Fifty Years of the NAACP

...Greater success has greeted similar efforts on the state level...

...Meanwhile, the number and proportion of Negroes living in the North and West have grown rapidly in the last few years...

...Finally, in 1947, President Harry Truman created the President's Commission on Civil Rights, composed of distinguished Negroes and whites...

...We tend to take for granted the fact that the right to vote is fundamental to citizenship...

...Negroes still face difficulties in obtaining decent housing, equal job opportunities and equal pay...

...And both the national board of directors and the branch leaders were specifically instructed to carry out this policy meticulously...

...When all other means of rectifying the situation seemed to have failed, two NAACP leaders, A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and the late Walter White, NAACP Executive Secretary, organized a march on Washington to demand jobs...

...But years later, when the District's statutes were recodified, this provision was rather mysteriously dropped, although it was never overtly repealed...

...In a number of Southern states, stringent property and or educational qualifications for suffrage were enacted, but the laws provided that the qualifications did not apply to aspiring voters whose parents or grandparents had been eligible to vote prior to the Civil War...

...when a recession hits the country, the rise in Negro unemployment averages nearly twice that of white unemployment...

...As a result of constant urging by the NAACP, President Franklin D. Roosevelt opened up the Air Force, Marine Corps and all branches of the Navy to Negro enlistment...

...Victory over Jim Crow has been largely won in the courts, but practice, which reflects more deeply rooted mores, has only slowly begun to conform to the spirit of the law...

...this time, only one was convicted and had his sentence reduced to one year...

...Today that horrible crime has all but disappeared (except in Mississippi...

...It was not until the Korean War that the Army fell into step...

...In Little Rock, Arkansas, which attracted national and international attention for the bitterness of the school segregation dispute, Governor Orval Faubus' effort to prevent integration was struck down again two weeks ago in a Federal Court...

...Similar victories have been won in desegregating train and bus travel...

...Despite the NAACP's small beginnings—its first year's budget was a mere $6,500—it has scored some amazing successes in the law courts, in federal and state legislative bodies and in molding public opinion...

...A federal Fair Employment Practices Law with enforcement powers remains one of the NAACP's primary objectives...

...Today it has over 312,000 dues-paying members, organized in some 1,200 branches, college chapters and youth councils in virtually every state of the Union, including the fledgling state of Alaska...

...The NAACP engaged Clarence Darrow, the country's most famous trial lawyer, for the defense, and he won an acquittal...

...More and more Southern cities have gradually abandoned this practice, the latest being Atlanta, in January 1959...

...Today, some 2.000 Negro students are attending Southern colleges that were closed to them only a few years ago...

...The Navy and the Air Force promptly carried out the order, but the Army acted more slowly...

...he also appointed a federal Fair Employment Practices Commission to supervise the proper enforcement of his order...

...Education...

...On the other hand, Negroes who were hastily thrown into battle as replacements in white regiments fought efficiently and courageously...

...Henry Sweet and his brother had bought a home in a white neighborhood and were assaulted there by a white mob...

...In Louisiana, for example, Negroes attend state-supported colleges, although the state has no desegregated public schools...

...And two more states, Ohio and California, are confidently expected to enact similar laws this year...

...Negroes in segregated regiments felt they had little to fight for...

...The Armed Forces...

...In the 1940s and early 1950s, when the Communist effort to infiltrate was at its height, the NAACP leadership undertook a vigorous educational campaign among its branches...

...NAACP legal researchers discovered this fact and won the case in 1953 which outlawed these forms of segregation in the nation's capital...

...outlawing the so-called White Primary System...

...The civil rights battle is far from won...

...When World War II began, there were no Negroes in the Air Force and the Marine Corps, none in the Navy except for the steward's branch—and even in that branch there were no Negro commissioned officers...

...The defense was headed by NAACP chief counsel Thur-good Marshall, who had to live out of town for safety during the trial...

