The NAACP at 100

“Agitation is a necessary evil to tell of the ills of the Suffering. Without it many a nation has been lulled to false security and preened itself with virtues it did not possess. The function of this Association is to tell this nation the crying evil of race prejudice. It is a hard duty but a necessary one—a divine one…. Agitation does not mean Aggravation—Aggravation calls for Agitation in order that Remedy may be found.” — W.E.B. DuBois “Agitation” 1910

Conference Schedule

Thursday, October 29: Auditorium of the Harrison Institute/Small Special Collections Library

Directions to the Harrison Institute/Small Special Collections Library

Time	Session
9:00-9:10	Opening Remarks Deborah McDowell, Director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute
9:15–10:45	Groundwork for a Southern Movement Emma Edmunds , University of Virginia: Moderator Erivn Jordan, University of Virginia: "To Go Boldly": Alice Jackson, African American Women and the Desegregation of the University of Virginia Claudrena Harold, University of Virginia: The Hour Has Come: The NAACP and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the New South Larissa Smith Fergeson, Longwood University: Groundwork for a Southern Movement: The NAACP in Virginina
11:00-12:45	THE LEGAL CAMPAIGN AGAINST SEGREGATED SCHOOLS Patrice Grimes, University of Virginia: Moderator Robert Pratt, University of Georgia: Into the Lions' Den:  The role of Local NAACP Attorneys in the Campaign against School Segregation and the Fight for Racial Justice Mildred Robinson, University of Virginia: Brown v. Board of Education from the Ground Up: Glimmers of Light, Opportunities Lost and Grievous Costs

Thursday Afternoon & Evening Events:Auditorium of the Harrison Institute/Small Special Collections Library

 

Time	Session
2:45-4:30	Recasting the legacy of the Naacp Frank Dukes, University of Virginia: Moderator Ronald Walters, University of Maryland: Recasting the Legacy of the NAACP: Fighting 20th Century Slavery Herbert Timothy Lovelace, University of Virginia: Close the Dump: The Roanoke Virgina NAACP and the Struggle Against Environmental Racism Ian Grandison, University of Virgina: Other Side of the "Free" Way: College Campuses and Racialized Territories in the Wake of Massive Resistance
7:30–9:00	Keynote Address Julian Bond: The Beginning of Something Big Video of the Keynote Address

Friday, October 30: Auditorium of the Harrison Institute/Small Special Collections Library

Directions to the Harrison Institute/Small Special Collections Library

Time	Session
9:00–9:20	Remarks - Benjamin todd Jealous (president and Ceo of the NAACP)
9:30-11:00	Julian Bond Interviews Benjamin Todd Jealous Video of the Interview
11:15-12:45	Labor and the Naacp Robert Fatton, University of Virgina: Moderator Francille Wilson, University of Southern California "A Corporai's Guard for Negro Workers": Black Social Scientists and the NAACP's Policies during the Depression Risa Goluboff, University of Virginia: The Lost Promise of Civil Rights: Evaluating the NAACP in the Pre-Brown Era M. Rick Turner, President of the Charlottesville Branch of the NAACP
2:00–3:30	the naacp - ONe hundred years and beyond Marlon B. Ross , University of Virginia: Moderator Daylanne K. English, Macalester College: "The Thorny Stem of Time": One Hundred Years of Crisis Patricia Sullivan, University of South Carolina: Beyond "Eyes on the Prize": The NAACP and the Struggle for Civil Rights Dianne Pinderhughes, University of Notre Dame : The NAACP's Second Century: Organizational, Economic, Demographic and Philosophical Challenges Lacy Ward, Director of Robert Russa Moton Museum Avonique DeVignes, University of Virgina: Flesh and Blood and Breath of Life Must Be Added to the Skeleton We Have Constructed: A Glance at Youth Participation in the NAACP
3:45-5:00	LIFT EVERY VOICE: THE NAACP AND THE MAKING OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT: A ROUNDTABLE Kenneth Mack, Harvard University Raymond Gavins, Duke University Daryl Scott, Howard University

Symposium Participants

JULIAN BOND - University of Virginia, Chairmand of the Board of the NAACP

Julian Bond is Professor of History here at the University.  From his student days to his current Chairmanship of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Julian Bond has been an active participant in the movements for civil rights and economic justice. As an activist who has faced jail for his convictions, as a veteran of more than 20 years service in the Georgia General Assembly, a university professor and a writer, he has been on the cutting edge of social change since 1960.

While a student at Morehouse College, he participated in the Atlanta student sit-in and anti-segregation organization and helped to found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).  As SNCC's Communications Director, Bond was active in protests and registration campaigns throughout the South.

Bond serves as Chairman of the Premier Auto Group PAG Diversity Council and sits on the Boards of People for the American Way, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Council for a Livable World, and the advisory board of the Harvard Business School Initiative on Social Enterprise, among others.

He was a commentator on America's Black Forum, the oldest black-owned show in television syndication. His poetry and articles have appeared in numerous publications. He has lent his voice to various documentaries, including A Time for Justice, which won an Academy Award and the prize-winning and critically acclaimed series Eyes on the Prize.

He has served since 1998 as Chairman of the Board of the NAACP and was the awarded the organization’s prestigious Spingarn Medal in July 2009.  .

Keynote Adress: "The Beginning of Something Big"

AVONIQUE DEVIGNES - University of Virginia Third Year Student, Double Major in Foreign Affairs and African-American Studies

Originally from the island of Trinidad and Tobago, Avonique is now a resident of Prince George's County, Maryland. She is President of the College Chapter of the NAACP here at the University. The organization’s role in the community, she states, is to serve as a "protest organization," to speak out against injustices, to do not what is popular, but rather what is right. The Chapter’s initiatives include voter empowerment, which focuses on increasing minority students' involvement in school, local and national elections. As president, one of her goals is to increase student membership in the NAACP and to raise awareness of discriminatory practices, not only affecting African Americans, but also racial and ethnic minorities more broadly.

