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NAACP history
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Mary White Ovington, journalist William English Walling and Henry Moskowitz met in New York City in January 1909 to work on organizing for black civil rights.
The expanded group agreed to issue a call on February 12, 1909, for a conference in New York.
In February 1909 future NAACP organizers issued “The Call,” a statement protesting lawlessness against Negroes, and began forming the Committee on the Negro.
The conference opened on May 30, 1909, and after a series of organizational meetings, the NAACP opened its doors with two offices in the Evening Post building in New York.
On May 30, 1909, the Niagara Movement conference took place at New York City's Henry Street Settlement House; they created an organization of more than 40, identifying as the National Negro Committee.
The conference formed the National Negro Committee, out of which the NAACP emerged in May 1910.
By 1910 the organization had adopted the name National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and had begun publication of a monthly journal, The Crisis, under editor W. E. B. Du Bois.
The first local NAACP branch was organized in New York in January 1911.
Following the report of a Committee on Program headed by Villard, the NAACP was incorporated in New York on June 20, 1911.
From its earliest years, the NAACP devoted most of its resources to seeking an end to lynchings and other forms of mob violence; the organization's protest campaign after a lynching in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, in 1911 resulted in its first substantial publicity.
The NAACP's structure and mission inspired the formation of several other civil rights groups, such as South Africa's African National Congress, formed in 1912.
In 1913, other branch offices were created in Chicago, Kansas City, Tacoma, Washington, and Washington, D.C. Membership in the organization was contingent upon acceptance of NAACP philosophy and programs.
“How the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Began,” by Mary White Ovington, 1914.
Jewish historian Howard Sachar writes in his book A History of Jews in America that "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."
Furthermore, he donated funds to establish the annual Spingarn Medal, first awarded in 1915, which rapidly became the most prestigious African-American award.
The first was the NAACP's ten-year protest campaign for the withdrawal of the film The Birth of a Nation, beginning in 1915.
Consolidating the NAACP's power, in 1916 Du Bois initiated a conference of black leaders, including Washington's men, and their friends.
The Atlanta branch, founded in late 1916, had become one of the organization's strongest, with a membership of more than 1,000.
Unlike the first Amenia Conference held in 1916, which was integrated, the second was all-black.
In 1917 it led the celebrated silent protest parade of 15,000 people through Harlem with muffled drums to protest the violent riots that year against blacks in East St Louis, Illinois, and discrimination in general.
Johnson began by organizing a branch in Richmond, Virginia, in 1917.
For example, the NAACP helped to inspire President Woodrow Wilson to denounce lynching in 1918.
Johnson's predecessor, John Shillady, hired in 1918, had served as the first professional secretary.
The bill was introduced by Senator Leonidas C. Dyer of Missouri in 1918.
The organization sent its field secretary Walter F. White to Phillips County, Arkansas, in October 1919, to investigate the Elaine Race Riot.
While he did not make sizable personal contributions to the organization until 1919, Spingarn's knowledge of the management of stocks and bonds also enabled him to direct the organization's financial policies.
After Ovington, a long-time ally and supporter, became NAACP chair in 1919, she too became a severe critic of Du Bois's refusal to follow board policy, though she accepted his independence in management of The Crisis.
Despite its promising beginnings, by 1919 it was clear that the NAACP's reliance on agitation and education had proved largely ineffective against racial violence.
Only five branches—at Fort Valley, Griffin, Hawkinsville, Monroe, and Newnan—formed during the 1920s.
In 1921 Johnson became NAACP secretary, establishing the permanent line of blacks to hold the position.
The NAACP strengthened its executive staff in 1922 when it hired Herbert J. Seligman as its first full-time director of publicity.
The first map shows branch activities in the first decade and a half, up to 1923.
Dempsey 261 United States 86 (1923) that significantly expanded the Federal courts' oversight of the states' criminal justice systems in the years to come.
Even though Congress failed to pass antilynching legislation during the Coolidge and Hoover administrations, the Republican party's repeated pledge in 1924 to seek such a law was a strong indication that the NAACP's political emphasis held considerable promise.
In 1925, Sweet moved his family into a house he had purchased in a middle-class white neighborhood.
The NAACP began to attack “white primaries” in 1927.
Arthur Spingarn assumed leadership of this program in 1929.
