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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 39. Negro Improvement and Protest Organizations - 9. Critique of the N.A.A.C.P.
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832 An American Dilemma
culture, particularly in the South, was thereafter given great importance
in nearly every specific aspect of our study. But we have also observed the
definite trend toward a more equitable administration of the law in the
South, and we have found that this trend is not unrelated to efforts of the
type here discussed. With specific reference to the N.A.A.C.P., the present
writer is inclined to agree with James Weldon Johnson who was once sec-
retary of the organization:
There is a scJiooI that holds that these legal victories are empty. They are not. At
the very least, they provide the ground upon which we may make a stand for our
rights.®®
Very rightly Johnson points to the legal status of the Negro when the
N.A.A.C.P. began to fight its battle, and the danger in the trend then under
way, as the only basis for evaluating the organization:
When the N.A.A.C.P. was founded, the great danger facing us was that we should
lose the vestiges of our rights by default. I’he organization checked that danger. It
acted as a watchman on the wall, sounding the alarms that called us to defense. Its
work would be of value if only for the reason that without it our status would be
worse than it is."^®
Another Negro writer, Bertram W. Doyle, though of the ‘‘accommoda
tion” school, testifies to the same effect:
The significance of the agitation for rights and equality, as exemplified in, say,
Mr. Du Bois, formerly a guiding spirit in the National Association for the Advance-
ment of Colored People, was that under his scheme the races were not to be allowed
to come to terms, and race relations were not again to be fixed in custom and formu-
lated in codes before the Negro had fully experienced his freedom. Resistance to
compromise has, then, helped to keep the racial situation in a state of flux and has
tended to serve notice on the white man that weaker peoples expect him to live up
to the principle established in his laws—those laws to which he proclaims loyalty
Thus, an evaluation of the N.A.A.C.P. requires us to examine the cases
won by it and to note the effects of these victories. In the field of residential
segregation, while the N.A.A.C.P, has not succeeded in getting the courts
to outlaw private restrictive covenants, it has succeeded in having all laws
to enforce residential segregation declared unconstitutional. This has meant
that the Negroes are not completely ghettoized, and that they can expand
in a city, though with much difficulty.* More important, the legal fight still
goes on, and it is not improbable that the Supreme Court will soon come
to reverse its stand on the constitutionality of even the private restrictive
covenants. Similarly, in regard to suffrage: It is true that the Southern
states have so far succeeded in evading the Supreme Court decisions on the
* See Chapter 29, Sections 3 and 4.
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