BALTIMORE (Map, News) - As one measure of the consuming passion sweeping the country over election of the brand-new president of the NAACP, The New York Times, the nation’s newspaper of record, ran the story Sunday.

They gave it four paragraphs.

On page 18.

They squeezed it down there at the bottom of the page, above a story about a leaky train in Louisiana and an advertisement for hardwood flooring.

So much for the importance of political changes inside the nation’s oldest civil rights organization.

“New Leader for NAACP Is Its Youngest,” said the headline in The Times. The 145-word story had all the feel of an obligation instead of an eagerness to let people in on something relevant to their lives.

Around Baltimore, some of us think the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is still important, but maybe that’s because we have a kind of proprietary interest in the 99-year-old civil rights group­ — and not just because the organization still makes its national headquarters here, in a business park just off Northern Parkway in northwest Baltimore County.

We are the city that gave America Thurgood Marshall, who stood before the U.S. Supreme Court 54 years ago as chief counsel for the NAACP and argued the blatant unfairness of separate schools for children based on the color of their skin.

We are the city that gave America Clarence Mitchell Jr., whose work as chief lobbyist for the NAACP for 30 years, along with his tireless efforts for equal rights laws, earned him the nickname “the 101st U.S. senator.” (And Mitchell’s wife was Juanita Jackson Mitchell, an indomitable crusader for the NAACP and the first black woman to practice law in Maryland.)

We are the city that gave America Kweisi Mfume, who relinquished his congressional career and took over the NAACP and helped steady its political compass and restore its financial base at the lowest point in its modern history.

And, if all of this isn’t personal enough for Baltimoreans, the new NAACP president, Benjamin T. Jealous, has his own family roots here.

But Jealous is 35 years old, and this is a measure of how far the country has traveled since the era of Marshall and Mitchell, whose efforts helped give America a conscience on matters of race.

When Marshall was coming of age, his skin color denied him entrance to the University of Maryland Law School. When Mitchell was coming of age, as a young reporter for the Afro-American newspaper, he witnessed the lynching of a black man on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

When Jealous was coming of age, millions of African-Americans were reaching economic middle class for the first time in their families’ history — but millions more were being left behind, no matter any new civil rights legislation.

As leaders of the NAACP, Marshall and Mitchell lived in a nation where some black people weren’t allowed to vote, weren’t allowed fair housing, weren’t allowed to drink from the same water fountains as whites.

When Americans turned on their television sets and saw blacks marching for equal rights, they also saw fire hoses turned on them, and snarling dogs, while law-enforcement people either looked the other way or took out billy clubs and pounded them on demonstrators’ heads.

The sheer physical drama captured the moral imperative of that era.

But those dramas have passed into history now. Marshall and Mitchell went to their graves knowing their efforts had changed the laws of the land.

Jealous takes over in a time when an African-American man, Barack Obama, prepares to run for president as the Democratic nominee, but many other black people continue to live lives of desperation.

The jobless figures are far higher for blacks than whites­ — particularly in this bleak economic time. In academic testing, black students’ scores continue to lag. The fracturing of African-American families, where children are raised without benefit of fathers, continues. As does high crime and drug abuse.

But these are trickier issues for the NAACP to rally around.

For millions of middle-class black people, these represent scars they wish to leave behind. For millions more, to raise these issues is to invite charges of blaming the victims — for history does not turn on a dime, and America continues to reap the sad results of generations of institutional bigotry.

But this is the NAACP’s opportunity: to help change the lives of those left behind.

And thus make the organization relevant to those who imagine its great years faded forever in the time of Marshall and Mitchell.