National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Founded in 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) arose from two American reform traditions, one rooted in white
philanthropy and the
antislavery movement, the other in various black self‐help organizations created in the antebellum free states to promote group solidarity and racial power.In the decades following emancipation,
African Americans formed a number of organizations committed to the struggle for equal rights. Among these were T. Thomas Fortune's Afro‐American League and Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin's National Federation of Afro‐American Women. Other groups, such as Alexander Crummell's American Negro Academy, utilized research and publications to combat theories of black inferiority. These organizations maintained ties with white progressives and encouraged interracial cooperation toward the goal of a more egalitarian society in which African Americans might fully enjoy the benefits of American citizenship—both as individuals and as members of an ethnic community.
In the early twentieth century, Booker T.
Washington worked with white progressives and northern capitalists behind the scenes to encourage a form of industrial democracy for the benefit of black workers and white capital alike. Washington's so‐called “Tuskegee machine” was challenged by the elitist but racially conscious W.E.B.
Du Bois, who in 1905 founded the so‐called Niagara movement, which advocated militant propaganda and political activism to achieve black advancement.
The NAACP originated as a philanthropic movement among white progressives, including Oswald Garrison Villard, Joel Spingarn, William English Walling, and Mary White Ovington. Black “founders” immediately entered its ranks from across the political spectrum, including Du Bois; Mary Church Terrell, a Tuskegee sympathizer; and Ida B.
Wells‐Barnett, a radical anti‐Bookerite. The immediate impetus was the
lynching of two African Americans in Springfield, Illinois, in 1908, and the antilynching crusade became a major early focus. Du Bois effectively functioned as the NAACP's voice through his editorship of its monthly magazine, the
Crisis, until his ouster in 1934 for advocating a degree of voluntary segregation embodying modified
socialism within the black community.
From 1934 to the 1960s, the NAACP emphasized the legal struggle against
de jure racial
segregation. After Du Bois's departure, leadership passed to field secretary Walter White (1893–1955) and chief legal counsel Thurgood
Marshall, whose arguments before the U.S.
Supreme Court led to the 1954
Brown v. Board of Education decision, which outlawed
de jure public school segregation in the
South. Under Roy Wilkins (1910–1981), executive director from 1955 to 1977, the NAACP, through its national office and local branches throughout the country, was active in the struggle for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It also fought against public acts of defamation and the negative stereotyping of African Americans and other people of color. (As early as 1915, the NAACP had organized a boycott of D.W.
Griffith's racist movie
The Birth of a Nation.)
By the early 1970s,
de jure segregation had been at least temporarily eradicated through a combination of court decisions, acts of Congress, and executive orders. Legal barriers to black participation in the electoral processes of the southern states had also been effectively overcome. With these objectives largely achieved, the NAACP under president Kweisi Mfume (1948–) and board chairman Julian Bond (1940–) searched for new ways to define its mission and reinforce its identity as a black‐controlled self‐help organization as the twentieth century ended. With more than 500,000 members in over 2,200 branches, it remains the nation's oldest, largest, and most influential African‐American organization.
See also
Civil Rights;
Civil Rights Legislation;
Civil Rights Movement;
Progressive Era;
Racism;
Urban League, National.
Bibliography
Charles Flint Kellogg , NAACP: A History of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1967.
John H. Bracey and August Meier, eds., Papers of the NAACP, 1992.
Christopher Robert Reed , The Chicago NAACP and the Rise of Black Professional Leadership, 1910–1966, 1997.
Wilson J. Moses
