Are black rights campaigners still relevant?

By Gary Younge

Benjamin Jealous is the new leader of America's oldest and largest civil rights organisation, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The 36-year-old joins an organisation that begins its 100th year with a funding crisis, an image crisis and dwindling membership.

Mr Obama held a "beer summit" to take the heat out of a race row

A few weeks ago, a private swimming club in suburban Philadelphia was accused of racism after it cancelled a contract with a group of mostly black and Latino children to swim there once a week. It was a hot afternoon towards the end of June, and as the children from the Creative Steps Day Camp dived in, some of the white parents pulled their kids out.

One child said he overheard a woman ask: "What are those black kids doing here?"

When asked why the group's contract had been cancelled, the club's president, John Duesler, initially said: "There is a lot of concern that a lot of kids would change the complexion… the atmosphere of the club."

He has also said the decision was made out of safety considerations, not racial concerns.

'Beers and reconciliation'

A few weeks later, a renowned Harvard professor arrived home in Cambridge Massachusetts to find he could not get into his house.

The nature of the battles we are fighting has shifted Benjamin Jealous, new leader of the NAACP

Henry Louis Gates Jr asked the cab driver if he would help jimmy the door. A passer-by saw them and called the police.

The ensuing fracas between the policeman and the professor ended in the arrest of Mr Gates for disorderly conduct, and a fraught national conversation about racial profiling.

The matter became an affair of state after President Barack Obama chastised the police for acting "stupidly".

It ended with Mr Obama inviting the two men to the White House for highly publicised beers and reconciliation.

In between those two incidents came the centennial conference of the nation's oldest civil right's organisation, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which recently elected its youngest leader, 36-year-old Benjamin Jealous.

It was a curious hiatus: a week sandwiched between two familiar bouts of interracial fury, during which commentators asked whether both the NAACP and the struggle for racial equality remained necessary and relevant.

'Greying revolutionaries'

As the first leader of the organisation who has never experienced codified segregation, the appointment of Mr Jealous was controversial.

The board was evenly split.

His arrival signals not just a generational handover but yet more evidence of the paradigm shift in black American politics.

Thanks to the success of civil rights struggles, African Americans can now advance through top colleges, business and academia. Their ascent is no longer limited to historically black colleges, the church and majority black congressional districts.

One in three black boys born in 2001 is destined to go to jail, according to The Sentencing Project

This creates more opportunity and less forced cohesion.

In the past, black leadership was produced by the black community. Now black leaders are more likely to be presented to it.

But Mr Jealous has a tough task ahead of him.

"The fight in any year in any decade for this organisation is about two things," Mr Jealous said. "It's about the present and the future."

But many believe the organisation is stuck in the past.

Following the civil rights years there was a "rapid disintegration of purpose and organisation," says Juan Williams, author of the civil rights classic, Eyes on the Prize.

"By the 1980s the very leadership of the group is in chaos," he says. "They become like greying revolutionaries."

'Human rights battles'

Away from the conference marking the NAACP's centenary, pretty much all the African Americans we spoke to had a genuine affection for the historical advances achieved by the NAACP.

There is an affection for the historical advances achieved by the NAACP

Those young people we spoke to in working class areas of Harlem and Baltimore who had come into contact with the organisation were impressed. But they were also relatively few and most were pretty confused about what its role should be today and how it should go about playing it.

The experiences of the children in Philadelphia and the fracas between Gates and the policeman indicates that racism remains an urgent issue.

One in three black boys born in 2001 is destined to go to jail, according to the Sentencing Project, a national organisation that promotes "more effective and humane" alternatives to prison for criminal offenders.

Yet reducing racism to a simple morality play starring villains and victims, white hoods and nooses is more ludicrous than ever.

Thanks to civil rights victories, African Americans now have the right to go into any restaurant they wish. But thanks to the legacy of segregation and continuing discrimination many cannot afford what is on the menu.

That, says Mr Jealous, demands a change in strategy.

"The nature of the battles we are fighting has shifted," he said in his first conference address. "We will always be there to enforce basic civil rights. But the big battles. The battles for good schools; the battles for good jobs, for health care for all… are human rights battles."

An organisation does not get to be 100 by accident.

It needs to be sufficiently conservative to maintain its institutional integrity and sufficiently responsive to adapt to changing circumstances.

Quite what that will mean for the young swimmers of Philadelphia, both black and white, remains to be seen.

Gary Younge is a journalist based in the US.