On the NAACP's 100th birthday, a civil-rights expert offers a
celebratory history of perhaps the most successful advocacy group
ever.The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
set out to agitate against a segregated society that had done
little since emancipation to advance the civil rights of
African-Americans. Although open to all at its inception, the
primarily black organization raised its early profile by
chronicling patterns of racial discrimination with its magazine,
The Crisis, an anti-lynching campaign and a nationwide call to
protest the racist movie, The Birth of a Nation. By the 1920s, the
NAACP's 100,000 members were waging a multifront battle on behalf
of racial justice. Sullivan (History/Univ. of South Carolina;
Freedom Writer: Virginia Foster Durr, Letters From the Civil Rights
Years, 2003, etc.) begins with the organization's pre - World War I
founding and follows its various transformations up to the historic
Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The
author pinpoints the NAACP's place in the civil-rights universe -
too integrationist for the Garveyites, too timid for the
communists, too radical for most everyone else. She also spotlights
important cases and issues - racial terror, voting rights, criminal
justice, discrimination in the military, employment, housing and
education - that aroused the organization's members, and focuses on
the NAACP's growth, achievements and synergistic composition.
Locals organized in membership branches and were coordinated by
field workers and attorneys, all of whom were informed by an agenda
articulated at annual meetings of the national and statewide
organizations. Although Sullivan touches on the group's internecine
squabbling and various rivalries - W.E.B. Du Bois had an especially
tumultuous relationship with the association - Sullivan's tone is
largely uncritical This is understandable perhaps when the list of
major players - including Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Walter
White, Roy Wilkins, Charles Huston, William Hastie, Thurgood
Marshall, Medgar Evers and Rosa Parks - reads like a civil-rights
Hall of Fame.An overdue tribute to the organization most
responsible for dismantling American apartheid. (Kirkus Reviews)
The first major history of America's oldest civil rights
organisation is destined to become a classic in the field. When it
was founded in 1909, The National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People was an elite organisation of white reformers. By
1918, it had become a mass organisation with predominantly black
members. Sullivan unearths the little-known early decades of
NAACP's activism, telling startling stories of personal bravery,
legal brilliance and political manoeuvring, before moving on to the
critical post-war era.
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