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National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

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National Association for the Advancement of Colored People


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Contact Information
NAACP
4805 Mount Hope Dr.
Baltimore, MD 21215
MD Tel. 410-580-5777
Toll Free 877-622-2798
Fax 410-585-1310

Type: Private - Association
On the web: http://www.naacp.org

The NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) strives to ensure that all people are represented and have equal rights in American society and culture, regardless of race. The nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization, the group works via advocacy, education, and research, and it publishes the magazine Crisis. It registers African Americans to vote, encourages academic achievement among high school students, and works with inmates to promote education and reduce recidivism. Sources of support include contributions and membership dues. The NAACP was founded in 1909 by a group that included W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells-Barnett.

Officers:
Chairman: Julian Bond
President and CEO: Benjamin T. (Ben) Jealous
COO: Rev Nelson B. Rivers III

 
US Supreme Court: National Association For the Advancement of Colored People
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Commonly known by its acronym NAACP, is the largest civil rights organization in the United States. Founded in 1909, the NAACP during its first two decades participated in a number of Supreme Court cases that expanded the rights of African‐Americans. It submitted an amicus brief in Guinn v. United States. (1915), which overturned the use of the “grandfather clause” to disfranchise black voters, and it successfully challenged residential segregation ordinances in Buchanan v. Warley (1917). In Moore v. Dempsey (1923), the Court ratified the association's arguments that federal courts could intervene to protect the procedural rights of defendants who were tried in mob‐dominated state proceedings.

The NAACP's failure to wrest control of the Scottsboro cases from the International Labor Defense in 1931, however, exposed the organization's lack of a comprehensive litigation strategy. In 1934 the association appointed Charles Hamilton Houston, dean of Howard Law School, as the NAACP's first full‐time counsel. Houston advocated a unified approach to resolving the disparate problems associated with discrimination, segregation, and racial violence. The creation of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) in 1939 further enhanced the organization's ability to fashion a viable constitutional litigation strategy. Most of the association's most famous legal victories, such as Brown v. Board of Education (1954), were achieved by the LDF, but the NAACP retains its own legal staff and continues to pursue litigation, particularly through its coordinated system of state conferences and local branches.

The NAACP also seeks to influence the Supreme Court through political action. In 1930, the association played a pivotal role in defeating John J. Parker's nomination to the Court after it discovered that Parker had criticized political participation of African‐Americans during the 1920 North Carolina gubernatorial campaign. Subsequently, the NAACP has opposed the appointments of Clement Haynsworth, Harrold Carswell, Robert Bork, and Clarence Thomas because of their positions regarding civil rights.

See also Legal Defense Fund.

— Eric W. Rise

 

Oldest and largest U.S. civil rights organization. It was founded in 1909 to secure political, educational, social, and economic equality for African Americans; W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells were among its 60 founders. Headquartered in Baltimore, Md., the NAACP has undertaken litigation, political activity, and public education programs. In 1939 it organized the independent Legal Defense and Education Fund as its legal arm, which sued for school desegregation in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). During World War II it pressed for desegregation of the armed forces, which was achieved in 1948. In 1967 its general counsel, Thurgood Marshall, became the U.S. Supreme Court's first African American justice.

For more information on NAACP, visit Britannica.com.

 
US Government Guide: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
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The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is a private, not-for-profit organization founded in 1909 to protect and expand the civil rights of African Americans. The NAACP has used both political and legal strategies to carry out its mission. In 1939 the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) was created to support legal strategies on behalf of civil rights for African Americans. From 1940 to 1961 Thurgood Marshall was the director of the LDF. He was primarily responsible for winning 29 victories for the LDF in cases before the Supreme Court. Marshall and the LDF helped the NAACP to win its greatest legal victory, the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which outlawed racial segregation in public schools. Marshall went on to become an associate justice of the Supreme Court.

The NAACP carefully monitors the President's nominations of Supreme Court justices and other federal judges. The purpose is to encourage the appointment of people who are likely to agree with the organization's views on civil rights.

See also Brown v. Board of Education; Civil rights

 
US History Encyclopedia: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
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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.

Bibliography

Harris, Jacqueline L. History and Achievement of the NAACP. New York: Watts, 1992.

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Web site http://www.naacp.org/.

Ovington, Mary W. Black and White Sat Down Together: The Reminiscences of an NAACP Founder. New York: Feminist Press, 1995.

Tushnet, Mark V. NAACP's Legal Strategy against Segregated Education, 1925–1990. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Zangrando, Robert L. The NAACP Crusade against Lynching, 1909–1950. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980.

 
Spotlight: Naacp
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From our Archives: Today's Highlights, February 12, 2006

This date in 1909 is the official date given for the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Though the meeting to form the group – scheduled to coincide with the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth – was postponed for three months, it is still considered to be the founding date of the organization. The group's initial mandate was to work to end lynchings and Jim Crow Laws legalizing racial discrimination.
 
Columbia Encyclopedia: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
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National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), organization composed mainly of American blacks, but with many white members, whose goal is the end of racial discrimination and segregation.

