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National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
4 articles on National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund

Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
Word Count: 3174 Includes: The Roots of the Fund. | The Fund and the Civil Rights Movement. | The Contemporary Fund. | BibliographyThe origins of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.—commonly known as the Legal Defense Fund or the LDF—lie at the beginnings of the NAACP. The first president of the NAACP, Moorfield Storey, a white lawyer and former president of the American Bar Association, led one of the organization's early legal attacks, Buchanan v. Warley (1917), in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down municipal ordinances requiring residential segregation. Not all of the early members of the NAACP leadership, however, supported a legal attack on segregation. Some, most notably W. E. B. Du Bois, argued that the goals of the organization would be best advanced by public actions, such as strikes and demonstrations.In 1931the NAACP, following the suggestion of its executive secretary, Walter White, ...
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Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
Word Count: 6549 Includes: Origins. | Challenges. | Approaches and Achievements. | The NAACP and the Civil Rights Movement. | The NAACP in the Post–Civil Rights Era. | BibliographyThe National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded in 1909 and is America's oldest and largest civil rights organization. Throughout its hundred years of existence the association has fought all manifestations of racial segregation and discrimination and demanded equal rights and opportunity for all Americans regardless of race and color. Its preeminent goals have been the full integration and participation of African Americans and other racial minorities in the promise of American democracy.In waging this struggle the NAACP has employed a broad range of strategies and methods, including legal action, political lobbying, public relations campaigns, voter registration and education, boycotts, and mass protest. Since its early days its membership has been overwhelmingly African American, but the association has always considered itself interracial and sought cooperation with and ...
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Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 2107 Includes: BibliographyInterracial organization devoted to civil rights and racial justice. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has been instrumental in improving the legal, educational, and economic lives of African Americans. Combining the white philanthropic support that characterized Booker T. Washington's accommodationist organizations with the call for racial justice delivered by W. E. B. Du Bois's militant Niagara Movement, the NAACP forged a middle road of interracial cooperation. Throughout its existence it has worked primarily through the American legal system to fulfill its goals of full suffrage and other civil rights, and an end to segregation and racial violence. Since the end of the Civil Rights Movementof the 1950s and 1960s, however, the influence of the NAACP has ...
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Source: The Oxford Companion to United States History
Word Count: 813Founded in 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) arose from two American reform traditions, one rooted in white philanthropy and the antislavery movement, the other in various black self-help organizations created in the antebellum free states to promote group solidarity and racial power. In the decades following emancipation, African Americansformed a number of organizations committed to the struggle for equal rights. Among these were T. Thomas Fortune's Afro-American League and Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin's National Federation of Afro-American Women. Other groups, such as Alexander Crummell's American Negro Academy, utilized research and publications to combat theories of black inferiority. These organizations maintained ties with white progressives and encouraged interracial cooperation toward the goal of a more egalitarian society in which African Americans might fully enjoy the benefits of American citizenship—both as individuals and ...
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