Flesh and Blood and Breath of Life Must Be Added to the Skeleton We Have Constructed: A Glance at Youth Participation in the NAACP

 

SUSAN "SYD" DORSEY - University of Virginia Board of Visitors

Ms. Dorsey is a 1982 graduate of The University of Virginia’s School of Architecture and a 1987 graduate of its Darden School of Business Administration.  Since completing her graduate education she has served her alma mater in many ways: as a past member of the UVa Club of Richmond where she chaired the Jefferson Scholars Selection Committee, as a member of the UVa Alumni Association Board of Managers, as a member of the National Jefferson Scholars Selection Committee and of the Jerome Holland Selection Committee; and as a member of the Walter N. Ridley Scholarship Fund, and a member or the National Committee on University Resources. 

In 2003 Ms. Dorsey was appointed by Governor Mark Warner to the Board of Visitors of the University of Virginia and reappointed by Governor Tim Kaine in 2007.  She is a member of the special Committee on the nomination of a President, and serves as the Chair of the Student Affairs and Athletics Committee.  A Marketing Professional, Ms. Dorsey enjoyed a career at IBM Corporation where she served as market manager for IBM’s Global State and Local Government segments. She is currently the Director of Sales and Marketing for Astyra Corporation, an I/T Staffing and Consulting firm.

E. FRANKLIN DUKES - Director of the Institute for Environmental Negotiation, University of Virginia

Mr. Dukes is Director of the Institute for Environmental Negotiation at the University.  He has worked as a mediator and consensus builder at local, state, and federal levels on projects involving environment and land use, community development, education, and health. He currently leads an initiative titled "University and Community Actions for Racial Equity," designed to understand and directly confront the legacy of the harmful effects of slavery and segregation involving the University of Virginia and surrounding communities. He is also working with the Navajo Nation on a project titled "Navajo Truth in History" to reconcile their past and present.

Co-founder and core faculty of the Virginia Natural Resources Leadership Institute, he also initiated the "Community-Based Collaborative Research Consortium."  This organization, which focuses on natural resources and community development, led to the publication of Collaboration: a Guide for Environmental Advocates.

He is the author of Resolving Public Conflict: Transforming Community and Governance co-author, with Marina Piscolish and John Stephens of Reaching for Higher Ground in Conflict Resolution.

Moderator

EMMA C. EDMUNDS -University of Virginia Director of the Editorial Design Group, Strategic Communications

Emma C. Edmunds is director of the Editorial and Design Group and Strategic Communications in the Office of Development and Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. She is also principal investigator of Mapping Local Knowledge: Danville, Virginia, 1945–75, an oral history project co-sponsored by the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies and the Virginia Center for Digital History.

Moderator

DAYLANNE ENGLISH - Macalester College

Daylanne English is Associate Professor and Chair of English at Macalester College.  She received her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia and her B.A. from Oberlin College. Before joining Macalester's faculty in 2003, she taught African American Literature at Bowie State University. She has also held visiting appointments in African American Literature at Brown University and in Caribbean Literature at Brandeis University.  The author of Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (University of North Carolina Press), her essays on African American literature and culture have appeared in African American Review, American Literary History, American Literature, Critical Inquiry, and Novel. She is currently at work on a second book titled Political Fictions: Time and Justice in African American Literature, 1773-2007.

“The Thorny Stem of Time”: One Hundred Years of Crisis

Abstract:

A number of scholars have noted the jarring mixture of images and print material in the Crisis. Under W. E. B. Du Bois’ editorship, the journal included photographs of happy children, proud college graduates, and accomplished professionals, but also of lynching victims. It featured literature with widely varying form and content, from Langston Hughes’s free verse poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” to Claude McKay’s sonnet “To the White Fiends.” Alongside these were human interest stories, political and social scientific articles, news and editorials, and, as of 1920, a children’s feature, the “Brownies’ Book.” Critics have explained this juxtaposition of achievement and horror, poetry and protest, entertainment and opinion, in several different ways: as an expression of modernity’s essentially composite nature, as a byproduct of the attempt to show a fit racial family in the face of external threat, and as a mirror for the complex experience of being “an American, a Negro,” to use Du Bois’ words.

The temporal challenges that come with 100 years of showing a black community always in crisis have produced the tense collage that has been the Crisis since 1910 (except for July 1997 through March/April 2003, when it was called New Crisis). Crisis was named after James Russell Lowell’s abolitionist 1844 poem “The Present Crisis,” that, like the journal, registers the tension among “history’s pages,” “the Present,” and “the Future’s heart.” Crisis aims at once to correct and produce a historical record, document present-day atrocity and accomplishment, and imagine a future post-crisis era. Yet, just as the ways we imagine black community change over time, there will always be a new crisis, whether that community is national or diasporic (lynching, World War II, segregation, the atom bomb, the Civil Rights struggle, police brutality, and, as of the July/August 2008 issue, the “crisis in Sudan”). The richly mixed contents of Crisis/New Crisis demonstrate at once the desirability and the impossibility of showing everything and everyone at once; its photos, like its poems, are forever caught on Lowell’s “thorny stem of time.”

 

ROBERT FATTON JR. – University of Virginia

Robert Fatton is Julia Allen Cooper Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs and Associate Dean for Graduate Academic Programs.  The author of several books and numerous scholarly articles, his publications include: Black Consciousness in South Africa (1986); The Making of a Liberal Democracy: Senegal's Passive Revolution, 1975-1985 (1987); Predatory Rule: State and Civil Society in Africa (1992); Haiti's Predatory Republic: the Unending Transition to Democracy (2002); and The Roots of Haitian Despotism (2007). He is also co-editor with R. K. Ramazani of The Future of Liberal Democracy: Thomas Jefferson and the Contemporary World (2004); and, Religion, State, and Society (2009).   He holds a Bachelors Degree from Goshen College, Indiana, and Master’s and Doctoral Degrees from the University of Notre Dame.  He has taught at the University of Virginia since 1981.

