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: