The recent resignation of the NAACP’s president, Bruce Gordon, is the product of political imperatives stemming from the Democratic takeover of Congress last year, but his departure also has roots in a century-old quarrel about the strategy of the civil rights struggle.

Mr. Gordon, a former Verizon executive, was hired in June 2005 as the organization sought traction in the Republican-dominated capital and hoped to fend off a federal tax investigation. He resigned last month, citing differences with the NAACP’s 64-member board, but observers say one factor in his demise was that his corporate sensibilities proved to be less of an asset after Democrats won control of the House and Senate.

“They didn’t put Gordon in there to make nice to Charlie Rangel,” a political analyst at a Washington think tank, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, David Bositis, said. “Why suck up to Republicans when they’re clearly on the defense?”

In 2006, Mr. Gordon persuaded President Bush to speak to the group’s annual convention for the first time in his presidency. To outsiders, that may have seemed like a shrewd move for both Mr. Bush and the group, but the president’s appearance there hurt Mr. Gordon with the organization’s local activists.

“They resented that, quite frankly,” a former NAACP official, Michael Meyers, said. “They don’t cotton to Republicans. This alienated the base, the rank-and-file church ladies with the big hats. If you offend them or ignore them, you’re in trouble.”

The rift was exacerbated as Mr. Gordon sought to expand the NAACP’s involvement with financial literacy programs, Medicare Part D enrollment, and other social services the organization has traditionally left to others.

“We make it possible for social justice programs to be done. We should not be the organization doing it,” a veteran NAACP organizer in California, Alice Huffman, told KQED-FM in a recent interview. “We shouldn’t take government money. … We have to be very careful. You cannot bite the hand that feeds you.”

The quarrel evokes a long-standing divide among black activists that stretches back at least a century, to the time when a moderate promoting self-help, Booker Washington, clashed with one of the founders of the NAACP, W.E.B. Du Bois, who favored political action and protest.

Ms. Huffman and others argue that the focus of the NAACP should be, as it was at the outset, squarely on ferreting out racism. However, others in the community have questioned whether that focus still makes sense.

“We’re not going to change racism. The NAACP is still fighting that old ghost. He’s there and he’s always going to be there. What you need to do is find ways to do things that pull us up from the inside,” an African-American columnist at the St. Petersburg Times in Florida, Bill Maxwell, said in an interview. “My unpainted, dilapidated house doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

Mr. Maxwell said Mr. Gordon was trying to move the NAACP more in the direction of self-help, but the group’s leaders rejected that. “He was trying to change the direction of a battleship. … His approach was incremental,” the columnist said.

Still, Mr. Maxwell said any African-American calling for more individual and community responsibility is immediately viewed as a tool of white racists. That’s not entirely off the mark, as he found out when he recently wrote a column calling for the NAACP to promote more inward focus to advancement. He scored an invite to the organization’s local chapter, but also an unwelcome embrace from other readers. “The rednecks down here are thrilled,” the columnist said.

Advocates of a more traditional civil rights advocacy role for the NAACP say there are enough signs of flagrant racism that the group would be foolish to abandon its unique devotion to that issue. Just last month, a mainstream Asian-American newspaper, AsianWeek, published a column titled “Why I Hate Blacks.” Others see strong evidence of race-based police brutality in such incidents as the flurry of police bullets that killed an African-American man, Sean Bell, 23, on his wedding day last November in Queens.

“The NAACP with its resources nationally can really take a bite out of police misconduct,” Mr. Meyers, who heads the New York Civil Rights Coalition, said. He said he would like to see the group focused on housing discrimination, prisons, and greater accountability in schools.

Mr. Meyers said the NAACP’s drift toward direct social services under Mr. Gordon was driven in part by corporate donors who were not interested in supporting political and social activism, but willing to fund giveaway programs and financial seminars. “That’s not the role for the NAACP, though a lot of people in corporate America think that should be the primary focus of a civil rights organization,” he said.

The NAACP’s chairman, Julian Bond, did not respond to a request for comment for this article. Mr. Gordon could not be reached. However, in a memo to the NAACP’s board, Mr. Gordon attributed his departure primarily to issues of governance. “I did not accept this position to follow orders,” he wrote in the memo, which was posted by an African-American-oriented Web site, Afro-Netizen.com, and confirmed as authentic by people close to the organization. He mentioned tensions over meetings with Mr. Bush and other top administration officials, as well as disagreements about whether certain “service” activities were compatible with the NAACP’s role as an advocacy organization.
In a written statement posted on the group’s Web site, Mr. Bond offered something of a rebuttal. “The board sets policy and the CEO is obliged to implement it,” he said. Mr. Bond also spoke of a “return to fundamentals” at the organization.

Several observers credited Mr. Gordon with bringing honesty to the NAACP’s membership tallies and then working to boost them. The group had boasted for decades that it had half a million members, even as its numbers were dwindling. Mr. Gordon acknowledged that the number was about 250,000 and set about building the rolls to about 400,000, according to recent figures.

Still, one of the group’s most daunting challenges is a demographic one. The rank-and-file members that Mr. Meyers refers to as “the church ladies with the big hats” are aging and, to be blunt, dying.

“Half of the African-American population is younger than 32,” Mr. Bositis noted. While the NAACP has tried some outreach to the “hip-hop” generation, those efforts have fallen flat.

“It’s like going to an AARP convention,” Mr. Maxwell said of the NAACP’s annual convention. “If they don’t learn to attract some young blood, some young people, they’re gone.”