The Role of the Black Elite in Outreaching to the Black Lower Class...

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...And How It Relates to the National Leadership Level of the NAACP
Black Commentator
Black Commentator
Recent events affecting the national leadership level of the NAACP brought vividly to my attention the question of the 21st century Black elite role in “outreaching-to-Black-lower-class-crises.” After just under two years as executive officer of the NAACP, Bruce Gordon resigned from that office in December 2006. On March 6, 2007, Bruce Gordon presented a “Memo of Resignation” to members of the NAACP National in which he discussed the core reasons underlying his resignation. A copy of Gordon’s memo was made public through a Black-affairs website named “Afro-Netizen”, in its issue dated March 10, 2007 and later in its issue dated July 16, 2007.

 

I received a copy of Bruce Gordon’s resignation memo in mid-July and after reading it, I had no doubt about its significance to the issue of the role of the 21st century Black elite sector in “outreaching-to-Black-lower-class-crises.” Or to put this matter in the conceptual terms that are implied in Gordon’s resignation memo, his memo relates to the issue of fashioning a new post-Civil Rights Movement leadership identity for the NAACP, an identity that interconnects that great organization’s historical “civil rights advocacy function” with a 21st century “Black social-crisis reformation function.”

Bruce Gordon’s resignation memo also has a special significance owing to its intellectual candor, by which I mean the straightforwardness with which Gordon lays out issues surrounding his resignation. It is also significant, therefore, in regard to what the memo reveals about the leadership character of Bruce Gordon. His leadership personality is not given to obfuscation or circumvention, not given to narcissistic pettiness of “one-upmanship behavior” vis-à-vis his professional peers in the institution of which he’s a part, in this case the NAACP — that great warhorse of Black people’s freedom and their struggle against the White supremacist juggernaut in 20th century American civilization.

Furthermore, Gordon’s resignation memo is significant in regard to what it reveals about what might be called a “can-do ethos” that informed his decision-making while executive officer of the NAACP for two years. This “can-do ethos” aspect of Bruce Gordon’s leadership style caught my attention during the course of the Katrina Hurricane Crisis in 2005. During the early weeks of watching the television reports on the events of that horrible Katrina crisis unfold — especially as the lives of working-class and poor Black families were being devastated — I remember saying to my wife Marion: “I hope Black national organizations like the church denominations, the Urban League, the NAACP, and professional associations mobilize relief efforts to assist Black families in New Orleans.”

Within a week of saying this, we received an e-mail from the NAACP national office notifying people that it had set up an NAACP Katrina Relief Fund, and I returned the NAACP’s appeal message saying that the Kilson family would contribute $2000. Happily, I filed-away a copy of the pledge-letter, dated Sept. 8, 2005, I sent to the NAACP Katrina Relief Fund in which I remarked to the Fund’s director: “It is truly marvelous to have the NAACP under your new executive officer Mr. Bruce Gordon out-front in aiding the thousands of Black citizens, and White citizens too, whose lives have been smashed by the Katrina hurricane.”