Organisations

• NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall took the case of Brown v. Board to the Supreme Court and won, ending the legal basis for segregation.
• The NAACP included AA campaigners WEB Du Bois and Ida B Wells, and liberal white social reformers and campaigners. Du Bois was the only senior black committee member and it was initially dominated by Jewish white liberals.
• The main aims of the NAACP were suffrage rights, equal justice, better education, equality before the law and employment opportunities according to religion.
• The NAACP established 50 local branches and a journal, and set up marches in protest against the film The Birth of a Nation and the St Louis race riots in 1917.
• The NAACP didn’t initially recruit a mass following, with only 6000 members by 1915. A more dynamic recruitment policy led to increased membership in the 20s.
• In 1944 the NAACP achieved a Supreme Court ruling that it was illegal to deny AA the right to vote.
• To sustain the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Montgomery Improvement Association was formed by MLK and allies. Out of this came the SCLC, which had a guiding political philosophy and an articulate figurehead in King.
• One of the SCLC founders was influential in forming the SNCC in April 1960.
• Many organisations came together in the Council of Federated Organisations in February 1962, with a strategy of increasing voter registration in the Deep South. It included CORE, NAACP, SCLC and SNCC.
• Actions of SCLC in response to opportunity provided by Kennedy’s presidency:

  • vowed philosophy of non-violence
  • campaigns looked for white liberal support
  • won support from organised religion in South
  • wanted to demonstrate mass feeling
  • looked to invoke constitutional right of freedom of expression over local state laws which prevented demonstrations
• The SCLC’s first demonstration in Albany, Georgia in 1961 was thwarted by careful preparation from police chief Laurie Pritchett, who restrained his men and released King after his initial arrest.
• The March on Washington in August 1963 saw the various organisations working together. The scale was greater than anything attempted since 1865 or after. The key element was the gathering of white support, which was at its strongest since Reconstruction.
• The NOI was founded in Detroit by Wallace Fard Muhammad and dominated by Elijah Muhammad until 1975. It expanded considerably in the 1950s with the help of Malcolm X.
• The links with Islam increased the emotional appeal of the NOI, and the belief that AA were the chosen people of Allah gave the movement a religious strength akin to the Southern baptism behind the SCLC.
• The spiritual intensity of the NOI and the UNIA meant matters of voter registration and equal political rights were not priorities.
• For member of the NOI, King’s efforts and the demeaning spectacle of police hoses were objects of hatred. The Civil Rights Act seemed irrelevant if black superiority was not accepted.