Moderator

LARISSA SMITH FERGESON – Longwood University

Larissa Smith Fergeson is Associate Professor of History at Longwood University, where she teaches courses in twentieth-century American history, African American history and Virginia history. Before joining the Longwood faculty in fall 2000, she taught at Virginia State University. She earned her B.A. from the University of Virginia and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Emory University. A former fellow at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, Professor Fergeson has published articles on Virginia civil rights lawyers and labor activists and is currently at work on a book manuscript, entitled “Where the South Begins: The Civil Rights Struggle in Virginia, 1930-1960.” She is also the lead historian and curator for Moton 2011, a new permanent exhibit currently being planned for the Robert R. Moton Museum in Farmville, Virginia.

Groundwork for a Southern Movement: The NAACP in Virginia

Abstract:

Founded in 1935, the Virginia State Conference of the NAACP was the first state conference in the South. Led by Dr. J.M. Tinsley, a Richmond dentist, the Virginia State Conference built a network of branches across the state that generated a wide-ranging campaign to protest discrimination, challenge segregation, and empower black citizens. Central to the work of the State Conference was a coterie of highly-trained lawyers, most notably Oliver W. Hill and Spottswood W. Robinson, III, and the State Conference Executive Secretary W. Lester Banks, who was hired in 1947. This paper will focus on the work of the Virginia State Conference during the late 1940s, as the legal challenge to segregation in education gained momentum. Examining the work of the NAACP in the statewide context helps us not only to reframe the history of the legal campaign that led to Brown, but also to reconsider the relationship between local branches and the national NAACP office.

PAUL GASTON - Professor Emeritus, University of Virginia

Paul Gaston, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Virginia, was born and reared in Fairhope, Alabama, about which he has written two books. He is also the author of The New South Creed and Coming of Age in Utopia: The Odyssey of an Idea (November, 2010). A co-founder of the Woodson Institute he has received numerous awards and honors for both his professional work and civil rights leadership, including the outstanding professor award from the Commonwealth of Virginia; bridge builder recognition from the city of Charlottesville; legendary civil rights activist from the NAACP; and community leader,from his alma mater, Swarthmore College. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, with his wife of fifty-seven years, Mary Wilkinson Gaston.

RAYMOND GAVINS - Duke University

Raymond Gavins is Professor of History at Duke University.  The first African American to receive a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, his research focuses on African American and New South History.  Author of The Perils and Prospects of Southern Black Leadership: Gordon Blaine Hancock, 1884-1970, he is the project co-director of Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South and co-editor of Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell about Life in the Segregated South.  A former fellow of the Carter G. Woodson Institute and the Woodrow Wilson International Center, he is at work on The Meaning of Freedom: Black North Carolina in the Age of Jim Crow, 1880-1955. 

RISA GOLUBOFF - University of Virginia

Professor of Law and History, Risa L. Goluboff teaches constitutional law, civil rights litigation and legal history. Her scholarship focuses on the history of civil rights, labor and constitutional law in the 20th century. She earned a J.D. from Yale Law School and a Ph.D. in history from Princeton University. She clerked for Guido Calabresi of the 2nd U.S. Court of Appeals and then for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer. She joined the U.Va. faculty in 2002.

Her book, The Lost Promise of Civil Rights, won the 2008 James Willard Hurst Prize, given by the Law and Society Association for the best work in socio-legal history published in 2007. Goluboff is also co-editor (with Myriam Gilles) of Civil Rights Stories, published in 2008.  Goluboff's next book will explore how the collapse of vagrancy law became an integral part of the social revolutions of the 1960s.  The legal and social implications of that collapse have reverberated throughout the decades since.

The Lost Promise of Civil Rights: Evaluating the NAACP in the Pre-Brown Era

Abstract:
This paper explores the NAACP’s litigation on behalf of African American workers in the 1940s. It highlights the choices the NAACP made in the early 1950s to focus on education litigation instead of labor-related litigation.  While evaluating the consequences of those choices for the subsequent development of constitutional law and civil rights, the paper also discusses the difficulties of scholarly critiques of the NAACP in light of the heroic actions of the NAACP lawyers and the understandable (and appropriate) desire to valorize their actions.

K. IAN GRANDISON - University of Virginia

Professor of English, K. Ian Grandison is a practicing landscape architect who studies college and university campuses in the Deep South.  His interest in the topic was stimulated in part by his involvement in campus planning as an architect with Johnson, Johnson and Roy, Inc. between 1990 and 1993. Exploring historically black college campuses as spatial records of the contentious history of race relations in the Deep South in the postbellum moment, he raises theoretical and methodological questions regarding incorporation of multiculturalism in discourses on the built environment. His research has been published in such diverse venues as Landscape Journal, American Quarterly, Journal of Architectural Education, and Appendix.

Other Side of the “Free” Way:  College Campuses and Racialized Territories in the Wake of Massive Resistance

Abstract:

The phrase, “Other Side of the ‘Free’ Way” is meant to emphasize how inequality is preserved through racialized territories in post-Board of Education America.  Considering the spatial context of historically black Virginia Union University (VUU) in relation to that of historically white Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), he shows how the I-95/I-64 corridor was planned in the 1950s to intentionally position VUU in a black reservation estranged from an increasingly white identified downtown.  In contrast, the freeway positioned VCU not only as a catalyst, but also a beneficiary of downtown’s urban renewal, with its accompanying opportunities for economic, social, and political access.  All over the South, there is this curious juxtaposition between black college campuses and freeways.  Given how crucial black college campuses were, practically and symbolically, in the NAACP’s campaign for racial equality, the desecration of these campuses in the name of infrastructural improvements for the public good, and at the public’s expense, highlights how racial justice continues to be inconsistent with assumptions of official progress in the United States.

