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The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (usually abbreviated as NAACP) is one of the oldest and most influential civil rights organizations in the United States.^[1] The NAACP was founded on February 12, 1909 by a diverse group composed of W.E.B. Du Bois (African American), Ida Wells-Barnett (African American), Henry Moskowitz (Jewish), Mary White Ovington (White), Oswald Garrison Villard (German-born White), and William English Walling (White, and son of a former slave owning family)^[2][3], to work on behalf of the rights of African Americans. Its name, retained in accord with tradition, is one of the last surviving uses of the term "colored people". The group is based in Baltimore, Maryland.

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 of directors led by a chairman. The board elects one person as the president and chief executive officer for the organization; Bruce S. Gordon, who resigned in March of 2007, was selected to fill this post in 2005 following the resignation of Kweisi Mfume, who had headed the organization for nine years. Civil Rights Movement activist and former Georgia state representative 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 healthcare for minorities through public policy initiatives and education. As of 2007, the NAACP had approximately 400,000 paying and non-paying members.^[4]

History

In 1905, a group of 32 prominent, outspoken African Americans met to discuss the challenges facing "people of color" (a term that was used to describe those who are not white people) in the U.S. and possible strategies and solutions. 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.

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

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

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. DuBois 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, co-founder of the NAACP. The organization held its second conference in May of 1910, where members chose the name the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The name was formally adopted May 30, and the NAACP 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 viable, influential and diverse organization, where the leadership was predominantly white and heavily Jewish. In fact, at its founding, the NAACP had only one African American on its executive board, DuBois himself, and did not elect a black president until 1975. 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." [1] Early Jewish co-founders included Julius Rosenthal, Lillian Wald, Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch and Wise.

DuBois 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.

The president of the NAACP from its founding to 1915 was Moorfield Storey, who was white. 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 American Indians and immigrants (he opposed immigration restriction).

Fighting Jim Crow

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

By 1914, the group had 6,000 members and 50 branches, and 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 registered for the draft. The following year the NAACP organized a nationwide protest against D.W. Griffith's silent film Birth of a Nation, a film that glamorized the Ku Klux Klan.

The NAACP began playing a leading role in lawsuits targeting racial segregation and other denials of civil rights early in its history. It played a significant part in the challenge to Oklahoma's discriminatory "grandfather" rule that disenfranchised many black citizens. It persuaded the Supreme Court of the United States to rule in Buchanan v. Warley in 1917 that states 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 under his leadership, the NAACP would escalate 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 inter-war years to fighting the lynching of blacks throughout the United States. The organization sent Walter F. White to Phillips County, Arkansas, in October, 1919, to investigate the Elaine Race Riot in which more than two hundred 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. The NAACP organized the appeals for the twelve men sentenced to death a month later — based on the fact of the testimony used in their convictions having been obtained by beatings and electric shocks — and obtained 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.

The NAACP also spent more than a decade seeking federal legislation barring lynching. The organization regularly displayed a black flag stating "A Man Was Lynched Yesterday" from the window of its offices in New York to mark each outrage.

The NAACP led the successful fight, in alliance with the American Federation of Labor to prevent the nomination of John Johnston Parker to the Supreme Court based on his support for denial of the right to vote to blacks and his anti-labor rulings. It organized support for the Scottsboro Boys, although the NAACP lost most of the internecine battles with the Communist Party and the International Labor Defense over the control of those cases and the strategy to be pursued. The organization also brought litigation to challenge the "white primary" system in the South.

Desegregation

With the rise of private corporate litigators like the NAACP to bear the expense, civil suits have become the pattern in modem 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. Beginning by challenging segregation in state professional schools, then attacking Jim Crow at the college level, the campaign culminated in a unanimous Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education that held that 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, to protest segregation on the city's buses when two-thirds of the riders were black. The boycott lasted 381 days.

The State of Alabama responded by effectively barring the NAACP from operating within its borders for its refusal to divulge a list of its members, out of fear that they would be fired or face violent retaliation for their activities. While the Supreme Court eventually overturned the decision in NAACP v. Alabama, 357 U.S. 449 (1958) the NAACP lost its leadership role in the Civil Rights Movement during those years to organizations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that relied on direct action and mass mobilization, rather than litigation and legislation to advance the rights of African Americans. Roy Wilkins, its executive director at that time, clashed repeatedly with Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders over questions of strategy and prestige within the movement.

At the same time, the NAACP used 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. Congress passed a civil rights bill aimed at ending racial discrimination in employment, education and public accommodations in 1964, followed by a voting rights act in 1965.

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, and 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 hired him, accused of using NAACP funds for an out-of-court settlement in a sexual harassment lawsuit.^[5] Following the dismissal of Chavis, Myrlie Evers-Williams narrowly defeated NAACP chairperson William Gibson 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.

However, 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, one million more than four years before,^[6] and the NAACP's effort was credited by observers as playing a significant role in handing Democrat Al Gore several states where the election was close, such as Pennsylvania and Michigan.^[7]

U.S. President Bush and the NAACP

During the 2000 U.S. presidential campaign, the NAACP's National Voter Fund ran a television ad against then Texas Governor and Republican Party nominee George W. Bush. The ad featured the daughter of James Byrd, a black man dragged to death by three white men in a pickup truck, blaming Bush for refusing her pleas for a hate-crime law when he was Texas governor. The ad also depicted a truck with chains dragging behind it, and was criticized by some for trying to connect Bush with the lynching.

In 2004, President George W. Bush (2001—) became the first sitting U.S. president since Herbert Hoover (1929–1933) not to address the NAACP when he declined an invitation to speak.^[8] The White House originally said the president had a scheduling conflict with the NAACP convention, slated for July 10-15, 2004. However, on July 10, 2004, Bush said he declined the invitation to speak to the NAACP because of harsh statements about him by its leaders. "I would describe my relationship with the current leadership as basically nonexistent. You've heard the rhetoric and the names they've called me." Bush also mentioned his admiration for some members of the NAACP and said he would seek to work with them "in other ways."

On July 20, 2006, after having declined the civil rights group's invitations for five years, Bush addressed the NAACP convention, making a bid for increasing support at the polls for Republicans by African Americans, in the midst of a heated midterm election.^[9]

NAACP and Tax Exempt Status

The Internal Revenue Service informed the NAACP in October 2004 that it was undertaking an investigation into its tax-exempt status, focusing on a speech given by Julian Bond at its 2004 Convention in which he criticized President George W. Bush, as well as other political figures. The NAACP has denounced the investigation as retaliation for its campaign involvement. In September 2006 the investigation concluded with the IRS finding "that the remarks did not violate the group's tax-exempt status."^[10]

Mention in Popular Culture

• The song "You Can't Stop the Beat" from the Broadway musical Hairspray (as well as the film adaptation) features the lyric "And if they try and stop us, Seaweed, we'll call the NAACP." The lyric is sung by Penny Pingleton, a white character, to her African-American boyfriend Seaweed J. Stubbs.

References

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

• Association for the Study of African American Life and History
• Black Rock Coalition
• List of progressive organizations
• Niagara Movement
• NAACP Image Award
• NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund
• Racial integration
• National Association for the Advancement of White People

External links

• Official site
• Annual ACT-SO Contest
• Official site of the Brooklyn, New York Branch
• George W. Bush addresses NAACP national convention for the first time, July 20 2006 (Video)

•  • [ e] Topics on racism
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