Mar 22, 2022 ¡ In 1936, the NAACP hired Charles H. Houston to lead a campaign that would challenge segregation in the courts. At that time Houston was the dean of Howard University's âŚ
Often referred to as the âMoses of the civil rights movement,â Houston was the architect and chief strategist of the NAACPâs legal campaign to end segregation. In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court âŚ
Mar 21, 1981 ¡ Pioneering civil-rights attorney Thurgood Marshall, the head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), successfully argued the case before the court. Marshall, âŚ
NAACP v. Jim Crow The Legal Strategy That Brought Down "Separate but Equal" by Toppling School Segregation By Robert J. Cottrol, Raymond T. Diamond, and Leland B. Ware The âŚ
The NAACP played a pivotal role in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. One of the organizationâs key victories was the U.S. Supreme Courtâs 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education that outlawed segregation in public schools.
A white lawyer, Moorfield Storey, became the NAACPâs first president. Du Bois, the only Black person on the initial leadership team, served as director of publications and research. In 1910, Du Bois started The Crisis, which became the leading publication for Black writers; it remains in print today.
Sources. The NAACP or National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was established in 1909 and is Americaâs oldest and largest civil rights organization. It was formed in New York City by white and Black activists, partially in response to the ongoing violence against African Americans around the country.
The NAACP or National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was established in 1909 and is Americaâs oldest and largest civil rights organization. It was formed in New York City by white and Black activists, partially in response to the ongoing violence against African Americans around the country. In the NAACPâs early decades, its anti-lynching campaign was central to its agenda. During the civil rights era in the 1950s and 1960s, the group won major legal victories, and today the NAACP has more than 2,200 branches and some half a million members worldwide.
During the civil rights era in the 1950s and 1960s, the group won major legal victories, and today the NAACP has more than 2,200 branches and some half a million members worldwide.
The NAACPâs Early Decades. Since its inception, the NAACP has worked to achieve its goals through the judicial system, lobbying and peaceful protests. In 1910, Oklahoma passed a constitutional amendment allowing people whose grandfathers had been eligible to vote in 1866 to register without passing a literacy test.
In 1917, some 10,000 people in New York City participated in an NAACP-organized silent march to protest lynchings and other violence against Black people. The march was one of the first mass demonstrations in America against racial violence.
The lead plaintiff, Oliver Brown, was not a prominent figure in the local NAACP.
Diamond, and Leland B. Ware. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was formed in 1909 to fight Jim Crow, 20th-century America's experience with petty and not so petty apartheid. Under the leadership of W.E.B. Du Bois, the NAACP would take the bully pulpit to push for the abolition ...
Du Bois, the NAACP would take the bully pulpit to push for the abolition of segregation and racial caste distinctions, and it would fight for open and equal access to education and employment for Negroes. It would crusade against lynching and offer legal assistance to defend black people mistreated in criminal court. Over time, the NAACP would become the nation's premier civil rights organization. It would do so in large part because the NAACP early on recognized that the courts, despite their racial conservatism, were a potentially potent weapon in the battle for racial change.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was formed in 1909 to fight Jim Crow, 20th-century America's experience with petty and not so petty apartheid. Under the leadership of W.E.B. Du Bois, the NAACP would take the bully pulpit to push for the abolition of segregation and racial caste distinctions, ...
Sweatt was a letter carrier who lived in Texas. In 1946 he applied to the all-white law school at the University of Texas. He was immediately rejected. The rejection letter informed him that he could request that the state of Texas establish a law school for Negroes. The NAACP filed suit in state court on Sweatt's behalf. The results were familiar. The trial court opinion stated that state officials were under no obligation to admit him to the University of Texas. The opinion allowed state officials six months to establish a black law school. Just before the six months were up, the state presented the trial court with evidence that it had established the Jim Crow law school. The school was housed in two rented rooms in Houston. Administratively, the school was part of Prairie View University, a Texas state university for Negroes, some 40 miles away. The faculty consisted of two part-time instructors. There was no library.
The first case originated in Clarendon County, S .C. That county maintained a system of grossly unequal segregated schools. In the 1949â1950 academic year, there were 6,531 black students attending 61 schools. The annual expenditures for these schools were $194,575. There were 2,375 white students attending 12 schools. The annual expenditures for these schools were $673,850. Per pupil expenditures of public funds came to $43 per capita for black children and $179 per capita for white children. The average white schoolteacher earned two-thirds more than the average black one; and in contrast to its treatment of white children, the school board could not be troubled to provide a single bus for the transportation of black children. Thurgood Marshall took the case on behalf of 20 plaintiffs.
The lead plaintiff, Oliver Brown, was not a prominent figure in the local NAACP. He was an ordinary citizen who was angered that his daughter had to travel each day past a modern, fully equipped white school to a black school housed in a deteriorated building. There were several plaintiffs, but Oliver Brown 's name came first alphabetically, and as a result, when the case was filed in the federal court on February 14, 1951, the case bore his name. Robert Carter and Jack Greenberg were the NAACP's point men for Brown.
