Bruce Gordon takes charge: new leader of the NAACP brings a new style to the historic organization

STEP into Bruce Gordon's office at the Baltimore headquarters of the NAACP, and it soon becomes obvious that the organization, historically led by preachers, politicians and activists, is under new management, and a new management style.

The nation's oldest civil rights organization is now being run more like a business, by a businessman brought in to shake things up, and return the association to its founding mission of advocating for civil rights, conducting voter mobilization and monitoring equal opportunity in the public and private sectors.

Gordon's office is decorated with historic photos of a time when everything in the Black community ran through the NAACP. While Gordon knows that the issues today are less spirited than the black-and-white issues of the past, the 59-year-old says that he is up to the challenge of bringing the NAACP into the 21st century--in message and tone.

"Thanks to the dedication of leaders like W.E.B. DuBois, Thurgood Marshall and Julian Bond, the NAACP has diminished some of the most overt threats to equality," says Gordon, who succeeded Kweisi Mfume, a former U.S. congressman who left the NAACP to run for U.S. Senate in Maryland. "Today, however, we face subtler and more complex threats to equality in education, employment and other areas that are harder to recognize and just as hard to overcome. My goal as president will be to build on the legacy of this organization, to help it continue adapting to this new reality, and to extend its reach and influence to more of our youth, to more people of color, and to more leaders in the academic, business and political worlds."

A former top executive with Verizon, Gordon is in his first year at the helm of the NAACP, which has been dogged for much of the last decade by financial problems, a declining membership base and questioned purpose. At the announcement of Gordon to the NAACP's top spot, NAACP Chairman Julian Bond said Gordon would "bring the passion and commitment to justice that distinguished his corporate career."

Shortly after he took office, Gordon displayed that passion in the defense of Bond, who had been accused of slandering President Bush and members of his cabinet in a speech some called extremely partisan, an act that could threaten the nonprofit status of the NAACP. "It is interesting that while [some conservative] groups ... spread half-truths and lies about Bond, they offered no direct evidence of what was said," Gordon said at the time. "I view this as an attempt to derail my attempts to build a constructive relationship with the [Bush] administration."

One of his main goals at the NAACP is to make it effective and efficient. He wants to reignite the fire and also cultivate an environment of fiscal responsibility. "I was shocked that we had no endowment," says Gordon, who obtained a bachelor's degree from Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and later earned a master's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow.

Today, the NAACP is operating in the black, but barely. Founded in 1909, the NAACP's membership roles once stood at 500,000 during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. That number now is half that historic high.

One reason for the decline in the NAACP rolls: The Civil Rights Movement was a success, producing significant change, particularly in regard to overt racism that Blacks were subjected to. But still there is more work to be done, Gordon says. "Life is better today for Blacks than it was back then ... but not for everybody. Some Blacks are living in the best of times. Some Blacks are living in the worst of times ... So, to me, there are still many civil rights challenges that need to be addressed."

The biggest surprise to Gordon since he took office has been "the number of Blacks who are living with some material measure of disadvantage. It's just broader based than I realized ... By being in this role and focusing on this full-time, the eye-opener for me has been that we've come a long way, but we still have a long way to go."

Since taking office, Gordon has worked on such issues as extending the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and Hurricane Katrina, raising $2 million for disaster relief and organizing command centers in Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and Florida.

Gordon met one-on-one with President Bush to discuss relief efforts and afterwards proclaimed that "we might not agree on many issues, but it is important that decision makers at the highest level get input from the NAACP and civil rights leaders."

Later, he met privately with the head of Homeland Security, pressing the government to give survivors more time to find permanent housing. The next day, FEMA announced that it would give survivors who were living in hotels an additional three months to find housing. Gordon's connection with the NAACP runs deep. Growing up in Camden, N.J., he has attended NAACP meetings "since I could walk," he says. His father was a founder of the local branch, and Gordon recalls taking part in protests and marches at an early age. He says more civil rights issues today focus on economic inequalities than social ones, and he's a believer in self-reliance. "We sometimes get so caught up in what other people aren't doing for us that we don't pay attention to what we are not doing for us," he says. "So we as a community have to find the right balance ... It starts off with knowing the issues ... and being able to quantify the issues."