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the s through to the s.19 Denton Watson, Jack Greenberg, and Mark Tushnet contributed seminal works on the Association’s congressional and courtroom battles against segregation.In  and  Charles Zelden and Manfred Berg added an important new dimension with studies on the NAACP’s voting rights campaigns, a subject that Charles Zelden explores further in his essay for this volume.20 Notable developments in the writing of civil rights history in works published since the s included more emphasis on the organization of protests at local level, greater recognition of the role played by women activists, and a better appreciation of the importance of class. Publications on the NAACP in this period also reflected these broader trends. Beth Tompkins Bates and Christopher Robert Reed published influential,groundbreaking studies on the Association in Detroit and Chicago. The autobiography of Aaron Henry, NAACP organizer in Mississippi, and works by Ben Green and Merline Pitre, on Florida and Texas,provided equally valuable insights into the activities of the Association in the South.21 Pitre’s study, centered on the life and career of the Lone Star activist Lulu B.White, together with Barbara Ransby’s  biography of Ella Baker and Caroyln Wedin’s earlier biography of Mary White Ovington, provided much-needed accounts on the contribution of women organizers in the Association.22 This important development in correcting the gender imbalance in many existing studies of the NAACP was continued in coeditor Lee Sartain’s work on the NAACP in Louisiana. Sartain’s prize-winning monograph argued that in the Pelican State women were“invisible activists,”quietly taking on much of the crucial day-to-day work of the Association while their male counterparts in more high-profile, but less-active, positions within local branches received much of the credit for their achievements.23 Despite the growing number of scholarly publications on the NAACP there were still many aspects of its history that required further exploration as the Association approached its – centenary . Notwithstanding the  publication, Freedom’s Sword, by the journalist and NAACP insider Gilbert Jonas, there continued to be no authoritative scholarly history of the NAACP from its formation in  to the end of the twentieth century.24 This doubtless reflects the fact, as has been indicated earlier, that it is a near impossible task to xxiv KEVERN VERNEY AND LEE SARTAIN provide a detailed history of the NAACP within the confines of just one volume. Similarly, despite the work of Pitre, Ransby, Sartain, Wedin, and others there was,as August Meier and John H.Bracey pointed out,still a need for more work on women activists in the Association.25 In particular there was as yet no full-length biography of the legendary national field secretary of the s and s,Daisy Lampkin.Indeed, she received not even so much as a solitary mention in the index of Jonas’s history of the Association. Equally, the achievement of Pitre and Sartain in highlighting the work of women NAACP activists in Texas and Louisiana raised the question of how many others remained still as yet unrecognized for their equally important contributions in other states. In a different vein,the Second World War may no longer have been what historian Richard Dalfiume once called the “forgotten years of the Negro Revolution,” but they arguably continued to be the forgotten years of the NAACP.26 The war years saw a ten-fold rise in NAACP membership,from , in  to some , by the end of .27 Moreover, the conflict prompted a radical shift in the thinking of the Association secretary Walter White, who came to view civil rights as less a domestic American issue than part of a wider global struggle against racial injustice and colonialism.28 Paradoxically, there was no detailed monograph on the national organization and policy of the NAACP during the war and even in terms of journal articles and essays the number of publications on the work of the Association in this period remained limited. The essays in part  of this volume shed new light on a variety of underexplored topics in the historiography of the NAACP. Simon Topping assesses the contribution of Walter White as a race leader in the light of Kenneth Janken’s recent groundbreaking biography of the NAACP leader.Yvonne Ryan continues this theme,analyzing the quiet, but often effective, diplomacy of White’s underrated successor, Roy Wilkins. In a similar vein Simon Hall reexamines the policies of the...

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