The complexity of the struggle to desegregate public libraries can be seen in the way it played out very differently in two Southern cities: Jackson, Mississippi, and Birmingham, Alabama. In Jackson, nonviolent protest unleashed brutal white violence against blacks, and was resolved only by means of federal intervention and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s filing of a class action lawsuit. In Birmingham, despite initial pushback from whites, public libraries were desegregated surprisingly quietly and relatively peacefully, though the city would soon be reeling from a series of bloody confrontations elsewhere.

In Mississippi, the participants in the struggle included a band of courageous black college students called the “Tougaloo Nine.” Named after the historically black Tougaloo College, a private, liberal arts institution that had been founded by Northern Christian missionaries to educate free slaves and their descendants, the Nine were highly disciplined and organized, and used the tactics of nonviolent resistance to draw attention to the institutionalized racial discrimination and inequality around them.

Shortly after opening the Jackson, Mississippi Public Library on March 27, 1961, the white director was asked by two newspaper reporters if she was aware that a group of black students was coming to the library that day. She was not, she said, but after the reporters left she immediately phoned the police. “Contact us when the students arrive,” they responded. Unbeknownst to the director, while she was talking to police, the nine Tougaloo College students—four women and five men, and all members of the NAACP—were preparing for Mississippi’s first sit-in demonstration. NAACP mentors told all to dress well, sit quietly in the library, and avoid violence.

The four women wore dresses, the men dress shirts and ties; some added sport coats. First they visited Jackson’s George Washington Carver branch, which served blacks, and requested books that they knew were not there. At about 11:00 a.m., they walked to the main library.

“I went into the library and I stood up by the card catalog and was thumbing through it,” Ethel Sawyer later recalled. “After I didn’t see the…title of the book I wanted, I went over and sat at one of the tables…until the time I was interrupted.” Albert Lassiter stood in front of the card catalog with a clear view of the front door. “I had seen what a billy club could do to a guy’s head, so I positioned myself so I could see the blows coming. I didn’t want to get a blind shot.”

Ten minutes passed. During that time, the librarian called police, then approached the students, asking if she could help them. We’re doing research, they responded. She suggested that they visit one of the two black branches. Immediately thereafter, a group of policemen came in and told the students to get out of the library. But “nobody moved,” Sawyer said. About a minute later, the police chief told them they were under arrest. Six officers placed all the students into squad cars, and at the station charged them with breach of the peace.

In jail that evening, Tougaloo students worried. “Reflecting back on Emmett Till, the history of lynching connected with Mississippi,” Joseph Jackson told an OC Weekly reporter in 2015, “the later it got that night, I was in fear of my life.” He began rehearsing what he would say if the Ku Klux Klan came for them. “Please, Mr. Klansman, don’t hang me. I have a wife and two little children in Memphis, and if you release me this night, I promise you I will never, ever come back here to Jackson, and violate your Jim Crow laws.” “Well, that sounds very good,” one cellmate responded, “but you know what the Klansman would say? ‘N—–, you should have thought of that before you entered our segregated public library!’”

Several days later, the students were taken to the courthouse to be tried, and, again, reporters were ready. So were a hundred supporters who cheered the “Tougaloo Nine.” When the crowd began to applaud the students as they arrived for their trial, the police chief yelled, “That’s it! Get ‘em!” Police then set upon the crowd with nightsticks and dogs, as once again reporters captured the event with cameras snapping. In the melee, NAACP representative Medgar Evers and several women and children were beaten, two men were bitten by the dogs, and an 81-year-old man suffered a broken arm when police beat him with a club.

To describe the melee, white segregationists defaulted to their canned response. In his daily column, a Jackson newspaper staff writer complained, “A quiet community has been invaded by rabble-rousers stirring up hate between the races, and following are the…publicity media feeding an integrated North the choicest morsels from the Mississippi carcass.…The Negro who has so long held the guiding and helping hand of the white,” he warned, “may lose that hand as he climbs the back of his benefactor and teacher to shout into halls where he is not welcome.”

