"Every Man Should Try": John L. LeFlore and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Alabama, 1919-1956

The development of civil rights historiography since the 1980s has been notable for the extent to which scholars have focused attention on protest movements at the local level. The former "King-centric" approach to the African American freedom struggle has long since given way to a deeper understanding of the nature and development of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Important as the leadership of Martin Luther King may have been, it is now accepted that the gains made in these years could not have been achieved without the contribution of innumerable grassroots activists. The efforts of an ever-increasing number of hitherto unsung campaigners have been brought to light, and their names have been added to the pantheon of heroes in the civil rights struggle.¹

An equally significant departure has been to break from the "Montgomery to Memphis" timeline, the perception that the chronological boundaries of the post-war Civil Rights movement were marked by the start of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and the assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis in 1968. It is now routinely recognized by historians that the turbulent events of those two decades had important antecedents in developments during the interwar period and the Second World War.²

Given these advances, it is surprising that the civil rights leadership of John L. LeFlore of Mobile, Alabama, has been largely overlooked by the academic community. A founding member of the Mobile chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1926, LeFlore was the dominant figure in the branch until the mid-1950s and for much of this time was also the Association's leading organizer in Alabama. Undaunted by the legal proscription of the NAACP in the state between 1956 and 1964, LeFlore continued his work as a civil rights activist in the region until his death in 1976. Despite this he is given barely a passing mention in most scholarly studies on the civil rights struggle in Alabama.

Such neglect can be attributed to a number of factors. Although there have been a growing proliferation of studies on the NAACP in recent years, these have tended to focus on the work of the Association at the national level, its best-known national spokespersons, or initiatives in particular fields, such as voting rights or the campaign for a federal anti-lynching law. In comparison there have been comparatively few detailed, monograph length studies on the activities of the NAACP at the state or local level.³

In part, this reflects the fact that local branch leaders of the Association suffer from something of an image problem. Typically, they are viewed as being overly-conservative and middle class. Robin D. G. Kelly, in his seminal 1990 study Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression, thus concluded that NAACP branches in Alabama during the 1920s were "established by black middle class leaders," who sought "to redirect black resistance toward more respectable avenues." The growth of the Communist Party in the state during the 1930s was boosted by the fact that it offered "a working-class alternative to the NAACP."⁴ In a similar vein, Andrew Manis has suggested that the outlawing of the NAACP in Alabama between 1956 and 1964 may, paradoxically, have aided the civil rights struggle in the state by clearing the way for the emergence of more dynamic working class protest groups like Fred Shuttlesworth's Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) in Birmingham.⁵

Manis's study also reflects the fact that within Alabama, scholars have devoted most of their energies to chronicling the dramatic events of the civil rights struggle in Birmingham, Montgomery and Selma rather than Mobile. In part this is because, rightly or wrongly, Mobile has often been perceived as a center of racial moderation and "respectability." The Port City has not been associated with the shocking confrontations of the 1950s and early 1960s that beset other major urban centers in the state. Mobile was fortunate...