The foremost civil rights organization in the United States, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was the forerunner to the modern Civil Rights movement for racial equality.
Composed of white and black intellectuals committed to ending SEGREGATION and ameliorating the plight of black Americans, the organization was founded in 1910. The NAACP in its early inception set as its overarching goal the achievement of equal rights through gradualist, legalist means.
A multiracial organization, the NAACP differed in its outlook from the self-improvement and accomodationist message of Booker T. Washington, an educator and former slave who stressed the importance of economic selfdetermination for blacks, conceding that segregation was a fact of life. Growing opposition to the pernicious Jim Crow laws, providing for segregated facilities throughout the South, coupled with Washington’s refusal to challenge the existing structure of race relations, led to a new approach articulated by W. E. B. DuBois, a Harvard-trained sociologist and political philosopher. The tactics the NAACP used to gain equality for blacks were persuasion and legal action. These included attempting to educate mostly northern whites through publication of The Crisis, a journal edited by DuBois.
The NAACP grew quickly; by 1918, the organization had started local branches in every southern state, with membership in the South exceeding that of the North by 1919. This was largely due to the efforts of James Weldon Johnson, the national field secretary and organizer and later the first black executive secretary of the organization. In the main, however, the NAACP emphasized direct legal action as the primary means through which to effect change. In the 1920s, these actions included an antilynching campaign and, in 1930, a successful effort to block the confirmation of Judge John J. Parker to the Supreme Court.
The zenith of the NAACP’s success came during what historians frequently refer to as the “Second Reconstruction” in the 1950s and 1960s. The legalist approach of the NAACP proved enormously successful in removing the judicial linchpin of segregation, the doctrine of “separate but equal” established by the Supreme Court in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). In a series of five cases that were grouped together, NAACP counsel—headed by THURGOOD Marshall, later a Supreme Court justice—argued that separate educational facilities for white and black children were by their very existence unequal. In 1952, the case of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) came before the Supreme Court. Two years later, on May 17, 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren—an appointee of Dwight D. Eisenhower—returned a unanimous decision in favor of the plaintiffs, thereby rendering the Plessy doctrine, and school segregation, unconstitutional. A year later the Court ordered that desegregation should proceed “with all deliberate speed.” But as the hopes of many were raised by the legal successes of the NAACP in the 1950s, opposition grew to the Brown case in particular, and to the Civil Rights movement in general. Local southern NAACP chapters faced constant harassment and legal battles with attorneys general intent on crippling the ability of the organization to function. In 1956, a series of injunctions against the NAACP in eight southern states forced the organization temporarily to suspend operations. The state of Alabama, meanwhile, outlawed the organization for nine years. And by 1956, 101 members of Congress had attached their names to a SOUTHERN MANlfESTO, a document that argued that the Warren court had abused its judicial power.
As the Civil Rights movement experienced rising expectations due to the legal success of the NAACP, other civil rights groups, such as the CONGRESS Of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent COORDINATING COMMITTEE (SNCC), began to attract younger adherents, many of whom were committed to direct action and nonviolent confrontation. Together with the NAACP’s own youth councils, these organizations spearheaded such efforts as the Montgomery bus boycotts, SIT-INS, fREEDOM RIDES, and the March on WASHINGTON. Many of the leadership and organizing skills that student leaders of these organizations demonstrated in the 1960s resulted directly from the efforts of the NAACP.
Promotional poster for NAACP (Library of Congress)
Further reading: Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizingfor Change (New York: Free Press, 1984); Robert Weisbrot, Freedom Bound: A History of America’s Civil Rights Movement (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990).
—Kirk Tyvela