Today is not only the birthday of the Great Emancipator, but also of the anniversary of the founding
of America’s oldest Civil Rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. The
date, falling on the centennial of
Abraham Lincoln’s birth, was not
coincidental. It was largely a response
to the 1908 race riots in Lincoln’s home town of Springfield, Illinois.
The early NAACP often explicitly linked the organization in publications like this pamphlet by Chicago social worker and activist Jane Adams.
In 1905 a group of Black intellectuals led by Harvard historian W.E.B DuBois met in Fort
Erie, Ontario on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls—they could not meet in American hotels because were segregated
and most would not rent to Blacks—to discuss how to counter the alarming advance of Jim Crow laws across the old Confederacy and most boarder states. They agreed that there was a need for a single national organization to speak
for the interests of colored people.
The result was a loose organization
called the Niagara Movement. It was beset by financial burdens, leadership squabbles, and difficulty in getting the press to pay attention to the complaints of mere Negros.
DuBois realized that to be
effective, he would have to recruit White
liberals, with their personal wealth
and access to the press. In 1908 Mary
White Ovington, the descendent of a family of abolitionists and prominent Unitarian
lay woman and social activist, Dr.
Henry Moscowitz, Oswald Garrison
Villard, William English Walling joined the movement.
Ovington was the prime mover after the Springfield riots
erupted when she realized the need for a stronger organization. Along with
Walling, a muckraking journalist,
and Moscowitz, a leader of the
largely ethnic Jewish Society for
Ethical Culture she issued a call
to form a new organization. They sent
out a call to over 60 leading liberals.
In response a call to a founding Convention was issued on
Lincoln’s Birthday, 1909. A formal
founding convention was finally held in a New
York settlement house in May. DuBois
chaired.
The Black leadership of the Niagara
Movement although appreciative of the White support, was leery of joining an
organization so dominated by whites.
Many refused to attend the founding convention of the new organization. But DuBois and Chicago anti-lynching crusader Ida
B. Welles, and others threw their support fully behind the new group known
as the National Negro Committee.
At the second convention of the
Committee in May 1910, the name National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People was selected to
replace The Negro Committee. DuBois was
the only Black elected to the Executive
Committee as Director of Publicity
and Research.
The first President was Moorfield
Storey, a White Constitutional
lawyer and for President of the American
Bar Association. He was a Democrat and classical liberal. William English Walling, a Socialist and labor reformer who
had investigated the Springfield Riots was named Chair of the
Executive Committee. For balance the
largely ceremonial job of Treasurer went to John E. Milholland, a so-called Lincoln Republican and leading Presbyterian layman. Most of the duties ordinarily assigned to the
Treasurer were given to a Disbursing
Treasurer, Oswald Garrison Villard, a journalist who was a veteran of the anti-imperialist movement
against the Spanish American and Philippine Wars. Rounding out the original officers was Executive Secretary Frances Blascoe charged with day-to-day
administration.
A headquarters was established in New York City and the NAACP
received its charter in 1911 to:
…promote equality of rights and to eradicate caste or race
prejudice among the citizens of the United States; to advance the interest of
colored citizens; to secure for them impartial suffrage; and to increase their
opportunities for securing justice in the courts, education for the children,
employment according to their ability and complete equality before law.
The same year DuBois launched The
Crisis as the official organ
of the NAACP. Under his leadership it
became the leading intellectual journal
of Black life.
Ovington remained active, especially
as a fundraiser. Other early active members included Jane Adams, Clarence Darrow, John Haynes
Holmes, Mary McLeod Bethune, John Dewy, and William Dean Howells. A
great many early White activists were Jews including Jacob Schiff, and Rabbi
Stephen Wise, Julius Rosenwald, Lillian Wald, Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch.
Among the organization’s early battles were campaigns against
increasing voter restrictions in the
South, vigorously opposing the segregation
of the Federal Government under
Democrat Woodrow Wilson, and launch
a thirty-year-long anti-lynching
campaign
The NAACP's anti-lynching campaign continued for decades as in this 1939 protest by Howard University students.
Through the years the NAACP often filed law suits to affirm civil
rights. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund raised the money to employ lawyers
like Thurgood Marshall who won the
famous Brown v. the Board of Education case
outlawing public school segregation.
In the Fifties it supported, but also was sometimes at
odds with, the boot-on-the-ground
style of confrontation and protest promoted by Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Congress of Racial Equality (CORE),
and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC).
It took a long time for Black
members to assert leadership in the
integrated organization. The first Black
executive secretary was writer and diplomat
James Weldon Johnson in 1920, and Louis T. Wright, a surgeon, was named the first black chairman of its board of
directors in 1934. It did not elect a Black
President until 1975.
Along with another integrated old
line civil rights group, The Urban
League this led to heavy criticism from Black Nationalist groups in the later 20th Century, many of whom, ironically looked to DuBois as their ideological inspiration.
In the 1990’s the NAACP has suffered
embarrassing leadership turmoil
which sapped its strength and led to funding crises. Those issues were mostly resolved and the
organization re-imagined its mission entering the current century.
Recently the venerable organization
may be best known to the general public
for its sponsorship of the annual NAACP Image Awards launched in 1967 and
broadcast annually on national TV in 1974.
But in North Carolina the state branch of the NAACP under the Rev. William Barber II has emerged as a powerful voice
in a new mass movement. Led by Barber
the organization assembled a broad coalition of forces including activists
for voting rights, Women’s rights
and health, Gay rights and equality,
labor, public education,
and the environment plus religious groups including the state’s Unitarian
Universalist congregations. With the
state government firmly in the hands of ultra-conservative Tea Party
types hell bent on undoing 60 years of social justice progress, the coalition
began their dramatic Moral Monday rallies at the state capital of
Raleigh which included scores of arrests for civil disobedience and
focused the attention of the nation on the Tar Heel State.
In February 2014 the movement and
allies from around the country came together for the Mass Moral March touted with considerable justification “the Selma to Montgomery March of our generation.” Crowd estimates, of course varied from low
ball numbers peddled by authorities and their allies in the press of 10,000 to
obviously exaggerated claims of ten times that number by some over enthusiastic
participants. Suffice it to say many
tens of thousands thronged the streets, including more than 1,000 Unitarian
Universalists led by then UUA President Peter Morales.
It was the beginning of the spread
of Moral Mondays to other states. Along
with the Black Lives Matter movement
and the catastrophic Trump era assaults
on hard-won voting rights and economic justice it has re-energized
Black protest and resistance. Barber has
gone on to found a new Poor People’s
campaign modeled after Dr. King’s last project.
Moral Mondays not only revived the
NAACP as a premier leadership group, but they provide inspirations to activists
around the country. Dr. Dubois would be
proud.
No comments:
Post a Comment