NAACP Selects New Leader

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CHERYL CORLEY, host:

I'm Cheryl Corley in for Michel Martin, and this is Tell Me More from NPR News. We're broadcasting from Chicago Public Radio. Coming up, we examine what may be a financially tight summer for young people. But first, the NAACP, the historic civil rights group elected a new president this weekend. Benjamin Jealous is a former news executive, and at 35, the youngest leader in the 99-year history of the country's largest civil rights organization. In recent years the group has struggled, though, to refine, or redefine, its mission for the 21st century, and has also weathered internal disputes about the way forward. Mr. Jealous may have his work cut out for him. Well, here to talk about the next steps for the NAACP are Princeton University political science professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell. Also with us is former NAACP president Bruce Gordon. Welcome to you both.

Mr. BRUCE GORDON (Former President, NAACP): Good morning. How are you?

Prof. HARRIS-LACEWELL (Princeton University, Political Science): Thanks. Nice to be here.

CORLEY: I am quite well. Mr. Gordon, let's start with you. What were some of the obstacles that you faced as NAACP president, and do you think Mr. Jealous will face them as well?

Mr. GORDON: Well, I first of all think that Mr. Jealous is an excellent selection. I think he's well qualified, he's got great experience, his age I think is a real strong point. The challenges that I faced were primarily ones of getting alignment with the board and myself in terms of where the NAACP needed to go. I believe that the focus has to be community based. I believe particularly as you think about the headlines on your news program today, that focus on employment given the weakness in the economy, focus on public education. These are things that our community cares about. These are areas where there is the greatest disparity involving our community versus the majority community. And what I found was a difficult process in getting a common view on the issues and the solutions.

CORLEY: And you were president until last year. Professor Harris-Lacewell, Ben Jealous, as we've mentioned, is the youngest president in NAACP history. How much of that do you believe was a deliberate move to connect the next generation with the organization?

Prof. HARRIS-LACEWELL: Well, it certainly looks deliberate to me, but deliberate in all of the right ways. Organizations should be deliberate when they're making a choice about who their next president is going to be. And Jealous is interesting for lots of reasons beyond his age. Certainly being 35 puts him smack dab in the, you know, hip-hop or, you know, post-civil-rights, post-black power generation. Today is Malcolm X's birthday. He would have been 83. And when we think about that, we realize sort of how far we are into a new generation of leadership. But the other thing that's interesting about Jealous is that he's a true organizations person. He's not coming out of corporate America. He's not coming out of elected officialdom, he's coming out of leading other kinds of organizations, some of them political, some of them professional, east coast, west coast, deep south. That I think strikes me as a very important move for the NAACP which is now, I think, hopefully really getting a sense of itself as having an organizational responsibility that is distinct from either the elected official land or the kind of business corporate world.

CORLEY: I do want to ask you both what the job of the NAACP is now, but first let's listen a little bit to Ben Jealous himself who gave a brief statement to the press about his plan for his tenure. So let's listen to that.

(Soundbite of statement to the press)

Mr. BENJAMIN JEALOUS (President, NAACP): Across this country there are people in my generation who have checked out from this organization, and this is my day to say to them it's time to check back in.

CORLEY: So, Melissa, what will he have to do to get others in his age group involved?

Prof. HARRIS-LACEWELL: Well, certainly, you know, he's coming in on a great tide because the current primary season in the Democratic electoral side has led to an influx of new voters and young voters of exactly this generation. So he's got a little bit of political mobilization already occurring on the ground. What he's got to now do is craft a strategy so that the NAACP is not trying to be all things to all people, but has a very clear, sort of set of missions, with discernible goals that can be measured at the end, and which really kind of captivate this, you know, 30- to 50-year-old crowd. This is a group that is thinking about what it means to be black in America in a very different way than the generation before it.

CORLEY: Mr. Gordon, it was reported that the board of the NAACP was sharply divided on the final choice, and I was wondering if that was surprising to you at all? And if you had any idea of what the divide was about?

Mr. GORDON: Well, I'd like to say it's surprising, but not really so. Frankly I think that the division was not as much a function of the candidates. I think that anybody who looks at Ben Jealous's background will have to acknowledge that he's a very fine candidate. I think they were more divided on the process that employed a search committee, the executive committee, and then the full board. So I think that it was a procedural or process issue that caused them to be divided. I really believe that the final answer is a great answer, and the new leader has a great chance to be effective. If I could add on to Dr. Lacewell's comments about engaging young folks, I would also liken it to the Obama campaign in that Senator Obama has done very well in using technology, using the internet, using the communications mechanisms that young people use. And I believe that the NAACP has to make progress in that arena as well. If you want to talk to young folks, you need to communicate with them the way that they're most accustomed to being spoken with. So I do believe that there are some models from the current campaign that matter, and I do believe that this youthful leadership can make a big difference in bringing the NAACP forward.