...To date, this Committee, with no legal force at its disposal, has enjoyed only limited success...

...The NAACP's initial attack on school segregation was indirect: It sought from school boards in segregated districts equal salaries for Negro and white teachers with the same professional qualifications...

...At subsequent conventions, this resolution was adopted unanimously and was strengthened by the admonition against cooperating with Communist-dominated labor unions (though the NAACP's general policy is very friendly to labor unions...

...Thereafter, the barriers to school integration began slowly to crumble...

...These rulings have applied to municipal parks, playgrounds, swimming pools, tennis courts and golf links...

...In 1915...

...Only two of the defendants were convicted...

...Kentucky, Oklahoma, West Virginia and Missouri have desegregated their schools altogether...

...In the fight for Negro rights, the NAACP has played a unique and effective role in advancing American democracy...

...By no means all discrimination was eliminated in this way, but there is no doubt that many Negroes found job opportunities which they probably would otherwise not have been able to get for another decade or two...

...In the states of those two regions, and even in such southern states as Tennessee, Kentucky and Oklahoma, there are no special restrictions on Negro voting, and Negro political influence has constantly grown there...

...Fifteen states have enacted such laws, in one or another form, as have hundreds of municipalities...

...This reflects itself in the fact that there are today four Negro Congressmen, elected from New York City, Philadelphia, Detroit and Chicago, and nearly 60 Negro members of various state legislatures—including one Connecticut legislator elected from a Hartford district with less than a 10 per cent Negro vote...

...Equally convincing, in this respect, was the whole-hearted support given by the NAACP to the Marshall Plan, the Point Four program and U.S...

...When President Roosevelt got wind of this, he urged Randolph and White to call off the demonstration, assuring them that they had friends in Washington...

...After these Supreme Court decisions, which established the right of Negroes to attend hitherto all-white colleges supported by the states, many private and denominational schools in the South voluntarily opened their doors to Negroes...

...It is vitally important, therefore, to set the record straight on this vicious propaganda...

...Since 1950, there has been only one lynching in the country (with the exception of Mississippi, where there have been four in the past decade...

...The NAACP followed up this success by a series of legal cases which won the right for Negro students to attend all-white graduate schools in the South where similar educational facilities for Negroes were either non-existent or clearly inferior...

...True, we have come a long way in these past 50 years—how long can only be realized ALFRED BAKER LEWIS is on the national board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and serves as Executive Secretary of the Businessmen's Council, an affiliate of Americans for Democratic Action...

...George W. Lee in Belzoni and Lamar Smith in Brookhaven, were shot and killed because they refused to withdraw their names from the voting lists on the demand of local white leaders...

...Its annual national budget has grown to more than $800,000, exclusive of expenditures by state and local branches and councils...

...The District of Columbia, and the states of Delaware, Maryland...

...As a first step, President Truman issued an order as Commander-in-Chief abolishing segregation in the Armed Forces...

...The progress that has been registered in opening up job opportunities for Negroes also received a strong impetus from World War II developments...

...Since, obviously, no Negroes were eligible on this basis, they were disqualified, while most white voters who could not meet the other qualifications were protected in their voting rights by the "Grandfather Clause...

...The Army had learned its lesson the hard way...

...NAACP attorneys also established the principle that confessions wrung from defendants by mental, as well as physical, torture could not be used in evidence...

...Nevertheless, the attainment oi racial equality may aptly be called our country's unfinished business...

...This is still substantially below the proportion of voters among whites in the South, but the gap is closing up from year to year, except in the most backward rural counties of some states, especially Mississippi...

...Sweet killed one of the attackers and was tried for murder...

...Aside from these defense cases, the NAACP has been involved in other legal cases that have resulted in the clarification of important civil liberties and civil rights issues of a constitutional nature...

...This was another of the legal devices by which Negroes were excluded, either by state laws or by the rules of the dominant Democratic party, from voting in the primary elections...

