The NAACP at 100

Today marks the NAACP's 100th birthday. One can reasonably ask what purpose the organization serves today, but there is little question that the NAACP has been the preeminent civil rights organization in American history. By the 1960s the NAACP had come to seem passe, even conservative, by a generation of activists weaned on direct-action protests, but without the work of the NAACP, and especially its Legal Defense Fund, the prospects for success in challenging Jim Crow would have been diminished, the process would have taken far longer.

Everyone knows about the successes of the NAACP in fighting segregated education, which culminated in Brown v. Board. But the organization fought discrimination in its myriad guises, in diverse realms such the political arena and on public transportation. It is quite possible to assert that without SNCC or CORE there still would have been an NAACP, but without the NAACP there may never have been a SNCC or a CORE.

Racism in the North Country

I was always perplexed by the racism that I saw and heard in my home town in New Hampshire. People trafficked in the most appalling stereotypes about blacks despite the fact that almost no one in Newport could even plausibly say that he or she knew any black people. If one wants to see racism as a function of ignorance and unfamiliarity, most of northern New England would be the place to go. Of course there are other wellsprings for racism as well, but that which springs from ignorance born of unfamiliarity, the most literal kind of ignorance, is among the most truculent. I was reminded of these experiences from those years while reading this story in The New York Times about death threats levied against anyone who dared attend NAACP meetings in Bangor, Maine. Not surprisingly, Maine is apparently the whitest state in the country. And this example shows that the racism of unfamiliarity can carry with it every bit of the malice of any other form of racism. Keep this example in mind also when someone next tries to tell you that America is over its racist past, or that blacks just need to get over it, or any of the other cliches that some people reflexively blurt out in order to avoid scrutinizing a country that has come a long way but that still has a long way yet to travel.