History, Purpose, Activities of The NAACP

The NAACP, or National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, has been active since 1909 in its attempts to break legal ground and forge better opportunities for African Americans. The history, function, purpose, and current activities of the organization will be examined. It will be apparent that the NAACP stands as one of the progressive movement in America's major victories against legal, and thus political, oppression.

Early in 1909, some twenty persons met together in New York City for the purpose of utilizing the public interest in the Lincoln Centennial in behalf of African Americans, then known as colored people, or Negroes. Within a few weeks this number was enlarged to about fifty, one-third of whom were from other cities than New York. According to the NAACP's 1984 pamphlet commemorating highlights of NAACP history, "From the outset, this committee was composed of white and colored people alike, and represented the most varied opinions; all agreed only in the feeling that no one of the great efforts now being made by the Negroes, or by whites on their behalf, or all of them put together, fully responded to the needs of the situation" (NAACP, 1984, cited in The Crisis, 1994, p. 28).

It was the opinion of all the members of the preliminary committee, and also of everyone of those interested in the Conference, that the most neglected side of the African American's welfare is the right to civil and political equality, recognized only in part for near

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been shown, however, inclusiveness was one of the most distinguishing characteristics of the early NAACP. The NAACP's interracial makeup, its politics of integration and assimilation, and even Du Bois's light skin color were "anathema to Garvey, who, in his speeches and in his newspaper the Negro World, ridiculed the NAACP, and called Du Bois 'purely and simply a white man's nigger'" (Meier & Bracey, 1993, p. 11). Although Du Bois had considered himself a socialist for some time, he was also attacked from the left by socialists who thought he had sold out to bourgeois interests--in effect, that he had sold out the African American working class. The crisis in black leadership reached a peak in the Du Bois affair. Du Bois, who had helped found the NAACP, and who was editor of the Crisis, was, in the eyes of some people, the NAACP. He became convinced, after seeing one riot too many, that a new approach to African American equity and liberty was necessary. As Bennett reports (1994), Du Bois felt, "'One damned protest after another' would never end racism. 'By 1930,' he said, 'I had become convinced that the basic policies and ideals of the NAACP must be modified and changed'" (p. 3). Bennett goes on to give Du Bois's isolat

Category: History - H