NAACP the Emancipation Proclamation and the Fourteenth

NAACP

The Emancipation Proclamation and the fourteenth amendment freed the slaves in the 19th century, but prejudice and open malice towards America's black population continued and even grew worse fifty years after Abraham Lincoln's death. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was the first grass-roots civil campaign built in reaction to the constant harassment and lynching which still took place regularly in the early 1900s. The United States would undergo many progressive transformations as a result of the newfound pressure of the NAACP and its guided purpose to the elimination of continued oppression against America's former slave population.

The NAACP was formed in 1908 by a group of four well-known Americans who saw grave injustices in their country. The Race Riot of 1908 in Springfield, IL, Abraham Lincoln's hometown, led to the necessity of an organization to represent colored people who were being mistreated. The foremost Black American member of the newfound NAACP was W.E.B. Dubois, an American sociologist and civil rights activist. Also joining the NAACP was Mary White Ovington, a suffragette and civil rights activist in her own right. William English Walling was an American journalist who investigated the Russian revolution of 1905 and the Race Riot of 1908 in Illinois, seeing the oppression of the black population first hand. Finally, Henry Moskowitz was a New York City Jewish civil rights activist, who was President of the New York Municipal Civil Service Commission. This collection of members was intentionally diverse, as that strategy was seen as more pragmatic than having an all colored founding group which could have been more easily dismissed.

The goals of the founding members of the NAACP were very clear, to advance the movement of the black community into the mainstream, step-by-step, through the courts, through congress, and through local governments. The organization was truly a grassroots movement, as its goals included opening many representative offices around the country, not merely concentrating in Washington DC. The other stated purposes of the NAACP were to eradicate all forms of racism among the American people, including allowing for equal education opportunities and employment under all forms of law in the United States.

The NAACP had many of its earliest victories during the Jim Crow law era, which blocked Black Americans from participating in local elections in various former slave states in the South. In some states such as Louisiana and Mississippi, the black population was over 25%, and therefore it was seen as a dangerous and unpredictable voting block to the states politicians. The NAACP did not have much impact in Washington at first, as Woodrow Wilson instituted segregation into the federal government in 1913, and the amount of lynching during World War I rose compared to pre-war levels. Eventually, however, the NAACP gained influence in Washington. In the 1930s Depression era, for instance, many remaining Jim Crow laws were finally abolished, and the Democratic Party enacted many protections for American consumers which also helped African-Americans to reduce the number of lynching victims in the South, although that practice continued sparingly until after World War II.

Fifty years after its formation in 1908, in the 1960s and what was to become the Civil Rights era, the NAACP was a principle actor in desegregation in the South. Having decades of expertise in approaching Washington, the NAACP became the voice for many in the South who were unable to voice their feelings at being kept out of white schools, white bathrooms, and white businesses. A hero of the NAACP at this time was an African-American lawyer by the name of Thurgood Marshall, who successfully argued Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court. This reputation led to his being named the first African-American Supreme Court Justice in 1967 by President Lyndon Johnson. The NAACP backed Martin Luther King Jr., and assisted in the passing of Affirmative Action to ensure equal education opportunity.