Let me summarize my thoughts on how today’s Black elite sector can mobilize a post-Civil Rights Movement era outreach-to-Black-lower-class-crises. First, this can be achieved through initiatives from the ranks of Black professional associations, from middle-class Black civic and voluntary associations, from the ranks of Black clergy and their churches, through the resources available to the new-rich elements in today’s Black elite — wealthy business persons, corporate executives, entertainment personalities, some sports personalities, etc. Accordingly, insofar as new class and new wealth capabilities are available to the new Black elite sector, the next crucial ingredient required for this sector to fashion efforts at remedying Black lower-class crises is what I call a “flowering of Black-elite will”, that modern leadership quality of “elite obligation to popular society.”

Of course, the Black leadership institutions must shoulder the task of galvanizing into action the new middle-class and professional elements at the top of Black America’s social mobility ladder. Primary among these Black leadership institutions that I have in mind are civil rights organizations, Black advocacy organizations, and Black political class organizations. By name, these include the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Rainbow Coalition, the National Urban League, the National Council of Negro Women, the Children Defense Fund, the Council of Black Trade Unionists, the National Caucus of Black State Legislators, and the Congressional Black Caucus. I leave the NAACP as the last-mentioned Black leadership institution because, in my understanding of modern African-American leadership development, the NAACP possesses a kind of “crown jewel” historical leadership status among such institutions.

Accordingly, in light of this perspective on the NAACP’s great historical role as African-American’s premier Black leadership agency during the 20th century, there should be today an important rise in NAACP membership among middle-class and professional African-Americans. Among the literally millions of African-Americans employed in white-collar job ranks — nearly 10 million such Black persons are so employed today. Thus, current membership figures between 400,000 and 500,000 for the NAACP are unacceptable, at least from my perspective. Those figures should be somewhere over one million!

Moreover, the “Life Membership" category ought to be sizable; it costs one thousand dollars and can be paid in installments. Anyway, “Annual Membership” category in the NAACP is under $50 and no one can tell me that a million-plus individuals in the middle-class and professional stratum of African-American life cannot afford such a membership. Such membership by middle-class and professional African-American (and stable working-class African-Americans too) is owed the NAACP. The defense for this statement is the NAACP’s historical legacy as the great warhorse of Black people’s freedom - the NAACP’s historical legacy of persistent and courageous struggle against the White supremacist juggernaut in American civilization.

Furthermore, reports during the spring of 2007 of the NAACP’s financial difficulties — resulting in plans to cut its staff by a third — disturbed me a lot. After all, the Black elite sector today comprises many wealthy individuals — persons with multi-millions at their touch and perhaps a few with billions. Upon reading about the NAACP’s financial troubles, I thought to myself: “Aren’t there a few among that special category of today’s Black elite sector who will make available to the NAACP financial contributions (gifts, loans, or whatever) to ease that historic Black American institution’s financial troubles? There must be. I refuse to believe otherwise."

One final observation. Although over the past decade or so the NAACP has mounted social-crisis remedying programs relating to the problems of education performance among African-American children and youth, there is a much larger programmatic-platform in the overall sphere of Black social crises for the 21st century NAACP to mount. It can be said, I think, that it is to the leadership credit of the former executive officer of the NAACP — Bruce Gordon — that he clearly understood the imperative need for today’s Black elite sector to design and execute social-crisis reformation programs to remedy the plight of weak working-class and poor African-Americans. It is to the leadership credit of Bruce Gordon that he initiated, in the leadership circle of the NAACP, the topic of fashioning a new leadership profile that interconnects its historic “civil rights advocacy function” and “social-crisis reformation function”. I trust that a full-fledged adoption of such a new leadership profile at the national level of the NAACP is not too far in the future.

• Also by Dr. Martin Kilson, PhD featured on iZania.com: 
  Probing the Black Elite's Role for the 21st Century (Part One)
  Probing the Black Elite’s Role for the 21st Century (Part Two)
  Probing the Black Elite's Role in the 21st Century (Part Three)
  
  
• BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member Martin Kilson, PhD hails from an African Methodist backgound and clergy: From a great-great grandfather who founded an African Methodist Episcopal church in Maryland in the 1840s; from a great-grandfather AME clergyman; from a Civil War veteran great-grandfather who founded an African Union Methodist Protestant church in Pennsylvania in 1885; and from an African Methodist clergyman father who pastored in an Eastern Pennsylvania milltown--Ambler, PA. He attended Lincoln University (PA), 1949-1953, and Harvard graduate school. Appointed in 1962 as the first African American to teach in Harvard College and in 1969 he was the first African American tenured at Harvard. He retired in 2003 as Frank G. Thomson Professor of Government, Emeritus. His publications include: Political Change in a West African State (Harvard University Press, 1966); Key Issues in the Afro-American Experience (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970); New States in the Modern World (Harvard University Press, 1975); The African Diaspora: Interpretive Essays (Harvard University Press, 1976); The Making of Black Intellectuals: Studies on the African American Intelligentsia (Forthcoming. University of MIssouri Press); and The Transformation of the African American Intelligentsia, 1900-2008 (Forthcoming). Click here to contact Dr. Kilson.

• Reprinted with permission from The Black Commentator