With the
recent resignation of NAACP President & CEO Bruce
Gordon after just 19 months in office, national debate
has arisen over the differing objectives and vision of
Gordon and NAACP Board Chairman Julian Bond. The two men have very different ideas about the
direction that the NAACP should take now and in the
future.
Julian
Bond
On the one
hand, Bond feels that the NAACP should stick to its
original mission and vision statement – that of
addressing the causes of racial hatred and
discrimination by seeking to ensure equality of all
races by removing racial barriers through the democratic
process and by educating the public as to their rights
and the appropriate course(s) of action should those
rights be violated.
Bruce Gordon
On the other
hand, Gordon’s focus seems to be on addressing the effects of
discrimination by modernizing the organization to be
more effective for the issues and needs of blacks today,
i.e. better education opportunities, more widespread
HIV/AIDS testing, more voters registered and out on
Election Day, more homeownership literacy,
etc.
Julian Bond
attended Morehouse
College in the 60s
and while there, he helped found the SNCC (Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee). Bond is a
staunch Democratic and has a very strong political
background, having served four terms as a Georgia state
representative from 1965 to 1975 and six terms as a
state Senator from 1975 to 1986. He resigned from
his Senate seat to run for a seat in the U.S. House of
Representatives, but lost to civil rights leader John
Lewis. He
has taught at several distinguished universities
including Harvard and Drexel. He currently
teaches at American
University in
Washington,
DC and at the
University of
Virginia, but will
retire from Virginia after the
spring semester 2007 has ended.
Bond was
elected Chairman of the NAACP in 1998 and throughout the
years has worked to educate the public about the history
of racial injustice and the ways that those injustices
remain today.
He has derided George W. Bush in many speeches
and often refers to the Republican Party as the American
Taliban.
Concerning the recent differences of opinion
between himself and Bruce Gordon that resulted in
Gordon’s resignation, Bond remarked “He (Gordon) wanted
us to do more of the (social) service than we had been
doing and we thought that is contrary to what our
mission has been since 1909. There are
literally dozens, if not hundreds of organizations in
the United
States, both
within and without the black community that engage in
social service.”
State Representative and President
of GABEO
(Georgia
Association of Black Elected Officials) Tyrone Brooks,
agrees. “I think there was a clash between the styles of
the two men,” Brooks said. “In any case,
you need to know what role you will play before you
accept a position such as head of the NAACP or any other
organization for that matter. The NAACP is not
Verizon; I don’t think Mr. Gordon understood what it was
going to be like.
The NAACP must be the civil/human rights
organization that it was founded to be in 1909, working
with the legislative process and through the court
system to fight racial injustice; what it has always
been,” he concluded.
Bruce Gordon
is obviously on the other side of the debate. A graduate of
Gettysburg
College and holder
of a Master’s Degree in Management from MIT, Gordon rose
in corporate management at Bell of Pennsylvania to
become the Head of the Retail Markets Division of
Verizon in 2003.
He also sits on the boards of the Alvin Ailey
Dance Foundation, Office Depot, and Tyco
International.
He was named one of 50 Most Powerful Black
Executives by Fortune Magazine in 2002.
Gordon’s
selection to head the NAACP in June of 2005 was unusual
from the outset in that he is an immensely successful
businessman, having spent most of his career with
Verizon and currently serving as a corporate director of
CBS.
Historically, the NAACP has chosen political or
religious giants to run the organization. To his credit,
Gordon, with his moderate political views, managed to
persuade President George W. Bush to make his first
appearance at the NAACP in July of 2006, after he (Bush)
had ignored the organization’s contributions to society
for most of his presidency.
Citing
strain with the board as the reason for his resignation,
Gordon was specific about the reasons for his
decision.
“I did not step into the role to be a caretaker,
to be dictated to,” he said. “I stepped into
the role to understand as best I could the needs of the
African American community and then to propose
strategies and policies and programs and practices that
could improve conditions for African Americans…..The
things that I had in mind were not consistent with what
some – unfortunately, too many – on the board had in
mind.”
Bob Holmes, Georgia State
Representative, Polit
ical Science
Professor, and Director of the Southern Center for
Studies in Public Policy, tends to agree with
Gordon.
“I’ve known and been a friend of Julian’s for 35
years,” he said.
“But unfortunately, any group has to change with
the conditions.
Most of the original legal issues have been dealt
with through the courts. Legal Defense
and the ACLU can deal with the leftovers. The NAACP needs
to grow like Dr. King did in the last three years of his
life. We
need to start focusing on and moving into the economic
realm,” he added.
“The Capitalist Model doesn’t work for the black
community,” Holmes explained. “We need to look
at co-op models with a pooling of resources; more
lending institutions, banks and credit unions so we can
support and build an economic base for blacks; lower and
middle-class blacks have not experienced any great
improvements in this area. In this way, the
NAACP must become more relevant to the 21st
century; it must carve out a new niche in order to offer
help,” he concluded.
Also at
issue is the size of the National Board of Directors of
the NAACP.
At 64 members, one might question how anything gets
done.
Journalist and writer Shavar Jeffries remarked on
this anomaly in his recent article The Resignation of
Bruce Gordon and the Irrelevance of the NAACP. Said
Jeffries, “Concerning governance, one wonders if the
NAACP’s organizational structure is designed
intentionally to produce inertia….It is virtually
impossible for a non-profit to operate effectively with
such a large and unwieldy board….Running the NAACP,
apparently, is more like leading a legislature than
leading a non-profit organization.” Jeffries
concluded, “I doubt seriously that any non-profit has
ever achieved sustainable success with such a large
Board.”
Representatives
Holmes and Brooks tend to have differing views on this
issue as well.
Mr. Holmes felt that the Board is a little too
large. “How
do you build a consensus?” he asked. “Cutting it in
half might facilitate a new CEO being able to move the
organization into a new direction.” Mr. Brooks felt
it was workable if done right. “It’s not
necessarily too large,” he said, “as long as it’s
organized and there are clearly defined responsibilities
for leadership.”
Despite the
opposing viewpoints on the direction that the NAACP
should be taking, one thing remains clear: the
organization should continue
and this is only possible through continued financial
support, public involvement in NAACP meetings, and new
faces in membership representative of the current
generation of blacks facing discrimination in today’s
world.