Founded Feb. 12. 1909, the
NAACP is the nation’s oldest, largest and most widely recognized
grassroots-based civil rights organization. Its more than half-million
members and supporters throughout the United States and the world are the
premier advocates for civil rights in their communities, campaigning for equal
opportunity and conducting voter mobilization.
Founding group
The NAACP was formed partly in response to the continuing horrific practice
of lynching and the 1908 race
riot in Springfield, the capital of Illinois and resting place of President
Abraham Lincoln. Appalled at the violence that was committed against blacks, a
group of white liberals that included Mary White Ovington and Oswald Garrison
Villard, both the descendants of abolitionists, William English Walling and Dr.
Henry Moscowitz issued a call for a meeting to discuss racial justice. Some 60
people, seven of whom were African American (including W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B.
Wells-Barnett and Mary Church Terrell), signed the call, which was released on
the centennial of Lincoln’s birth.
Other early members included Joel and Arthur Spingarn, Josephine Ruffin, Mary
Talbert, Inez Milholland, Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, Sophonisba Breckinridge,
John Haynes Holmes, Mary McLeod Bethune, George Henry White, Charles Edward
Russell, John Dewey, William Dean Howells, Lillian Wald, Charles Darrow, Lincoln
Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker, Fanny Garrison Villard, and Walter Sachs.
Echoing the focus of Du Bois’ Niagara Movement began in 1905, the NAACP’s stated
goal was to secure for all people the rights guaranteed in the 13th, 14th, and
15th Amendments to the United States Constitution, which promised an end to
slavery, the equal protection of the law and universal adult male suffrage,
respectively.
The NAACP’s principal objective is to ensure the political, educational, social
and economic equality of minority group citizens of United States and eliminate
race prejudice. The NAACP seeks to remove all barriers of racial discrimination
through the democratic processes.
The NAACP established its national office in New York City in 1910 and named a
board of directors as well as a president, Moorfield Storey, a white
constitutional lawyer and former president of the American Bar Association. The
only African American among the organization’s executives, Du Bois was made
director of publications and research and in 1910 established the official
journal of the NAACP, The Crisis.
The Crisis
Du Bois founded The Crisis magazine as the premier crusading voice for civil
rights. Today, The Crisis, one of the oldest black periodicals in America,
continues this mission. A respected journal of thought, opinion and analysis,
the magazine remains the official publication of the NAACP and is the NAACP’s
articulate partner in the struggle for human rights for people of color.
In time, The Crisis became a voice of the Harlem Renaissance, as Du Bois
published works by Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen and other African American
literary figures. The publication’s prominence would rise.
Now published quarterly, The Crisis is dedicated to being an open and honest
forum for discussing critical issues confronting people of color, American
society and the world in addition to highlighting the historical and cultural
achievements of these diverse peoples.
In essays, interviews, in-depth reporting, etc., writers explore past and
present issues concerning race and its impact on educational, economic,
political, social, moral, and ethical issues. And, each issue is highlighted
with a special section, “The NAACP Today” reporting the news and events of the
NAACP on a local and national level.
Growth
With a strong emphasis on local organizing, by 1913 the NAACP had established
branch offices in such cities as Boston, Massachusetts; Baltimore, Maryland;
Kansas City, Missouri; Washington, D.C.; Detroit, Michigan; and St. Louis,
Missouri.
Joel Spingarn, one of the NAACP founders, was a professor of literature and
formulated much of the strategy that led to the growth of the organization. He
was elected board chairman of the NAACP in 1915 and served as president from
1929-1939.
A series of early court battles, including a victory against a discriminatory
Oklahoma law that regulated voting by means of a grandfather clause (Guinn v.
United States, 1910), helped establish the NAACP’s importance as a legal
advocate. The fledgling organization also learned to harness the power of
publicity through its 1915 battle against D. W. Griffith’s inflammatory Birth of
a Nation, a motion picture that perpetuated demeaning stereotypes of African
Americans and glorified the Ku Klux Klan.