...Their reply rapidly went the rounds of the capital: They declared that they might have friends in Washington, but they did not have jobs—and jobs were what they wanted...

...The Commission's historic report, "To Secure These Rights," has properly been considered a milestone in our democratic progress...

...Racial discrimination is still an ugly blot on our nations escutcheon...

...The first cases banned segregation in interstate travel, and the ban was then extended to intrastate travel...

...The NAACP was founded by a devoted group of Negroes and whites who were horrified by the spectacle of lynchings and race riots at the time, including a particularly savage one in Springfield, Illinois, which provided the impetus for the organization's creation...

...The NAACP has scored some notable legal victories in securing the right to fair trials for Negroes...

...Even the schools on Armed Forces posts in Southern states are operated on a non-segregated basis, making them the only non-segregated schools in some of these states...

...The fight was then carried to the next and perhaps most important level—the elementary and high schools...

...A meeting of Negro sharecroppers in a church was invaded by a group of white plantation owners, who shot into the assembled crowd...

...It strongly recommended the elimination of segregation and discrimination in all its forms...

...Nevertheless, as this 50-year record demonstrates, progress has been remarkable, especially in recent years...

...One of the most famous of these legal devices was the "Grandfather Clause...

...the Supreme Court, ruling on a test case conducted by NAACP attorneys, declared the clause unconstitutional...

...Similarly, Negroes attend state colleges in Virginia, while many communities are offering "massive resistance" to public school desegregation...

...involvement in the Korean War—all of which were strongly opposed by the Communists...

...And they persuaded the President to use his war powers toward this end...

...In that event, the Department is authorized to obtain a court order requiring properly qualified Negroes to be enrolled as voters...

...Conclusion...

...It goes without saying that the Communists tried to destroy the NAACP, first by setting up a rival organization, and then by seeking to infiltrate the NAACP...

...In 1946, a similar case occured in Columbus, Tennessee, where whites assaulted the Negro section of town and the Negroes defended themselves...

...During the Reconstruction period, Congress had actually passed a law which forbade such segregation and discrimination in the District...

...This approach resulted in a real improvement...

...The NAACP carried the case to the Supreme Court on the ground that a trial dominated by mob violence, or the threat of violence, did not represent due process of law...

...Despite the defense industry boom, Negroes found themselves largely excluded from defense jobs...

...For the experience of that war demonstrated that Negroes' morale was exceedingly low...

...The Association also participated with other civil rights groups in gaining a Supreme Court decision that restrictive covenants, by which white property owners bound themselves not to sell to persons of other racial groups, cannot be enforced in law...

...Nevertheless, a postwar Presidential executive order requires that all government contracts, which are let by the executive branch, include a clause forbidding employment discrimination...

...Here the NAACP won the historic Supreme Court decision of May 17, 1954, which declared that racial segregation in education is a denial of equal protection of the law and therefore unconstitutional...

...It is all too easy to forget that for many decades Negroes were excluded from the ranks of voters in the South, where most of them lived until recently, by various legal devices and sometimes by sheer terrorism...

...If the local electoral officials fail to comply, they may be jailed for civil contempt, without a jury trial, until they obey the court order...

...In fact...

...The right to fair trials...

...This early victory for the right to vote was climaxed by another Supreme Court decision, in 1944...

...Though Congress never succeeded in passing a federal anti-lynching law, the fight was won in the forum of public opinion...

...A Dr...

...Three counties of Virginia have recently opened their elementary and high schools to Negroes...

...The occasion marks the organization's 50th anniversary, an appropriate time for a retrospective survey of its work, of the progress made in enhancing the status of Negroes in the United States, and of the distance that must yet be spanned before racial equality will have been achieved...

...A certain piquancy is added to the situation in some of these stales...

...For example, in 1908, the year before the NAACP was founded, there were more than 100 lynchings in various parts of the country...

...The convictions were appealed and set aside...

