National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

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Four NAACP leaders hold up an anti-segregation poster in Mississippi in 1956

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (Engl. National Organization for the Promotion of colored people ), including NAACP called, is one of the oldest and most influential black civil rights organizations of the United States .

history

It emerged from the Niagara Movement , founded in 1905, and was launched on February 12, 1909 to work for the benefit of the African American population. Founding members were William Edward Burghardt Du Bois , Ida Wells-Barnett , Henry Moskowitz , Mary White Ovington , Oswald Garrison Villard, Sr. and William English Walling . Other early members were Joel and Arthur Spingarn, Josephine Ruffin , Mary Talbert , Inez Milholland , Jane Addams , Florence Kelley , Sophonisba Breckinridge , John Haynes Holmes , Mary McLeod Bethune , George Henry White , Charles Edward Russell , John Dewey , William Dean Howells , Lillian Wald , Charles Darrow , Lincoln Steffens , Ray Stannard Baker , Fanny Garrison Villard, and Walter Sachs. Initially, the organization took legal action to reverse the Jim Crow laws , which legalized segregation .

The NAACP established its first national office in New York City in 1910 and elected a board of directors and President Moorfield Storey , a white constitutional lawyer and former president of the American Bar Association . The only African American executive was Du Bois, who was elected director of publications and research. He founded the NAACP's official journal The Crisis in 1910 as the leading voice for civil rights. To increase circulation, Du Bois published works by Langston Hughes , Countee Cullen and other representatives of the Harlem Renaissance such as Claude McKay , Jean Toomer , Nella Larsen , Georgia Douglas Johnson , George Schuyler , Arna Bontemps and Anne Spencer .

After Hattie McDaniel received an Oscar for her role in Gone With the Wind , then chairman Walter Francis White accused her of being an Uncle Tom, someone who submissively accepts the role of slave.

After the desegregation by the Supreme Court in 1954 ( Brown v. Board of Education ), the NAACP sought to reverse segregation in all southern states and supported the bus boycott of Montgomery in 1956. In addition, the NAACP supported and organized the 1963 march Washington for Work and Freedom and the 1995 Million-Man March .

In the 1990s the NAACP went into debt in the millions, so that between 1992 and 1995 the workforce had to be reduced from 250 to just under 50.

organization

Its headquarters are in Baltimore , with regional offices in California , New York , Michigan , Missouri , Georgia , Texas and Maryland . The NAACP is represented at the national level by an administrative board. It has 64 members and is led by a chairman. The board elects a president and chief executive officer for the organization.

In 1996, Kweisi Mfume , a Democratic Congressman , was named president and served until 2004. He was followed by Bruce S. Gordon until his resignation in March 2007 ; Benjamin Jealous followed until May 2014 . The American lawyer and activist Cornell William Brooks was elected president by the election on May 16, 2014 .

Roslyn Brock has been Chairman since February 2010 ; her predecessor was the Civil Rights Movement activist and former US Congressman Julian Bond .

The NAACP had 300,000 members in August 2011.

Awards given

The organization awards two different awards to African Americans every year: the NAACP Image Award for special achievements in the fields of film, television, music and literature, and the Spingarn Medal for special achievements of any kind.

Trivia

The work of the NAACP is discussed in the book Go there, put a watchman .

Movie

literature

  • Horace Bumstead : Secondary and higher education in the South for whites and negroes. Publisher: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People New York, 1910
  • Manfred Berg , The ticket to freedom. The NAACP and the right to vote for Afro-Americans, Campus-Verlag Frankfurt a. M. 2000. ISBN 3-593-36534-0 .
  • Manfred Berg: Ticket to Freedom. The NAACP and the Struggle for Black Political Integration, Gainesville, Fla. 2005.
  • Minnie Finch , The NAACP: Its Fight for Justice . Scarecrow Press, 1981.
  • Harris, Jacqueline L. History and Achievements of the NAACP (The African American Experience) . 1992.
  • Kellogg, Charles Flint. NAACP: A History of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People . Johns Hopkins University Press: 1973. ISBN 0-8018-1554-1 .
  • Richard Kluger Simple Justice . Alfred A. Knopf: 1976. ISBN 0-394-72255-8 .
  • Ovington, Mary White, Black and White Sat Down Together: The Reminiscences of an NAACP Founder . Feminist Press: 1995. ISBN 1-55861-099-5 .
  • Pitre, Merline. In Struggle Against Jim Crow: Lulu B. White and the NAACP, 1900-1957 . Texas A&M Press: 1999. ISBN 0-89096-869-1 .
  • St. James, Warren D. NAACP: Triumphs of a Pressure Group, 1909-1980 . Exposition Press, 1980.
  • Sullivan, Patricia: Lift Every Voice. The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement . The New Press, New York 2009. ISBN 978-1-59558-446-5 .
  • Tushnet, Mark V. The NAACP's Legal Strategy Against Segregated Education, 1925-1950 . UNC Press: 1987. ISBN 0-8078-4173-0 .
  • Carolyn Wedin , Inheritors of the Spirit: Mary White Ovington and the Founding of the NAACP . Wiley Publishers: 1999. ISBN 0-471-32724-7 .
  • Jenny Woodley: Art for Equality: The NAACP's Cultural Campaign for Civil Rights. University Press of Kentucky, Lexington 2014, ISBN 978-0-8131-4516-7 .
  • Robert L. Zangrando , The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909-1950 . Temple University Press: 1980. ISBN 0-87722-174-X .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ "The NAACP's 93rd Convention: An Assessment" ( Memento from January 6, 2007 in the Internet Archive )

Web links

Commons : National Association for the Advancement of Colored People  - Collection of Pictures, Videos and Audio Files