NAACP leader takes businesslike approach

updated 2:26 p.m. ET July 17, 2006

NEW YORK - Bruce S. Gordon works quickly.

The retired businessman has been president of the NAACP for less than a year. But as he presides over his first national convention with the group this week in Washington, he has already overcome the low expectations of many critics, who figured a corporate type had little to offer a group with a history of upending the status quo.

It isn’t so much what the former Verizon executive has accomplished as what he has started to do that has earned praise. For instance, he has worked on repairing frayed ties with the Bush administration, is advocating for Hurricane Katrina victims and kicked off an overhaul of the NAACP’s structure and staff.

Now Gordon is facing tougher work — reviving stagnant membership and pushing a civil rights agenda in a conservative national climate.

“I was very skeptical about him coming on, but when I look at the extraordinary challenges he’s faced in his first year — I’ve seen him engaged,” said Ronald Walters, a political scientist at the University of Maryland. “I give him high marks for trying, but it hasn’t yielded very much.”

Eyes on the prize
Gordon’s own to-do list is long. He wants to close racial gaps in wealth, in education and on prison rolls, among other things.

“These are high bars,” Gordon said in a recent interview at his Manhattan home. “But if we don’t engage in addressing the fundamental issues that, to me, represent the civil rights struggles of the 21st century, then we shouldn’t exist.”

Right now, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is often a bit player in public policy debates.

It denounced the nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, for example, but both were approved. It blasted federal budget cuts targeting the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; they passed. Meanwhile, an IRS investigation of the group, which threatens its nonprofit status, is ongoing.

Low-key on immigration
And the group has taken a low-key approach to one of the year’s biggest national issues: immigration. It’s a tricky subject for the NAACP because, more than other groups, blacks worry that immigrants take jobs from Americans, though Gordon notes that blacks and Latinos have many common bonds. Rather than joining this spring’s massive street demonstrations calling for immigration reform, the NAACP issued a news release and Gordon attended a Latino conference.

“Wherever there’s an issue that African-Americans are concerned with, they should have a presence,” said Lorenzo Morris, a political scientist at Howard University. “They haven’t been as effective as I’d hoped.”

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