PATRICE GRIMES - University of Virginia

Patrice Preston-Grimes, an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education, brings over 20 years of professional experience to her current academic role as researcher and teacher educator.  Her research focuses on the history of African American schooling in the South before 1954, with emphasis on civics teaching and learning, and on how educational history can inform current schooling policy and practice. She is the recipient of the 2007 Exemplary Research in Social Studies Award for “substantive scholarly inquiry” by the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) and has published articles, commentary and presented her work at numerous national and state educational conferences.

Moderator

CLAUDRENA HAROLD - University of Virginia

Claudrena Harold is Assistant Professor in the Corcoran Department of History, where she teaches African American history, African American Studies, and Labor History. She is the author of The Rise and Fall of the Garvey Movement in the Urban South, 1918-1942 (Routledge, 2007), which chronicles the history of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) from the perspective of black women and men living below the Mason-Dixon Line.  Her articles on African American music have appeared in the Seattle Times, the Charlotte Observer, and Popmatters.  She is currently at work on No Ordinary Sacrifice: New Negro Politics in the Jim Crow South, 1917-1929, a book-length project that examines the critical role of the southern black majority in the making of New Negro modernity.

The Hour Has Come: The NAACP and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the New South

Abstract:
In January, 1917, the noted civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson embarked on an extensive tour of the Jim Crow South, with the expressed purpose of increasing the NAACP’s presence in the region.  If the NAACP was to realize its full potential as a catalyst for social change, the organization, Johnson insisted, would have to establish itself in the belly of America’s racial beast. Much to the delight of the respected activist, thousands of black Southerners rushed at the opportunity to organize NAACP branches in their respective communities. “I am not only gratified by the campaign in the South,” Johnson proudly reported in the NAACP’s chief organ, The Crisis, “but I have been encouraged and inspired by it.” Over the next decade, the NAACP would become a permanent fixture in many southern black communities, fundamentally transforming the contours of black political struggle through grassroots organizing, institution building, and cross-regional networking.

This paper examines how the NAACP’s political endeavors in the South between 1917 and 1930 challenged the white supremacist practices undergirding the region’s political system, as well as assisted in the nationalization of the black freedom struggle. Specific attention will be given to the association’s endeavors to improve black workers’ material condition, its push to augment the black electorate, and its relentless support of black youth activists working to democratize higher education. The cumulative result of the NAACP’s democratic strivings across the broad front of civil society, I argue, facilitated the emergence of new black counter publics that not only loosened racial accommodationists’ stranglehold over black political discourse, but also facilitated the formation of transregional networks that widened significantly the zones of political contact and exchange within the broader African American community.

BENJAMIN TODD JEALOUS - President and CEO of the NAACP

Benjamin Todd Jealous became the youngest national leader of the NAACP on September 1, 2008. During his career, he has served as president of the Rosenberg Foundation, director of the U.S. Human Rights Program at Amnesty International and Executive Director of the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA), a federation of more than 200 black community newspapers. From his early days of organizing voter registration drives up until his nomination and election as NAACP president, Jealous has been motivated by civic duty and a constant need to improve the lives of America's underrepresented. A graduate of Columbia University in New York, Mr. Jealous is also a Rhodes Scholar, holding a master’s degree in Comparative Social Research from Oxford University.

ERVIN JORDAN -University of Virginia

Ervin Jordan is Associate Professor and Research Archivist in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library.  Specializing in Civil War and African-American history, he is the author of three books: 19th Virginia Infantry (1987), Charlottesville and the University of Virginia in the Civil War (1988), and Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia (University Press of Virginia, 1995) for which he received a Virginia Foundation for The Humanities fellowship as a scholar-in-residence. This book, a History Book Club selection, also received the 1995 Kirkland Certificate of Meritorious Excellence. Since 1979 Professor Jordan has researched and lectured on the African-American experience at the University of Virginia.

To Go Boldly: Alice Jackson, African-American Women, and the First Attempt to Desegregate the University of Virginia

Abstract:
When looking back on her life and legacy Alice Jackson (1913-2001) proudly recalled, “In the late autumn of 1935, I filed an application to the University of Virginia for admission to graduate school. This action was the first seed sown in the state giving rise to the matter of equal educational opportunities in Virginia.” This paper will examine how the first black attempt to desegregate the University of Virginia, by Alice Jackson of Richmond, Virginia in 1935 ultimately contributed to the desegregation of the University and other public institutions of higher education in the state. Jackson’s efforts, which involved the NAACP, Virginia State College (at that time the state’s only public college for black Virginians) and other organizations, state officials and private citizens, created a public firestorm of segregation defenders and desegregation proponents.

The NAACP’s strategy of challenging segregated graduate education programs as a means to overcome racial inequality, and Alice Jackson’s initial willingness to become a test case, led to the establishment of a separate tuition program for black graduate students and increased funding for Virginia State College.   Jackson would go on to battle educational racism throughout her life, calumniating in another enrollment attempt at the University of Virginia shortly before the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954.

PHYLLIS LEFFLER - Director of the Institute for Public History at the University of Virginia

Phyllis Leffler is the Director of the Institute for Public History at The University of Virginia. She is the author of two books, with Joseph Brent, on the uses of history beyond the classroom. She has also authored numerous essays on the culture of museums and on the history of women at The University of Virginia. Since 2000, she has co-directed with Julian Bond the Explorations in Black Leadership oral history project (www.virginia.edu/publichistory/bl), and she is currently writing a book based on the collection of interviews.

