NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE (NAACP)

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded on February 12, 1909, on the fringes of the progressive movement at Charity Organization Hall in New York City. The organization evolved with the changing social milieu as it struggled to implement its egalitarian philosophy with programs designed to obtain basic citizenship rights for African Americans. The programs developed along two distinct paths: (1) agitation and education, which would become the organization's well-defined political course, and (2) legal, which would define its constitutional foundation. As the NAACP stated in its tenth annual report, its goal was "to reach the conscience of America" in seeking racial equality. 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. Du Bois accomplished his mission through the organization's official magazine, The Crisis, which he edited; through his prolific writings and speeches; and through his founding of Pan Africanism.

By 1930, despite the financial ravages of the Great Depression, the NAACP was a major force in the burgeoning liberal phalanx that included the expanding organized Congress-labor movement and the socialist forces that would create the New Deal. Walter Francis White, who succeeded James Weldon Johnson that year as executive secretary, demonstrated the NAACP's growing political strength by launching the struggle that defeated President Herbert Hoover's nomination of Judge John J. Parker of North Carolina to the U.S. Supreme Court by a thirty-nine to forty-one vote in the Senate. Challenging Hoover's "lily-white policies" and his indifference to the black electorate, the NAACP opposed the nomination because of a speech Parker had given ten years earlier endorsing black disenfranchisement.

The Parker fight marked the coming to political maturity of African Americans who previously were ignored. The Washington Post published a lengthy feature on May 18, 1930, noting the development. The Crisis targeted several senators who had supported Parker's nomination and were running for reelection in 1930, 1932, and 1934. Eleven were defeated, but as The Crisis noted in its December 1934 issue, three "escaped" by winning reelection. White observed in his 1948 autobiography, A Man Called White, "Out of these effective hard-hitting and uncompromising campaigns two changed political attitudes came." White politicians "were forced to recognize that the Negro voter no longer was gullible, purchasable, or complacent as before and would have to be recognized as an increasingly potent force in the American political scene." Furthermore, African Americans "found new hope and dignity" when "hitherto their efforts had been crowned at best with purely 'moral' victories." In "the Parker fight victory had been achieved and a philosophy and aura of success had replaced the purely protest values of preceding battles." Editorials in the black press confirmed the transformation. William Hastie, a member of the NAACP national board, concluded that victory strengthened the NAACP's belief that the ballot was "the most important phase of the Negro's effort to improve his status in America."

Economic inequality, though, remained a burning issue. Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidential victory in 1932 further confirmed that concern; it also marked the beginning of the seismic shift of African Americans away from the Republican to the Democratic Party, a shift that became dramatic in Roosevelt's 1936 reelection. The Great Depression and the New Deal confirmed the maturity of the NAACP as a civil rights organization, a national bureaucratic machine with branches in every state. The deterioration of the economic position of African Americans, however, forced the NAACP to begin reexamining its strategy and emphasizing the economic needs of the masses. "We are becoming concerned," an NAACP statement declared, "that we are able to accomplish so little....We are going to continue to agitate....But we believe what the Negro needs primarily is a definite economic program."

The endemic discrimination of the New Deal's alphabet soup of programs opened the NAACP to intense criticisms from young radical black intellectuals, including John P. Davis, head of the Joint Committee on National Recovery, who pushed the association to further shift its focus to economic issues. The most prominent of these radicals, who were centered at Howard University in Washington, D.C., were economist Abraham L. Harris, sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, and political scientist Ralph J. Bunche. As Bunche noted, "the New Deal for the first time gave broad recognition to the existence of the African American as a national problem and undertook to give special consideration to this fact in many ways, though the basic evils remained untouched." Another prominent critic was Charles Hamilton Houston, associate dean of Howard University Law School, who also pressed the NAACP to shift its focus from anti-lynching to economic issues.

In 1933, the NAACP held a second Amenia Conference at the Troutbeck estate of Joel E. Spingarn, its president, in upstate New York, to develop a broader civil rights program and strategy. Unlike the first Amenia Conference held in 1916, which was integrated, the second was all-black. The conference concluded that a union of black and white workers was needed in the labor movement to direct America's economic and political life. The following year, the NAACP began implementing this program by appointing a Committee on Future Plan and Program of the NAACP, headed by Harris. 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.

At the same time, under Houston's direction, the NAACP launched its legal campaign against educational inequalities. In 1935, Houston and his protégé Thurgood Marshall (later to become the first black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court) won in the Baltimore City Court the NAACP's trailblazing legal challenge to segregation at the University of Maryland Law School. Their success helped set the stage for subsequent NAACP's court challenges that led to the landmark victory in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the "separate but equal" doctrine, established in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson-case, was unconstitutional. To accomplish that goal, Houston recommended to the NAACP that it attack the unequal funding of schools in the South in order to make maintaining segregation within the context of "separate but equal" so expensive that the region would be forced to abandon its Jim Crow education system. His recommendation, more limited and direct, varied from that of Nathan Margold of Harvard University, a white expert in constitutional law, who had earlier urged the NAACP to abandon its case-by-case attack on discrimination by directly challenging the constitutional validity of the "separate but equal" doctrine.

Part of the reason the NAACP reacted slowly during the Depression to increasing demands from blacks for assistance was that its leaders feared infiltration by Communists, and the NAACP was anxious to avoid fly-by-night projects. White, furthermore, had strong reservations about embracing a more "mass-oriented" program. Nevertheless, the NAACP could not disregard the obvious inequalities in the implementation of New Deal programs, including wage differentials sanctioned by the National Recovery Administration; the exclusion of black sharecroppers from the benefits of the Agricultural Adjustment Act; and the exclusion of black-dominated occupations, such as agricultural and domestic work, from Social Security coverage. The programs of other New Deal agencies, such as the Works Progress Administration, the National Youth Administration, and the United States Housing Authority, helped attract blacks to the Democratic Party, but the party itself, especially its southern wing, remained discriminatory. Most of the NAACP's effort to end discrimination in New Deal agencies was waged through the Joint Committee on National Recovery, which was composed of twenty-two national racial and interracial organizations.

White, furthermore, established a solid and warm working alliance with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, enabling the NAACP to garner added respect and ready access to the White House. This access was essential because, as White explained, "the President was frankly unwilling to challenge the Southern leaders of his party."

As a member of the NAACP national board of directors, Eleanor Roosevelt remained fully attuned to the thinking of blacks with the help of her friend, Mary McLeod Bethune, spiritual leader of the New Deal's Black Cabinet. Mrs. Roosevelt worked tirelessly to influence the course of government for the benefit of the NAACP and African Americans. A noteworthy challenge for her was the refusal in 1939 by the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) to permit the African-American contralto Marian Anderson to sing in Constitution Hall. Roosevelt protested the decision by resigning from the DAR. With the president's blessing (and at Eleanor's nudging), the Department of the Interior approved the use of the Lincoln Memorial for the concert, which was held under the auspices of the NAACP. Characteristically, White relished another victory over bigotry. Nothing made him happier, however, than Anderson's exquisitely beautiful performance, which brought tears of joy streaming down the face of one young girl who said, "If Marian Anderson could do it ... then I can, too."

The NAACP's activities during the Great Depression considerably strengthened its political and legal programs, enabling it in the 1940s to become an early leader in the modern civil rights movement. Its Depression-era programs contributed to the reaffirmation by the federal courts of the principle of equality under the Fourteenth Amendment, and to the subsequent adoption by the federal government of civil rights policies, and the enactment of a comprehensive package of new laws to protect those rights.

NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE (NAACP)

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