Encyclopedia of world history (facts on file library of world history) 7 volume set ( PDFDrive ) 2541

N NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) Founded in 1909, the NAACP is an organization whose purpose is to use the legal system of the United States to force the government to provide civil rights equitably to U.S blacks It came into being in reaction to the violent racism that plagued the United States at the time After the end of Reconstruction allowed the imposition of de facto and then de jure segregation, African Americans lost many of the legal protections established by laws and amendments to the U.S Constitution Violence against blacks became common as lynching reached epidemic proportions Economic and social discrimination increased Blacks found themselves second-class citizens or worse in white America Black leaders were in a quandary over how their people should handle the deteriorated situation In 1895 educator Booker T Washington, the most prominent black of his time, proposed that African Americans should accommodate They should allow segregation to continue while they used self-help to develop their own society and to improve their economic condition Washington hoped that U.S society would notice the gradual improvement and come to accept black participation in the white political and social systems Washington established the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama as a segregated vocational school to teach blacks practical skills they needed for everyday life Not all black leaders agreed with Washington’s accommodationism Some looked at the increase in poverty and the backwardness of a Jim Crow system as separate and blatantly unequal They also noted the outrageousness of hundreds of lynchings a year They regarded Washington as a tool of the white system Among the critics who engaged Washington in a long debate was the intellectual W E B DuBois For over a decade the debate continued as black Americans suffered Then in 1905 DuBois and William Monroe Trotter called a meeting at Niagara Falls, Canada The meeting led to the formation of the Niagara movement, which rejected Washington’s gradualist accommodationism and called for vigilance and protest The Niagara movement was premature Washington was too powerful By 1908 the movement was history Its message, however, lingered: There would be no more appeasement of white racism by black Americans The NAACP came into being in 1909, formed by DuBois and other blacks and whites dedicated to legal resistance of Jim Crow discrimination and segregation Among the founders was Oswald Garrison Villard, the editor of the New York Evening Post and grandson of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison A charter member was Mary Church Terrell, the first president of the National Association of Colored Women Also among the founders were the lawyer Clarence Darrow and Jane Addams, social worker, peace activist, and founder of Hull-House The NAACP campaign against the decades-old plague of lynching set the approach it would take—long, 261