Amid the din, the Tougaloo Nine went to trial. They were quickly found guilty of breach of the peace. Each student was fined $100, and their 30-day sentences were suspended on condition that they “participate in no further demonstrations.” None of the students testified, but a police captain said they had been arrested because their presence at the library could have caused “trouble.” Medgar Evers later argued that the brutality exercised on those black supporters set into motion the broader desegregation activities in Mississippi. On January 12, 1962, the NAACP filed a class action lawsuit and five months later a federal judge ordered the Jackson Public Library to desegregate.

In Alabama, the desegregation of Birmingham’s Public Library progressed quite differently.

In early April 1963, Southern Christian Leadership Council Executive Director Wyatt Walker recruited fair-skinned Addine “Deenie” Drew to pass as white and case the downtown library to prepare for a public library sit-in. Attired like a middle-class white, in blue and white silk dress and hat, she entered the library unhindered, walked through reading rooms and stacks, and after noting all entrances and exits, left the building to call Walker from a pay phone across the street. The experience was so traumatic, she later recalled, she had to “look down at my feet and tell them to keep walking.” On April 9 she and other black students entered the library, and sat reading at desks, undisturbed. Whites stared, but said nothing. When librarians took no action, students left quietly.

Disappointed that they had provoked no incident, Walker planned a second sit-in the next day. He told 12 students to approach the library that afternoon, and asked Shelley Millender, a student at Miles College, another historically black school, to speak for the group once they got inside. As they approached the library two white men came up to Millender. “I was really afraid that day,” he later recalled. If violence occurred, he hoped the media would be there to photograph the incidents. He was unaware the two men were newspaper reporters whom Walker had tipped off. They followed him into the library, and as the other students gathered, Millender spoke to librarians at the circulation desk.

Birmingham had a library for Negroes, the librarian said; Millender should go there. Millender and the librarian then had “quite a little skirmish in terms of rhetoric,” he later recalled, and when finished, Millender sat at a desk with several other students. Police came, but after several phone calls and much muffled conversation refused to arrest them. Forty-five minutes later students left “voluntarily and without incident or disturbance,” the library director later told his board, although when they walked through a crowd of young whites, some uttered remarks like “it stinks in here,” and “why don’t you go home?” “We were there to get arrested,” Millender said; when that did not happen, they saw no purpose in staying.

At a quickly assembled board meeting the next day, the library director wanted approval of his actions the previous day and guidance for what he perceived would be inevitable future sit-ins. The board discussed alternatives, and although it rejected any use of the library for sit-in demonstrations, it approved the director’s actions and unanimously passed a resolution that “no persons be excluded from the use of the public library facilities” because of race. The very next day, Birmingham’s Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene “Bull” Connor, arrested Martin Luther King Jr. and 132 other protesters, and in subsequent weeks, millions of television viewers across the county watched Connor’s minions using fire hoses and police dogs on black demonstrators. Then, on September 15, the nation was shocked when four adolescent black girls attending Sunday School died in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

By “quietly desegregating” in the midst of a violent summer, the Birmingham Public Library actually functioned as a lone mediating site for facilitating racial reconciliation. Perhaps board members approved the effort to counter the national image of violence Connor helped create for their city; perhaps they feared cameras capturing and news media reporting on similar violence in their library. At a July board meeting, the library director reported a distinct increase in the number of blacks using the main library facilities, and particularly the formerly white branch closest to a black neighborhood. When the director testified in court in December, he reported that the Birmingham Public Library was an integrated institution. But the media—national and local—had largely ignored the library in its coverage.

For many years the activists who desegregated these libraries remained “hidden figures” in the history of the civil rights era and the South.

It wasn’t until June 24, 2018, that the American Library Association (the world’s oldest and largest such organization) formally recognized the activists and their struggle, by passing a “Resolution to Honor African Americans Who Fought Library Segregation” at its annual conference in New Orleans. The resolution apologized for the role the Library Association played in supporting segregated libraries and discriminating against African American librarians. And it commended, “African Americans who risked their lives to integrate public libraries for their bravery and courage in challenging segregation in public libraries and in forcing public libraries to live up to the rhetoric of their ideals.”

