National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

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NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE

NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE. African American communities, usually through their churches, made several attempts to organize in the late nineteenth century. The only national organization to last from these efforts was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909. The NAACP was originally founded by an inter-racial group of white progressives and black militants belonging to the Niagara Movement. In response to the Springfield, Illinois, race riot of August 1908, a distinguished gathering that included the journalist William English Walling, the social worker Mary White Ovington, the newspaper editor Oswald Garrison Villard, and the scholar W. E. B. Du Bois issued "The Call" for a national conference on black rights to meet on 12 February 1909, the centennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth. The conference formed the National Negro Committee, out of which the NAACP emerged in May 1910.

At its formation, the NAACP adopted a militant program of action based on the platform of its radical fore-runner, the Niagara Movement, demanding equal educational, political, and civil rights for blacks and the enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The NAACP initially employed two basic methods in its protest philosophy—the legal approach and public education. Relying on an integrated and middle-class approach to reform, the NAACP stressed corrective education, legislation, and litigation rather than more radical, disruptive protest. The first years of the NAACP were dedicated to the problems of mob violence and lynching. Between 1915 and 1936, under the leadership of Arthur B. Spingarn, white and black attorneys for the NAACP, including Moorfield Story, Louis Marshall, and Clarence Darrow, attacked four areas of injustice: suffrage, residential segregation ordinances, restrictive covenants, and due process/equal protection for African Americans accused of crimes. The NAACP legal committee joined other organizations, such as the National Urban League, and won its first important victory before the U.S. Supreme Court in Guinn and Beal v. United States (1915), which overturned the amendment to Oklahoma's state constitution that exempted from literacy tests those or the descendents of those who had been eligible to vote prior to 1 January 1867. Other states had enacted similar "grandfather clauses," the clear intent of which was to deny blacks the vote. A second case, Buchanan v. Warley (1917), nullified Jim Crow housing ordinances in Louisville, Kentucky, as they were found to be in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.

During the post–World War I period, the organization, led by its African American executive secretary James Weldon Johnson, focused its attention on antilynching legislation. Although no federal antilynching bills were passed by Congress, in an age of increasing racism and the national rise to prominence of the Ku Klux Klan, the NAACP's aggressive campaign heightened public awareness of and opposition to mob violence against blacks and firmly established the organization as the national spokesman for African Americans.

Over the next three decades, the NAACP directed its attention to voting rights, housing, and the desegregation of public education. In the 1930s, under the leadership of Charles Houston, former dean of the Howard University Law School, the NAACP prepared its first cases aimed at "the soft underbelly" of Jim Crow—graduate schools. In 1935, NAACP lawyers Charles Houston and Thurgood Marshall won the legal battle to admit an African American student, Donald Gaines Murray, to the University of Maryland Law School. Building on the strategy and issues used in the Murray case, the NAACP legal counsel finally argued its first case involving education and the "separate but equal" doctrine before the Supreme Court in Missouri ex. rel. Gaines v. Canada in 1938. Although the court decision reaffirmed the doctrine that separate educational facilities were legal if equal, the road to the 1954 Brown decision had been paved.

During the depression, the NAACP had notable successes, the most famous of which was in response to the barring of the acclaimed soprano Marian Anderson from performing at the Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., by the Daughters of the American Revolution. The NAACP helped to have her concert moved to the Lincoln Memorial, where over 75,000 people attended.

Between 1940 and 1950, the NAACP fought in the courts in two areas, racial injustice in court procedures and discrimination in the voting process. The first case, involving a forced confession of a crime, Lyons v. Oklahoma (1944), resulted in a setback for the NAACP legal team, but the second case, Smith v. Allwright (1944), resulted in banning the all-white primary in Texas. During World War II, the NAACP led the effort to ensure that President Franklin Roosevelt ordered a nondiscrimination policy in war-related industries and federal employment. In 1946, the NAACP won the Morgan v. Virginia case, which banned states from having laws that sanction segregated facilities in interstate travel by train and bus. The NAACP was also influential in pressuring President Harry Truman to sign Executive Order 9981 banning discrimination by the federal government and subsequently integrating the armed forces in 1948.

With Thurgood Marshall as its special legal counsel, the NAACP figured prominently in a series of Supreme Court decisions that outlawed residential covenants against black homebuyers (Shelley v. Kraemer, 1948) and ordered the integration of the University of Oklahoma (Sipuel v. University of Oklahoma, 1948) and the University of Texas (Sweatt v. Painter, 1950). These successful cases on higher education issues helped lead to the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka of May 1954, which finally declared segregated schools unequal and unconstitutional. The Brown decision marked the beginning of the end of the formal aspects of Jim Crow and ushered in a new and stormy course for race relations in the form of the civil rights movement. Although it worked with a variety of newly formed African American–led groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the NAACP's hegemony as the country's major civil rights group was unchallenged.

After one of his many successful mass rallies for civil rights, the NAACP's first field director, Medgar Evers, was assassinated in front of his house in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1963; five months later, President John F. Kennedy was also assassinated, setting the course of the civil rights movement in a different direction, through legislative action. The NAACP achieved its goals by playing a leading role in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which established the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice and the Commission on Civil Rights. The NAACP worked for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which not only forbade discrimination in public places, but also established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

As the NAACP entered the fourth quarter of the twentieth century, it remained an active force among African Americans committed to racial integration, and it continued to work successfully to fight discrimination in housing and strengthen the penalties for violations of civil rights. The organization helped win extensions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and led successful efforts in 1972 to increase the power of the EEOC. Under its executive secretary, Roy Wilkins, the NAACP had a membership of 433,118 in 1,555 branches located in all fifty states by 1975.

In 1982, the NAACP registered more than 850,000 voters, and its protests helped prevent President Ronald Reagan from giving a tax break to the racially segregated Bob Jones University. The NAACP led a massive antiapartheid rally in New York in 1985 and launched a campaign that helped defeat the nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987. In 1996, Maryland congressman Kweisi Mfume left Congress and became the NAACP's president. As the twenty-first century started, the NAACP continued to follow its original goals of fighting social injustice through legal and political action.