than twice the mean earnings of a black high school graduate…more than a million dollars. [Also college-educated] black males…are more likely to marry and live with their children…. (Emphasis added) 

Bob Herbert concludes his Education, Education, Education article with what might  be viewed as an injunction to middle-class African-Americans to outreach-to-Black-lower-class-crises.  Here’s how Herbert put it:

This is not a close-call issue. It is becoming very hard for anyone to succeed in this society without a college education. To leave school without even a high school education, as so many males do — specially black males…is extremely self-destructive.  The effort to bolster the education background of black men has to begin very early. It’s extremely difficult to turn a high school dropout into a college graduate. This effort can succeed on a large scale only if there is a cultural change in the black community — a powerful change that acknowledges as the 21st century unfolds that there is no more important life tool for black children than education, education, education.  (Emphasis added)

I might add to Herbert’s discussion of today’s education crisis that’s crippling Black youth another set of facts relating to this crisis. These facts are from USA Today (August 6, 2007), reporting that “fourth-graders reading below the basic level” number 59% among African-Americans, compared to 25% among White Americans. Clearly, as Bob Herbert observed, the “effort [to reverse today’s education crisis] can succeed on a large scale only if there is a cultural change in the black community….”     

When Bob Herbert takes up the subject of the job-market/job-opportunity crisis facing lower-class African-Americans, he again strikes a quite dire and foreboding analytical tone.  He commences his New York Times article “The Danger Zone” (March 15, 2007)  thus:

What I’m talking about is extreme joblessness — joblessness that is coursing through [black] communities and being passed from one generation to another, like a deadly virus. …In big cities, more than half [black male youth] do not even graduate from high school. Their employment histories are gruesome. Over the past few years, the percentage of black male high school graduates in their 20s who were jobless (including those who abandoned all efforts to find a job) has ranged from well over a third to roughly 50 percent.  Those are the kind of statistics you get during a depression. For dropouts,  the rates of joblessness are staggering. For black males who left high chool without a diploma, the real jobless rate at various times over the past few years has ranged from 59 percent to a breathtaking 72 percent. 

In the second half of “The Danger Zone” article, Bob Herbert discusses the faint beginnings of federal-level leadership interest in addressing the dreadful job-market-job-opportunity crisis facing Black males.  This faint federal-level interest we owe, no doubt, to the fortuitous Democratic Party victory in the 2006 congressional elections, and especially to the first-ever rise of 4 African-American U.S. legislators heading major Congressional Committees and 16 frican-American legislators heading Sub-Committees, and an African-American chosen as Congressional Whip to boot.  Herbert commences this discussion by reference to new Congressional Hearings held at the end of February 2007, by Congress’s Joint Economic Committee on the joblessness crisis among African-American males. He quotes the chair of that committee, Senator Charles Schumer of New York:

“Seventy-two percent jobless [for school dropout black males]! This compares to 29 percent of white and 19 percent of Hispanic dropouts.” Senator Schumer described the problem of black male unemployment as “profound, persistent and perplexing.” Jobless rates at such sky-high levels don’t just destroy lives, they destroy entire communities. They breed all manner of anti-social behavior, including violent crime. One of the main reasons there are so few black marriages is that there are so many black men who are financially incapable of supporting a family. “These numbers should generate a sense of national alarm,” said Senator Schumer.  (Emphasis Added)

Bob Herbert continues “The Danger Zone” article discussing how little is being done by either the private economy or public policy programs to address the unique and horrendous job-market/job-opportunity crisis of Black males.  “However much this epidemic of joblessness may hurt,” observes Herbert, “very little is being done about it.” In regard to the private economy,  he notes that “According to the Labor Department, only 97,000 new jobs were created in February [2007]…not even enough to accommodate new entrants to the work force.”  And even when there may be a high number of new jobs in a month [e.g., over 300,000 in July 2007] or economic quarter, Herbert observes that, according to studies by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston, “the only groups that have experienced a growth in jobs since the last recession are older workers and immigrants.  …Steady jobs with good benefits are going the way of Ozzie & Harriet. Young workers, especially, are hurting, which diminishes the prospects for the American family. And blacks, particularly black males, are in a deep danger zone.” 

