Penn State University Libraries: Diversity Exhibit: NAACP


he Papers of the NAACP on microfilm are an invaluable source of information on twentieth-century African-American history. Issued in parts, the collection documents the Association's growth, the evolution of its policies, and the record of its achievements. The primary interests of the NAACP in its formative years were equal treatment for African Americans before the courts, nullification of Jim Crow laws, and abolishment of lynching and all forms of discrimination and segregation. Under the leadership of Joel Spingarn, W.E.B. Du Bois, Moorfield Storey, and others, the Association grew rapidly in numbers and influence. Within a few years of its founding in 1909, the Association was involved in a wide range of legal, educational, and lobbying efforts. Despite many early successes, however, the long struggle had merely begun; it would not be until a new generation of leaders-among them Roy Wilkins, Walter White, and Thurgood Marshall-were directing the NAACP that equality in housing, education, and employment was truly within reach. The Papers of the NAACP includes thousands of pages of minutes of meetings of the board of directors, records of the Association's annual conferences, as well as voluminous special reports written by the Association's officers and committees. These reports cover the entire spectrum of topics important to the civil rights movement: the power of the African American vote, the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, discrimination in public employment, prejudicial depiction of African Americans in films, economic equality, the structure of the African American family, monitoring and supporting favorable trends in legislation, African American victims of crime, the press as an ally in shaping public opinion, the church and civil rights, misconceptions regarding heredity and the intelligence of African Americans, the changing attitudes of African American youth, and many more. Also included in the Papers are large segments of correspondence selected by Library of Congress archivists for their special value to researchers. This correspondence is usually between NAACP officials-Walter White, James Weldon Johnson, Charles Houston, Daisy Lampkin (field secretary), William Pickens (branch director)-and well-known (most of them white) figures such as Jane Addams, Clarence Darrow, Felix Frankfurter, Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, Herbert Lehman, H.L. Mencken, and Norman Thomas. Often overlooked by researchers is the literary quality of this correspondence; White, Johnson, and other NAACP officials were leading authors who wrote incisively and poignantly about the African American experience. Featured in the Pattee exhibit are frames from several of the collection's many parts.

he Papers of the NAACP on microfilm are an invaluable source of information on twentieth-century African-American history. Issued in parts, the collection documents the Association's growth, the evolution of its policies, and the record of its achievements.

The primary interests of the NAACP in its formative years were equal treatment for African Americans before the courts, nullification of Jim Crow laws, and abolishment of lynching and all forms of discrimination and segregation. Under the leadership of Joel Spingarn, W.E.B. Du Bois, Moorfield Storey, and others, the Association grew rapidly in numbers and influence. Within a few years of its founding in 1909, the Association was involved in a wide range of legal, educational, and lobbying efforts. Despite many early successes, however, the long struggle had merely begun; it would not be until a new generation of leaders-among them Roy Wilkins, Walter White, and Thurgood Marshall-were directing the NAACP that equality in housing, education, and employment was truly within reach.

The Papers of the NAACP includes thousands of pages of minutes of meetings of the board of directors, records of the Association's annual conferences, as well as voluminous special reports written by the Association's officers and committees. These reports cover the entire spectrum of topics important to the civil rights movement: the power of the African American vote, the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, discrimination in public employment, prejudicial depiction of African Americans in films, economic equality, the structure of the African American family, monitoring and supporting favorable trends in legislation, African American victims of crime, the press as an ally in shaping public opinion, the church and civil rights, misconceptions regarding heredity and the intelligence of African Americans, the changing attitudes of African American youth, and many more.

Also included in the Papers are large segments of correspondence selected by Library of Congress archivists for their special value to researchers. This correspondence is usually between NAACP officials-Walter White, James Weldon Johnson, Charles Houston, Daisy Lampkin (field secretary), William Pickens (branch director)-and well-known (most of them white) figures such as Jane Addams, Clarence Darrow, Felix Frankfurter, Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, Herbert Lehman, H.L. Mencken, and Norman Thomas. Often overlooked by researchers is the literary quality of this correspondence; White, Johnson, and other NAACP officials were leading authors who wrote incisively and poignantly about the African American experience.

Featured in the Pattee exhibit are frames from several of the collection's many parts.

Part 3: The Campaign for Educational Equality: Legal Department and Central Office Records, 1913-1950 (Call number: Microfilm A312)

A letter from A. Maceo Smith at the Texas branch of the NAACP to Thurgood Marshall at the New York office concerning proposed litigation over educational opportunities in Texas.

Part 4: The Voting Rights Campaign, 1916-1950 (Call number: Microfilm A313)

Letter written by James Smith, an African American living in Allensville, Kentucky, to NAACP officer James W. Johnson detailing an incident in which Smith was prevented from voting by election judges in his district.

Part 5: The Campaign Against Residential Segregation, 1914-1955 (Call number: Microfilm A314)

Telegram from Walter White of the NAACP to William H. Hastie at the Department of the Interior regarding a proposed housing bill.

Part 6: The Scottsboro Case, 1931-1950 (Call number: Microfilm A183)

   Part of the testimony of Victoria Price, witness for the state in the famous Scottsboro case, the major U.S. civil rights controversy of the 1930s surrounding the prosecution in Scottsboro, Alabama, of nine black youths charged with the rape of two white women. The nine, after nearly being lynched, were brought to trial in Scottsboro in April 1931 just three weeks after their arrest. Not until the first day of the trial were the defendants provided with the services of two volunteer lawyers.
  Despite testimony by doctors who had examined the women that no rape had occurred, the all-white jury convicted the nine, and all but the youngest, who was 12 years old, were sentenced to death. The announcement of the verdict and sentences brought a storm of charges from outside the South that a gross miscarriage of justice had occurred in Scottsboro.
  In 1932 the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the convictions (Powell v. Alabama) on the grounds that the defendants had not received adequate legal counsel in a capital case. The state of Alabama then retried one of the accused and again convicted him. In a 1935 decision (Norris v. Alabama), the U.S. Supreme Court overturned this conviction, ruling that the state had systematically excluded blacks from juries.

Part 7: The Anti-Lynching Campaign, 1912-1955 (Call number: Microfilm A334)

Telegram from Walter White, then secretary of the NAACP, to Mississippi governor Thomas Bailey, exhorting him to prevent a lynching about to take place outside Mize, a small town in the south central part of the state.