Sixty-nine African Americans were reported lynched in 1909.

If those murders followed the pattern of thousands of similar crimes committed between the Civil War and the civil rights movement, each would have attracted hundreds of Christian white women, children and men to watch the death kicks of a black man hanging by his neck from a tree or burning alive. The atmosphere would have been festive, like a county fair. They would have taken pictures or body parts as souvenirs. Nobody would have ever stood trial.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People – the NAACP – was founded that year and chances are, nobody would have felt it difficult to explain what was meant by the second of those double-A’s. It would have been considered quite an “advancement,” for instance, simply to get white people to stop lynching black ones with impunity.

Beyond that, there was a need to secure voting rights, desegregate schools, stop job discrimination, fight police brutality. In 1909, then, it was clear what you meant when you spoke of “the advancement of colored people.”

Ninety-eight years later, it is considerably less so.

Witness this month’s surprise decision by NAACP President Bruce S. Gordon to step down after only 19 months on the job. Gordon, a 61-year-old telecommunications executive, quit because of a disagreement over the meaning and methods of advancement.

He says he wanted the group to invest more of its resources into what might be called advancement from within. Meaning pregnancy counseling, mentoring, and programs designed to teach business and wealth-building skills. This brought him into conflict with the NAACP board of directors, which wanted to restrict the organization to its traditional role of advocating against injustice.

Gordon told the New York Times it was never his intention that the NAACP stop going after job discrimination, police brutality and other manifestations of injustice. He only wanted it to shift some of its emphasis toward strategies designed to empower. “It would be insane to give up on advocacy,” he said. “I just think we can do more than that, and should.”

He’s right.

We are all quick – we are all far “too” quick – to embrace a false choice where African Americans are concerned. It asks us to believe that if we agitate against injustice, we cannot acknowledge the need to improve from within, and if we acknowledge the need to improve from within, we forfeit the right to agitate against injustice. Gordon apparently realizes what many of us do and the NAACP board does not: This is not a case of either/or. We can do both/and. And, we must.

Lynching is no longer a pressing problem, the murder of James Byrd notwithstanding. But many of the other issues the NAACP was formed to fight still exist, albeit in altered form. So its leadership is still needed on issues like voting rights, desegregation, job discrimination and police brutality, just as it was in 1909.

But by the same token, this is no longer 1909. Or 1940. Or 1955. Or even 1972. This is 2007: the world is different now. The problems are more complex and the strategies employed against them need to be multilayered and sophisticated. The NAACP’s inability to understand this has, I think, helped make it stagnant, static, and marginal to today’s struggle.

“The NAACP is Today,” says a slogan on the organization’s Web site. But that will only be wishful thinking until the group finds a way to reinvent itself for this millennium. It can start by recognizing that we – meaning African Americans – can and should take ownership of our own uplift, be the instrument of our own empowerment. Ideally, the NAACP should be a leader in that movement.

After all, that’s advancement, too.