At 100, NAACP fights to keep struggle alive

updated 6:25 p.m. ET Feb. 11, 2009

The bookends of the NAACP's century testify to the change it has wrought.

In 1908, a race riot in Springfield, Ill., left at least seven people dead and led to the birth of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In 2008, Barack Obama, who had launched his campaign just blocks from where Springfield's blood once spilled, became the first African-American president.

In between, wielding legal arguments and moral suasion in equal measure, the NAACP demanded that America provide liberty and justice not only for blacks, but for all. Now, its very achievements have created a daunting modern challenge as the NAACP turns 100 on Thursday: convincing people that the struggle continues.

"When I was in college, I could see signs that said 'white' and 'colored' when I went to the movie theater. That was an easy target for me to aim at," says Julian Bond, chairman of the NAACP board. "Today, I don't see those signs, but I know that these divisions still exist ... and it's more difficult to convince people that there's a problem."

Benjamin Todd Jealous, the new president and CEO of the NAACP, says his greatest obstacle is "the lack of outrage about the ways that young people and working people are routinely mistreated."

He cites figures such as a 70 percent unsolved murder rate in some black communities, blacks graduating from high school at a far lower rate than whites, and studies showing that whites with criminal records get jobs easier than blacks with clean histories.

"There are issues of basic fairness, obstacles to opportunity, that still exist," Jealous says. "The NAACP is needed now as urgently as it has ever been."

No one group did more to pave the way for Obama's ascension than the NAACP, historians say, pointing to its primary role in three towering civil rights victories — the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education school desegregation ruling, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

But now that the black son of a poor single mother has moved into the White House, a new era has clearly begun.

"We've got to rise to the occasion today," says former NAACP board chairman Myrlie Evers-Williams, who was married to the slain civil rights icon Medgar Evers.

"We cannot continue to sing 'We Shall Overcome,'" she says. "It's a dear, valued, valuable song that expresses a time that should live with us. But I want a new song."

Niagara Movement
The first incarnation of the NAACP was the Niagara Movement, a 1905 conference of prominent blacks led by the scholar and activist W.E.B. DuBois. After the Springfield riots, Niagara members joined a group of mostly white Northerners to form the NAACP on Feb. 12, 1909 — the centennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth.

An early focus of the group was the hundreds of lynchings taking place each year. In 1917, the NAACP won its first Supreme Court case, a unanimous ruling that states could not segregate people into residential districts based on race.

This was an early example of perhaps the NAACP's most powerful argument: Equal rights are a fundamentally American value.

Slideshow   NAACP at 100 Click to view images of the people and events that helped to shape the NAACP. more photos

"We are the only country that was founded on an idea or a premise ... the notion of equal citizenship," says Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the civil rights movement. "Pretty much all of our history has tested what that meant. Most often the greatest crises have been around race."

The NAACP framed its arguments as "civil rights doesn't mean black rights, it means rights pertaining to citizenship," Branch says.

This stance provided huge moral leverage. "Their power came from knowing they were right," Bond says.

Power also came from thousands of average citizens who risked retaliation to challenge unjust laws.

"Thurgood Marshall's brilliance was the instrument of victory, but that brilliance was essentially rooted in the courage of ordinary farmers and workers," says William Chafe, a Duke University history professor.

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