The National Association of Colored People (NAACP)

Hartford Web Publishing is not the author of the documents in World History Archives and does not presume to validate their accuracy or authenticity nor to release their copyright.

The NAACP
From The Autobiography of W.E.B. DuBois (New York: International Publishers, Inc. 1968), pp. 254–276. Interesting account of the NAACP from its origins in 1919 up through the 1920s, by one of its principal founders (54 kb).
NAACP, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People: An interracial membership organization, founded in 1909, that is devoted to civil rights and racial justice
By Kate Tuttle. An article of 16 January 2000 located at Africana.com. It is a useful overview of the history of the NAACP that hints at the organization's inner contradictions.
NAACP tries to revive once-weighty magazine
By Larry Bivins, Detroit News Washington Bureau, 13 April 1997. The Crisis magazine played a central roll in the development of the NAACP, and was once both intellectually exciting and politically bold. It has reflected the character of the NAACP itself.
Guide Introduction: Papers of the NAACP–Part 17: National Staff Files, 1940–1955
Lexis-Nexis African American Studies, December 1995. Access to source files needed for research in the NAACP's history. The period covered by this example was critical for quantitative institutional growth accompanied by the seeds of its eventual decline.
Changing of the Guard: Resounding Speech by the Rev. Jamal Bryant
By Jeffrey Ball, Knight-Ridder, 10 July 1996. The NAACP's new youth coordinator indicts the organization's graying leadership for having grown complacent by largely ignoring troubled young people who most need its help.
CPUSA replies to slander in NY Times
By Gus Hall & Jarvis Tyner, People's Weekly World, 21 December 1996. Response to New York Times' McCarthyite attack on the role of progressives in the NAACP.
NAACP Reaffirms Policy On Desegregation
By Maurice Williams, The Militant, 11 August 1997. Divisive issues at the 88th annual NAACP convention in Pittsburgh. Pro-business President Kweisi Mfume's and NAACP national board chairperson Myrlie Evers-Williams' policies.
NAACP chair will broaden message
By Frank Chapman, Weekly World, 28 February 1998. Julian Bond is elected national chair of the NAACP. He wants the NAACP to reach out to emerging Americans, Hispanics, Latinos, Native Americans, Asians and white Americans.
NAACP criticizes Mumia teach-in. School officials hope to limit controversy
By Jonathan Schorr, Oakland Tribune, 8 January 1999. Oakland NAACP blasts planned teach-in concerning Mumia Abu-Jamal.
NAACP Convention: Beware of Anti-Racists Funded by the Rulers
From Challenge, 4 August 1999. The Progressive Labor Party assessement of the 90th convention of the NAACP (New York, 15 July 1999). Accuses the leadership of selling out. Appended is an extract from W.E.B.Dubois' Autobiography saying why he believed in communism.
About the NAACP
From the NAACP web page (1999). The current NAACP's self-assessment. Access to the NAACP website.
National NAACP; Is there a plan?
A dialog on the BRC-ALL list, December 1999. Discussion of whether the NAACP, the only nationally recognized large viable organization, is totally lame.
Quote of the day
By Adam Fairclough, June 2000. The NAACP's decision to abandon equalization for integration involved a strategic decision to attack Jim Crow at what appeared to be its most vulnerable point. Given its (virtually) consistent opposition to legally imposed segregation, the decision was entirely consonant with the organization's basic philosophy. But this produced profound misgivings among black educators such as Du Bois.
Battle Brewing in Philadelphia NAACP
By Linn Washington Jr., The Black World Today, 16 November 2000. The caustic campaign by Mayor Street to oust the often-combative NAACP chapter president Mondesire, turning the NAACP presidential election into a battleground to settle long-standing political vendettas for personal reasons totally unrelated to Mondesire's performance as NAACP president.
Letter to NAACP
By Susan Abulhawa, 3 December 2000. The daughter of Palestinian refugees expelled from their homes at gun point in 1967 expresses deep sadness at seeing Bond's signature in the NY Times in support of Israel, a government that has systematically, for decades, oppressed and enslaved the native Palestinian population.
92nd Annual NAACP Convention Address
By Julian Bond, Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, New Orleans, Louisiana, 8 July 2001. The theme for our Convention is an old Quaker maxim: follow your highest sense of right, whatever the consequences, however lonely the path and however loud the jeers. This is a prescription we ought to follow today: agitation, nonviolence, and a refusal to cooperate. Speaking truth to power.
The price of silence
Editor, The Black Commentator, 17 October 2002. At times it seems we can almost hear the roar of approaching war—but little outcry is heard from the national office of the NAACP. Sadu Nanjundiah, a physics teacher at Central Connecticut State University, is more than disappointed with the nation's oldest civil rights organization.
NAACP hit for policy on Cuba
By Steve Miller, The Washington Post, [17 July 2003]. Undated Post article with running commentary. Cuban dissidents accuse the NAACP of a double standard in its promotion of human rights, defending those of blacks in South Africa while embracing—rather than condemning—the treatment of blacks in Cuba.
A Militant Liberalism: Anti-Communism and the African American Intelligentsia, 1939–1955
By Daniel W. Aldridge, III, Davidson College, Conference Paper for the 2004 American Historical Association, December 2003. In their zeal to rehabilitate the Cold War's domestic victims and to criticize the shortcomings of the post-civil rights era, many writers have accepted an incomplete and romanticized picture of the Left. The paper supports the liberal position against Du Bois' radical critique of society.
USA's Oldest Civil Rights Group Investigated after anti-Bush Speech
Radio Havana Cuba, 30 October 2004. The US's Internal Revenue Service has informed the country's oldest and largest civil rights organization that it is investigating whether the group improperly intervened in a political campaign when it posted on its website a speech by its chairman that condemned the Bush administration's policies.
The Bruce Gordon Resignation: You Can't Know The NAACP If You've Never Been In The NAACP
By Anthony Asadullah Samad, The Black Commentator, 15 March 2007. Bruce Gordon's resignation as President (formerly called the Executive Director) of the NAACP. He was a change activist; no change activist is a fit for the NAACP.
Unappologetically young, Black and female...: The relevance of the NAACP to someone under 40
By Jasmyne A. Cannick, The Black Commentator, 15 March 2007. It's only been 19 months and already NAACP President Bruce Gordon has called it quits, citing irreconcilable differences with the management style of its 64-member board of directors, a clear indication that the Black leadership is in a serious crisis.