Founded February 12, 1909, as an interracial membership organization dedicated to civil rights and racial justice, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has played, throughout its history, an instrumental role in improving the legal, educational, and economic situation of African Americans. It has operated through the American legal system to reach its goals of full suffrage and other civil rights for African Americans and also figured prominently in the struggle to end segregation and racial violence. After the high tide of the Civil Rights movement, the influence of the NAACP waned, and it suffered declining membership, as well as a series of damaging internal scandals.
During the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, the NAACP was criticized for its insistence on working within the system and seeking exclusively legislative and judicial solutions. The organization sought to apply its interracial, integrationist approach to the issues of increasing urban crime and poverty and of de facto segregation and job discrimination. This approach alienated many African Americans, whose sympathies began to shift toward more militant, even separatist, philosophies embodied in groups such as the Black Power Movement and the Nation of Islam.
Although this shift in popular sentiment precipitated a decline in NAACP membership, the organization did not cease to be active in seeking legal and political solutions to the problems that confronted African Americans. In the 1970s, as the Civil Rights activist movement splintered politically and ideologically, the NAACP became less influential. To regain its momentum, the organization increased its focus on the doctrines of self-help, black pride, and moral and community values. The NAACP stepped up its attempts to register and organize black voters against the agenda of the Ronald W. Reagan administration, which came into office in 1981, as well as lobby Congress to support affirmative action policies. Along with other organizations, the NAACP contributed to a 14 percent increase in black voter registration in the South between 1980 and 1984. The organization continued its push for black electoral activity by supporting Jesse L. Jackson’s “Southern Crusade” for voter registration during his 1984 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. The group broke stride, however, with the majority of African Americans by opposing, on ideological grounds, Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the U. S. Supreme Court by President George H. W. Bush in 1991. This failure to identify with the majority of African Americans, coupled with legislative setbacks and internal corruption in the 1980s and 1990s, further limited the organization’s influence.
The NAACP faced major challenges during Benjamin Hooks’s tenure as executive director (1977-95). In Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), the U. S. Supreme Court upheld the state court’s decision that racially exclusionary preferences in medical school admissions standards constituted a quota and, as such, were a denial of equal protection. This decision, made in favor of a white medical school applicant, seriously undermined the process of affirmative action that the NAACP strongly supported. Concurrent with this setback, tensions between the executive director and the board of directors escalated into open hostility. Although such tension had always been present in the organization, this time it represented a serious threat to the stability of the NAACP. The tension and controversy intensified with the election of Benjamin Chavis as the director in 1993. In seeking to lead the NAACP in a new direction, Chavis reached out to Louis A. Far-RAKHAN, leader of the Nation of Islam, and, in doing so, offended many liberals, black and white. He further undermined his position, and the credibility of the organization, by using NAACP funds to settle a sexual harassment lawsuit against himself, an error in judgment that forced his resignation in 1995. Chavis subsequently joined the Nation of Islam and changed his name to Chavis Muhammad.
Kweisi Mfume, former congressman and head of the Congressional Black Caucus, replaced Chavis as director of the NAACP. With Julian Bond as chairperson of the executive board, Mfume shifted the organization’s focus to economic development and establishing educational programs for young African Americans, while also maintaining its function as legal advocate for civil rights issues. In 2001, the NAACP claimed a membership of more than half a million.
See also race and racial conflict.
Further reading: Steven Lawson, Running for Freedom: Civil Rights and Black Politics in America since 1941 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997); Warren D. St. James, NAACP: Triumphs of a Pressure Group, 1909-1980 (Smithtown, N. Y.: Exposition Press, 1980).
—William L. Glankler
World History