HERBERT TIMOTHY LOVELACE - University of Virginia

Tim Lovelace is Assistant Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Law, University of Virginia Law School.  He received his B.A. with Distinction in American Politics from the University of Virginia in 2003. As an undergraduate, he was a Lawn Resident and served as the Student Member of the University’s Board of Visitors. In 2006, he graduated from the University of Virginia School of Law, where he was an Oliver Hill scholar, Black Law Students Association President, an editor of the Virginia Sports & Entertainment Law Journal, the Thomas Marshall Miller Prize recipient, and the Bracewell & Patterson LLP Best Oralist Award winner. Tim is currently a doctoral student in History at the University. His research examines how civil rights activism in the American South informed the development of international human rights law.

"Close the Dump!": The Roanoke, Virginia NAACP and the Struggle Against Environmental Racism

Abstract:
For nearly two decades, Roanoke, Virginia operated an open air landfill adjacent to the city’s African-American public housing project, hospital, park, and primary and secondary schools. The city deposited tons of tons of uncovered waste each day in the Washington Park dump, and the stench of rotting garbage and the routine fires caused by methane gas seeping from the dump left neighborhood residents and schoolchildren with respiratory problems and unsavory living conditions. The Roanoke NAACP spearheaded the charge to close the Washington Park dump, and after a protracted battle, the city finally agreed to cease dumping in 1963. While illustrating how deeply the Roanoke NAACP was involved in the fight against eco-racism during the classical phase of the movement, this paper challenges civil rights scholars to better historicize the relationship between the environmental justice and the civil rights movements. It also highlights a basic but often overlooked strength of the NAACP’s national structure. Though the NAACP’s national program was focused on voting rights and the desegregation of schools and public accommodations during the early 1960s, the NAACP’s democratic structure allowed the local prerogatives of the Roanoke NAACP—the struggle against environmental racism—to supplement the NAACP’s national program.

DEBORAH E. MCDOWELL - University of Virginia

Deborah McDowell is Director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute and Alice Griffin Professor of English. The founding editor of the Beacon Black Women Writers Series, she is co-editor with Arnold Rampersad of Slavery and the Literary Imagination, and period editor of the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature.  She is also the author of “The Changing Same”: Studies in Fiction by Black American Women and the editor of various scholarly editions - including, Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing and Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative of the Life.  She has published numerous essays and review essays on African American literature, culture, photography and film. Her most recent book is Leaving Pipe Shop:  Memories of Kin, published by Charles Scribner’s and W. W. Norton. 

KENNETH MACK - Harvard University

Kenneth W. Mack is Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where he has taught since 2000.  His current research focuses on civil rights and the social construction of race and professional identity in American law. The author of a number of scholarly articles, he is completing a book entitled Representing the Race: Creating the Civil Rights Lawyer, 1920-1955, to be published by Harvard University Press. Prior to pursuing his Ph.D. studies in history, he was a law clerk for Federal District Judge Robert L. Carter of the Southern District of New York, as well as a trial and appellate litigator at Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C. During the first national elections in post-apartheid South Africa, he served as co-area director of election monitoring for the United States and Canada.

DIANNE PINDERHUGHES - University of Notre Dame

 Dianne Pinderhughes is a Notre Dame Presidential Faculty Fellow in the Departments of Africana Studies and Political Science. She teaches racial and ethnic politics in the US, Voting Rights policy and American urban politics. She is the author of Race and Ethnicity in Chicago Politics: A Reexamination of Pluralist Theory. Her current research explores the creation of American civil institutions in twentieth century society and analyzes their influence on the formation of voting rights policy. She is involved in the Gender and Multicultural Leadership Project, which examines the intersection of race and gender in American electoral representation. Race, Gender, and the Changing Face of Political Leadership in 21st Century America, co-authored with Hardy-Fanta, Lien and Sierra is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

The NAACP's Second Century: Organizational, Economic, Demographic and Philosophical Challenges

Abstract:
This presentation discusses the NAACP at the beginning of its second century and summarizes the challenges it faces.  Many of the issues Benjamin Jealous confronts are very much related to the organization’s foundations and evolution during the twentieth century.  Organizational location and staff resources, fundraising strategies and economic flexibility shaped the NAACP’s capacity to communicate with and interact with its membership, and to make decisions about policy efforts whether in federal, state or local level legislative environments.  The twentieth century national political landscape was constrained by tight limits on immigration that made for a relatively simple demographic environment.  By the latter half of the century when the organization’s legal and legislative efforts bore fruit in the Civil Rights Movement and in the passage of civil and voting rights legislation, immigration policy was simultaneously reformed.  While Congress expected the Immigration Act of 1965 would lead to no significant changes in either the type or the volume of immigrant flows into the country, they were proven wrong.  The rapid growth in immigration from Latin America, Asia, Europe (and to a lesser extent from Africa) has radically changed the national political context.  This will have an impact on the kinds of political strategies the NAACP and African American organizations use when they plan civil rights reform, and the types of racial groups for which they plan it.

ROBERT A. PRATT - University of Georgia

Robert Pratt is Professor of History and Department Chair at the University of Georgia where he teaches courses in civil rights, southern and U.S. history, with particular research emphasis in modern African American experience and the struggle for black freedom. He earned his Master’s and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia.  He is the author of The Color of Their Skin: Education and Race in Richmond, Virginia, 1954-89 (Virginia, 1992) which received an Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights, and We Shall Not Be Moved: The Desegregation of the University of Georgia (U of Georgia Press, 2002), which examines the desegregation of the University of Georgia.  He is currently at work on Loving v. Virginia, a history of the 1967 Supreme Court case legalizing interracial marriage in the United States.