...Token integration has begun in some North Carolina communities, where a few Negro students have been assigned to previously all-white schools...

...The most recent advance made in securing the right to vote is embodied in the Civil Rights Act of 1957...

...Negro teachers in some Southern states now receive a higher average salary than white teachers...

...In 1950, this ruling was also applied to the undergraduate college level...

...The city's school board is now free to undertake its original plan for limited integration...

...In 1955...

...The right to vote...

...by studying the record...

...Since then, Negroes in the South have been voting in increasing numbers...

...A glance at some of the major areas of NAACP activities will provide a significant index of progress in the field of civil rights...

...As a result, 26 Negroes were tried on the charge of attempting murder...

...Negroes have also been accepted in state-supported colleges in North Carolina and Arkansas, where public school integration has been very spotty...

...In defending himself...

...For example, it won important cases which established the principle that Negroes may not be excluded from the jury panel from which the final jury is chosen...

...To it must go the major share of the credit for the advances that have been made in combatting racial discrimination...

...White supremacists and segregationists have been conducting a campaign in recent years to discredit the NAACP as an organizational dupe, front or ally of the Communists...

...Today nearly two-fifths of the country's population lives in states where employment discrimination is illegal...

...Both efforts failed dismally, a significant reflection of the fact that the Negro community as a whole has been singularly impervious to Communist penetration and influence...

...In general, federal courts have consistently ruled in recent years that segregation ir...

...A case of a different type—but no less important—was the court victory by which segregation in District of Columbia hotels, restaurants and theaters was outlawed...

...Later, the men were retried on a lesser charge of assault...

...The case was argued in the Supreme Court by the then-president of the American Bar Association, Moorfield Storey, one of a group of distinguished attorneys who volunteered their services to the NAACP at a time when it could not yet afford to hire permanent counsel...

...The NAACP and Communism...

...The so-called Elaine Massacre case in 1919 was a dramatic early triumph...

...By their fruits shall ye know them" is sound politics as well as sound ethics...

...Employment discrimination...

...two NAACP branch presidents in that exceptional state, the Rev...

...The Negroes returned the fire, and in the melee several Negroes and one white man were killed...

...today, some 1.5 million are registered voters...

...The same order created a Government Committee on Contract Compliance headed by the Vice President, which attempts to secure voluntary compliance from industries under the terms of their government contracts...

...Despite this advance, however, segregation was strictly maintained throughout the Armed Forces...

...No more convincing evidence is needed than the passage of a state anti-lynching law in Texas...

...This campaign culminated in the adoption of a resolution, by an overwhelming majority at its 1950 national convention, denying membership in the NAACP to those who follow the Communist line...

...This stems largely from the fact that Negro women teachers, expecting less frequently than their white colleagues to quit their profession upon marriage, gain greater seniority and spend more time getting advanced degrees at summer schools...

...Roosevelt then issued an executive order forbidding industries that had government war contracts to discriminate in job opportunities on the basis of race, creed, color or national origin...

...Though Smith was killed in broad daylight on the courthouse steps, no one has to this day been indicted for the crime...

...Since then, under directives issued by President Eisenhower, segregation among civilian employes of the Armed Forces has also been ended...

...This law enables the Department of Justice to intervene when it seems likely that Negroes, or others, might be illegally denied their voting rights...

...But these bare statistics do not begin to tell the story...

...Another of the dramatic early cases occurred in Detroit in 1926...

...After the War had ended and the special Presidential war powers had lapsed, the wartime FEPC failed to be perpetuated, owing to the combined opposition of Southern Democrats and many Northern Republicans...

...Although the Negroes had fired in self-defense, they were indicted for murder and convicted...

...Partial desegregation has occurred in Tennessee and Texas and in a few places in Arkansas...

...Storey succeeded in obtaining a reversal of the conviction...

...amusement facilities provided by taxpayers' money is unconstitutional...