262 NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) deliberate, and difficult campaigns that would entail first bringing attention to the problem through its newspaper, The Crisis, then issuing lengthy and detailed reports and lobbying Congress for changes in the laws The U.S House of Representatives passed federal antilynching laws in 1922, 1937, and 1940, but each time the legislation died in the Senate, falling victim to actual or threatened filibusters The NAACP persisted, but the federal government never passed such legislation The NAACP did not spend all of its time on the antilynching effort It also investigated other civil rights abuses and litigated discrimination cases in areas including the segregation of streetcars and railroad trains, residential restrictive covenants, segregated schools, and general abuses of civil rights and liberties including the ban on blacks on juries and the denial of voting rights Civil rights action through the mid-1930s included work on behalf of accused criminals who rarely enjoyed juries of their (black) peers The NAACP was also active in working to get equal salaries for black public school teachers Sometimes it won Often it lost Always it kept the issues in the public awareness FAIR TRIALS On the matter of fair trials, a significant success occurred in 1919 in Arkansas That year black farmers tried to form a union In retaliation, a white mob killed more than 200 black men, women, and children Local authorities arrested 79 black sharecroppers and charged them with murder The trial featured coerced testimony and a defense that called no witnesses A white mob threatened during the trial to lynch any found not guilty After a single hour of deliberation, the jury declared 12 of the defendants to be guilty of crimes warranting a sentence of death Others received long prison terms The NAACP appealed the case for four years before the U.S Supreme Court agreed to hear the case In Moore v Dempsey the court overturned the convictions The NAACP attempted to fight restrictions on the black vote In Guinn v United States the NAACP successfully convinced the Supreme Court to overturn Oklahoma’s grandfather clause, which allowed the vote to only those persons whose grandfathers had voted and effectively excluded all but a handful of blacks Southern states found new methods of disenfranchising blacks A popular choice was defining political parties as private and allowing them to select their members, which meant that the parties and their primaries would be white only In the one-party South the primary was the election, so the white primary denied blacks access to the ballot Decades later, in 1945, Smith v Alright, brought by the NAACP, eliminated the white primary The NAACP had early on developed a somewhat schizophrenic character, with DuBois, as editor of The Crisis, stressing publicity and lobbying, and the legal staff continuing the slow and tedious work of litigation DuBois became more radical as he aged He was more concerned with civil liberties and the working class across race lines, and he thought that the NAACP’s preoccupation with segregation was excessive He also thought that the NAACP was becoming increasingly conservative, moving toward Washington’s accommodationism When the NAACP shifted its focus from The Crisis to the courts in the 1930s as it took up segregation as its major target, it completed the split In 1934 DuBois left the NAACP and established the National Negro Congress, a union of 600 black organizations with a focus on economic justice LITIGATION With DuBois and the economic radicals out of the picture, the NAACP under president Walter White used the resources of the NAACP legal department, especially Charles Houston and Thurgood Marshall For two decades the NAACP focused strongly on ending school segregation, lynching, and the Jim Crow system The process entailed litigating against one city, state, or county at a time, forcing the party sued to show that it was complying with Plessey v Ferguson The NAACP forced those it sued to either upgrade their black facilities to the white standard or abandon the separate but equal myth of Plessey In the 1930s and 1940s the NAACP began eroding the legal basis for segregated educational systems, and in 1954 it won its most important victory in Brown v the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, which ruled that separate was inherently unequal and opened the door to the civil rights revolution of the 1960s The “Second Reconstruction” occurred thanks to, but largely without, the NAACP After white backlash and timid enforcement of the laws by the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, black Americans began forcing the battle in the early 1960s with sit-ins, freedom rides, and other methods of peaceful confrontation The NAACP was hamstrung by state efforts such as one that occurred in Alabama There the state used anticommunist legislation to demand the membership rolls of the NAACP Because the NAACP was a locally based rather than a national organization, the release of its membership rolls would have proved fatal But the