Into the Lions' Den: The Role of Local NAACP Attorneys in the Campaign Against School Segregation and the Fight for Radical Justice

Abstract:
Beginning with Charles Hamilton Houston's equalization strategy in the 1930s, the NAACP began its gradual assault on segregated education by forcing local school districts to "equalize" black schools.  Black schools in the South were not only inferior to white schools, but they were also grossly inadequate.  But because of the time and expense required to wage this equalization campaign, the NAACP shifted its strategy in the early 1950s, making the bold decision to confront the legality of segregation head on.  While the role that Thurgood Marshall and others from the national NAACP played in this campaign has been well documented, what is lesser known is the extent to which local attorneys assisted--and sometimes led--in these efforts.  Because local attorneys usually lived in the areas where they waged their battles, they were often at greater personal risk.  Also overlooked is the role that local leaders of the various state branches of the NAACP played in mobilizing local black activists to initiate protests and litigation at the regional level, which resulted in hundreds of youth chapters of the NAACP being formed across the nation.  Eventually these young activists would move beyond school desegregation to become involved in many other forms of social protest.

MILDRED ROBINSON - University of Virginia

Mildred Robinson is Henry L. and Grace Doherty Charitable Foundation Professor of Law and E. James Kelly, Jr. Class of 1965 Research Professor of Law.A member of the faculty since 1985, she teaches federal, state and local tax law, as well as trusts and estates. She has served on numerous boards and commissions, including the Board of Trustees of the Law School Admission Council, the inaugural Board of Directors for Law Access, Inc. (currently The Access Group), and the Board of Visitors for the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University.

She was a Commissioner from Virginia to the National Conference on Uniform State Laws from 1990-94 and served as a member of the Executive Committee of the Association of American Law Schools from 2000-03. She is a member of the American Law Institute. Here at home, she has chaired the Boards of Trustees of Piedmont Court Appointed Special Advocates (PCASA) (2004 thru 2006) and the Martha Jefferson Hospital (2008).

She is the editor, with Richard Bonnie, of Law Touched Our Hearts: A Generation Remembers Brown v. Board of Education, (Vanderbilt Press, 2009).

Brown v. Board of Education From the Ground Up: Glimmers of Light, Opportunities Lost and Grievous Costs

Abstract:
The Brown decision set in motion forces that ultimately reached into every facet of American life, fomenting both positive changes and crippling setbacks. This paper will theorize about opportunities lost and setbacks experienced in the immediate wake of that case and will suggest how lessons drawn from that experience might influence the continuing effort to reconcile differences and further the quest for justice.

MARLON B. ROSS - University of Virginia Professor

Marlon Ross is Professor of English and African-American Studies.   He teaches 18th-and 19th-century British literature; 20th-century African American literature and culture; gender, sexuality, and masculinity studies; gay/lesbian/queer theory; theories of space; literary history and historiography. The recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, he is the author of Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era and The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women's Poetry. His numerous scholarly articles and essays have appeared in Callaloo, New Literary History, The Wordsworth Circle, The Keats-Shelley Journal, and Southern Humanities. His essays have also appeared in a range of volumes, including Romanticism and Feminism; Revisioning Romanticism; James Baldwin, Now; Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory; and Black Queer Studies:  A Critical Anthology.  Professor Ross is currently at work on “The Color of Manhood:  Re-Making Black Masculinities in and Beyond the Civil Rights Era and co-editing with Kenrick Ian Grandison, “Race, Space and Culture:  Essays on Critical Theory and the Built Environment.”

Moderator

DARYL SCOTT - Howard University

Daryl Scott is Professor of History at Howard University. His first book, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880-1996 won the Organization of American Historians' 1998 James Rawley Prize for the Best Book on Race Relations History. In 2008, he edited Carter G. Woodson's Appeal: The Lost Manuscript. He is currently writing The Lost World of White Nationalism in the American South, Vol I: 1865-1910. He is Vice President for Programs of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.

PATRICIA SULLIVAN - University of South Carolina

Patricia Sullivan is Associate Professor of History at the University of South Carolina and an Associate in the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. A former Woodson fellow, her research interests include African American History, the South since the Civil War, and history of the civil rights movement. Professor Sullivan’s newly published book, Lift Every Voice, the NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement, is the first major history of America’s oldest civil rights organization. She is also the author of Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era; Freedom Writer: Virginia Foster Durr, Letters from the Civil Rights Years, Civil Rights in the United States, co-edited with Waldo E. Martin, Jr. and New Directions in Civil Rights Studies, co-edited with Armstead L. Robinson, founder of the Carter G. Woodson Institute. Professor Sullivan is also co-editor of the John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture for the University of North Carolina Press.

Beyond Eyes on the Prize: The NAACP and the Struggle for Civil Rights

Abstract:
Popular understanding of the civil rights movement has been informed in large part by visual images, such as the film footage used in the widely acclaimed 1986 PBS series, Eyes on the Prize. Yet the archival record of struggles against racial segregation and discrimination contained in the NAACP Papers – which includes thousands of letters as well as field reports from all parts of the nation– contains compelling documentary evidence of the political strategies, organizing efforts, and protests that have been formative in the struggle for civil rights and foundational to the southern-based movement of the late 1950s and 1960s. The records of the NAACP also spotlight the national dimensions of the movement to secure racial justice and equality, revealing the hardening of the color line in the North as the movement to dismantle Jim Crow gained traction and momentum in the South.  This paper will consider how the history of the NAACP from its founding in 1909 through the late 1950s complicates our understanding of the civil rights movement and raises new questions about the struggle for racial equality in the twentieth century.

M. RICK TURNER - President of the Charlottesville Branch of the NAACP

M. Rick Turner is the current President of the Charlottesville Branch of the NAACP and a consultant on African-American student issues. Throughout over 40 years of professional experience, his work has focused on African-American students at predominantly white institutions and on related issues including student recruitment, admission, retention, and graduation.

