PERSPECTIVE ON CIVIL RIGHTS : Born to the Injustices of a Hostile World : Almost from the outset, the NAACP ran into internal tension between calls to ‘Agitate, Agitate’ or to ‘Work, Work.’

A race riot in Abraham Lincoln’s hometown sparked the formation of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People a year later.

The riot in Springfield, Ill., on Aug. 14, 1908, began after a lynch mob came for two men, one suspected of murder, the other accused of rape. The suspects were black, their victims white. The two were whisked to a safe, distant jail, and the mob that had come to hang them without benefit of lawyer, judge, jury or trial, turned its fury on other African-Americans. Shouting “Lincoln freed you, we’ll show you where you belong,” the mob attacked defenseless people, their homes and stores, killing eight and wounding more than 50. The justification given for trying to drive 6,000 peaceful African-Americans out of a city where some had resided for more than 50 years was that they had come “to think they were as good as we are.” About 2,000 did flee the town, where Lincoln had been laid to rest.

Many were shocked by this race riot in Lincoln’s hometown. In an article headlined “The Race War in the North” published in the Independent, journalist-reformer William English Walling asked, “What large and powerful body of citizens is ready to come to our aid?” In response, several whites met, including Walling, social workers Mary White Ovington and Henry Moskovitz, and New York Post editor Oswald Garrison Villard, grandson of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.

They called a national conference to form a civil rights organization. Villard drafted this “call,” which was signed by about 60 leading whites and African-Americans and issued on Feb. 12, 1909.

About 300 persons, heeding the call, attended the National Negro Conference held in New York on May 31 and June 1, 1909. A Committee of 40 was set up to plan a permanent organization. Meetings were held during 1909 and 1910. The second annual conference met at the same site in New York, May 12-14, 1910. That conference adopted the permanent name, but 1909 is considered the NAACP’s birth year.

The NAACP was born into a hostile world. The period from 1890 to 1910 was a low point for African-Americans. Starting with Mississippi in 1890, Southern states greatly curbed the voting rights gained under the 14th and 15th Amendments and congressional Reconstruction measures. In Louisiana, for example, 130,344 African-Americans were voting in 1896, but only 5,230 could register in 1900, a drop of 96%. Twenty-two African-Americans served in Congress (two in the Senate and and 20 in the House) from 1870 to 1901, all representing Southern constituencies, but none served thereafter until 1929.

Anger and violence confronted African-Americans as they migrated from the rural South to the North and to cities, North and South, competing for jobs, housing, recreation. The African-American population went from 80.2% rural and 90.3% Southern in 1890 to 72.4% urban and 45% Northern and Western in 1960. Census data on occupations in 1890 showed that they were overwhelmingly concentrated (87.3%) in the two lowest-paying categories and only 12.7% in the three highest while the respective figures for whites were 57% and 43%.

North and South were reuniting at the expense of African-Americans. The two sections had fought over abolitionism and slavery from the 1830s to 1865 and quarreled over rights for freed men from 1865 to the 1890s. Then America acquired overseas territories populated bydark, Latino, Catholic people who, North and South agreed, should be kept in colonial status; and more Americans agreed with Southerners that the South knew best how to handle the domestic race problem. Social Darwinist thinking, minstrel and Uncle Tom shows, and newspaper and magazine jokes all helped undercut African-Americans. Though dominated by Northern Republicans, the Supreme Court greatly weakened civil rights. Hostility came from within as well as outside the race. The main leader, from 1895 to 1915, Booker T. Washington, was opposed to, and actively worked against, the NAACP. Before him, African-Americans were generally militant. In 1895, Frederick Douglass, the acknowledged leader from about 1874 until his death in 1895, advised a student starting out in life: “Agitate! Agitate! Agitate!” Washington’s advice was: “Work! Work! Work! Be patient and win by superior service.”

Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise” speech in September, 1895, vaulted him into Douglass’ place of leadership. Washington proudly voted and used first-class accommodations and urged his fellows to do so where permitted. But he opposed protest, agitation and demonstration to force change, calling on his people to focus on self-improvement to show their usefulness. He was willing to forgo political and civic rights temporarily in return for job opportunities. Whites took this to mean accepting permanent second-class citizenship without ever regaining rights.

Some African-Americans, such as educator John Hope and journalist William Monroe Trotter, openly opposed Washington from the start. Others, like W. E. B. DuBois, waited some years. In 1903, DuBois came out against Washington’s accommodationist policy and against his powerful Tuskegee machine, which used press subsidies to control black newspapers and magazines. In 1905, DuBois and Trotter formed the Niagara Movement that met in successive years at places sacred to the anti-slavery struggle: Niagara Falls, N.Y. and Harpers Ferry, W. Va., Oberlin, Ohio, and Faneuil Hall in Boston. Their declaration stated, “The voice of protest of 10 million African-Americans must never cease to assail the ears of their fellows whites so long as America is unjust.” The Niagara Movement remained small and its finances shaky. Washington’s Tuskegee machine infiltrated, prevented news coverage and got editorialists to assail the leaders as radicals. Outside help was needed. It came by merging into the NAACP.

The NAACP continued the fight for full rights--civic, educational, voting. Although Washington and many observers viewed it as radical, many of his followers went over to it after his death in 1915. The NAACP investigated lynchings, led protests and lobbied hard for anti-lynching bills and other measures. Its greatest impact was in court cases won by teams of NAACP lawyers of both races.

The unpaid officers holding the NAACP’s top posts were white, including Villard, Walling, Ovington, Moorfield Storey and the Spingarn brothers, Joel and Arthur. From the start, the chief paid officer was DuBois as director of publicity and research and editor of the Crisis, the NAACP magazine. He served from 1910-1934 and 1944-1948. The chief operating post, executive secretary, was held successively by four African-Americans, whose dynamic leadership molded and shaped the organization: James Weldon Johnson, 1920-1931; Walter White, 1931-1955; Roy Wilkins, 1955-1977; and Benjamin Hooks, 1977 to present.

Over the years, as more militant organizations emerged using more explosive tactics, the NAACP has come to be viewed as conservative. But it provides the important legal underpinning to protect the activists and to bail them out of hot spots. And NAACP officials and workers, such as its Mississippi secretary, Medgar Evers, have been gunned down. The NAACP remains the largest of all civil-rights organizations. And its many branches and members generate much of the action leading to protest, court cases and change.