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In 1956, Florida’s state legislature established a committee to investigate legal infractions by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, as well as any links that the organization might have to subversive groups. At the time, Florida was just one of several Southern states creating their own sovereignty and education commissions, as well as committees on un-American activities.

The Florida committee, like the others, was part of the white South’s campaign of “massive resistance.” State and local governments deployed legal and procedural weapons against efforts to implement Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision desegregating public education. These state groups, which operated largely independently but maintained varying degrees of communication with each other, all had one purpose: to keep white schools white.

In Florida, however, that purpose would expand to include other threats to the status quo. In an effort to fight the influences it saw transforming society, the committee would turn into a vehicle for identifying, interrogating, and removing homosexuals from schools and universities, while also attacking other groups it believed were threatening traditional American values. This broad targeting of groups and manipulation of public fear in the face of cultural change emerged as a set of strategies still in use today.

The Florida Legislative Investigation Committee was led by state senator Charley Johns, a key member of a bloc of conservative lawmakers from northern and central counties who held power well beyond their numbers in the legislature. The Johns Committee, as it became known, was an interim committee, which meant that every two years its renewal required approval from both chambers.

Over the next nine years, legislators renewed the Johns Committee four times. During that period, the committee’s list of targets grew. First, they focused on the NAACP. Spying on and harassing members, they held a series of public hearings in which they tried to show that the organization was breaking the law, that it had been infiltrated by communists, and that social equality (a euphemism for interracial marriage) was its true aim.

Two years later, the committee moved on to homosexuals. Late in 1958, the Johns Committee began an investigation of suspected gay professors and students at the University of Florida. This expanded to a search for gay and lesbian public schoolteachers around the state; then to scouring Miami for underage male prostitutes and pornography; and finally, investigating alleged deviants, atheists, and liberals among the University of South Florida faculty.

In all of its investigations, from civil rights to gay and lesbian teachers, from liberal professors to indecent literature, the Johns Committee was both a product of its time as well as a trailblazer in mobilizing opposition against liberalism as a threat to racial and sexual norms. Its investigations of civil rights activists were part and parcel of a regional attack on the NAACP. Rooting out homosexual teachers and professors—which involved surveillance, entrapment, interrogations, threats of exposure, and accusations of seducing and recruiting the young—reflected the prevailing approach to dealing with homosexuality at the time, from local law enforcement to the federal government and the U.S. military. Concern over obscenity was enmeshed in a broader decency crusade that was washing over much of the country in the late 1950s and early 1960s. And criticism of leftist intellectuals and the modern university had been a mainstay of Cold War conservatism for years.

Beginning in 1958 at the University of Florida in Gainesville, chief investigator R. J. Strickland, assistant investigators, and city and university police officers moved to question hundreds of suspected homosexuals around the state. They spied on private residences and infiltrated gay bars. They staked out bus stations and parks, as well as men’s bathrooms on college campuses and in the Alachua County courthouse. They questioned prison inmates, college students, juveniles in reform schools, public school teachers, choir directors, university professors, ministers, hustlers and prostitutes, truck drivers, scout leaders, and traveling salesmen.

In a 1959 report to the legislature, Charley Johns explained that the committee had uncovered vitally important facts about the problem of homosexuality in Florida: There were “several classes” of homosexuals. Homosexual activity became “more prevalent as you progress upward on the educational scale.” Lesbians and gay men were “made by training, not born.” And “a surprisingly large percentage of young people are subject to be influenced into homosexual practices if thrown into contact with homosexuals who desire to recruit them.”

For a brief period in the early 1960s, the committee’s mission and ideas had the full and enthusiastic support of the governor, Farris Bryant, a conservative Democrat who created advisory committees on homosexuality and indecent literature in 1961. That year, the Johns Committee joined with these advisory committees and the Florida Children’s Commission to host a series of conferences across the state.

