Long Is the Way and Hard: One Hundred Years of the NAACP
Celebrating its one-hundredth anniversary in February 2009, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has been the leading and best-known African American civil rights organization in the United States. It has played a major, and at times decisive, role in most of the important developments in the twentieth century civil rights struggle. Drawing on original and previously unpublished scholarship from leading researchers in the United States, Britain, and Europe, this important collection of sixteen original essays offers new and invaluable insights into the work and achievements of the association. The first part of the book offers challenging reappraisals of two of the NAACP’s best-known national spokespersons, Walter White and Roy Wilkins. Other essays analyze the association’s cultural initiatives and the key role played by its public-relations campaigns in the mid 1950s to counter segregationist propaganda and win over the hearts and minds of American public opinion in the wake of the NAACP’s landmark legal victory in Brown v. Board of Education. Others provide thought-provoking accounts of the association’s complex and difficult relationship with Martin Luther King, the post–World War II Civil Rights movement, and Black Power radicals of the 1960s. The second part of the collection focuses on the work of the NAACP at state, city, and local levels, examining its grassroots organization throughout the nation from Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit in the North, to California in the West, as well as states across the South including Virginia, Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas. Providing detailed and fascinating information on hitherto little explored aspects of the association’s work, these studies complement the previous essays by demonstrating the impact national initiatives had on local activists and analyzing the often-strained relations between the NAACP national office in New York and its regional branches.
"1113068961"
Long Is the Way and Hard: One Hundred Years of the NAACP
Celebrating its one-hundredth anniversary in February 2009, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has been the leading and best-known African American civil rights organization in the United States. It has played a major, and at times decisive, role in most of the important developments in the twentieth century civil rights struggle. Drawing on original and previously unpublished scholarship from leading researchers in the United States, Britain, and Europe, this important collection of sixteen original essays offers new and invaluable insights into the work and achievements of the association. The first part of the book offers challenging reappraisals of two of the NAACP’s best-known national spokespersons, Walter White and Roy Wilkins. Other essays analyze the association’s cultural initiatives and the key role played by its public-relations campaigns in the mid 1950s to counter segregationist propaganda and win over the hearts and minds of American public opinion in the wake of the NAACP’s landmark legal victory in Brown v. Board of Education. Others provide thought-provoking accounts of the association’s complex and difficult relationship with Martin Luther King, the post–World War II Civil Rights movement, and Black Power radicals of the 1960s. The second part of the collection focuses on the work of the NAACP at state, city, and local levels, examining its grassroots organization throughout the nation from Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit in the North, to California in the West, as well as states across the South including Virginia, Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas. Providing detailed and fascinating information on hitherto little explored aspects of the association’s work, these studies complement the previous essays by demonstrating the impact national initiatives had on local activists and analyzing the often-strained relations between the NAACP national office in New York and its regional branches.
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Long Is the Way and Hard: One Hundred Years of the NAACP

Long Is the Way and Hard: One Hundred Years of the NAACP

Long Is the Way and Hard: One Hundred Years of the NAACP

Long Is the Way and Hard: One Hundred Years of the NAACP

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Overview

Celebrating its one-hundredth anniversary in February 2009, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has been the leading and best-known African American civil rights organization in the United States. It has played a major, and at times decisive, role in most of the important developments in the twentieth century civil rights struggle. Drawing on original and previously unpublished scholarship from leading researchers in the United States, Britain, and Europe, this important collection of sixteen original essays offers new and invaluable insights into the work and achievements of the association. The first part of the book offers challenging reappraisals of two of the NAACP’s best-known national spokespersons, Walter White and Roy Wilkins. Other essays analyze the association’s cultural initiatives and the key role played by its public-relations campaigns in the mid 1950s to counter segregationist propaganda and win over the hearts and minds of American public opinion in the wake of the NAACP’s landmark legal victory in Brown v. Board of Education. Others provide thought-provoking accounts of the association’s complex and difficult relationship with Martin Luther King, the post–World War II Civil Rights movement, and Black Power radicals of the 1960s. The second part of the collection focuses on the work of the NAACP at state, city, and local levels, examining its grassroots organization throughout the nation from Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit in the North, to California in the West, as well as states across the South including Virginia, Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas. Providing detailed and fascinating information on hitherto little explored aspects of the association’s work, these studies complement the previous essays by demonstrating the impact national initiatives had on local activists and analyzing the often-strained relations between the NAACP national office in New York and its regional branches.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781557289094
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
Publication date: 11/01/2009
Pages: 330
Product dimensions: 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Kevern Verney is associate head of the Department of English and History at Edge Hill University, England, and the author of The Debate on Black Civil Rights in America.

Table of Contents

Foreword Adam Fairclough vii

The NAACP in Historiographical Perspective Kevern Verney Lee Sartain xv

Part 1 The NAACP at the National Level

1 "All Shadows Are Dark": Walter White, Racial Identity, and National Politics Simon Topping 3

2 In Harlem and Hollywood: The NAACP's Cultural Campaigns, 1910-1950 Jenny Woodley 15

3 "A Gigantic Battle to Win Men's Minds": The NAACP's Public Relations Department and Post-Brown Propaganda George Lewis 29

4 Leading from the Back: Roy Wilkins's Leadership of the NAACP Yvonne Ryan 43

5 Uneasy Alliance: The NAACP and Martin Luther King Peter J. Ling 59

6 The NAACP and the Challenges of 1960s Radicalism Simon Hall 75

Part 2 The NAACP at the State, City, and Local Levels

7 The Falls Church Colored Citizens Protective League and the Establishment of Virginia's First Rural Branch of the NAACP Beverly Bunch-Lyons Nakeina Douglas 89

8 "To Hope Till Hope Creates": The NAACP in Alabama, 1913-1945 Kevern Verney 105

9 "It's Worth One Dollar to Get Rid of Us": Middle-Class Persistence and the NAACP in Louisiana, 1915-1945 Lee Sartain 121

10 "In No Event Shall a Negro Be Eligible": The NAACP Takes on the Texas All-White Primary, 1923-1944 Charles L. Zelden 135

11 Tensions in the Relationship between Local and National NAACP Branches: The Example of Detroit, 1919-1941 Patrick Flack 155

12 The Chicago NAACP: A Century of Challenge, Triumph, and Inertia Christopher Robert Reed 169

13 The NAACP in California, 1914-1950 Jonathan Watson 185

14 "Your Work Is the Most Important, but without Branches There Can Be No National Work": Cleveland's Branch of the NAACP, 1929-1968 Andrew M. Fearnley201

15 "They Say... New York Is Not Worth a D-to Them": The NAACP in Arkansas, 1918-1971 John A. Kirk 219

A Chronology of the NAACP 235

Notes 247

Contributors 299

Index 303

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