Long Is the Way and Hard: One Hundred Years of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) (review)

This collection a fitting commemoration that contributes to an ongoing re-conceptualization of the black freedom struggle in terms of time scope, region, and strategy. In addition, its authors successfully treat understudied aspects of the nation’s most prominent African American civil rights organization, in the process complicating the picture at both the national and local levels. The contributors cover a wide range of topics, from underappreciated association presidents like Walter White and Roy Wilkins to branches in large midwestern cities, on the West Coast, and in the rural South. The essays make clear that the NAACP waged battles in the realms of cultural production and public relations as well as in the courtroom, and also that local branches and youth chapters often took positions or adopted causes not favored by the national leadership. Particularly useful is the editors’ extensive cowritten historiographical essay, as is Peter J. Ling’s treatment of Martin Luther King Jr. and the NAACP, which is actually more like an evaluation of the organization’s place in the freedom struggle as a whole over the course of the 1960s.

For students of Ohio history, Andrew M. Fearnley’s chapter on Cleveland’s NAACP branch will hold the greatest interest. The only other mention of Ohio in the volume is the association’s key role in foiling Republican senator Roscoe McCullough’s 1930 reelection bid, unless one counts the discussion of native Clevelander Henry Lee Moon’s skillful tenure as head of the Department of Public Relations at the time of the Brown decision. The Cleveland Branch was founded in 1914, although black newspaper editor Harry C. Smith had participated in the Niagara Movement, which led to the NAACP’s formation. Fearnley argues for the Cleveland chapter’s significance—it was the organization’s third largest as of 1954—although the branch, unlike Detroit’s, “lacked national prominence” despite its innovative and occasionally radical stances (201). In the 1930s, the branch proved willing to work with the Future Outlook League, which utilized direct action (boycotts) in contrast to the more gradual legal strategy favored by the national office. It also served an important coordinating function for branches in smaller Ohio cities. Fearnley describes the Cleveland branch’s trajectory as “deeply entwined” with the Great Migration, especially in the World War II and postwar era when the association became a truly mass organization and successfully recruited members beyond the black middle class (209). His account serves as a useful overview but is a largely top-down assessment of the branch’s activities. Papers from the national office constitute his main source, while he barely makes use of a local collection of branch records that could have honed his description of the activities it pursued. Fearnley’s mention of activism around the desegregation of amusement parks neglects the famous 1948 Euclid Beach Park fight, in which the branch was prominently involved. His assessment that the branch failed to connect housing and school segregation is particularly unfair, considering that the NAACP stood at the head of the United Freedom Movement, a coalition that opposed the locations of new schools planned by the Board of Education for precisely that reason. However, quite welcome is his mention of the branch’s activism on the issue of police abuse of power, which nonetheless culminated in it losing the landmark Terry v. Ohio case (1968) that expanded police powers of search and seizure. Finally, there are several confusing errors, such as calling public housing “public accommodations” and giving the date of the 1966 Hough Riots as 1968, apparently conflating these with renewed civil unrest in the Glenville neighborhood in the latter year.