The association was formed as the direct result of the lynching (1908) of two blacks in Springfield, Ill. The incident produced a wide response by white Northerners to a call by Mary W. Ovington, a white woman, for a conference to discuss ways of achieving political and social equality for blacks. This conference led to the formation (1910) of the NAACP, headed by eight prominent Americans, seven white and one, William E. B. Du Bois, black. The selection of Du Bois was significant, for he was a black who had rejected the policy of gradualism advocated by Booker T. Washington and demanded immediate equality for blacks. From 1910 to 1934 Du Bois was the editor of the association's periodical The Crisis, which reported on race relations around the world. The new organization grew so rapidly that by 1915 it was able to organize a partially successful boycott of the motion picture The Birth of a Nation, which portrayed blacks of the Reconstruction era in a distorted light.

Most of the NAACP's early efforts were directed against lynching. In this area it could claim considerable success. In 1911 there were 71 lynchings in the United States, with a black person the victim 63 times; by the 1950s lynching had virtually disappeared. Since its beginning, and with increasing emphasis since World War II, the NAACP has advocated nonviolent protests against discrimination and has disapproved of extremist black groups such as SNCC and the Black Panthers in the 1960s and 70s and CORE and the Nation of Islam in the 1980s and 90s, many of which criticized the organization as passive. While complacent in the 1980s, it became more active in legislative redistricting, voter registration, and lobbying in the 1990s.

Well-known leaders of the NAACP include Moorfield Storey (1910–29), Walter White (1931–55), Roy Wilkins (1955–77), and Benjamin Hooks (1977–93). In the mid-1990s the group faced financial difficulties and a loss of confidence in its leadership, as the organization's executive director, Benjamin Chavis (see Muhammad, B. F.), and board chairman, William Gibson, were dismissed in 1994 and 1995, respectively. Merlie Evers-Williams, widow of slain civil-rights leader Medgar Evers, replaced Gibson in 1995, and Representative Kweisi Mfume of Maryland, head of the Congressional Black Caucus, was chosen to replace Chavis in 1996, with the new title of president and chief executive officer. Mfume retired as president in 2004 and was succeeded by Bruce S. Gordon, a former telecommunications executive, who served from 2005 to 2007. In 2008 Benjamin Todd Jealous was named Gordon's successor. Julian Bond has been board chairman since 1998.

With a membership of about 300,000, the association remains the most influential civil-rights organization in the United States. The NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, an independent legal aid group, argues in court on behalf of the NAACP and other civil-rights groups. Along with the NAACP, it was instrumental in helping to bring about the Supreme Court's ruling (1954) against segregated public education in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kans. case.

Bibliography

See R. L. Jack, A History of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1943); L. Hughes, Fight for Freedom (1962); B. J. Ross, J. E. Spingarn and the Rise of the NAACP, 1911–1939 (1972); R. L. Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade against Lynching, 1909 to 1950 (1980).


 
Law Encyclopedia: National Association For the Advancement of Colored People
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This entry contains information applicable to United States law only.

Founded in 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is the oldest and largest civil rights organization in the United States. The interracial NAACP works for the elimination of racial discrimination through lobbying, legal action, and education. With its victories in landmark Supreme Court cases such as Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483, 74 S. Ct. 686, 98 L. Ed. 873 (1954), as well as its sponsorship of grassroots social programs, the NAACP has been a leader in the effort to guarantee that African Americans and members of other racial minorities receive equal protection under the law.

The NAACP grew out of race riots that occurred in Springfield, Illinois, in August 1908. Shocked at the violence directed against African Americans by European American mobs in Abraham Lincoln's hometown, William English Walling, a white socialist, wrote a magazine article that called for the formation of a group to come to the aid of African Americans. The following year, Walling met with two young white social workers, Mary White Ovington and Henry Moskowitz, and began planning a course of action. They enlisted the aid of Oswald Garrison Villard, grandson of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, to publicize the Conference on the Status of the Negro, to be held that May. The conference drew several hundred people, many of whom would unite a year later as the NAACP.

Although originally the NAACP's leadership was largely white, since the 1920s, it has been primarily African American. The organization drew many of its original white members from progressive and socialist ranks, and most of its first African American members through the leadership of the historian and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington were the two principal African American leaders of the day. Du Bois had led the Niagara Movement, an African American protest organization, since 1905 and he brought the membership of that organization into the NAACP. He was named director of publicity and research for the NAACP in 1910, and edited the organization's highly respected journal, The Crisis, until 1934.

From the beginning, the NAACP made legal action on behalf of African Americans a top priority. It won early Supreme Court victories in Guinn v. United States, 238 U.S. 347, 35 S. Ct. 926, 59 L. Ed. 1340 (1915), which overturned the grandfather clause as a means of disfranchising black voters, and in Buchanan v. Warley, 245 U.S. 60, 38 S. Ct. 16, 62 L. Ed. 149 (1917), which barred municipal ordinances requiring racial segregation in housing. (The grandfather clause imposed a literacy test on persons who were not entitled to vote prior to 1866. This meant that all slaves and their descendants had to pass a rigorous literacy test based on knowledge of the state constitution and other highly technical documents. Few, if any, African Americans passed the test.)

The NAACP appointed its first African American executive director, James Weldon Johnson, in 1920. Under Johnson and his successor, Walter White, who led the organization from 1931 to 1955, the NAACP worked for the passage of a federal antilynching law. Although unsuccessful in its efforts to pass a federal law, the NAACP brought public attention to the brutality of lynching and helped to significantly reduce its occurrence. As a result, lynching— which is the infliction of punishment, usually hanging, by a mob without trial — is now illegal in every state.