The creation of the NAACP legal department resulted from a comprehensive study of the association's legal program that Nathan Ross Margold, a white public service lawyer in New York, conducted in 1930 under a grant from the American Fund for
For example, in 1931, Helen Boardman, a white NAACP investigator, reported that the 30,000 blacks on the War Department's Mississippi Flood Control project were receiving 10 cents an hour for an 84-hour week.
Between that year and 1931, the NAACP raised $545,407 in general funds, of which $374,896 came from the branches.
In 1933, Roy Wilkins and George S. Schuyler, a former Socialist and writer for the Messenger, disguised themselves as laborers in order to investigate the deplorable, peonage-like conditions under which blacks on the project were working.
Wilson (1933) was one of the first test cases involving segregation in higher education.
Until June 26, 1934, when he resigned from the organization, W. E. B. Du Bois led the NAACP in developing its agitation and education program.
Eleven were defeated, but as The Crisis noted in its December 1934 issue, three "escaped" by winning reelection.
He earned a law degree from Harvard Law School and in 1934 he became the first full-time attorney for the NAACP.
To end its dependence on volunteer lawyers, which had proved a large handicap in the Scottsboro case, as well as to wage an all-out fight against segregation, the NAACP in 1935 created its legal department.
In 1935, NAACP lawyers Charles Houston and Thurgood Marshall won the legal battle to admit an African American student, Donald Gaines Murray, to the University of Maryland Law School.
Despite the severe hardships of the Depression, the branches in 1936 contributed $26,288 toward the total income of $47,724.
The organization's economic program included the launching in 1936 of a sustained legal battle in Baltimore, Maryland, against unequal salaries for African-American teachers.
Houston began the higher education litigation in 1938.
In 1939, William H. Hastie, a black scholar and federal judge, succeeded Arthur Spingarn as chair of the NAACP Legal Committee.
The board of directors of the NAACP created the Legal Defense Fund in 1939 specifically for tax purposes.
In its first 50 years the branch led the fight in Chicago against housing discrimination, culminating in victory in 1940 in Hansberry v.
In 1941 the NAACP established its Washington, D.C., bureau as the legislative advocacy and lobbying arm of the organization.
More than ever, court action defined the NAACP's identity, while direct action was left to small groups such as the National Negro Congress and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), founded in 1942.
CORE, or the Congress of Racial Equality, formed in Chicago in 1942 as an interracial organization focused on social justice.
At the same time, the NAACP directed worldwide attention to the problem of colonialism by sending Walter White and W. E. B. Du Bois as its representatives in 1945 to the founding United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco.
In fall 1946, in response to demands from the NAACP for presidential leadership on civil rights, Truman appointed the President's Committee on Civil Rights and made Walter White a key adviser to it.
Under White’s leadership, the NAACP saw a significant growth in its membership, boasting approximately 500,000 members by 1946.
In 1946, the NAACP won the Morgan v.
“A Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States of America and an Appeal to the United Nations for Redress,” by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, edited by W. E. B. Du Bois, 1947
In 1947 Truman became the first president to attend an NAACP convention when he addressed the organization's thirty-eighth annual convention in Washington.
An indication of the NAACP's strength was that in 1950, for the first time in its history, it held its annual conference in the Deep South in Atlanta.
With help from the fund-raising campaign, the NAACP's membership grew to 240,000 by 1954.
Board of Education of Topeka, 1954). These LDF efforts effectively changed the second-class citizenship status of African Americans.
Board of Education, 1954; Civil Rights; Civil Rights Movement, United States; Du Bois, W. E. B.; Integration; Jim Crow; Race; Segregation
Roy Wilkins, who was elected in April 1955 to succeed White as NAACP executive director, faced enormous challenges.
In 1956 the South Carolina legislature created an anti-NAACP oath, and teachers who refused to take the oath lost their positions.
Furthermore, the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first such bill passed by Congress in eighty-two years, broke the psychological barrier to civil rights measures, making it easier for future efforts to succeed.
The NAACP managed to get legislation through the Congress in the form of the 1957 Civil Rights Act.
The NAACP achieved its goals by playing a leading role in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which established the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice and the Commission on Civil Rights.
St James, W. D. (1958). The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People: A case study in pressure groups.
On January 14, 1963, for the Supreme Court in another significant case (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People v.
