News from the College of Arts and Sciences...

January 8, 2010

Professor's new book focuses on NAACP’s role in the struggle for Civil Rights

Most people today think of key events in the Civil Rights movement as having occurred during the 1950s and ’60s with the march on Washington, the Montgomery bus boycott, and passage of the Civil Rights and the Voting Rights acts.

In fact, there were many mile markers in the movement decades before then, going all the way back to 1909. That’s when three hundred people—black and white—came together in New York City to protest the spread of racism and revive the Constitutional guarantees enacted during Reconstruction.

It was the first meeting of what would become the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which very quickly became an interracial organization that 100 years later would be credited in large part for the election of Barack Obama to the presidency.

Patricia Sullivan can’t think of another story in American history that compares to the importance of the NAACP in terms of its impact on the country.

“It was transformational,” said the associate professor of history and the author of a new book on the organization, Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement, published in August by the New Press. “It laid the groundwork for the mass movement of the 1960s and played a leading role in crafting and securing the legal and legislative changes that ended Jim Crow in the South and expanded federal protection of citizenship rights for all Americans.” That’s one of the reasons why Sullivan finds it interesting that the story of the NAACP hasn’t gotten the sort of attention she thinks it not only deserves, but needs for the country to have a fuller appreciation of the struggle for civil rights, the way race has worked in the country, and what it has taken to move the country forward.

Today’s students are apt to have a romanticized view of the Civil Rights movement, Sullivan said, a view that focuses on the dramatic protests of the 1960s. Her history of the NAACP turns attention to what she calls the “foundational decades” and reveals what it took to mount an effective challenge to an entrenched national caste system that was not only structured legally, but also reinforced with terror and violence in the North and South. What kept the movement alive, Sullivan said, was a commitment among a handful of people who devoted their time and energy to the issue and were insistent on bringing it to the attention of the American people.

“As a teacher, I am glad I have an opportunity to help bring this history into the broader story of American history in the 20th century,” said Sullivan, who uses the book in a graduate seminar about the Civil Rights movement and discussed it at the National Book Fair in Washington, D.C., in late September.

She thinks of the NAACP’s history as many stories about people, including major activists like attorney Charles Houston, architect of the strategy for the landmark Brown v. Board of Education desegregation case, and scores of others like W.E.B. Du Bois, Ella Baker, and Roy Wilkins. “Many, however, are largely unknown, but come to life in the pages of this book.”

One of the surprising things was how little money the organization had, said Sullivan, who did much of her research at the Library of Congress where the NAACP’s papers are the largest collection on file.

“They did so much with so little. In the 1930s their annual national organization budget was something like $50,000 that included expenses for sending out field workers, having a legal campaign, and going to court.”

The lack of money forced the NAACP to become improvisational by drawing on human talent, resources, and creativity in the face of concerted opposition that was frequently deadly and at times must have seemed overwhelming.