Mr. Turner served as Dean of the University of Virginia’s Office of African-American Affairs from 1988 until his retirement in 2006. During his tenure, the University boosted its African-American graduation rate to 87%-- among the highest of any public institution in the nation. Prior to coming to UVA, he served in various student affairs leadership positions at institutions across the nation, including the University of Connecticut, University of California-Irvine, and Stanford University.

RONALD WALTERS - Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland

Dr. Ronald Walters is internationally known for his expertise and scholarship on the issues of African American leadership and politics.  Before retiring from the University of Maryland College Park in June 2009, Walters carried three major titles: Director of the African American Leadership Institute and a Distinguished Leadership Scholar at the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership, and professor in government and politics. 

Walters received his Bachelor of Arts degree in History and Government with Honors from Fisk University (1963) and both his M.A. in African Studies (1966) and Ph.D. in International Studies (1971) from American University.    He formerly served as professor and chair of the political science department at Howard University, assistant professor and chair of Afro-American Studies at Brandeis University, and assistant professor of political science at Syracuse University.    He has also served as visiting professor at Princeton University and as a fellow of the Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He is a former member of the governing council of the American Political Science Association. Walters has also served as the senior policy staff member for Congressman Charles Diggs, Jr. and Congressman William Gray.

In 1984, Walters served as deputy campaign manager for issues of the Jesse Jackson campaign for president, and in 1988, he was consultant for convention issues for the Jackson campaign directed by former Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown.    He serves as board member of the Black Leadership Forum, the National Coalition of Black Civic Participation, and other organizations.  He Co-Chairs a Commission on Presidential Politics sponsored by the Institute of the Black World 21st Century.

Dr. Walters is the author of over 100 articles and ten books. His book, Black Presidential Politics in America, (SUNY Press, 1989), won the Ralph Bunche Prize, given by the American Political Science Association and the Best Book award from the National Conference of Black Political Scientist (NCOBPS).    Pan Africanism in the African Diaspora (Wayne State University Press, 1993) also won the NCOBPS Best Book award.    His most recent books are White Nationalism, Black Interests: Conservative Public Policy and the Black Community (Wayne State University Press, 2003), Freedom is Not Enough : Black Voters, Black Candidates, and American Presidential Politics (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005), and The Price of Racial Reconciliation (University of Michigan Press, 2008).

Walters is the winner of many awards, including a distinguished faculty award from Howard University (1982), Distinguished Scholar/Activist Award, The Black Scholar Magazine (1984), W.E.B. DuBois/Frederick Douglas Award, African Heritage Studies Association (1983), the Ida Wells Barnett Award, Association of Black School Educators, (1985), the Fannie Lou Hammer Award, National Conference of Black Political Scientist (1996), Distinguished Faculty Contributions to the Campus Diversity, University of Maryland (1999), and the Ida B. Wells-W.E.B. DuBois Award for Distinguished Scholarship from the National Council for Black Studies (March 2000).

Recasting Aspects of the NAACP Legacy: Fighting 20th Century Slavery

Abstract:
This presentation examines the persistence of slavery in the 20th Century—a topic which professional historians have tended to ignore—and the attempts of the NAACP to bring it to a close.   It can be documented that, as many as one-third of African Americans were effectively enslaved at the turn of the 20th century.  Indeed, as Douglas Blackmon observes in his 2009 Pulitzer-Prize winning book, Slavery by another Name, a form of slavery extended well past the Second World War. Drawing on correspondence from the NAACP files, the presentation challenges and complicates the view, common in popular and scholarly arenas alike, that the legacy and achievement of the NAACP are rooted exclusively in its litigation against racial discrimination.   Such a view overlooks the early activities of the NAACP on the economic front, activities driven by the existence of peonage, a powerful motivating force for the initial popularity of the organization among blacks, especially in the South and Border States.   

LACY WARD, JR. - Director of the Robert Russa Moton Museum

Lacy Ward, Jr. is director of the Robert Russa Moton Museum in Farmville, Virginia.  The Museum honors the role Prince Edward County played in bringing about racial desegregation in America’s public schools including: the 1951 Moton student strike; the 1954 and 1955 Brown v. Board decisions; the 1959 public school closings; the 1963-64 Prince Edward Free Schools; and the 1964 public school reopening under Griffin.  Ward was appointed by President George W. Bush to serve on the Brown v. Board of Education 50th Anniversary Commission.

Ward received his master’s degree from Virginia Tech and his bachelor’s degree from Virginia State University.  He served formerly as superintendent of the Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site, and vice president for marketing and communications at Tuskegee University.  He also served on the staffs of two Virginia congressmen, and was an agent with Equitable Life.  Serving nine years on active duty as a Naval Flight Officer he logged more than 1,000 military flight hours and completed more than 200 carrier-based missions.  A Gulf War veteran, Ward participated in combat operations in the Libyan and Iranian theaters.

FRANCILLE WILSON - University of Southern California

Francille Wilson is Director of African American Studies and Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.  She is an intellectual and labor historian whose current research examines the intersections between black labor movements, black social scientists, and black women's history during the Jim Crow era. Her book, The Segregated Scholars: Black Social Scientists and the Creation of Black Labor Studies, 1890-1950, was awarded the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Prize for the best book in African American Women’s history by the Association of Black Women Historians. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa appointed Wilson to the Los Angeles Commission on the Status of Women in December 2007, and reappointed her for a full term in May 2008. She chairs the jobs committee of the Commission on the Status of Women. Wilson was awarded the 2008 Bethune Award for Excellence in Education by Our Author’s Study Club of Los Angeles. She is also on the board of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History and a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.

