The NAACP

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is the oldest civil rights organization in the United States. The mission of the NAACP is to end discrimination against African Americans and members of other minority groups.

In 1909, Mary Ovington, a descendant of White abolitionists, called for a conference to be held to discuss ways to work toward equality for African Americans. She and the other Black and White activists who participated were responding to a lynching in Springfield, Illinois. The original group called themselves the National Negro Committee. The following year, in 1910, the participants formed the NAACP. W.E.B. Du Bois was one of the original leaders of the newly formed association. Du Bois, the editor of The Crisis (the organization's official periodical) called for immediate action to end discrimination; this approach was in contrast to the philosophy of gradualism endorsed by some African American leaders such as Booker T. Washington.

During the first thirty years of the NAACP's existence, much of the organization's efforts centered around the fight to end lynching. The organization also pressed for legislative remedies to prevent job discrimination and discrimination in the judicial system. The first legal battle taken on by the NAACP was the Pink Franklin case. Franklin, a Black farm worker, was awakened at 3:00 in the morning by an intruder in his house. Franklin killed the intruder, in self-defense as far as he knew, but the individual who had broken into his home turned out to be a policeman who had come to arrest him on a civil charge. This case went all the way to the Supreme Court, but they ruled against him. Joel Spingarn (after whom the NAACP's Spingarn Medal is named) and his brother Arthur spearheaded the efforts to continue fighting cases like Franklin's.

In 1913 the NAACP publicly protested segregation in the federal government, and in 1915 they organized a nationwide protest against the racist film "Birth of a Nation." The NAACP spent many years fighting against segregation throughout the country. The greatest victory against segregation in public schools was the Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954; NAACP Special Counsel Thurgood Marshall led the legal team.

In 1955 an NAACP member, Rosa Parks, refused to give up her seat on a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama, providing the spark for the highly successful Montgomery Bus Boycott led by Rev. Martin Luther King.

In 1960, NAACP Youth Council members in North Carolina led a series of well-publicized sit-ins at segregated lunch counters. In 1963, Field Director Medgar Evers was murdered in front of his house in Jackson, Mississippi, after leading a civil rights rally.

The NAACP was directly involved in lobbying for establishment of the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission and the passage of the Voting Rights Act. The organization has worked for many years to encourage voter registration among minority citizens. In 1991 the NAACP launched a voter registration campaign that brought out seventy-six percent of African American voters in Louisiana to defeat ex-Klansman David Duke in his bid for a U.S. Senate seat.

In 1986 the NAACP held a massive rally and lobbied concertedly for economic sanctions against the country of South Africa because of its official policy of apartheid.

Historically, the NAACP has favored non-violent protests and has expressed disapproval of some of the philosophies of more hard-edged groups like the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam. These groups have criticized the NAACP, characterizing them as too passive.

The NAACP has hundreds of thousands of members and many local chapters and youth councils. Their headquarters is in Baltimore, Maryland, with a legislative bureau in Washington, D.C. The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund is based in New York City. The current president and CEO of the organization is former congressman Kweisi Mfume. []

By
Susan Robinson
Republished 11.7.05

Home