At 100, NAACP says it’s still vital, needed

When Sophia Hall wrote a personal statement for her college application, she struggled with what to reveal about herself. Should she say she was the first in her family to strive for higher education? Or that her father is black, her mother Puerto Rican?

She didn’t want to be judged on her race or be seen as a quota filler, but she realized that what she considered a small part of her identity had directly shaped her outlook on the world.

“My success is not merely my own, but the success of my family and friends who have worked tirelessly to assist me,” she wrote.

“I firmly believe that the primary factor that separates people is not their desires, but the lack of opportunities they are allotted; and, it is the responsibility of those that succeed to equalize the playing field.”

Hall’s is a language of a new generation of color.

And it’s precisely the kind of language the nation’s oldest civil rights organization wants to hear as it celebrates its first century and gears up for another.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People turns 100 today, a century of existence bookended by a birth stemming from a violent race riot in Springfield, Ill., and the election of America’s first black president, who launched his campaign in that same town.

Hall, 22, an international studies major at Emory University, leads the campus chapter of the NAACP. She recognizes the election of Barack Obama as a culmination of all the hard-won victories of civil rights activists, but it does not mean the struggle is over.

Hall also knows that it’s up to her generation to pick up the baton as the NAACP enters a new era in which racism is not always as overt or ubiquitous.

The NAACP’s new young president and CEO, Benjamin Todd Jealous, 35, has already laid out a host of issues for Obama to address: fair distribution of federal bailout funds; reducing double-digit black unemployment; reducing the disparity between unsolved murders in black and white communities; access to good schools for minority children; and confronting lenders who push minorities with good credit into subprime mortgages.

That agenda, says Hall, is evidence that the mission of the NAACP — to end discrimination — remains unchanged.

In times when some have even questioned the relevancy of the NAACP, Hall says the organization is needed more than ever. If nothing else, it serves as a constant reminder of what was and nudges younger, more complacent Americans into action.

She says her involvement in the NAACP opened her eyes to the world around her.

In 2007, she marched in Jena, La., to protest what was seen as a racially discriminatory legal system that excessively charged six black teens in the beating of a white boy.

“We didn’t live through the ’60s or march on the streets,” Hall says. “Jena gave people who had no clue a chance to get involved. I think the NAACP and other civil rights organizations are necessary to maintain a sense of reality.

“Just because I don’t want to be judged on my race doesn’t mean I won’t be judged on it,” she says. “We know what happens when we don’t push forward, when we don’t do anything.”

Her fear is that the election of a black president may become an excuse for young people to go into passive mode.

Those who led the civil rights movement agree.

“A good deal of the problems have been solved,” said the Rev. C.T. Vivian, former interim director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “There was no justice for black people in America but the world has changed. The NAACP has partially worked itself out of a job.”

Vivian says some organizations like the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee have disappeared, while others including the SCLC, the Congress of Racial Equality and the National Urban League are greatly diminished.

He says the NAACP’s challenge is to win the kind of grass-roots support it enjoyed in the heyday of the civil rights movement.

And that can be a tough task today when racism is more subtle.

“People don’t explode over institutional racism,” he says.

Julian Bond, who helped form SNCC and has been chairman of the NAACP since 1998, says it’s wrong to use Obama’s election as a sole social barometer for race relations in America.

“To the degree that Americans believe the election of a black man instantly eliminated racial discrimination, our work is harder,” he said.

“Unfortunately, evidence of racial disparities and racial discrimination remain ever-present; we will have little trouble proving an organization like ours remains needed.”

As the NAACP celebrates its birthday on the heels of Obama’s historic inauguration, Bond wants every American, especially younger ones like Hall, to remember one thing:

“We were never the National Association for the Advancement of One Colored Man.”

HIGHLIGHTS IN NAACP HISTORY

• 1909: The National Negro Committee is formed after race riots the previous year in Springfield, Ill. It becomes the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1910.
• 1914: The NAACP begins a campaign against segregation in the federal government.
• 1916: The NAACP forms an anti-lynching committee.
• 1927: The Supreme Court, ruling in an NAACP-sponsored case, strikes down the Texas practice of holding whites-only primaries.
• 1946: The Supreme Court in an NAACP-filed case rules that interstate buses and trains cannot be segregated.
• 1948: President Harry Truman ends segregation in the armed forces.
• 1954: The NAACP-sponsored case Brown v. Board of Education results in a Supreme Court ruling outlawing school segregation.
• 1963: NAACP Field Director Medgar Evers is assassinated in Mississippi.
• 1964: Congress passes the Civil Rights Act.
• 1965: Congress passes the Voting Rights Act.
• 1987: The NAACP helps lead the movement that defeats the nomination of conservative Robert Bork to the Supreme Court.
• 1991: The NAACP leads a voter registration drive in Mississippi aimed at defeating the Senate candidacy of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.
• 2007: The NAACP assembles a march against what it charges was the race-influenced prosecution of black students in a fight with a white classmate in Jena, La.

— NAACP and news services