Who Needs the NAACP?

Francis Miller / Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images As it celebrates its 100th year, the NAACP is at a crossroads. The Daily Beast's Benjamin Sarlin talks to up-and-coming black leaders about how the organization can re-invent itself for a new generation.

At one level, Barack Obama's address to the NAACP on Thursday at its 100th annual convention will be a testament to its success.

But Obama's presence is also indicative of the shifting grounds of the civil-rights landscape: He comes from a younger generation of activists with a new set of assumptions about politics and advocacy—a demographic the NAACP has had difficulty connecting with in recent years. Last year’s appointment of 36-year-old Ben Jealous, a community organizer, as president of the organization was widely interpreted as an acknowledgment that it needs to bridge the gap. Jealous' candidacy drew strong opposition from some older members looking for a more traditional résumé, but has fueled hopes among reformers that he can revive the NAACP.

The flagship institution of the civil-rights movement faces a variety of challenges as it moves into the next century. On an organizational level, it's consistently rated as one of the least-efficient major charities by outside analysts and three of its most recent presidents have resigned for reasons ranging from a sex scandal to clashes with the older leadership. The NAACP has faced tough criticism from activists who argue that it’s grown out of touch with the grassroots and has failed to deploy new technologies and tactics to encourage broader participation. At the same time, the changing politics of race in America have made the group’s agenda less obvious and more difficult to articulate.

View Our Gallery: The NAACP at 100

According to Harris-Lacewell, one obstacle the NAACP faces is in part due to the accomplishments of the previous generation of civil-rights leaders. Many of the most pressing issues cited by activists today—inadequate funding for education, HIV rates among African American women, overincarceration—are tied with broader policy questions, rather than overt racism.

“I would say one of the greatest challenges facing an organization like the NAACP is not only fighting racial inequality, but even convincing and creating a public consensus that racial inequality is the result of something external rather than simply black pathologies,” Harris-Lacewell said.

Partly in response to these issues, which often intersect with policy-reform efforts regardless of race, many prominent new activists have come up through groups beyond the traditional channels of the NAACP and black churches.

“We are more and more products of institutions that may not be African-American ones,” William Jelani Cobb, an associate professor of history at Spelman College, told The Daily Beast.

“When we look at people politically like the Cory Bookers the Barack Obamas and so on, these are folks who are as comfortable in white environments as well as majority-black environments. I think the coalitions we work with will be very different.”