Let’s Look at the Issues
In two weeks we will mark the 105th anniversary of the founding of the NAACP. It is indeed appropriate that this observance is held at this time each year. After all, February is Black History Month.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People began in 1909, after a thwarted lynching in Springfield, Illinois. A wealthy liberal, William English Walling, was stunned that this kind of activity could take place in the very town that was the home of Abraham Lincoln. Walling contacted a multi-racial Who’s Who of reformers, including W.E.B DuBois, Lincoln Steffens, Jane Addams and Ida Wells; and the new civil rights organization was founded right here in New York, on Lincoln’s birthday, February 12, 1909.
The first meeting of the organization was also held in Manhattan, at Cooper Union, the fabled institute of higher learning that still exists today at 30 Cooper Square. At the time of its establishment, the NAACP’s immediate goal was to stop lynching. But it’s long-term goal was to have federal law and society itself recognize the equality if all people.
The NAACP had its first major victory in 1918. After it engaged in a relentless campaign that year, it convinced President Woodrow Wilson to make a public statement against lynching. Two years later the NAACP took a bold step and held its national convention in Atlanta, Georgia, a stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan. At the same time the NAACP raised money to take out large ads in major U.S. newspapers to educate the public about discrimination in schools, the workplace, and public establishments.
One of the proudest moments in the NAACP’s history took place 75 years ago, in 1939. Black opera and spirituals singer Marian Anderson was barred from singing at Washington D.C.’s Constitution Hall, by the venue’s owner, a conservative civic organization called the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR). The DAR banned Anderson because she was black, but the move backfired, spreading outrage among many in the entertainment community like conductor Arturo Toscanini and violinist Isaac Stern, as well as people in the political arena such as Eleanor Roosevelt, the nation’s First Lady. Mrs. Roosevelt resigned from the DAR and, with her assistance and the help of the NAACP, the Anderson concert was moved to the Lincoln Memorial. It drew a live audience of 75,000 and millions more on the radio.
In the 1940s the NAACP began using the courts to seek redress for the discrimination suffered by blacks. In 1946 the NAACP was the winning plaintiff in the case Morgan v. Virginia. In an historic ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down all states’ laws that sanctioned segregation in facilities involved in interstate travel by train or bus. Although the decision did not address all forms of segregation, it was a major step in the civil rights struggle.
Every high school student in the U.S. knows the significance of the 1954 Supreme Court ruling called Brown v. Board of Education. The case was brought to the courts by the NAACP and its lead attorney, Thurgood Marshall, who was later appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Lyndon Johnson. This decision dealt with segregation in public schools, which many officials explained away as “separate but equal.” But in the Supreme Court’s majority decision Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, “We conclude that the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”
And, as many of you know, the NAACP was one of the groups at the forefront of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. The organization’s first field director, Medgar Evers, paid the ultimate price for his involvement with the NAACP, when he was gunned down in the driveway of his home in 1963. It took more than three decades to bring his assassin to justice.
There are obviously many other examples of the contributions made by the NAACP in the fight for justice and equality, including its strong and inspiring leadership in the successful effort to end apartheid in South Africa.
Our Union has always had strong ties with the NAACP and its goals; from our very first contract in 1939, which banned discrimination in the workplace, through the days of our annual civil Rights awards in the 1950s and 1960s, to today, as we continue to recognize that our diversity is our greatest strength.
We salute the NAACP on its upcoming 105th anniversary. It is an organization with a glorious history of accomplishment. Perhaps more than any other group the NAACP helped bring America from a country that treated blacks as second class citizens to a nation that has elected its first African American President. While there are still forms of discrimination quite evident in the U.S., it is encouraging to know that this extraordinary organization is still here to fight for equality.