“A Corporal's Guard for Negro Workers”: Black Social Scientists and the NAACP's Policies During the Depression

Abstract:
This paper examines the NAACP during the Great Depression.  A cadre of younger left-leaning black social scientists and intellectuals including Abram Harris and Robert Weaver led interlocking efforts to move the NAACP toward an agenda that would emphasize the needs of black workers, change its organizational structure to become more democratic, and to use social science in its legal fight against segregation.  Their failure to move the organization to the left and to give the branches more power provided important lessons for others who later sought to reform the structure and mission of the NAACP.  Their collaboration with W.E. B. Du Bois on the one hand and Charles Hamilton Houston on the other hand helped to shape both the scholarship of the 1940s and the partnership of lawyers and social scientists who developed the legal theories to dismantle Jim Crow laws. 

Recommended Reading

NAACP THROUGH THE DECADES

1900-1920

• February 12, 1909: NAACP Was Founded In New York City, Ny.

Ida Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. Du Bois, Henry Moscowitz, Mary  White Ovington, Oswald Garrison Villiard, and William English Walling renewed the “Call” for civil liberty, initially calling themselves the National Negro Committee.

• 1910: Pink Franklin Case

NAACP begins the first in a legacy of legal battles to combat social injustice. Pink Franklin, a black farmhand, killed a police officer in self-defense when the officer broke into his home. One year after losing a Supreme Court battle, Joel and Arthur Spingarn begin an effort to fight such judicial injustice.         

• 1913: NAACP Publicly Protests Segregation

Woodrow Wilson introduces segregation into the Federal Government. The NAACP launches a public protest.

• 1918: President Wilson Condemns Lynching

After massive pressure by the NAACP, President Woodrow Wilson makes a public statement against lynching.

The trends outlined above were hastened by major policy changes affecting the ways in which the criminal justice system dealt with offenders before, during, and after sentencing. Punitive policies like mandatory minimums were passed largely without public debate. But while these statistics and the policy changes that led to their acceleration are among the most shocking developments in modern history, at best they have received uneven scholarly attention; at worst, they are routinely neglected in many fields: political science, economics, and psychology.

• 1920: NAACP Hold Annual Conference in Atlanta

The NAACP holds its annual conference in Atlanta, one of the most active Ku Klux Klan sites in the U.S., sending the message that the NAACP would not be intimidated

1921-1930

• 1922: Newspaper Ads About Lynching

NAACP starts placing advertisements in major newspapers, presenting the facts about lynching.

• 1930: NAACP Protests Against Supreme Court Nominee

NAACP launches a protest of  John Parker as Supreme Court Justice nominee. Parker was known for his partiality for laws that discriminated against African Americans. This would be the first successful protest of a Supreme Court Nominee by the NAACP.

1931-1941

• 1935: University of Maryland Admits First African American

NAACP lawyers Charles Houston and Thurgood Marshall win a legal battle to admit the first black student to the University of Maryland.

1941-1950

• 1945: Kerr v. Enoch Pratt Free Library (Kerr Principle)

When a Baltimore library refused to admit Louise Kerr into a training program because she was black, she filed a civil suit alleging violation of equal protection. Attorney Charles Hamilton Houston argued the case, and despite the library’s claim of no racist intent, prevailed in the debate of when and why a state is responsible for enabling exclusivity.

• 1948: Executive Order Banning Governmental Discrimination

The NAACP pressures Harry Truman to sign an Executive Order banning discrimination by the Federal government.  

• 1950: Gregory Swanson Admitted Into UVA Law School

Gregory Hayes Swanson is denied admittance to the University of Virginia Law School until the NAACP intervenes.

1951-1960

• 1954: Brown v. The Board of Education

One on the NAACP’s greatest victories, Special Counsel Thurgood Marshall wins the battle to end segregation in public schools and paves the way for integration.

• 1955: Rosa Parks Refuses to Give Up Seat on Bus

Rosa Parks is arrested in Montgomery, Al. for refusing to give up her seat on a segregated bus. This would become the catalyst for the civil rights movement spearheaded by the NAACP.

1961-1970

• 1963: NAACP Field Director, Medgar Evers is Assassinated

Medgar Evers, the first NAACP Field Director, is murdered in front of his home in Jackson, Mississippi.

• 1965: Voting Rights Act

The Voting Rights Act is passed and the NAACP manages to register more that 80,000 voter in the South, despite great threats of violence.    

1971-1980

• 1979: Voter Registration in High Schools

The NAACP initiates a bill to allow voter registration in high schools.

1981-1990

• 1982: Protest of Racially Segregated Bob Jones University

Racially segregated Bob Jones University is denied a tax-break by President Reagan, through protests by the NAACP and the support of the Supreme Court.

• 1989: Silent March

NAACP leads over 100,000 people in a silent march to protest Supreme Court rulings reversing many of the victories against discrimination.

1991-2000

• 1991: David Duke Defeated in Senate Race

Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke is defeated in his bid for Senator (Louisiana) when the NAACP launches a massive voter registration campaign. 76% of African American voters turn out to deny Duke a seat in the Senate.

• 1995: Myrlie Evers Elected Chairman of NAACP

Myrlie Evers, widow of slain civil rights activist Medgar Evers is elected chairman of the NAACP thirty years after her husband’s death.

• 1998: Julian Bond Elected Chairman of NAACP
• 2000: Great March

On January 17th, over 50,000 people protested the flying of the Confederate battle flag in Columbia, South Carolina. This was the largest civil rights demonstration held in the South up to this date.

2001-2009

• 2008: Benjamin Toddd Jealous Named President and CEO of NAACP

On September 1, 2008, Benjamin Jealous became the youngest National leader of the NAACP.

• 2009: NAACP Centennial

On February 12, 2009, the NAACP marked its 100th anniversary as the United States most widely recognized grassroots-based civil rights organization.

Additional Information & Resources

NAACP Website

"How the NAACP Began" by Mary White Ovington

Sponsors

We gratefully acknowledge support for this symposium from:

 

 

J & E Berkley Foundation

The Carter G. Woodson Institute would also like to thank the following sponsors for their continued support:

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