NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF

COLORED PEOPLE (NAACP)

By: Aaron Rust, Robert Barrett and Jorge Ornelas

History and background of NAACP

• The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded on February 12th 1909 during the the Jim Crow era of race relations

• Mission statement is "to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate racial hatred and racial discrimination"

Historic timeline of the NAACP

• 1908 Race riots in Abraham Lincoln's hometown of Springfield, Illinois highlight urgent need for an effective civil rights organization in the U.S

• Appalled by the violence against blacks, three white liberals issued a call for a meeting to discuss racial justice

• Journalist Mary White Ovington, William English Walling and civil rights activist Henry Moskowitz met in New York City in January 1909

• Focused on using the courts to overturn the Jim Crow statutes that legalized racial segregation and campaigned against lynching

• By 1914, the group had 6,000 members and 50 branches, by 1919 membership was around 90,000, with more than 300 local branches

Issues Focused on

• School

• Media Diversity

• Federal Advocacy

• Economy Opportunity

• Education

• Civic Engagement

Issues Focused on

• -ism intercepto crosso ex.: color, gender, class, race, ethnicity

NAACP Allies/ Group Members

• John F. Kennedy 1953-1963

• Martin Luther King Jr. 1955-1968

• Condoleezza Rice 1975-Pres

• Barack Obama 1988-Pres

• Verizon Wireless 2004-Pres

NAACP Vision“The vision of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is to ensure a society in which all individuals have equal rights without discrimination based on race.”

• To ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of all citizens

• To remove all barriers of racial discrimination through democratic processes

• To inform the public of the adverse effects of racial discrimination and to seek its elimination

• To achieve equality of rights and eliminate race prejudice among the citizens of the United States

What are they doing today?

“In recent years, the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization, has made great strides forward to advance its mission to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate race-based discrimination”

• Registered 374,553 new voters and mobilized 1.2 million citizens to the ballot box for the 2012 election

• Helped abolish the death penalty in New Mexico, Illinois, Connecticut and Maryland

• Helped increase graduation standards for NCAA athletes

• Trained black churches to fight the HIV/AIDS epidemic

• Helped outlaw New York City’s stop-and-frisk racial profiling program.