NAACP

REQUIRED READING

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded in 1909 in response not only to widespread lynchings of Black people in the South but also a dramatic 1908 lynching in the Great Emancipator Abraham Lincoln's hometown of Springfield, Illinois in the North. During the 1920s the NAACP developed as a mass organization, becoming the largest American civil rights group with numerous grassroots branches.

Over the years, the NAACP focused on desegregating schools and universities through the court system, winning the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954 and helping James Meredith integrate the University of Mississippi in 1962. Its members (including Rosa Parks) also challenged segregation in public accommodations, lobbied for civil rights legislation in Congress, and promoted voter registration throughout the South. 

Despite such dramatic courtroom and congressional victories, the implementation of civil rights was a slow, painful, and oft times violent process. The unsolved 1951 murder of Harry T. Moore, an NAACP field secretary in Florida whose home was bombed on Christmas night, and his wife was just one of many crimes of retribution against the NAACP and its staff and members. NAACP Mississippi field secretary Medgar Evers and his wife Myrlie also became high-profile targets for pro-segregationist violence and terrorism. In 1962, their home was firebombed and later Medgar was assassinated by a sniper in front of their residence. Violence also met black children attempting to enter previously segregated schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, and other southern cities.

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s echoed the NAACP's goals, but leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, felt that direct action was needed to obtain them. Although the NAACP was criticized for working too rigidly within the system, prioritizing legislative and judicial solutions, the Association did provide legal representation and aid to members of other protest groups over a sustained period of time. The NAACP even posted bail for hundreds of Freedom Riders in the '60s who had traveled to Mississippi to register black voters and challenge Jim Crow policies.

Led by Roy Wilkins, who succeeded NAACP collaborated with A. Philip Randolph, organizations to plan the historic 1963 March on Washington. The following year, the Association accomplished what seemed an insurmountable task: the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

QUESTIONS

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