Nearly twelve hundred Floridians attended the conferences. According to the Tampa Tribune, until Governor Bryant “or other experts” could find the “best answer to curbing homosexual practices before they corrode innocent persons’ characters, there will be no attempt by the administration to hamstring or slow down the work of the Johns Committee.”

The title page of the Johns Committee’s controversial 1964 report, Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida. Courtesy of the Florida Heritage Collection and the George A. Smathers Libraries Special Collections, University of Florida.

Around the same time, a small group of self-described “concerned citizens,” including the mayor of Tampa, met to discuss the University of South Florida, where parents expressed concern that their kids were being corrupted in the classroom by the teaching of evolution, moral relativism, acceptance of interracial dating, and the historical fallibility of the Bible, as well as a speakers’ policy that would allow communist sympathizers on campus.

The group voted to ask the Johns Committee to investigate the university—not only about homosexuality, but about this whole set of issues. Strickland began questioning students in Room 170 of the Hawaiian Village Motel in Tampa. There, witnesses described unwanted homosexual advances by a music professor, rumors about which professors were gay or suspiciously effeminate, inappropriate sexual comments in class, liberal discussions of race, disdain for religion, softness on communism, and even a list of swear words uttered by one professor during a lecture.

Word got out about the motel-room interrogations, and the USF president, John Allen, took the investigation public, demanding that the committee hold open hearings on campus. For two weeks, the Johns Committee questioned faculty, staff, and administrators about who they were hiring and what they were teaching. As with the NAACP, the university was able to defend itself and paint the committee as overzealous and overstepping legislative bounds. A consensus in the Tampa Bay area eventually emerged on the side of defending academic freedom, but that was tempered by a persistent distrust of higher education from the right.

The effects of the investigation rippled across the state’s university system. In 1962, the Board of Control of the university system revised its “Policy on Morals and Influences,” in part mandating that each university president maintain files on all faculty members, including their “academic background, loyalty, attitudes toward communism, moral conduct, and general teaching ability.” Prospective and current students were now to be scrutinized for “any indication of antisocial or immoral behavior, such as communistic activities or sex deviation.”

In 1963 the committee again used a highly publicized investigation to make the case for their own renewal by the legislature. Charley Johns reported that they had succeeded not only in uncovering homosexuality, “anti-Christian teachings,” and communist sympathizers “teaching and indoctrinating,” but also in helping an unnamed federal agency remove “thirty-nine homosexuals and two of ’em was in high, exalted positions of trust.” The work of the committee, Johns insisted, “has got to go on. It’s larger than any of us.”

But the Johns Committee would disband before its term was up. In less than a year after the publication of a lurid 1964 report called Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida (informally, and infamously, known as the Purple Pamphlet) and the outcry it elicited, the committee quietly disbanded. A state attorney in Miami called it obscene and threatened legal action, while publications ranging from the Tallahassee Democrat to the New Republic, Life, and Confidential drew national attention to the graphic photos, alarmist claims, and eye-popping glossary contained in the report. Johns himself later admitted that they should “close the office, lock up the records, and save the taxpayers of Florida the remainder of the $155,000 appropriation.”

The myth behind the anti-gay, anti-integration, and anti-obscenity arguments at midcentury was that liberals were attempting to force Americans, especially young people, to accept abnormal behavior as normal. It is striking how these views still animate part of our political imagination in much the same way they did in postwar battles: over what kind of nation we want to be, as well as how to define “Americanism” and who should be included in, and excluded from, the rights and privileges that come with it. There are some historical moments—like the time the Johns Committee operated in Florida—when such myths are embraced by enough people to provide a veneer of legitimacy, and an excuse to act.

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Bond was speaking to a packed house in the Petersen Automotive Museum, with a generous assortment of Lamborghinis and Bugattis accenting the scene.  Moderator Warren Olney, host of the shows “Which Way, LA?” and “To The Point” on KCRW, asked Bond why he thought the term “racism” had become an occasional punch line among some of the younger generation. Bond said he found it perplexing. “Does it mean that, if someone says something uncomfortable to you that might involve race, you can say ‘racism’ and make a joke?” Bond asked. “Then I don’t get the joke. Maybe I’m dense.” But, he added, “I was host of Saturday Night Live, so I know a joke when I see it.”

