When Hugh B. Price was elected president and CEO of the National Urban League in 1994, the league was operating with a deficit and the organization was so ineffectual that even other civil rights leaders were openly asking: Is the Urban League Dead? Some questioned the selection of Price, the former Rockefeller Foundation executive whose lack of national civil rights credentials caused some to refer to him by a 1984 movie title, “The Brother From Another Planet.”

What a difference eight years can make. When the National Urban League concluded its national convention Wednesday in Los Angeles, the organization had resumed its role as a major force in civil rights, there’s no deficit and instead of being a “Brother From Another Planet,” Hugh Price is now just a brother.

As Price has quietly and efficiently rebuilt the National Urban League, which was founded a year after the NAACP in 1910, he has returned the organization to its traditional role under its best-known leaders, Whitney Young and Vernon Jordan Jr.

“I don’t think there’s a full appreciation of the division of labor that has always existed in the African-American community,” Price says. “In the heyday of the Civil Rights Movement, you had spear throwers, spear collectors, you had builders, advocates, and you had [Dr. Martin Luther] King doing this, the league doing that. The key was that everybody was after the same thing. We don’t try to organize marches—we don’t do that well—but we can operate programs and mobilize people around the details of literacy in ways nobody else can.”

And that’s just what the National Urban League and its 100-plus affiliates have been doing. Price has been traveling around the country sounding the alarm that we need to improve the school system that produces students who graduate without the ability to read, write and compute at grade level. In addition to education, the National Urban League emphasizes youth programs, economic independence and equal opportunity. It’s not the type of work that inspires consistent media coverage, but it’s what Price calls “God’s work.”

When reporters cover certain civil rights leaders, they know—if they don’t know, they’ll quickly find out—that one of the most dangerous places they can be is not in the Middle East or the cold mountains of Afghanistan, but standing between a civil rights leader and a TV camera.

Hugh Price, who often uses football terminology to describe his work, does not compete for that attention.

“It’s not a charismatic movement build around a figure,” he explains. “It’s about a set of issues and a national institution with a capacity to move those issues down the field on behalf of our people.”

Over the years, the National Urban League has been noted for having more corporate leaders on its national board than any other civil rights organization and for being far more conservative than both the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

Few things irk Price more than the perception that the National Urban League is just another bourgeoisie Negro organization. That perception was not helped by Price’s decision not to participate in the Million Man March or the league’s decision—later reversed—to hold an upcoming convention in Cincinnati, which is being boycotted by African-Americans because of its failure to adequately address police brutality.

“People are always saying that the Urban League is a middle-class organization, which tells me that they don’t know who we are or who we serve,” Price says with a trace of disappointment. “From day one, our primary mission has been to help people get into the middle class—but not from the upper class.

“Our whole thrust when you’re looking at the achievement effort is to enable our children in inner cities to read so that they can achieve so that they can get the jobs that will take them into the middle class. We want them to have economic-self sufficiency—get off of welfare and onto jobs and buy that first house.

“The perception out there, for reasons I don’t fully understand, that we’re a middle-class organization is not the principal work of any of our affiliates, it’s not the agenda of the league and we struggle to overcome that perception.”

Of course, perceptions are shaped in large part by the media. And it’s hard to get coverage when one is focusing on the nitty-gritty work of improving academic achievement in schools instead calling a press conference to complain about the depiction of African-Americans on television, even if the same group later presents its highest media awards to the worst offenders.

Though disappointed in the amount of coverage the National League receives for doing “God’s work,” Price says the organization will continue to focus on issues to get results instead of national headlines.

“If television doesn’t cover our work, there’s still radio,” he explains. If mainstream national newspapers are not as interested, the fact is that in communities, more people read NNPA [Black] papers and mainstream local papers, anyway. More people watch local television than national, anyway. So we’ll work harder and go retail instead of wholesale.”

A civil rights leader who doesn’t crave the national limelight? That is a brother from another planet.