Following the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963, Lyndon Johnson vowed to ensure passage of his predecessor's civil rights bill and provided the leadership that the NAACP had demanded from the executive branch.
Clarence Mitchell Jr., director of the NAACP's Washington Bureau, led the fight for a permanent FEPC, which was realized in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, created by the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was an immense victory for the NAACP. Following its passage, the NAACP began work on legislation to protect the right to vote.
The NAACP worked for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which not only forbade discrimination in public places, but also established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
Houston was assisted by thurgood marshall, a young lawyer who would go on to argue many cases before the Supreme Court and in 1967 would become the first African American appointed to the Court.
Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr., an official of the United Church of Christ in Cleveland, who had once served more than four years in prison after being wrongly convicted on charges of conspiracy and arson for setting fire to a grocery store in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1972.
J. E. Spingarn and the Rise of the NAACP. New York: Atheneum, 1972.
On November 29, 1976, the NAACP finally won freedom for Clarence Norris, the last of the Scottsboro nine, when the Alabama Board for Pardons and Paroles pardoned him.)
In 1976 Roy Wilkins retired as NAACP executive director.
Roy Wilkins retired as executive director in 1977, and Benjamin Hooks, a lawyer and clergyman, was elected his successor.
In 1984, Benjamin Hooks led a 125,000-person March on Washington to protest the "legal lynching" of civil rights by the Reagan administration.
Baltimore, M.D.: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1987.
Harris, Jacqueline L. History and Achievement of the NAACP. New York: Watts, 1992.
In 1993, the NAACP's Board of Directors narrowly selected Reverend Benjamin Chavis over Reverend Jesse Jackson to fill the position of Executive Director.
In 1996, Congressman Kweisi Mfume, a Democratic Congressman from Maryland and former head of the Congressional Black Caucus, was named the organization's president.
Julian Bond, a longtime civil rights activist, became chair of the Board of Directors in 1998.
In January 2003 the NAACP announced that the united nations had designated it as a non-governmental organization (NGO). The NGO designation meant that the NAACP could advise and consult with foreign governments and with the U.N. secretariat on issues relating to human rights.
In October 2004, the Internal Revenue Service informed the NAACP that it was investigating its tax-exempt status based on chairman Julian Bond's speech at its 2004 Convention, in which he criticized President George W. Bush as well as other political figures.
Bruce Gordon, a retired Verizon executive, followed Mfume as executive director in 2004.
He later announced his intention to run for the United States Senate (for Maryland) in 2006.
NAACP: Celebrating a Century of 100 Years in Pictures, text by Julian Bond, Roger Wood Wilkins, Mildred Bond Roxborough, and India Artis, 2009.
In 2009 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People celebrated its 100th anniversary.
On May 19, 2012, the NAACP's board of directors formally endorsed same-sex marriage as a civil right, voting 62–2 for the policy in a Miami, Florida quarterly meeting.
Board of Education, and he later was appointed as the first African American in the Supreme Court (Smith, 2016).
How to Cite this Article (APA Format): Paul, C. A. (2018). The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Social Welfare History Project.
Rolinson, Mary. "National Association for the Advancement of Colored People." New Georgia Encyclopedia, last modified Apr 14, 2021. https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/national-association-for-the-advancement-of-colored-people-naacp/
"National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ." U*X*L Encyclopedia of United States History. . Retrieved June 21, 2022 from Encyclopedia.com: https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/national-association-advancement-colored-people
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| Company name | Founded date | Revenue | Employee size | Job openings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Children's Defense Fund | 1973 | $21.3M | 321 | 2 |
| NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund | 1940 | $33.9M | 51 | 23 |
| Southern Poverty Law Center | 1971 | $136.3M | 254 | 6 |
| Uncf-United Negro College Fund | - | $79.9M | 1 | - |
| National Urban League | 1910 | $53.1M | 255 | 4 |
| AFT | 1916 | $199.9M | 345 | - |
| NCNW Headquarters | 1935 | $4.4M | 20 | - |
| BIG EAST Conference | 1979 | $53.6M | 20 | - |
| Cherry Blossom Festival, Macon Georgia | 1982 | $230,000 | 1 | - |
| Asian Pacific Islander American Public Affairs | 2001 | $7.4M | 100 | - |
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NAACP may also be known as or be related to Naacp, NAACP and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.