Essay on NAACP and how it has Effected Social Change

Founded in 1909 in New York, by a group of black and white citizens in order to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of minority group citizens of the United States and eliminate racial prejudice. The NAACP seeks to remove all barriers of racial discrimination through democratic process. (www.NAACP.org)

The NAACP is America's oldest civil rights organization, and for years stood as the moral conscience of the nation, fighting for the rights of black Americans to equal treatment at the polling booth, in the schoolhouse, in the courts and in the marketplace. How sad, now, that this venerable institution has been turned into a caricature of its former self.

The formation of the NAACP was urged by the leading radicals of the era including Jane Addams, John Dewey, William Lloyd Garrison, John Haynes Holmes, Lincoln Steffens, Brand Whitlock, Lillian Wald, Rabbi Stephen Wise, and Ray Stannard Baker. Among the first officials of the NAACP were more radicals including: Mary White Ovington, Oswald Garrison Vilard, Walter E. Sachs, John Milholland, Frances Blascoer, and William English Walling. Other radicals were among the first NAACP members: Florence Kelly, William Pickens, James W. Johnson, Charles E. Russell, and E. R. A. Seligman. (Many of these individuals were already or would soon become enrolled in the newly formed Intercollegiate Socialist Society [which later became the League for Industrial Democracy] and, within a few years, they were prominent in various pacifist groups, including the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and the American Civil Liberties Union. The NAACP gave them one more vantage point - agitation for Negroes' equality - from which they could promote Socialism and other facets of radicalism.) (Jakoubek, 1994)

This may be true; however, I seem, too often, to see another side of this organization................

ESSAY ON THE AMERICAS