For its early litigation efforts, the NAACP relied on lawyers who volunteered their services. In 1934, the group hired Charles Hamilton Houston, an African American and dean of Howard Law School, as its first full-time attorney. The following year, Houston started a legal campaign to end school segregation. Houston was assisted by Thurgood Marshall, a young lawyer who would go on to argue many cases before the Supreme Court and in 1967 would become the first African American appointed to the Court. In 1940, the NAACP appointed Marshall director-counsel of its new legal branch, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

After succeeding in Supreme Court cases concerning unequal salary scales for black teachers and segregation in graduate and professional schools, the NAACP achieved its most celebrated triumph before the Court in Brown, a decision that declared racial segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional.

The Brown decision sparked another civil rights initiative, the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott of 1955. The boycott catapulted Martin Luther King, Jr., to national recognition and spurred the creation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). By the early 1960s, the SCLC, the Student NonViolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the National Urban League all took the lead in promoting civil rights for African Americans. These groups adopted a direct-action approach to promoting African American interests, conducting highly publicized sit-ins and demonstrations.

The NAACP, meanwhile, drew criticism for its devotion to traditional legal and political means for seeking social change. Roy Wilkins, executive director of the NAACP from 1955 to 1975, voiced his preference for traditional tactics over "the kind that picks a fight with the sheriff and gets somebody's head beaten" (Spear 1984, 7:402). Although many viewed it as overly conservative in its civil rights approach, the NAACP helped pass important civil rights legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (42 U.S.C.A. § 2000a et seq.), the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (42 U.S.C.A. § 1973 et seq.), and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 (42 U.S.C.A. § 3601 et seq.). The NAACP remained an interracial group and spurned the call for black nationalism and separatism voiced by SNCC, the Black Panthers, and other groups that turned to blacks-only membership later in the 1960s.

Unlike many of the more radical civil rights groups, the NAACP outlasted the turbulent 1960s. However, it experienced setbacks during the 1970s in Supreme Court cases such as Bradley v. Millikin, 418 U.S. 717, 94 S. Ct. 3112, 41 L. Ed. 2d 1069 (1974), which overturned efforts to integrate largely white suburban public school districts and largely black urban districts, and Regents of University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265, 98 S. Ct. 2733, 57 L. Ed. 2d 750 (1978), which placed limits on affirmative action programs.

Benjamin L. Hooks succeeded Wilkins as NAACP director in 1977. He held that office until 1993, when he was replaced by Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr. Funding and leadership problems plagued the NAACP during the mid-1990s. After a sexual harassment suit was filed against Chavis in 1994, the NAACP board of directors voted to oust him as executive director. The following year, it dismissed board chairman William F. Gibson and replaced him with Myrlie Evers-Williams, the widow of civil rights activist Medgar Evers. Seeking to put aside its troubles, on February 20, 1996, the NAACP board appointed Kweisi Mfume, a U.S. representative from Maryland and head of the Congressional Black Caucus, as the organization's new president and chief executive officer. To restore the organization's financial stability, Mfume cut back the national staff by one-third.

Among its many tasks, the NAACP works on the local level to handle cases of racial discrimination; offers referral services, tutorials, and day care; sponsors the NAACP National Housing Corporation to help develop low- and moderate-income housing for families; offers programs to youths and prison inmates; and maintains a law library. It also lobbies Congress regarding the appointment of Supreme Court justices.

The NAACP accepts people of all races and religions as members. In the mid-1990s, it had a membership of over four-hundred-thousand people, with 1,802 local groups and 132 staff. Its headquarters is in Baltimore.

See: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas; Civil Rights Movement; Integration; Regents of University of California v. Bakke; School Desegregation.

 
Abbreviations: NAACP
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is short for:

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

 
Politics: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
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An organization that promotes the rights and welfare of black people. The NAACP is the oldest civil rights organization in the United States, founded in 1909. Among the NAACP's achievements was a lawsuit that resulted in the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Brown versus Board of Education, in 1954, which declared the segregation of public schools unconstitutional. (See also W. E. B. DuBois and separate but equal.)

 
Wikipedia: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
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National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
Abbreviation NAACP
Formation February 12, 1909
Type Non-profit organization
Purpose/focus "To ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate racial hatred and racial discrimination."
Headquarters Baltimore, Maryland
Membership 300,000[1]
President/CEO Benjamin Jealous
Budget $27,624,433[2]
Website http://www.naacp.org/
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The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, usually abbreviated as NAACP and pronounced N-double-A-C-P, is one of the oldest and most influential civil rights organizations in the United States.[3] Its mission is "to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate racial hatred and racial discrimination".[4] Its name, retained in accord with tradition, is one of the last surviving uses of the term colored people.

The NAACP bestows the annual Image Awards for achievement in the arts and entertainment, and the annual Spingarn Medals for outstanding positive achievement of any kind, on deserving African Americans.

Contents

Organization

The NAACP's headquarters are in Baltimore, Maryland, with additional regional offices in California, New York, Michigan, Missouri, Georgia, and Texas. Each regional office is responsible for coordinating the efforts of state conferences in the states included in that region. Local, youth, and college chapters organize activities for individual members.