NAACP membership grew rapidly, from around 9,000 in 1917 to around 90,000 in
1919, with more than 300 local branches. Writer and diplomat James Weldon
Johnson became the Association’s first black secretary in 1920, and Louis T.
Wright, a surgeon, was named the first black chairman of its board of directors
in 1934.
The NAACP waged a 30-year campaign against lynching, among the Association’s top
priorities. After early worries about its constitutionality, the NAACP strongly
supported the federal Dyer Bill, which would have punished those who
participated in or failed to prosecute lynch mobs. Though the bill would pass
the U.S. House of Representatives, the Senate never passed the bill, or any
other anti-lynching legislation. Most credit the resulting public debate-fueled
by the NAACP report “Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States,
1889-1919”-with drastically decreasing the incidence of lynching.
Johnson stepped down as secretary in 1930 and was succeeded by Walter F. White.
White was instrumental not only in his research on lynching (in part because, as
a very fair-skinned African American, he had been able to infiltrate white
groups), but also in his successful block of segregationist Judge John J.
Parker’s nomination by President Herbert Hoover to the U.S. Supreme Court.
White presided over the NAACP’s most productive period of legal advocacy. In
1930 the association commissioned the Margold Report, which became the basis for
the successful reversal of the separate-but-equal doctrine that had governed
public facilities since 1896’s Plessy v. Ferguson. In 1935 White recruited
Charles H. Houston as NAACP chief counsel. Houston was the Howard University law
school dean whose strategy on school-segregation cases paved the way for his
protégé Thurgood Marshall to prevail in 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education, the
decision that overturned Plessy.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, which was disproportionately
disastrous for African Americans, the NAACP began to focus on economic justice.
After years of tension with white labor unions, the Association cooperated with
the newly formed Congress of Industrial Organizations in an effort to win jobs
for black Americans. White, a friend and adviser to First Lady–and NAACP
national board member–Eleanor Roosevelt, met with her often in attempts to
convince President Franklin D. Roosevelt to outlaw job discrimination in the
armed forces, defense industries and the agencies spawned by Roosevelt’s New
Deal legislation.
Roosevelt ultimately agreed to open thousands of jobs to black workers when
labor leader A. Philip Randolph, in collaboration with the NAACP, threatened a
national March on Washington movement in 1941. President Roosevelt also agreed
to set up a Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to ensure compliance.
Throughout the 1940s the NAACP saw enormous growth in membership, recording
roughly 600,000 members by 1946. It continued to act as a legislative and legal
advocate, pushing for a federal anti-lynching law and for an end to
state-mandated segregation.
Civil Rights Era
By the 1950s the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, headed by Marshall,
secured the last of these goals through Brown v. Board of Education (1954),
which outlawed segregation in public schools. The NAACP’s Washington, D.C.,
bureau, led by lobbyist Clarence M. Mitchell Jr., helped advance not only
integration of the armed forces in 1948 but also passage of the Civil Rights
Acts of 1957, 1964, and 1968, as well as the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Despite such dramatic courtroom and congressional victories, the implementation
of civil rights was a slow, painful, and oft times violent. The unsolved 1951
murder of Harry T. Moore, an NAACP field secretary in Florida whose home was
bombed on Christmas night, and his wife was just one of many crimes of
retribution against the NAACP and its staff and members.
NAACP Mississippi Field Secretary Medgar Evers and his wife Myrlie also became
high-profile targets for pro-segregationist violence and terrorism. In 1962,
their home was firebombed and later Medgar was assassinated by a sniper in front
of their residence following years of investigations into hostility against
blacks and participation in non-violent demonstrations such as sit-ins to
protest the persistence of Jim Crow segregation throughout the south.
Violence also met black children attempting to enter previously segregated
schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, and other southern cities. Throughout the
south many African Americans were still denied the right to register and vote.