Asked to name his favorite moment while hosting Saturday Night Live in 1977, Bond pointed to a routine he performed with Garrett Morris. “We did a skit called ‘Black Perspectives in the News,’” Bond recalled. The skit concerned I.Q. tests and racial differences in outcomes. “I said, ‘That’s because light-skinned blacks are smarter than dark-skinned blacks.’ And he was darker-skinned than I am. And he did this marvelous double-take, and said, ‘Say what?’  And I said, ‘Everybody knows it. Light-skinned blacks are smarter than dark-skinned blacks.’ And he said, ‘I see we’ve run out of time.’”

Asked about the state of identity politics today, Bond broke in skeptically.  “What does that mean, ‘identity politics’?” he asked. “The Tea Party is identity politics. Some people find it objectionable when people of color band together in their own interests. And somehow that’s thought to be hostile to the American way. But they don’t think the same about white people coming together in their own interests.”

Bond rejected the notion that race was a determinant of political loyalties. “Herman Cain” – the Godfather’s Pizza CEO turned Republican presidential contender – “went to my college,” Bond said. “Herman Cain is a black man. I’m not going to vote for Herman Cain.”

Bond said he was mostly satisfied with Obama’s job performance but worried about what he saw as extreme vitriol among Republican voters. He averred that opposition to Obama could be based purely on policy but said that often it seemed to be at heart about race. “I think he faces an unusual amount of hostility from the other party,” Bond said. “Is it because he’s from Chicago? Is it because he’s tall and thin? No, it’s because he’s black.”

As for Obama’s shortcomings, Bond was accepting. “Yes, he’s disappointed me,” Bond said. “And I have to say he will not be the first president to do that, nor will he be the last.”

Bond began his work in civil rights when he helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the early 1960s, but one of his earliest encounters with a civil rights leader was while he was still in college.  Bond attended Morehouse College, a historically black college in Atlanta, in the late 1950s, and he was one of eight students in the only class Martin Luther King Jr. ever taught. King was a co-instructor of a philosophy course, and Bond said that King could recite passages in textbooks from memory. “He had wonderful recall,” Bond said. But Bond’s memories of the class didn’t go too much further. “I can’t remember a thing,” Bond admitted.

Asked by Olney about the courage it took to integrate lunch counters in the South, Bond downplayed the effort. “I’m not sure if it took a tremendous amount of courage to sit at a lunch counter,” Bond said. The year was 1963, and the sit-in he led at a City Hall cafeteria in the South got him arrested and jailed. He was sent to court, where the defense lawyer to his left, a legendary civil rights defender, happened to have fallen asleep at the moment Bond was deciding how to plead. The lawyer to his right was young and inexperienced but had clear advice: “Not guilty, you fool.”

In 1965, Bond was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives but wasn’t seated because of comments he’d made in opposition to the Vietnam War. After a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in his favor, Bond joined the legislature and, after a few years, managed to be accepted by many of his former foes. “Politicians are very rational,” Bond said. “When it became clear to my colleagues in the house that I was a vote, then they began to pay attention, to woo me when I could help them.  And in turn I tried to woo them when they could help me.”

When the microphone was handed to the audience, question topics ranged from same-sex marriage to bugging by the FBI.  Bond said that he wasn’t shocked to discover, years later, that SNCC had been subject to audio surveillance by the government. “We were always right on the edge of paranoia, but even paranoids have enemies,” Bond said. “Andy Young used to say, ‘Our offices are recording studios, and J. Edgar Hoover is the engineer.’”

Bond spoke out strongly in favor of same-sex marriage and of civil rights for gays and lesbians. Bond stayed away from the funeral of Coretta Scott King because it was being held in a church hostile to gay rights; in response to a question about that, Bond said he had no regrets. “Mrs. King was a strong supporter of gay rights and same-sex marriage,” he said. “The idea that she would be buried in this church was abhorrent to me.”

