"NAACP Head Resigns After 19 Months"

Barely a year and a half into the job, Bruce Gordon is out as president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People due to "management differences". Robert A. George, a black moderate-conservative Republican blogger, comments on the situation:

"When selected in 2005, former Verizon executive Gordon was a surprise choice, coming out of the business community rather than the civil rights and political worlds that previously had produced NAACP leaders.....Gordon's singular 'achievement' -- if it can be called that -- in his tenure was managing to convince President Bush to address the NAACP's annual meeting in 2006 after the White House boycotted -- rightly, in my opinion -- the conference during the previous five years of Bush's term. Perhaps Gordon was too thin-skinned to run a non-corporate entity. The comment above that he was ready to quit six weeks into his tenure might suggest that. But given the leadership problems that the NAACP has had since Benjamin Hooks ended a 15-year run, it seems that the onus has to be on the organization.

Pardon the bluntness, but the NAACP ain't going to change while Julian Bond still runs the board. He is too dogmatic, too ideologically-fixed, in a 1960s political mindset to allow growth for the group in the 21st century. It was Bond that created much of the conflict between the group and the Bush White House, personalizing policy differences with the Republican Party, not once, but repeatedly. This tended to put the NAACP president -- whether Gordon or his predecessor Kweisi Mfume -- in the position of trying to smooth things over. And don't think that Bond doesn't have considerable sway over the other board members.

Thus, it's not surprising that the organization president and the board would be out of step. Now, with Gordon's early departure, the NAACP still -- as Earl Graves, Jr. said -- needs to figure out how to make itself relevant to a younger generation. Bond certainly isn't helping any."