The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s echoed the NAACP’s goals, but
leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., of the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, felt that direct action was needed to obtain them.
Although it was criticized for working exclusively within the system by pursuing
legislative and judicial solutions, the NAACP did provide legal representation
and aid to members of other protest groups over a sustained period of time. The
NAACP even posted bail for hundreds of Freedom Riders in the ‘60s who had
traveled to Mississippi to register black voters and challenge Jim Crow
policies.
Led by Roy Wilkins, who succeeded Walter White as secretary in 1955, the NAACP,
along with A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin and other national organizations
began to plan the 1963 March on Washington.
With the passage of major civil rights legislation the following year, the
Association accomplished what seemed an insurmountable task. In the following
years, the NAACP began to diversify its goals.
Assisting the NAACP throughout the years were many celebrities and leaders,
including Sammy Davis Jr., Lena Horne, Jackie Robinson, Harry Belafonte, Ella
Baker, an NAACP director of branches who stressed the importance of young people
and women in the organization by recruiting members, raising money, and
organizing local campaigns; Daisy Bates, NAACP national board member, Arkansas
state conference president and advisor to the Little Rock Nine; and NAACP
stalwarts like Kivie Kaplan, a businessman and philanthropist from Boston, who
served as president of the NAACP from 1966 until 1975. He personally led
nationwide NAACP Life Membership efforts and fought to keep African Americans
away from illegal drugs.
Close of the first century
Wilkins retired as executive director in 1977 and was replaced by Benjamin L.
Hooks, whose tenure included the Bakke case (1978), in which a California court
outlawed several aspects of affirmative action. During his tenure the Memphis
native is credited with implementing many NAACP programs that continue today.
The NAACP ACT-SO (Academic, Cultural, Technological and Scientific Olympics)
competitions, a major youth talent and skill initiative, and Women in the NAACP
began under his administration.
As millions of African Americans continued to be afflicted as urban poverty and
crime increased, de facto racial segregation remained and job discrimination
lingered throughout the United States, proving the need for continued NAACP
advocacy and action.
Dr. Hooks served as executive director/chief executive officer (CEO) of the
NAACP from 1977 to 1992. Benjamin F. Chavis (now Chavis Muhammad) became
executive director/CEO in 1993, while in 1995 Myrlie Evers-Williams (widow of
Medgar Evers) became the third woman to chair the NAACP, a position she held
until 1998, succeeded by Chairman Emeritus Julian Bond.
In 1996 the NAACP National Board of Directors changed the executive director/CEO
title to president and CEO when it selected Kweisi Mfume, a former congressman
and head of the Congressional Black Caucus, to lead the body. The elected office
of president was eliminated.
Former telecommunications executive Bruce S. Gordon followed in 2005. [NAACP
General Counsel Dennis Courtland Hayes would serve the Association well as
interim national president and CEO twice during changes in administrations in
recent years.]
In May 2008, the NAACP National Board of Directors confirmed Benjamin Todd
Jealous, a former community organizer, newspaper editor and Rhodes Scholar, as
the 14th national executive of the esteemed organization.
Heading into the 21st century, the NAACP is focused on disparities in economics,
health care, education, voter empowerment and the criminal justice system while
also continuing its role as legal advocate for civil rights issues.
Yet the real story of the nation’s most significant civil rights organization
lies in the hearts and minds of the people who would not stand idly by while the
rights of America’s darker citizens were denied. From bold investigations of mob
brutality, protests of mass murders, segregation and discrimination, to
testimony before congressional committees on the vicious tactics used to bar
African Americans from the ballot box, it was the talent and tenacity of NAACP
members that saved lives and changed many negative aspects of American society.
While much of NAACP history is chronicled in books, articles, pamphlets and
magazines, the true movement lies in the faces–the diverse multiracial army of
ordinary women and men from every walk of life, race and class–united to awaken
the consciousness of a people and a nation. The NAACP will remain vigilant in
its mission until the promise of America is made real for all Americans.
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