The NAACP is run nationally by a 64-member board led by a chair. The board elects one person as the President and chief executive officer for the organization; Benjamin Jealous is its most recent (and youngest) President, selected to replace Bruce K. Gordon, who resigned in March 2007. Civil Rights Movement activist and former Georgia State Senator Julian Bond remains as chairman.

Departments within the NAACP govern areas of action. Local chapters are supported by the Branch and Field Services department and the Youth and College department. The Legal Department focuses on court cases of broad application to minorities, such as systematic discrimination in employment, government, or education. The Washington, D.C., bureau is responsible for lobbying the U.S. government, and the Education Department works to improve public education at the local, state and federal levels. The goal of the Health Division is to advance health care for minorities through public policy initiatives and education.

As of 2007, the NAACP had approximately 425,000 paying and non-paying members.[5]

History

In 1905, a group of 32 prominent, outspoken African Americans met to discuss the challenges facing "people of color" (a term used to describe people who were not white) - and possible strategies and solutions. Among the issues they were concerned about was the disfranchisement of blacks in the South starting in 1890 to 1908, when Southern legislatures ratified new constitutions creating barriers to voter registration and more complex election rules. Voter registration and turnout dropped markedly in the South as a result. Men who had been voting for 30 years were told they did not "qualify" to register.

Because hotels in the U.S. were segregated, the men convened under the leadership of Harvard scholar W. E. B. Du Bois at a hotel situated on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. As a result, the group came to be known as the Niagara Movement. A year later, three whites joined the group: journalist William E. Walling, social worker Mary White Ovington, and Jewish social worker Henry Moskowitz, then Associate Leader of the New York Society for Ethical Culture.

The fledgling group struggled for a time with limited resources and decided to broaden its membership to increase its scope and effectiveness. Solicitations for support went out to more than 60 prominent Americans, and a meeting date was set for February 12, 1909. This was intended to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the birth of President Abraham Lincoln, who emancipated enslaved African Americans. While the meeting did not take place until three months later, this date is often cited as the founding date of the organization.

The Race Riot of 1908 in Lincoln's hometown of Springfield, Illinois, the previous summer had highlighted the urgent need for an effective civil rights organization in the U.S. This event is often cited as the catalyst for the formation of the NAACP.

The NAACP was founded on February 12, 1909 by a diverse group composed of Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Archibald Grimké, Henry Moscowitz, Mary White Ovington, Oswald Garrison Villard, William English Walling (the last son of a former slave-holding family),[6][7], and Florence Kelley, a social reformer and friend of Du Bois.[8]

On May 30, 1909, the Niagara Movement conference took place at New York City's Henry Street Settlement House, from which an organization of more than 40 individuals emerged, calling itself the National Negro Committee. Du Bois played a key role in organizing the event and presided over the proceedings. Also in attendance was African-American journalist and anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett. At its second conference on May 30, 1910, members chose as the organization's name the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and elected its first officers, who were [9]:

  • National President, Moorfield Storey, Boston
  • Chairman of the Executive Committee, William English Walling
  • Treasurer, John E. Milholland (a Lincoln Republican and Presbyterian from New York City and Lewis, NY)
  • Disbursing Treasurer, Oswald Garrison Villard
  • Executive Secretary, Frances Blascoer
  • Director of Publicity and Research, Dr. W.E.B. DuBois.

The NAACP was incorporated a year later in 1911. The association's charter delineated its mission:

To promote equality of rights and to eradicate caste or race prejudice among the citizens of the United States; to advance the interest of colored citizens; to secure for them impartial suffrage; and to increase their opportunities for securing justice in the courts, education for the children, employment according to their ability and complete equality before law.

The conference resulted in a more influential and diverse organization, where the leadership was predominantly white and heavily Jewish American. In fact, at its founding, the NAACP had only one African American on its executive board, Du Bois himself. It did not elect a black president until 1975, although executive directors had been African American. The Jewish community contributed greatly to the NAACP's founding and continued financing. Jewish historian Howard Sachar writes in his book A History of Jews in America of how, "In 1914, Professor Emeritus Joel Spingarn of Columbia University became chairman of the NAACP and recruited for its board such Jewish leaders as Jacob Schiff, Jacob Billikopf, and Rabbi Stephen Wise."[10] Early Jewish-American co-founders included Julius Rosenthal, Lillian Wald, Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch and Wise.

According to Pbs.org "Over the years Jews have also expressed empathy (capability to share and understand another's emotion and feelings) with the plight of Blacks. In the early 1900s, Jewish newspapers drew parallels between the Black movement out of the South and the Jews' escape from Egypt, pointing out that both Blacks and Jews lived in ghettos, and calling anti-Black riots in the South "pogroms". Stressing the similarities rather than the differences between the Jewish and Black experience in America, Jewish leaders emphasized the idea that both groups would benefit the more America moved toward a society of merit, free of religious, ethnic and racial restrictions."[11] Pbs.org further states, "The American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, and the Anti-Defamation League were central to the campaign against racial prejudice. Jews made substantial financial contributions to many civil rights organizations, including the NAACP, the Urban League, the Congress of Racial Equality, and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. About 50 percent of the civil rights attorneys in the South during the 1960s were Jews, as were over 50 percent of the Whites who went to Mississippi in 1964 to challenge Jim Crow Laws. "[11]

Du Bois continued to play a pivotal role in the organization and served as editor of the association's magazine, The Crisis, which had a circulation of over 30,000.

