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The Role of the Black Elite in Outreaching to the Black Lower Class... - Interconnecting Civil Rights Advocacy & Social Reformation

Page 7 of 14

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.

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