NAACP

• 1. Introduction

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  The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was born from outrage. In Springfield, Illinois, the state capital and Abraham Lincoln's hometown, a race riot in 1908 shocked a nation that had long looked away from racial violence. Men who had cast ballots for thirty years in the South were being told they did not qualify to register. Across the region, lynchings were at an all-time high. A small group of reformers decided the moment demanded something new. What they built in the years that followed became the largest and oldest civil rights organization in America. Who were these founders? What made their coalition so unusual? And how did an organization rooted in courtrooms and legislation survive a century of upheaval to remain a force in American life? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. An Unlikely Coalition

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  W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, and Moorfield Storey were not the sort of people who typically found themselves in the same room. Du Bois was a scholar and activist; Wells was an African-American journalist whose anti-lynching reporting had already made her famous; Storey was a white attorney from a Boston abolitionist family who had been a classical liberal Democrat under Grover Cleveland. Yet on the 12th of February 1909, a date chosen deliberately to mark the hundredth anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth, this improbable group came together along with dozens of others to form the NAACP.

  The founders were strikingly diverse by the standards of 1909. Four European Americans were among the original organizers: Mary White Ovington and Henry Moskowitz, both social workers; journalist William English Walling, described as a wealthy socialist and the son of a former slave-holding family; and Oswald Garrison Villard. Moskowitz, who was Jewish, was also Associate Leader of the New York Society for Ethical Culture. Florence Kelley, a social reformer and friend of Du Bois, and Charles Edward Russell, a renowned muckraker who had served as acting chairman of the National Negro Committee, rounded out the founding circle.

  This cross-racial character set the NAACP apart from its immediate predecessor. The Niagara Movement, formed in 1905 by thirty-two prominent African-American leaders, had been exclusively Black. Those men had convened in Canada at the Erie Beach Hotel on the Canadian side of the Niagara River in Fort Erie, Ontario, because American hotels were segregated. By 1910 the Niagara Movement had disbanded, but seven of its members joined the NAACP's board of directors, carrying forward a tradition that historians would later describe as more radical than the organization they fed into.

  At the founding conference on the 30th of May 1909, held at the Henry Street Settlement House in New York City, Ida B. Wells-Barnett addressed the gathering on the history of lynching and demanded action to publicize and prosecute such crimes. Du Bois presided over the proceedings and was named Director of Publicity and Research. Moorfield Storey of Boston became the first president. The formal name they chose reflected a deliberate linguistic choice: colored people was then a common and inclusive term for those with African ancestry, and the organization would keep it long after language shifted around it.

• 3. The Crisis and the Pen

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  In 1910, one year after its founding, the NAACP launched a quarterly magazine called The Crisis. Du Bois edited it for the first twenty-four years. What began as a newsletter grew into something far more ambitious. Within a few years its circulation surpassed 30,000, and it was carrying not just news but African-American poetry and literature.

  During the organization's campaigns against lynching, Du Bois used the pages of The Crisis to encourage the writing and performance of plays and expressive literature about racial violence. The magazine served simultaneously as a news organ, a literary platform, and a weapon. From the window of its New York offices, the NAACP hung a black flag bearing the words "A Man Was Lynched Yesterday" each time a lynching was reported.

  The Jewish community contributed significantly to keeping both the magazine and the broader organization alive in its early years. Julius Rosenwald, founder and president of Sears Roebuck and Company and a board member of the Tuskegee Institute, gave several thousand dollars in the early days. He arranged for the 1912 meeting in Chicago to be held at his synagogue, Temple Sinai. Later the Rosenwald Fund contributed over thirty thousand dollars for legal defense and education. In 1914, Professor Emeritus Joel Spingarn of Columbia University became chairman and recruited Jewish leaders including Jacob Schiff, Jacob Billikopf, and Rabbi Stephen Wise to the board. That Jewish-Black solidarity would prove central to NAACP identity for decades, and would be tested in ways the founders could not have anticipated.

• 4. From Nine Thousand to Ninety Thousand

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  In 1916, chairman Joel Spingarn invited James Weldon Johnson to serve as field secretary. Johnson was a former U.S. consul to Venezuela and a noted African-American scholar. He found an organization with roughly 9,000 members. Within four years he had brought that number to almost 90,000, and by 1920 there were 395 branches across the country.

  The geography of the membership shifted in ways that surprised even the leadership. Early on, branches were rare in the South. By 1920, all seventy-four southern branches spanned every state in the region. Jim Crow violence made membership far more dangerous in the South than elsewhere and kept per-capita numbers lower, but the network existed. Johnson was elected head of the organization in 1920, the same year he and his successor Walter F. White began their successive tenures as executive secretary, a role that functioned as chief operating officer. Both men were far more widely known as NAACP leaders than any of the presidents who held office during those years.

  The growth paused during the later 1920s and through the Great Depression, then surged again. By 1945, the NAACP counted 894 branches and 351,000 members. The source puts it plainly: virtually every town or city where Black people lived had a chapter. By 1958, the South accounted for well over half of the NAACP's 1,230 chapters and 302,000 members, a reversal of the early pattern. Juanita Jackson Mitchell, appointed national director of the Youth and College Division in 1936, had helped build the pipeline of younger activists who sustained that expansion.