Moorfield Storey, who was white, was the president of the NAACP from its founding to 1915. Storey was a long-time classical liberal and Grover Cleveland Democrat who advocated laissez-faire free markets, the gold standard, and anti-imperialism. Storey consistently and aggressively championed civil rights, not only for blacks but also for Native Americans and immigrants (he opposed immigration restrictions).

Fighting Jim Crow and disfranchisement

An African American drinks out of a segregated water cooler designated for "colored" patrons in 1939 at a streetcar terminal in Oklahoma City.

In its early years, the NAACP concentrated on using the courts to overturn the Jim Crow statutes that legalized racial segregation. In 1913, the NAACP organized opposition to President Woodrow Wilson's introduction of racial segregation into federal government policy, offices, and hiring.

By 1914, the group had 6,000 members and 50 branches. It was influential in winning the right of African Americans to serve as officers in World War I. Six hundred African-American officers were commissioned and 700,000 men registered for the draft. The following year, the NAACP organized a nationwide protest, with marches in numerous cities, against D.W. Griffith's silent movie Birth of a Nation, a film that glamorized the Ku Klux Klan. As a result, several cities refused to allow the film to open.

The NAACP began to lead lawsuits targeting disfranchisement and racial segregation early in its history. It played a significant part in the challenge of Guinn v. Harris (1915) to Oklahoma's discriminatory grandfather clause that disfranchised most black citizens while exempting many whites from certain voter registration requirements. It persuaded the Supreme Court of the United States to rule in Buchanan v. Warley in 1917 that state and local governments cannot officially segregate African Americans into separate residential districts. The Court's opinion reflected the jurisprudence of property rights and freedom of contract as embodied in the earlier precedent it established in Lochner v. New York.

In 1916, when the NAACP was just seven years old, chairman Joel Spingarn invited James Weldon Johnson to serve as field secretary. Johnson was a former U.S. consul to Venezuela and a noted scholar and columnist. Within four years, Johnson was instrumental in increasing the NAACP's membership from 9,000 to almost 90,000. In 1920, Johnson was elected head of the organization. Over the next ten years, the NAACP escalated its lobbying and litigation efforts, becoming internationally known for its advocacy of equal rights and equal protection for the "American Negro".

The NAACP devoted much of its energy during the interwar years to fighting the lynching of blacks throughout the United States by working for legislation, lobbying and educating the public. The organization sent its field secretary Walter F. White to Phillips County, Arkansas, in October 1919, to investigate the Elaine Race Riot. More than 200 black tenant farmers were killed by roving white vigilantes and federal troops after a deputy sheriff's attack on a union meeting of sharecroppers left one white man dead. White published his report on the riot in the Chicago Daily News.[12] The NAACP organized the appeals for twelve black men sentenced to death a month later based on the fact that testimony used in their convictions was obtained by beatings and electric shocks. It gained a groundbreaking Supreme Court decision in Moore v. Dempsey 261 U.S. 86 (1923) that significantly expanded the Federal courts' oversight of the states' criminal justice systems in the years to come. White investigated eight race riots and 41 lynchings for the NAACP and directed its study Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States.[13]

The NAACP also spent more than a decade seeking federal legislation against lynching, but Southern white Democrats voted as a block against it or used the filibuster in the Senate to block passage. Because of disfranchisement, there were no black representatives from the South in Congress and the region had essentially a one-party system of Democrats. The NAACP regularly displayed a black flag stating "A Man Was Lynched Yesterday" from the window of its offices in New York to mark each lynching.

In alliance with the American Federation of Labor, the NAACP led the successful fight to prevent the nomination of John Johnston Parker to the Supreme Court, based on his support for denying the vote to blacks and his anti-labor rulings. It organized support for the Scottsboro Boys. The NAACP lost most of the internecine battles with the Communist Party and International Labor Defense over the control of those cases and the strategy to be pursued in that case.

The organization also brought litigation to challenge the "white primary" system in the South. Southern states had created white-only primaries as another way of barring blacks from the political process. Since southern states were one-party states, the primaries were the only competitive contests. In 1944 in Smith v. Allwright, the Supreme Court ruled against the white primary. Although states had to retract legislation related to the white primaries, the legislatures soon came up with new methods to limit the franchise for blacks.

Desegregation

Locals viewing the bomb-damaged home of Arthur Shores, NAACP attorney, Birmingham, Alabama, on 5 September 1963. The bomb exploded on 4 September, the previous day, injuring Shores' wife.

With the rise of private corporate litigators like the NAACP to bear the expense, civil suits became the pattern in modern civil rights litigation. The NAACP's Legal department, headed by Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall, undertook a campaign spanning several decades to bring about the reversal of the "separate but equal" doctrine announced by the Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson.

The NAACP's Baltimore chapter under president Lillie Mae Carroll Jackson, challenged segregation in Maryland state professional schools by supporting the 1935 Murray v. Pearson case argued by Marshall. Houston's victory in Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938) led to the formation of the NAACP Legal Defense fund in 1940.