CORLEY: I must point out that you were also credited with improving the presence of the NAACP on the internet. So you are listening to Tell Me More from NPR News, and we're talking about the new president of the NAACP with the organization's former president Bruce Gordon, and with political science professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell. Professor, does the NAACP have to restructure the organization or revamp its mission in any way to stay, or really just to become relevant to African-Americans today?

Prof. HARRIS-LACEWELL: Absolutely. Again, I think that if the NAACP had two, three, four, things at most, that were kind of clear and discernible goals. You know, we're working towards making sure that, you know, whatever - for example, our public school system is serving every child in a way that leads to higher rates of test scores. Or we're looking to be sure that in this current mortgage crisis that African-Americans are not losing their homes at a disproportionate rate. Or, you know, you could sort of pick whatever these sets of goals are, but they've got to be measurable, and they've got to be clearly communicated, regularly.

I think the other thing is that the NAACP is going to be entering a new phase if we have a Democratic president beginning in January. It should not be just now an outsider organization fighting back against the status quo, but may actually have an opportunity to be sitting very much at the White House table of power regardless of which of the two Democratic nominees may become president. That I think should lead to a different set of strategies for how the NAACP is going to organize around political questions.

CORLEY: Mr. Gordon, what is your advice for Mr. Jealous? And how should the NAACP kind of position itself as it heads into its centennial?

Mr. GORDON: Well, focus clearly is the keyword here, and I'll repeat my point, because I feel so strongly about it. I think that the focus has to be on employment and education, but to be clear about that, it's not just a matter of equal access to public education, it's also about performance.

The organization has had a tendency in its pursuit of advocacy, to focus its attention on the source of the problems, let's say the school system. Do we really have laws that allow equal access? Do we really have school systems that produce good education? But not enough focus on the student. Are students respecting and valuing achievement? Are students going to school? Are students learning?

So there's got to be an approach to social change that is not just quoting statistics, criticizing the source of the problem. It's also a matter, or might I say, the supply of the problem. It's also solving the demand for the problem. Professor Lacewell talked about economics, about lending. It's one thing to sue a bank because the bank has minority lending practices that discriminate, and I'm not saying that that shouldn't happen, but we also need to go straight to the community, and straight to our people, and teach them the laws. And teach them the rules around getting a mortgage, understanding an adjustable rate mortgage, understanding whether it's good or bad for you. We need to focus on our people. We need to raise the level of sophistication of our people so that the institutions that have traditionally discriminated against us, won't find us to be simple uninformed victims.

CORLEY: You know it's interesting that Ben Jealous yesterday said that his plans for the group include ensuring a high voter turnout among blacks in the November election, and pushing civil rights. So, I was wondering should that be the primary job, though, of the NAACP? What is the NAACP's job these days?

Mr. GORDON: It should be a part of the job, for sure, just to make that distinction. We extended the Voting Rights Act a couple of years ago, that's affecting law, that's affecting policy. But if you've got the right to vote, but you don't register to vote, and then go vote itself, then the law isn't worth the paper that it's written on. So, to the extent that the NAACP is effective at voter turnout, that is something I believe traditionally the organization has done, and should continue to do. We simply should not be limited to that. And education and employment have to be, in my opinion, at the center piece of anything that programmatically the NAACP adjusts as going forward.

CORLEY: All right. Dr. Harris-Lacewell, at one point the NAACP was at the center of African Americans' fight for racial equality. Will this new appointment help the organization regain that ground or has the NAACP's time passed?

Prof. HARRIS-LACEWELL: I think that what's important is that as we see a maturity of black politics, and that maturity is related to our ability to run for the U.S. presidency, our capacity to have important presence in the U.S. congress, in the state houses, at the gubernatorial mansions. As well as all the local community organizing that is necessary...

CORLEY: I'm going to have to stop you right there.

Prof. HARRIS-LACEWELL: We've got to have multiple strategies, the NAACP is just part of it.

CORLEY: All right. Well, thank you so much. Melissa Harris-Lacewell is associate professor of politics in African-American studies at Princeton University. She joined us from the studio on campus. Bruce Gordon is the former president of the NAACP, he joined us by phone. Thank you both.

Mr. GORDON: Thank you.

Prof. HARRIS-LACEWELL: Thank you.

CORLEY: Join us tomorrow on Tell Me More for a special conversation with the new NAACP President Benjamin Jealous

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