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Bob Herbert concludes his “The Danger Zone” article (The New York Times, March 15) with a critical jab at the indifference of the Republican controlled Congress — through most of the 1990s down to the November 2006 congressional elections — to produce public policies that might help remedy the joblessness crisis facing Black males. As Herbert put it:

Instead of addressing this issue constructively, [Republican] government officials have responded by eviscerating programs that were designed to move young people from disadvantaged backgrounds into the job market. Robert Carmona, president of Strive, an organization that helps build job skills, told Senator Schumer’s committee [Congress’ Joint Economic Committee] – “What we’ve seen over the last several years is a deliberate disinvestment in programs that do work.” What’s needed are massive programs of job training and job creation, and a sustained national effort to bolster the education backgrounds of disadvantaged youngsters. So far there has been no political will to do any of that.

Crisis Reformation and Black Elite today: A New Perspective    

That Black America’s premier leadership agency — the  NAACP — is  capable of redefining itself for what I view as a new facet of its historic leadership function, I have not the slightest doubt. From my perspective, the main problems confronting this new metamorphosis in the NAACP stem less from “The State of Black America” (to quote the title of National Urban League’s annual volume on African-Americans) than from present-day conditions that define our 21st century oligarchic-capitalist American society. 

    

As the Atlantic Monthly Magazine editor Jack Beatty informs us in Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2007),  today’s oligarchic-capitalist American democracy is a sad country today, a “most distressful nation” (to crib a term used by the University of Chicago sociologist, Andrew Greeley, to characterize societal crises that once plagued Irish-Americans). Which is to say, our country today is a nation wherein top-level business elites claim Gilded Age-type wealth advantage over the typical American citizen, exhibit crude greed-type orientations, and have greed-type economic privileges.    

Worse still, perhaps, in today’s oligarchic-capitalist America, a corporatist-hegemony is exercised over state and federal legislators, a hegemony that crudely and massively manipulates and influences public policy decisions and outcomes that affect multi-layered spheres in daily American life.  Under this kind of oligarchic-capitalist American democracy, it is a Sisyphean undertaking to remedy social crises such as those facing the poor sector in African-American life. Or for that matter any other gigantic American crises, like America’s health care crisis, weakening middle-class crisis, wealth gap crisis, decaying physical infrastructure crisis (e.g., collapsed inter-state highway bridge in Minnesota in August 2007), etc.

Interconnecting Civil Rights Advocacy & Social Reformation     

I came away from reading Bruce Gordon’s resignation memo with two main thoughts. One thought was that both the national NAACP leadership ranks (e.g., the executive officer, chair of National Board, and National Board members) and local NAACP Branches should consider fashioning  more operational-connections with the working-class and poor sector in African-American life, perhaps 40% of African-Americans.  In doing so, I believe the NAACP can in fact kill-two-birds-with-one-stone, so to speak. By this I mean, the NAACP can not only continue to advance the longstanding historic “civil rights activism/advocacy function”, but also help advance a much needed national-level “Black social-crisis reformation leadership function”.    

These two functions of Black ethnic-bloc leadership are more interconnected than many members of today’s African-American professional stratum have recognized. I believe that former NAACP executive officer Bruce Gordon uniquely recognized the importance of interconnecting  the “civil rights advocacy function” and the “social-crisis reformation function.”  He understood that the NAACP national organization could eventually intertwine these two leadership tasks in its operation.    