The campaign for desegregation culminated in a unanimous 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education that held state-sponsored segregation of elementary schools was unconstitutional. Bolstered by that victory, the NAACP pushed for full desegregation throughout the South. Starting on December 5, 1955, NAACP activists, including E.D. Nixon, its local president, and Rosa Parks, who had served as the chapter's Secretary, helped organize a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. This was designed to protest segregation on the city's buses, two-thirds of whose riders were black. The boycott lasted 381 days.

The State of Alabama responded by effectively barring the NAACP from operating within its borders because of its refusal to divulge a list of its members. The NAACP feared members could be fired or face violent retaliation for their activities. Although the Supreme Court eventually overturned the state's action in NAACP v. Alabama, 357 U.S. 449 (1958), the NAACP lost its leadership role in the Civil Rights Movement while it was barred from Alabama.

New organizations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) rose up with different approaches to activism. These newer groups relied on direct action and mass mobilization to advance the rights of African Americans, rather than litigation and legislation. Roy Wilkins, NAACP's executive director, clashed repeatedly with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders over questions of strategy and leadership within the movement.

The NAACP continued to use the Supreme Court's decision in Brown to press for desegregation of schools and public facilities throughout the country. Daisy Bates, president of its Arkansas state chapter, spearheaded the campaign by the Little Rock Nine to integrate the public schools in Little Rock, Arkansas.

By the mid-1960s, the NAACP had regained some of its preeminence in the Civil Rights Movement by pressing for civil rights legislation. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom took place on August 28, 1963. That fall President John F. Kennedy sent a civil rights bill to Congress before he was assassinated.

President Lyndon B. Johnson worked hard to persuade Congress to pass a civil rights bill aimed at ending racial discrimination in employment, education and public accommodations, and succeeded in gaining passage in July 1964. He followed that with passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which provided for protection of the franchise, with a role for federal oversight and administrators in places where voter turnout was historically low.

After Kivie Kaplan died in 1975, scientist W. Montague Cobb became President of the NAACP and served until 1982. Benjamin Hooks, a lawyer and clergyman, was elected as the NAACP's executive director in 1977, after the retirement of Roy Wilkins.

The 1990s: crisis and restored strength

In the 1990s, the NAACP ran into debt. The dismissal of two leading officials further added to the picture of an organization in deep crisis.

In 1993 the NAACP's Board of Directors narrowly selected Reverend Benjamin Chavis over Reverend Jesse Jackson to fill the position of Executive Director. A controversial figure, Chavis was ousted eighteen months later by the same board that had hired him. They accused him of using NAACP funds for an out-of-court settlement in a sexual harassment lawsuit.[14] Following the dismissal of Chavis, Myrlie Evers-Williams narrowly defeated NAACP chairperson William Gibson for president in 1995, after Gibson was accused of overspending and mismanagement of the organization's funds.

In 1996 Congressman Kweisi Mfume, a Democratic Congressman from Maryland and former head of the Congressional Black Caucus, was named the organization's president. Three years later strained finances forced the organization to drastically cut its staff, from 250 in 1992 to just fifty.

In the second half of the 1990s, the organization restored its finances, permitting the NAACP National Voter Fund to launch a major get-out-the-vote offensive in the 2000 U.S. presidential elections. 10.5 million African Americans cast their ballots in the election. This was one million more than four years before,[14] and the NAACP's effort was credited by observers as playing a significant role in Democrat Al Gore's winning several states where the election was close, such as Pennsylvania and Michigan.[14]

Lee Alcorn controversy

During the 2000 Presidential election, Lee Alcorn, president of the Dallas NAACP branch, criticized Al Gore's selection of Senator Joe Lieberman for his Vice-Presidential candidate because Lieberman was Jewish. On a gospel talk radio show on station KHVN, Alcorn stated, "If we get a Jew person, then what I'm wondering is, I mean, what is this movement for, you know? Does it have anything to do with the failed peace talks?" ... "So I think we need to be very suspicious of any kind of partnerships between the Jews at that kind of level because we know that their interest primarily has to do with money and these kind of things."[15]

NAACP President Kweisi Mfume immediately suspended Alcorn and condemned his remarks. Mfume stated, "I strongly condemn those remarks. I find them to be repulsive, anti-Semitic, anti-NAACP and anti-American. Mr. Alcorn does not speak for the NAACP, its board, its staff or its membership. We are proud of our long-standing relationship with the Jewish community and I personally will not tolerate statements that run counter to the history and beliefs of the NAACP in that regard."[15]

Alcorn, who had been suspended three times in the previous five years for misconduct, subsequently resigned from the NAACP and started his own organization called the Coalition for the Advancement of Civil Rights. Alcorn criticized the NAACP, saying, "I can't support the leadership of the NAACP. Large amounts of money are being given to them by large corporations that I have a problem with."[15] Alcorn also said, "I cannot be bought. For this reason I gladly offer my resignation and my membership to the NAACP because I cannot work under these constraints."[16]

Alcorn's remarks were also condemned by the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Jewish groups and George W. Bush's rival Republican presidential campaign. Jackson said he strongly supported Lieberman's addition to the Democratic ticket, saying, "When we live our faith, we live under the law. He [Lieberman] is a firewall of exemplary behavior."[15] Al Sharpton, another prominent African-American leader, said, "The appointment of Mr. Lieberman was to be welcomed as a positive step."[17] The leaders of the American Jewish Congress praised the NAACP for its quick response, stating that: "It will take more than one bigot like Alcorn to shake the sense of fellowship of American Jews with the NAACP and black America. . . Our common concerns are too urgent, our history too long, our connection too sturdy, to let anything like this disturb our relationship."[18]