• 5. The Courtroom as Battlefield

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  Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall ran the NAACP's Legal department, and they approached segregation the way a military commander approaches a fortified position: methodically, from every angle, over a long horizon. Their campaign to overturn the doctrine of "separate but equal" established by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson spanned several decades.

  The groundwork went case by case. The NAACP challenged Oklahoma's discriminatory grandfather clause in Guinn v. United States in 1915. Two years later, in Buchanan v. Warley, it persuaded the Supreme Court that state and local governments cannot officially segregate African Americans into separate residential districts. In 1938, Houston's victory in Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada directly led to the formation of the Legal Defense Fund a year later in 1939. Marshall argued and won the 1935 Murray v. Pearson case, challenging segregation in Maryland state professional schools, before the Baltimore chapter.

  The Legal Defense Fund was created by the board of directors in 1939 specifically for tax purposes, operating as the NAACP's legal arm. By 1957 it had become a separate legal entity. Serious disputes between the two organizations emerged after 1961, but their shared foundational work produced the result both had aimed at: on the 17th of May 1954, a unanimous Supreme Court held in Brown v. Board of Education that state-sponsored segregation of public elementary schools was unconstitutional.

  The Montgomery bus boycott that began on the 5th of December 1955 grew directly from the NAACP's local network. Edgar Nixon, local chapter president, and Rosa Parks, who had served as the chapter's secretary, helped organize the action. The boycott lasted 381 days. Two-thirds of the Montgomery buses' riders were Black. Alabama responded by effectively barring the NAACP from operating within its borders when it refused to hand over a membership list, fearing retaliation against members. The Supreme Court eventually overturned that ban in NAACP v. Alabama, but the years the organization spent fighting that battle cost it leadership ground to newer groups, including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, founded in 1957, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, founded in 1960.

• 6. Turbulence and Renewal

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  The 1990s brought financial crisis and leadership scandal simultaneously. By 1992, with the organization running a significant debt, Rupert Richardson took over as president. In 1993 the board narrowly selected Reverend Benjamin Chavis over Reverend Jesse Jackson to serve as executive director. Chavis lasted eighteen months before the board ousted him, accusing him of using NAACP funds in an out-of-court settlement for a sexual harassment lawsuit.

  In 1995 Myrlie Evers-Williams narrowly defeated chairperson William Gibson for president after Gibson faced accusations of overspending and mismanagement. The following year, Democratic Congressman Kweisi Mfume, a Maryland representative and former head of the Congressional Black Caucus, took over as president. By the late 1990s strained finances forced the organization to cut its staff from 250 in 1992 to 50. It recovered. The NAACP National Voter Fund launched a major voter mobilization campaign for the 2000 presidential election, and 10.5 million African Americans cast ballots that year, one million more than in 1996.

  During that same election cycle, Lee Alcorn, president of the Dallas NAACP branch, made antisemitic remarks on a gospel radio station criticizing Al Gore's selection of Senator Joe Lieberman as his running mate. Mfume suspended Alcorn immediately and issued an unequivocal condemnation: "I find them to be repulsive, anti-Semitic, anti-NAACP and anti-American." Alcorn, who had been suspended three times in the previous five years for misconduct, resigned and founded what he called the Coalition for the Advancement of Civil Rights. The American Jewish Congress praised the NAACP's rapid response. In October 2004, the Internal Revenue Service opened an investigation into the NAACP's tax-exempt status following chairman Julian Bond's speech criticizing President George W. Bush. The IRS closed the investigation in August 2006, finding that the remarks had not violated the organization's tax-exempt status.

• 7. Broadening the Mission

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  On the 19th of May 2012, the NAACP's board of directors voted 62-2 to formally endorse same-sex marriage as a civil right, meeting in Miami, Florida. President Benjamin Jealous tied the decision to the Fourteenth Amendment and equal protection. Julian Bond, while chairman, had been an outspoken supporter of gay and lesbian rights for years; he boycotted the 2006 funeral services for Coretta Scott King, saying her children had chosen an anti-gay megachurch contrary to their mother's own positions. At a 2007 speech at Clayton State University in Morrow, Georgia, Bond stated plainly, "If you don't like gay marriage, don't get gay married." The vote drew the resignation of Keith Ratliff Sr. of Des Moines, Iowa, from the NAACP board.

  The organization also expanded into environmental justice, publishing a report in April 2019 that documented tactics used by the fossil fuel industry and argued that fossil fuel companies targeted the NAACP for manipulation. Its environmental justice group, headed by Abre' Conner with eleven full-time staff members, began working with local chapters to encourage environmentally sound policies and resist utility company influence.

  Travel warnings became another tool. On the 7th of June 2017, the NAACP issued a caution for African-American travelers to Missouri, citing a finding that African Americans were 75 percent more likely to be stopped for routine traffic violations than white drivers. Missouri NAACP Conference president Rod Chapel Jr. suggested visitors should carry bail money. In May 2023, the NAACP joined the American Civil Liberties Union, the League of United Latin American Citizens, and Equality Florida in issuing a travel advisory for visitors to Florida in response to new laws targeting people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals. The organization's archives, housed at the Library of Congress since 1964, now span approximately five million items covering the organization's history from its founding through 2003, with nearly two million pages digitized through 1972 in partnership with ProQuest.