When an audience member asked about continuing instances of race-based crime and violence, Bond stressed that a community as a whole must act. “It ought not be the NAACP’s job to do it,” Bond said. “When we see an evil, a wrong, an injustice, we ought to do something about it. Because if we don’t, and it happens again, we have only ourselves to blame.”

For event photos, click here.
For full video, click here.
To read four experts’ take on the future of the NAACP, click here.

*Photos by Aaron Salcido.

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It’s Still Visible and Important, But Needs a New Plan

The NAACP–the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People–is the most important organization in African-American politics, and historically it was the most visible organization in the 20th century struggle for freedom and equality.

In the post-civil rights era, the NAACP, like the other major civil rights organizations, has found it difficult to adapt organizationally and programmatically to the new barriers associated with institutional racism and the so-called black underclass. Indeed, there was a scholarly consensus at the end of the 20th century that the NAACP in its organizational structure, programs, and strategies was out of touch with the complex situation of racialized poverty and the multifaceted problem of institutional racism. Such criticism of the NAACP is not new. As the most recognized and visible African-American political organization, the organization’s relevance and effectiveness has always been questioned.

The problem of the association’s relevance today is related to its continued adherence to liberalism in an era when the ideology is in decline; its continued reliance for financial support on white philanthropy; its continued tendency to focus on symbolic issues of concern to middle-class blacks; and its reliance on traditional lobbying and litigation strategies that do little to address the problems of poverty and the “underclass”.

While the association has a large number of branches (estimated at more than 1500), its membership at the end of the 20th century was only about 200,000, considerably less than the estimated 400,000 in the 1940s although the black population has more than doubled since then (from 14 million to more than 35 million). The 1500 vary in size and activity, and tend to be dominated by an elderly membership. (It is estimated that two-thirds or more of the active members are 60 or older).

The NAACP has always had trouble attracting young people. In 1936, over the initial objections of the executive director, the association established a youth council and began to charter youth councils and college chapters. But in the 1960s, young people, dissatisfied with the NAACP’s middle class status and conservative approach, tended to drift toward other groups. In the post-civil rights era, this problem continues despite the promises of the organization’s leaders to involve young people in the group’s membership and leadership. J. Wyatt Mondesire, the former head of the 14,000 member Philadelphia branch, remarked in a 2001 interview that the situation was so bad with young people that “when I go out and speak to kids on college campuses and high schools, and I ask them what NAACP stands for, a lot of them think that I am talking about NCAA [the National Collegiate Athletic Association]. That’s how pitiful it is.”

Despite this, the NAACP remains the most important political organization in black America and one of the largest grassroots organizations in the United States. In most cities and towns, the local chapters are generally recognized as a dominant voice on black affairs, and they are usually consulted by white economic and political elites seeking advice on issues related to race. These chapters represent a potentially powerful social and political force that could be mobilized if the association could develop a national strategic program and plan of action to address today’s multifaceted problems of poverty and institutional racism.

The question, therefore, is: Can the NAACP–given its history, ideology, and organizational ethos–develop and implement such a plan and program? Can it adapt to the challenges of the 21st century and remain the most important organization in black politics? Or is it likely to remain an organization with a glorious past and an irrelevant future?

Robert C. Smith is a professor of political science at San Francisco State University. He most recently authored Conservatism and Racism and Why in America They Are the Same.

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The Fight for Racial Equality Isn’t Over

The NAACP is as relevant and needed today as it was 50 years ago. Racism has diminished in the years since the Civil Rights laws of the 1960s were enacted. Overt racists are increasingly a minority of America’s population, but we do not live in a post-racial society. Today, most whites believe that they support racial equality, but many of them harbor unconscious stereotypes and attitudes that social scientists have labeled “racial resentment.” This condition is an intense, emotional opposition to policies designed to assist racial minorities. Racial resentment is different from traditional prejudice because it is not based on a belief that African-Americans are biologically inferior. This psychological disposition is not usually conscious; it tends to reside deep within an individual’s psyche.

