Who Needs the NAACP?

One fast-rising star in the activist community, James Rucker, for example, worked for MoveOn.org before co-founding the online grassroots site ColorofChange.org. The site's co-founder, Van Jones, has worked in human-rights and environmental advocacy. Created after Hurricane Katrina, ColorofChange.org became a rapid success story, drawing particular attention for its effective fundraising and publicity efforts on behalf of the Jena 6.

In an interview with The Daily Beast, Rucker said that he was motivated to start the site after Katrina because he felt that the current set of black institutions was ineffective in generating political pressure from the ground-up.

“We had Condoleezza Rice, Bill Cosby, Oprah, everyone else, but when you saw the video of these black lower-income folks, it was not as if there was some black political lobby meeting with Congress and the White House saying, ‘You need to fix this now,’” Rucker said. “The people most connected to those people in those videos in terms of political power were MIA. That was really the reason [for founding the site]. It was a recognition that the institutions we have are doing certain things, but that is not happening.”

The executive director for the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, Lateefah Simon, told The Daily Beast that attentiveness to community concerns at the street level, rather than just top-down policy prescriptions and legal battles, was crucial to bringing older institutions into the next decade.

“If you go to the African-American community in San Francisco or New York and ask the woman who's trying to get fresh produce or HIV care…. that summary of what’s most urgent is going to be different than your politician or theologian or the 'thought leaders' in the civil-rights movement.”

Simon, who in 2003 became the youngest MacArthur fellow in history at age 26 for her work with the Center for Young Women's Development, says she is excited to see Jealous, who she knows from his days as a fellow activist in San Francisco, running the show at the NAACP.

“His lived experience as a young black man, his commitment to low-income people, to having real conversations with real people, it signifies that this is definitely a new day,” Simon said.

Others are less sure. Harris-Lacewell, while encouraged by Jealous' résumé, said she was concerned he would have trouble overcoming opposition from the NAACP's older membership.

“Members can exit stage right if they don't like what he's up to,” she said, “and because he's part of our generation, who were born when many of those battles had been won, its hard to get the thirty-somethings to fill in the gap of the fifty-somethings in terms of membership dues and a sense of urgency.”

A spokesperson for the NAACP could not be reached for comment.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly listed the date of Obama's speech.

Benjamin Sarlin is a reporter for The Daily Beast. He previously covered New York City politics for The New York Sun and has worked for talkingpointsmemo.com.