During the era of the Great Depression and World War II, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) continued to play a central role in working for civil rights for Aerican Americans and combating the racial discrimination, segregation, and violence they faced, especially in the South. On the eve of the Great Depression, the NAACP had 325 branches in 44 states but just over 21,000 members nationwide. By 1945, due to a rigorous recruitment campaign and an expanded plan of attack, the NAACP had experienced unprecedented growth and included nearly a half million members.
Several significant events occurred in the early 1930s. In 1930, the NAACP led a successful protest to block the nomination of Judge John Parker to the United States Supreme Court because of Parker’s racist statements. Later that year, James Weldon Johnson resigned as executive secretary of the association, and in March 1931 Walter White became his successor. A month into White’s tenure, the trial of nine black teenagers accused of raping two young white women began in Scottsboro, Alabama. The case of the Scottsboro Boys tested the NAACP, which became involved in an unsuccessful struggle over representing the defendants with the International Labor Defense (ILD), a communist-led organization.
During the 1932 presidential election, most African Americans remained loyal to the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, although a minority viewed liberal northern Democrats and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s promise of a “New Deal” as a hopeful alternative. In 1933, Robert C. Weaver and John P. Davis, together with the NAACP and a number of other black organizations, joined forces to create the Joint Committee on Economic Recovery (JCER). The JCER had some success in fighting against the racial wage differentials and for the inclusion of black Americans in New Deal programs. White and the NAACP were unable, however, to persuade Roosevelt actively to support, or Congress to enact, federal antilynching legislation. The organization repeatedly asked the Justice Department to intervene in lynching cases, because of the demonstrated reluctance or refusal of state and local authorities to take action, but the department denied any jurisdiction in the matter. The NAACP proved even less successful presenting its case before Congress, where several antilynching bills were brought up and passed in the House but invariably died in the Senate at least in part for want of presidential support. Thereafter, the NAACP placed greater emphasis on promoting negative publicity about lynching, ever more vigorously even as the actual number of lynchings decreased by the end of the decade.
By 1936, the association had become part of a New Deal political coalition consisting of liberal Democrats, labor, and civil rights organizations. The liberal-labor coalition helped FDR secure a landslide victory in the election oe 1936, and Walter White established a close relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt that gave the NAACP some access to President Roosevelt. Such connections with the Roosevelt administration won little support for NAACP civil rights efforts, but they did bring help in 1939, when the Daughters of the American Revolution excluded the famed African-American singer Marian Anderson from performing at Constitution Hall in Washington. The NAACP quickly reacted and with the assistance of Eleanor Roosevelt, Harold Ickes, and other New Deal leaders, the concert was moved to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, where Anderson performed before 75,000 people.
Throughout the depression, the NAACP experienced a number of internal conflicts, but none so important as that involving William E. B. DuBois, one of the organization’s founders and leaders. In 1934, DuBois criticized the NAACP’s program in the pages of its publication, the Crisis, suggesting that blacks organize among themselves and use self-segregation to defeat segregation and discrimination. Following those controversial remarks and his support of socialism, the board of directors denounced DuBois and forced him to resign from the association. DuBois later returned to the NAACP in 1944 as director of special research.
In 1935, Howard University law professor Charles Houston was appointed chief legal counsel of the NAACP. Assisted by his former student Thurgood Marshall, the two men began to lay the foundation for an extended and increasingly successful legal assault against school segregation. To accomplish this they would have to overturn the infamous Supreme Court decision of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which institutionalized constitutional notions of separate but equal. On November 5, 1935, the Maryland Court of Appeals ordered the University of Maryland to admit Donald Murray, an African American. This was done less out of altruism than to avoid the expenses of building a separate law school for blacks, but a significant blow had been struck for integration. The following year, the NAACP initiated successful lawsuits against unequal salaries for African-American teachers. In 1938, Marshall replaced Houston as special counsel of the association, and other cases in education and voting rights brought by the NAACP in the late 1930s and war years led to further Supreme Court decisions eroding the legal edifice of Jim Crow and pointing toward the landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. In 1938, in Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a state’s refusal to provide a law school education to a qualified African American. In Smith v. Allwright, the Court in 1944 found the all-white primary used in the South unconstitutional.
As the United States drew nearer to involvement in World War II, African Americans remained in segregated military units and were barred from most defense jobs. In 1941, the NAACP supported A. Philip Randolph and his March on Washington Movement that led FDR to sign Executive Order 8802 in June 1941, which outlawed discrimination in government and war industries and created the Fair Employment Practices Committee. When the order was signed the NAACP canceled its threatened march, sparing Roosevelt an otherwise embarrassing predicament. Subsequently, the NAACP joined and often led the growing activism of the war years on behalf of civil rights for African Americans. Under the leadership of Ella Baker, who joined the NAACP staff in 1941, southern membership increased from 18,000 in the late 1930s to 156,000 by the war’s end. Nationwide, the association witnessed record growth and by 1946 had nearly half a million members in roughly 1,000 branches. But, on balance, the NAACP in this period failed to reach major improvements in civil rights, partly because the president, while he empathized with blacks, was not willing to risk New Deal legislation that he regarded as more pressing. The political support of the southern Democrats in Congress proved too important. But significant battles had been won, and the successes presaged the even greater victories awaiting the cause of civil rights in the ensuing decade.
See also race and racial conllict.
Further reading: Manfred Berg, The Ticket to Freedom: The NAACP and the Struggle for Black Political Integration (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005); Gilbert Jonas, Freedom’s Sword: The NAACP and the Struggle against Racism in America, 1909-1969 (New York: Rout-ledge, 2005); Mark R. Schneider, We Return Fighting: The Civil Rights Movement in the Jazz Age (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002); Robert L. Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade against Lynching, 1909-1950 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980).
—Anthony Ratcliff and John C. Fredriksen
World History