U.S. President Bush and the NAACP

In 2004, President George W. Bush (2001-2009) became the first sitting U.S. president since Herbert Hoover (1929–1933) to fail to address the NAACP when he declined an invitation to speak to its national convention.[19] The White House originally said the president had a schedule conflict with the NAACP convention,[20] slated for July 10-15, 2004. On July 10, 2004, however, Bush's spokesperson said that Bush had declined the invitation to speak to the NAACP because of harsh statements about him by its leaders.[20] In an interview, Bush said, "I would describe my relationship with the current leadership as basically nonexistent. You've heard the rhetoric and the names they've called me."[20] Bush also mentioned his admiration for some members of the NAACP and said he would seek to work with them "in other ways."[20]

On July 20, 2006, after having declined the civil rights group's invitations for five years, Bush addressed the NAACP national convention. He made a bid for increasing support by African Americans for Republicans, in the midst of a midterm election.[21][22]

NAACP and tax exempt status

The Internal Revenue Service informed the NAACP in October 2004 that it was investigating its tax-exempt status based on Julian Bond's speech at its 2004 Convention in which he criticized President George W. Bush as well as other political figures.[23][24] In general, the US Internal Revenue Code prohibits organizations granted tax-exempt status from "directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office."[25] The NAACP denounced the investigation as retaliation for its success in increasing the number of African Americans who vote.[23][26] In August 2006, the IRS investigation concluded with the agency's finding "that the remarks did not violate the group's tax-exempt status."[27]

NAACP and youth

This aspect of the NAACP came into existence in 1936 and now is made of over 600 groups and totaling over 30,000 individuals. The NAACP Youth and College Division is a branch of the NAACP in which the youth are actively involved. The Youth Council is composed of hundreds of state,county,high school and college operations in which youth (and college students) volunteer to share their voices or opinions with their fellow mankind and address issues that are both local and national. Sometimes volunteer work expands to a more international scale. Committing to the Youth Council may reward youth with opportunities to travel or even scholarships.

In 2003, NAACP President and CEO, Kweisi Mfume, appointed Brandon Neal, the National Youth and College Division Director [Jet Magazine, April 2003]. Currently, Stefanie L. Brown serves as the NAACP's National Youth and College Division Director. A graduate and former Student Government President at Howard University, Stefanie previously served as the National Youth Council Coordinator of the NAACP.

Mission of the Youth and College Division

"The mission of the NAACP Youth & College Division shall be to inform youth of the problems affecting African Americans and other racial and ethnic minorities; to advance the economic, education, social and political status of African Americans and other racial and ethnic minorities and their harmonious cooperation with other peoples; to stimulate an appreciation of the African Diaspora and other people of color’s contribution to civilization; and to develop an intelligent, militant effective youth leadership"

ACT-SO program

Since 1978 the NAACP has sponsored the Afro-Academic, Cultural, Technological and Scientific Olympics (ACT-SO) program for high-school youth around the United States. The program is designed to recognize and award African American youth who demonstrate accomplishment in academics, technology, and the arts. Local chapters sponsor competitions in various categories of achievement for young people in grades 9–12. Winners of the local competitions are eligible to proceed to the national event at a convention held each summer at various locations around the United States. Winners at the national competition receive national recognition along with cash awards and various prizes.[28]

Criticism

The non-profit rating organization Charity Navigator lists the NAACP as #7 on their list of "10 Highly Paid CEOs at Low-Rated Charities".[29] Charity Navigator rates the NAACP's finances at zero out of four stars, in part because only 52.8% of the NAACP expenditures go towards programs, with the rest going towards administration and fund raising.[30]