The successor to Bruce Gordon’s office — whoever he or she might be — must, I believe, fashion a leadership methodology to institutionalize the interconnection of the combined “civil rights advocacy” and “social-crisis reformation” functions at the top-level of the NAACP, and thereby down through the ranks of its numerous  branch offices.  There is today plenty of anecdotal evidence suggesting the existence of a broad-based desire among African-Americans for this to happen.  Such as a letter published in the July 17, 2007 issue of USA Today (America’s largest circulation newspaper) from a middle-class African-American named Pamela Hairston of Washington, D.C.  Ms Hairston wrote:

In a mock funeral in Detroit, the NAACP [at its annual conference] recently laid to rest the infamous n-word. People  shouldn’t use this word, and I’m glad the  NAACP is recognizing this.  But instead of all the funeral fanfare  and  focusing on just one slur, I would like to know when one of the oldest and most influential civil rights organizations in the nation is going to take a real stand on the real issues that plague so many black Americans?

When will the NAACP lead the charge to decrease the number of  HIV/AIDS  cases, black Americans who are killing other black Americans, high school dropout rates, teenage pregnancies etc… 

I have already drawn attention to the important role that Bob Herbert of The New York Times has played in informing the country on the social crises now ravaging the life-chances of weak working-class and poor African-American children and youth.  In his article in The New York Times (July 14, 2007), Bob Herbert, without being too explicit about it, is addressing our national-level Black leadership regarding the epidemic of fratricidal violence plaguing Black youth in Chicago this summer of 2007:

Since September [2006]…dozens of this city’s public school students have been murdered, most of them shot to death. As of last week, the toll of public schoolchildren slain in Chicago since the opening of the school year had reached 34, including two killed since the schools closed for summer vacation. …This should be a major national story, of course, and it would be if the slain children had come from more privileged [and white] backgrounds. But these are the kids that most of America cares nothing about — black, Latino and poor.  …But most people know (and take for granted) that boys and girls growing up in America’s inner cities often have to deal with conditions that can fairly be compared to combat. 

Herbert continues this candid account of an epidemic of violent deaths among inner-city school children in Chicago by noting “the tremendous amount of passivity and lack of public outrage.”  This lack of outrage is found among the African-American community both in Chicago and elsewhere, a situation Herbert’s article alludes to but doesn’t explicitly mention.  Be that as it may, clearly Chicago’s epidemic of violent deaths among school children along with the national-level crises plaguing lower-class African-American life are situations that today’s Black elite sector is, I believe, obligated to address in a substantive manner.  Also clearly, the primary ethnic-bloc leadership organization representing African-Americans — the NAACP — is also obligated to address the multi-layered crises facing African-American life.

Today's Black Elite Sector Has New Capabilities    

In light of the multi-layered crises facing African-American families, children, and youth, we must confront candidly the issue of the obligation-and-responsibility of today’s middle-class and professional sector — the Black elite sector — to assist in fashioning solutions to these crises. There is available among today’s Black elite sector a much greater capacity to outreach-to-Black-lower-class-crises than has ever been available to previous generations of African-Americans who fell into the Black elite sector.    

We can deduce the existence of today’s new Black elite capabilities from data on the upper-stratum occupational growth among African-Americans during the post-Civil Rights Movement era.  A survey of U.S. occupations by the Department of Commerce in 2000 reported that within the ranks of white-collar jobs, African-Americans were increasingly penetrating the upper-tier of white-collar jobs. In the Department of Commerce report, the upper-tier of  white-collar jobs were defined as “management, professional, and related occupations.”  Accordingly, by 2000 some 25% of employed African-Americans held upper-tier white-collar jobs, which amounted to nearly 4 million African-American individuals.  This compared with 18% of Latino-Americans employed in “management, professional, and related occupations.”  (See  U.S. Census Bureau, Occupations—2000 (Washington, D.C.: Department of Commerce, August 2003) p.6)    

Furthermore, the categories of African-Americans throughout white-collar jobs were reported in a U.S. Census Bureau survey in 2002 as follows - out of 14,