National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

(noun)

An African-American civil rights organization in the United States, formed in 1909, whose mission is "to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate racial hatred and racial discrimination".

Related Terms

Examples of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the following topics:

  • Ideological Interest Groups

    • Interest groups represent people or organizations with common concerns and interests.
    • These groups work to gain or retain benefits for their members, or to make general changes they perceive to be for the public good.
    • Some examples of ideological interest groups include the National Organization for Women (NOW), the National Taxpayers Union, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the Christian Coalition.
    • The stated goal of the organization is to represent Christians who support a traditional family point of view.The group works on a variety of more specific issues such as disputing abortion, improving traditional education, and lowering taxes.
    • Examples include the National Rifle Association (NRA), a gun rights advocacy group, or AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), an LGBTQ group advocating around AIDS research and health.

  • Desegregation in Little Rock

    • The decision declared all laws establishing segregated schools to be unconstitutional, and it called for the desegregation of all schools throughout the nation.
    • After the decision the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) attempted to register black students in previously all-white schools in cities throughout the South.
    • By 1957, the NAACP had registered nine black students to attend the previously all-white Little Rock Central High, selected on the criteria of excellent grades and attendance.
    • Governor Orval Faubus called out the National Guard on September 4, 1957, and on the first day of school, troops from the National Guard blocked the nine students from entering the school.
    • The sight of a line of soldiers blocking nine black students from attending high school made national headlines and polarized the nation.

  • The "Color Line"

    • Du Bois was one of the co-founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.
    • Du Bois rose to national prominence as the leader of the Niagara Movement, a group of African-American activists who wanted equal rights for blacks.
    • When the silent film The Birth of a Nation premiered in 1915, Du Bois and the NAACP led the fight to ban the movie, because of its racist portrayal of blacks as brutish and lustful.
    • This book by Du Bois infamously proclaimed the problem of "the color line. "
    • Du Bois and the NAACP in combatting racism and the segregation of the "color line" in the early 20th century.

  • Court Decisions and Civil Rights

    • The nation's oldest black collegiate fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, took on the case of Pearson v.
    • By the time the case reached court, Murray was represented by Charles Hamilton Houston and a rising Thurgood Marshall of the Baltimore chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
    • Murray as the NAACP's first case to test Nathan Ross Margold's strategy to attack the "separate but equal" doctrine using the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S.
    • The NAACP's legal strategy of attacking segregation by demanding equal access to public facilities that could not be easily duplicated was followed in later lawsuits with mixed results.
    • Thurgood Marshall was the co-counsel for the prosecution in the landmark Murray v.

  • Freedom, Inequality, and Democracy in the Gilded Age

    • Between 1889 and 1922, as political disfranchisement and segregation were being established, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) calculates lynchings reached their worst level in history.
    • Under such conditions, even the most ambitious and talented black people found it extremely difficult to advance.
    • They also faced racism from Northerners with whom they were competing for jobs and housing.
    • The NAACP was established in 1909, and by 1920 the group had won a few important anti-discrimination lawsuits.
    • It created for the first time a class of the super-rich "captains of industry," the "Robber Barons," whose network of business, social, and family connections ruled a largely White Anglo-Saxon Protestant social world that possessed clearly defined boundaries.

  • Woodrow Wilson and Race

    • A Southerner, Wilson was said to be a vocal fan of the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, which celebrated the rise of the first Ku Klux Klan.
    • Wilson’s praise was used to defend the film from criticism by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
    • Numerous black people voted for Democrat Woodrow Wilson in the 1912 election based on his promise to work for them.
    • In 1914, Wilson told The New York Times, "If the colored people made a mistake in voting for me, they ought to correct it."
    • Quotation from Woodrow Wilson's History of the American People as reproduced in the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation.

  • Minorities and the New Deal

    • While the overall unemployment reached approximately a quarter of the labor force, for black workers, the rate was well over 50%.
    • The 1933 National Recovery Administration, the main First New Deal agency responsible for industrial recovery, had hardly anything to offer to African Americans as National Industrial Recovery Act's (NIRA) provisions covered the industries, from which black workers were usually excluded.
    • He also cited reports of discrimination: "There is evidence available that needed workers have been barred from industries engaged in defense production solely because of considerations of race, creed, color or national origin, to the detriment of workers' morale and of national unity."
    • The nation's oldest black collegiate fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, took on the case of Pearson v.
    • By the time the case reached court, Murray was represented by Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall of the Baltimore chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

  • The NAACP

    • At the beginning of the 1900s the conditions for people of color, and particularly Black people in the US were incredibly unequal.
    • The NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) was one of these groups.
    • In 1909 the NAACP formed, the fist call for a meeting was send out by a group of white liberals appalled by the continued violence committed against Black people in the US .
    • In the early years the NAACP campaigned vigorously against lynching, voter suppression laws, for education rights, and blocked the nomination of a segregationist Supreme Court Judge.
    • Du Bois and Mary White Ovington were two of the founding officers of the NAACP.

  • Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement

    • After the period of Reconstruction, the American South maintained an entrenched system of overt, state-sanctioned racial discrimination and oppression.
    • African Americans and other racial minorities resisted this regime in numerous ways and sought better opportunities through lawsuits, new organizations (such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), political redress, and labor organizing.
    • This was a more direct and potentially more rapid means of orchestrating change than the traditional approach of mounting court challenges.
    • Key events in the Civil Rights Movement included: the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-1956), which began when Rosa Parks, a NAACP secretary, was arrested when she refused to cede her public bus seat to a white passenger; the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School (1957); the Selma to Montgomery marches, also known as Bloody Sunday and the two marches that followed, were marches and protests held in 1965 that marked the political and emotional peak of the American civil rights movement which sought to secure voting rights for African-Americans.
    • The student sit-ins protesting segregated lunch counters (1960); the Freedom Rides (1961) in which activists attempted to integrate bus terminals, restrooms, and water fountains; voter registration drives; and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (1963), in which civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.

  • Civil Rights

    • There has been a tremendous awakening of the American conscience on the great issues of civil rights--equal economic opportunities, equal rights of citizenship, and equal educational opportunities for all our people, whatever their race or religion or status of birth.
    • The far-reaching effects that the committee had hoped for had little impact on the civil rights of Black Americans in the late 1940s.
    • In particular, from the 1930s to the 1960s the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB) issued guidelines that specified that a realtor
    • Robinson broke the baseball color line when the Brooklyn Dodgers started him at first base on April 15, 1947.
    • President Truman addresses the closing session of the 38th annual conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People at Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. (1947)