The two NAACPs and a century of struggle

In the hundred years since Ida Wells Barnett, W.E.B. DuBois and sixty others started the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, there have been many NAACPs. There was the founding NAACP, brought forth to challenge the infamous Atlanta Compromise, in which Booker T. Washington, in return for corporate white sponsorship and philanthropy, agreed that African Americans would not demand land, education, voting rights, economic justice, equality before the law or much of anything else. It was this early NAACP that carried on the fight against lynching in the courts of public opinion and the law. Ida Wells Barnett left the NAACP soon after its founding, dissatisfied with its legalistic approach to combating inequality, and W.E.B. DuBois was eased out by the mid 1930s. The NAACP of the twenties committed itself to a decades-long struggle to overthrow segregation in the courts. By 1935 the organization retained Charles Hamilton Houston as its general counsel, who mapped out the legal strategy and mentored a stellar team of black and white civil rights lawyers including Constance Baker Motley and Thurgood Marshall to carry it out. By the thirties and forties NAACP lawyers were taking hundreds of cases in dozens of states each year challenging segregation in housing, jobs, education and more, along with many of the kinds of capital cases that would have been plain lynchings just a few years earlier. Sometimes they even won. Thurgood Marshall argued 32 cases before the Supreme Court and won 29, including the 1954 Brown V. Board of Education, supposedly outlawing school segregation once and for all. At the same time, Roy Wilkins and Thurgood Marshall worked with the FBI to purge the NAACP of leftists, many of whom were the bones and flesh of local NAACP chapters. Fortunately they failed to get them all. Quite apart from the national NAACP, there was also the NAACP of its scores of local branches, often staffed and led by the very activists Wilkins and Marshall tried to eliminate. One of them was Birmingham's Edgar D. Nixon, a one-time local head of Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and instigator of the Birmingham Bus Boycott. Rosa Parks was the local branch secretary. With official and unofficial white economic retaliation and violence frequently orchestrated against the families, businesses and persons of local NAACP members, some Southern branches were forced to operate in near secrecy at times. Southern authorities demanded that the NAACP hand over its membership lists, often fining local chapters and locking up their leaders for failure to comply. Medgar Evers was not the only local NAACP leader to be murdered in the south, though he was probably one of the last.