Board of Education decision, which overturned the âseparate but equalâ doctrine . Former NAACP Branch Secretary Rosa Parksâ refusal to yield her seat to a white man sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the modern civil rights movement. In response to the Brown decision, Southern states launched a variety of tactics to evade school desegregation, while the NAACP countered aggressively in the courts for enforcement. The resistance to Brown peaked in 1957â58 during the crisis at Little Rock Arkansasâs Central High School. The Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups targeted NAACP officials for assassination and tried to ban the NAACP from operating in the South. However, NAACP membership grew, particularly in the South. NAACP Youth Council chapters staged sit-in demonstrations at lunch counters to protest segregation. The NAACP was instrumental in organizing the 1963 March on Washington, the largest mass protest for civil rights. The following year, the NAACP joined the Council of Federated Organizations to launch Mississippi Freedom Summer, a massive project that assembled hundreds of volunteers to participate in voter registration and education. The NAACP-led Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, a coalition of civil rights organizations, spearheaded the drive to win passage of the major civil rights legislation of the era: the Civil Rights Act of 1957; the Civil Rights Act of 1964; the Voting Rights Act of 1965; and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
In 1953 the NAACP initiated the âFight for Freedomâ campaign with the goal of abolishing segregation and discrimination by 1963, the centennial of Abraham Lincolnâs Emancipation Proclamation. The NAACP vowed to raise one million dollars annually through1963 to fund the campaign. The concept recalls the Lincoln Day âCallâ that began the NAACP. The NAACP has affirmed this connection to Abraham Lincoln throughout its history with annual Lincoln Day celebrations, related events, and programs which evoke Lincolnâs basic ideas of freedom and human brotherhood. The NAACP adopted âFight For Freedomâ as a motto.
Baltimore native Clarence Mitchell (1911â1984) attended Lincoln University and the University of Maryland Law School. He began his career as a reporter. During World War II he served on the War Manpower Commission and the Fair Employment Practices Committee. In 1946 Mitchell joined the NAACP as its first labor secretary. He served concurrently as director of the NAACP Washington Bureau, the NAACPâs chief lobbyist, and legislative chairman of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights from 1950 to 1978. Mitchell waged a tireless campaign on Capitol Hill to secure the passage of a comprehensive series of civil rights laws: the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the 1960 Civil Rights Act, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act. His invincible determination won him the accolade of â101st U.S. Senator.â
He then worked as an organizer for the United Steelworkers before joining the NAACP staff in 1948. He was named labor secretary in 1951. In this capacity, he filed hundreds of lawsuits against labor unions and industries that refused integration or fair employment practices. He also used picket lines and mass demonstrations as weapons. Recognized as a major authority on race and labor, Hill testified frequently on Capitol Hill and served as a consultant for the United Nations and the State of Israel. He left the NAACP in 1977 to accept a joint professorship in Afro-American studies and industrial relations at the University of Wisconsin, from which he retired in 1997.
Thurgood Marshall hired Robert L. Carter (b. 1917) as a legal assistant at the Inc. Fund in 1944 and promoted him to assistant counsel in 1945. Carter graduated from Lincoln University and Howard Law School, and earned a Master of Law degree from Columbia University. He helped prepare briefs in the McLaurin and Sweatt cases, and argued McLaurin in Oklahoma and before the Supreme Court. Carter later became Marshallâs key aide in the Brown v. Board of Education case. He recommended using social science research to prove the negative effects of racial segregation, which became a crucial factor in the Brown decision. He also wrote the brief for the Brown case and delivered the argument before the Supreme Court. He served as the NAACPâs General Counsel from 1956 to 1968. In 1972 President Nixon appointed Carter to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, where he still presides as judge.
Chief Justice Earl Warrenâ s reading copy of Brown is annotated in his hand. Warren announced the opinion in the names of each justice, an unprecedented occurrence. The drama was heightened by the widespread prediction that the Court would be divided on the issue. Warren reminded himself to emphasize the decisionâs unanimity with a marginal notation, âunanimously,â which departed from the printed reading copy to declare, âTherefore, we unanimously hold. . . .â In his memoirs, Warren recalled the moment with genuine warmth: âWhen the word âunanimouslyâ was spoken, a wave of emotion swept the room; no words or intentional movement, yet a distinct emotional manifestation that defies description.â#N#âUnanimouslyâ was not incorporated into the published version of the opinion, and thus exists only in this manuscript.
The Supreme Court bundled Brown v. Board of Education with four related cases and scheduled a hearing for December 9, 1952. A rehearing was convened on December 7, 1953 and a decision rendered on May 17, 1954. Three lawyers, Thurgood Marshall (center), chief counsel for the NAACPâs Legal Defense Fund and lead attorney on the Briggs case, with George E. C. Hayes (left) and James M. Nabrit (right), attorneys for the Bolling case, are shown standing on the steps of the Supreme Court congratulating each other after the Courtâs decision declaring segregation unconstitutional.
In 1918, Walter White, NAACP Assistant Secretary, initially joined NAACP as an investigator . His fair skin and straight hair made him effective in conducting investigations of lynchings and race riots in the South. He could "pass" and talk to whites but identified as Black. Through 1927, White would investigate 41 lynchings.
NAACP continued to push for federal anti-lynching legislation into the 1930s. National lynching rates declined in the 1930s, a trend that NAACP Executive Secretary Walter White attributed to anti-lynching activism, shifts in public opinion, and the Great Migration.
Lynchings were violent public acts that white people used to terrorize and control Black people in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly in the South.
Hundreds of Black people were lynched based on accusations of other crimes, including murder, arson, robbery, and vagrancy.
How NAACP fought lynching. As Black Americans fled the South to escape the terror of lynchings , a historic event known as the Great Migration, people began to oppose lynchings in a number of ways. They conducted grassroots activism, such as boycotting white businesses.
Anti-lynching crusaders like Ida B. Wells composed newspaper columns to criticize the atrocities of lynching. And several important civil rights organizations â including NAACP â emerged during this time to combat racial violence. NAACP led a courageous battle against lynching.
Washington was a 17-year-old Black teen lynched in Waco, Texas, by a white mob that accused him of killing Lucy Fryer, a white woman. Du Bois was able to turn postcards of Washington 's murder against their creators to energize the anti-lynching movement.