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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 39. Negro Improvement and Protest Organizations - 7. The N.A.A.C.P. National Office
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Chapter 39. Improvement and Protest Organizations 829
tion.®"^ Police brutality, third degree methods in forcing confessions, and
peonage have been fought.
The Association has likewise been continuously active in defending the
Negroes^ right to vote.® In 1915 it succeeded in having the “grandfather
clauses” of Southern state constitutions declared unconstitutional. It has
fought several other cases connected with the white primary and other
means of disfranchising Negroes. As we know, it has not succeeded in hin-
dering the wholesale disfranchisement of the Southern Negro population.
But it has put a stop to Southern legislatures enacting the most bluntly
discriminatory provisions against the suffrage of Negroes and has thus
achieved a strategic situation where the white South increasingly bases dis-
franchisement upon extra-legal measures.*^ In the very year of the founda-
tion of the Association a movement started to legalize residential segrega-
tion by city ordinance.® Challenging the constitutionality of this type of
legislation was one of the main efforts of the Association during its first
decade. In the famous Louisville Segregation Case, a decisive victory was
won. The Association has been constantly vigilant, though with consider-
able caution, against the Jim Crow laws and, particularly, against inferior
facilities for Negroes in segregated set-ups of various sorts. In recent years
it has concentrated its attack on the barriers against Negro students®® and
on the unequal salaries of Negro teachers.’*
The fights in court must not be viewed in isolation from the attempts to
influence legislatures and administrators. Both types of effort are part of a
grand strategy to win legal equality for the Negro people. The Association
has spared no pains in pushing any and all Congressional action in favor of
the Negro people, or in opposing measures having an actual or potential
detrimental effect. Foremost among these efforts to influence legislation is
the long fight for a federal anti-lynching law.®® In this it has not suc-
ceeded as yet, but the important effect has been to keep the national con-
science awake to lynching as a public scandal. In 1922, when the anti-lynch-
ing bill was first seriously considered in Congress, the number of lynch-
ings dropped spectacularly.® The Association—which has employed a
“watcher” in each branch of Congress and now has a bureau in Washing-
ton—has been able to stop much discriminatory legislation, including bills
against intermarriage, Jim Crow bills, and residential segregation bills for
the District of Columbia.®® It has fought for increased federal aid to edu-
cation, for an equal distribution of federal funds for education j
against dis-
criminatory provisions in the Wages and Hours Act j
against discrimination
* See Chapter 22, Section 2.
‘^Tie importance ofthis is discussed in Chapter 23, Section 4.
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