Internalized stereotypes cause many whites to harbor negative attitudes about African-Americans without a conscious awareness of the source. Whites can act in ways that disadvantage minorities as long as they can rationalize a race neutral justification for their actions. This can affect decision-making across a broad range of activities–including hiring, promotions, home buying (black buyers are taken to some neighborhoods but not others), and decisions on arrests and prosecution.

One of the most significant impediments to black progress is the persistent discrimination in the nation’s housing markets. A study using census data from 2005-2009 determined that progress in housing integration came to a halt during the first decade of the twenty-first century. African-Americans are the most segregated minority, followed by Hispanics and Asians.

This is not a matter of the private choices of individual families. Researchers have shown that, in rental and sales markets in metropolitan areas nationwide, black and Hispanic home seekers experienced significant levels of adverse treatment, compared to similarly situated white home seekers. This affects living conditions and the quality of public schools in black neighborhoods.

If the current trends continue, the black middle-class will continue to grow. Some blacks will achieve socioeconomic parity with their white counterparts, but most others will continue to lag behind. The NAACP and organizations like it are still needed to advocate for racial equality.

Leland Ware is a Louis L. Redding Chair and professor of Law & Public Policy at the University of Delaware. His research and professional interests include civil rights law, employment law.

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It Faces New Challenges, But Must Uphold The Same Mission

Throughout its history, the NAACP has upheld civil rights for ethnic minorities, working for political, educational, social and economic advancement. Some of the issues have changed over time, yet many are still strikingly similar. Where the NAACP once sought Depression-era economic justice, it now combats modern-day economic inequities. Where it once advanced school desegregation, it now fights school re-segregation without an individual or state actor to always blame. Voting rights have been won, yet we see retrenchment by the court.

Key challenges in today’s society take a more-subtle form: structural inequities, growing racial anxiety, and implicit bias:

• Structural barriers–in areas ranging from education and housing to employment and health care–limit access to opportunity.
• While some racial gaps have been bridged, Americans still harbor deep racial anxieties triggered by globalization and a declining middle class. This fuels anti-immigrant sentiments and raises fears of a declining white majority.
• Overt racial discrimination is obsolete, yet Americans still subconsciously hold “implicit” racial biases as an outgrowth of our troubled racial past. These hidden biases preserve discrimination in forms such as racial profiling and inequities in criminal sentencing.

In this current landscape, the challenges are new but the mission is still the same. Now, as always, the NAACP continues to lead the charge to uphold racial equity and like its founder, continues to raise understanding of the relationship between different domains such as economies, civil rights and global dynamics.

John A. Powell is executive director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and Gregory H. Williams Chair in Civil Rights & Civil Liberties at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law.

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It Protects Rights for All

In many ways, the NAACP stands for the same thing it has always stood for–advocacy for the equality of rights of all persons.

Despite the oft-misunderstood NAACP nomenclature and acronym, the fact has always been that the NAACP fought hard for the equality of rights of those who needed it most. For many years, those were primarily African Americans, and, of course, that challenge still remains. However, there are also other groups intersecting the traditional advocacy group on whose behalf the NAACP has long labored. Among those are members of the LGBT community, members of religious minority groups, and lower income persons of all ethnic backgrounds.

The nation’s oldest civil rights organization has been right to maintain its traditional roots while adapting to the new challenges of the twenty-first century. I’m proud of the fact that the NAACP has been and continues to be on the right side of history. And, I’m confident that the NAACP will be on the side of millions of American citizens and their allies who face daily the many challenges of modern era civil rights battles. If the NAACP did not do so, the organization would not be living up to its own mission. And the mission–equality of rights for all, wherein all means everybody–is what the NAACP stands for, both back then, today, and tomorrow.

Dr. Ravi K. Perry is assistant professor of political science at Clark University. He is currently writing Black Mayors, White Cities, a book manuscript on the challenges Black mayors face in representing Black interests in majority white, medium-sized cities.

*Photo courtesy of Village Square.

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