References

  1. ^ Five Reasons to Join the NCAAP from the organization's website
  2. ^ http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=4158
  3. ^ Appiah, K. A. and Gates, Jr., Henry Louis, eds. Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, in articles "Civil Rights Movement" by Patricia Sullivan (pp 441-455) and "National Association for the Advancement of Colored People" by Kate Tuttle (pp 1,388-1,391). ISBN 0-465-00071-1.
  4. ^ "NAACP - Our Mission". http://www.naacp.org/about/mission/. Retrieved on 2008-09-05. 
  5. ^ Texeira, Erin. "NAACP president to step down, cites discord with board". Associated Press (USA Today). http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-03-04-naacp_N.htm. 
  6. ^ Simkin, John. "William English Walling biography". Spartacus Educational. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAwalling.htm. 
  7. ^ "NAACP Timeline". National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. http://www.naacp.org/about/history/timeline/. 
  8. ^ Kathryn Kish Sklar, "Florence Kelley", Women Building Chicago, 1790-1990: A Biographical Dictionary, Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast, eds., Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana, 2001, p. 463
  9. ^ NAACP - How NAACP Began
  10. ^ Howard Sachar. "Working to Extend America's Freedoms: Jewish involvement in the Civil Rights movement". Excerpt from A History of Jews in America, published by Vintage Books.. MyJewishLearning.com. http://www.myjewishlearning.com/history_community/Modern/Overview_The_Story_19481980/America/PWPolitics/CivilRights.htm. Retrieved on 2009-02-04. 
  11. ^ a b http://www.pbs.org/itvs/fromswastikatojimcrow/relations.html
  12. ^ Kenneth Robert Janken, Walter White: Mr. NAACP, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2006, p.49
  13. ^ Kenneth Robert Janken, Walter White: Mr. NAACP, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2006, p.2 and 42
  14. ^ a b c Marable, Manning (August 2002). "The NAACP’s 93rd Convention: An Assessment (archived copy)" (PDF). Along the Color Line. http://web.archive.org/web/20070106002529/http://www.manningmarable.net/works/pdf/aug02a.pdf. 
  15. ^ a b c d "NAACP Leader Quits Under Fire". CBS News. August 9, 2000. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2000/08/09/politics/main223114.shtml. 
  16. ^ "Bush campaign denounces Dallas NAACP comments on Lieberman". CNN. August 9, 2000. http://edition.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/08/09/lieberman.naacp/index.html. 
  17. ^ Duncan Campbell (August 10, 2000). "Black leader suspended for anti-semitic Lieberman slur". The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,4049962-103632,00.html. 
  18. ^ AJCongress on Statement by NAACP Chapter Director on Lieberman, American Jewish Congress (AJC), August 9, 2000.
  19. ^ "Editorial: No mutual respect: Mr. Bush unwisely forgoes NAACP meeting". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. 2004-07-17. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04199/347713.stm. 
  20. ^ a b c d Allen, Mike (2004-07-10). "Bush Criticizes NAACP's Leadership". The Washington Post: p. A05. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40255-2004Jul10.html. 
  21. ^ "President Bush addresses the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (NAACP) national convention" (video). FORA.tv. 2006-07-20. http://fora.tv/fora/showthread.php?t=256. 
  22. ^ Bush invokes civil rights in NAACP speech, Associated Press (reprinted by MSNBC.com), July 20, 2006. (retrieved on October 14, 2008).
  23. ^ a b Janofsky, Michael (2004-10-29). "Citing July Speech, I.R.S. Decides to Review N.A.A.C.P.". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/29/politics/29probe.html?oref=login&th. 
  24. ^ "NAACP chairman calls for Bush's ouster". CNN. 2004-07-13. http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/07/12/naacp.bush/index.html. 
  25. ^ "Election Year Activities and the Prohibition on Political Campaign Intervention for Section 501(c)(3) Organizations". Internal Revenue Service. February 2006. http://www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/0,,id=154712,00.html. 
  26. ^ Anderson, Makebra M (2005-02-08). "NAACP says IRS has no "Legitimate" Claim". National Newspaper Publishers Association (Amsterdam News). http://www.amsterdamnews.org/News/article/article.asp?NewsID=3701&sID=3. 
  27. ^ Fears, Darryl (2006-09-01). "IRS Ends 2-Year Probe Of NAACP's Tax Status". The Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/31/AR2006083100737.html?nav=rss_print/asection. 
  28. ^ "NAACP Proudly Announces 30th Anniversary ACT-SO Medalists". National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. http://www.naacp.org/news/press/2008-08-13/index.htm. Retrieved on 2009-01-31. 
  29. ^ "Top Ten Lists". Charity Navigator. http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=topten. Retrieved on 2009-02-04. 
  30. ^ "National Association for the Advancement of Colored People". Charity Navigator. http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=4158. Retrieved on 2009-02-04. 

Sources

  • Richard Dalfiume, "The Forgotten Years of the Negro Revolution," Journal of American History 55 (June, 1969): 99-100. fulltext in JSTOR
  • Fleming, Cynthia Griggs. In the Shadow of Selma: The Continuing Struggle for Civil Rights in the Rural South Rowman and Littlefield, 2004. 349 pp.
  • Goings, Kenneth W. The NAACP Comes of Age: The Defeat of Judge John J. Parker (1990). late 1920s
  • Hughes, Langston. Fight for Freedom: The Story of the NAACP (1962)
  • Janken, Kenneth Robert. White: The Biography of Walter White, Mr. NAACP. New Press, 2003.
  • Jonas, Gilbert S. Freedom's Sword: The NAACP and the Struggle against Racism in America, 1909-1969. Routledge, 2005. 240 pp.
  • Lewis, David Levering. W.E.B. DuBois (2 vol, 1994, 2001); Pulitzer Prize
  • Mosnier, L. Joseph. Crafting Law in the Second Reconstruction: Julius Chambers, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and Title VII. U. of North Carolina, 2005. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund is an entirely separate organization despite its similar name
  • Barbara Joyce Ross, J. E. Spingarn and the Rise of the NAACP, 1911-1939 (1972)
  • Warren D. St. James, The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People: A Case Study in Pressure Groups (1958)
  • Mark Robert Schneider. We Return Fighting: The Civil Rights Movement in the Jazz Age (2001)
  • Simon Topping; "'Supporting Our Friends and Defeating Our Enemies': Militancy and Nonpartisanship in the NAACP, 1936-1948," The Journal of African American History, Vol. 89, 2004
  • Robert Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909-1950 (1980)
  • Events on the NAACP timeline (1939 - Present)

See also

External links


 
 
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From Today's Highlights
February 12, 2006

It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

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