Medgar Evers: Mississippi Martyr

3. The Face of Social Change: THE NAACP IN MISSISSIPPI

3. The Face of Social Change THE NAACP IN MISSISSIPPI When you hate, the only one that suffers is you because most of the people you hate don’t know it and the rest don’t care. —Medgar Evers Every time I think about my kids and their innocence, I wonder how whites can make the youngsters suffer so. I guess that thought keeps me in NAACP work. —Medgar Evers No man has come to true greatness who has not felt in some degree that his life belongs to his race, and that what God gives him he gives him for mankind. —Quoted in Medgar Evers, “News and Views” PRIOR TO THE BIRTH of the NAACP in 1909, there were much more radical calls for an organization devoted to establishing social and political change in America. In 1905, William Edward Burghardt (W. E. B.) Du Bois served as the chief organizer of the Niagara Movement. The twentynine delegates met at Niagara Falls, Canada, and outlined what would be their organizational assault on racism and inequality. The organization sought to challenge Tuskegee Institute founder Booker T. Washington’s seemingly “accommodationist” ideology. In response, the organization advocated 85 Williams2RevisedPages:Layout 1 9/7/11 9:52 AM Page 85 direct action in the pursuit of voting rights for African Americans, the end of segregation in all of its manifestations, and the attainment of all social and political rights due African Americans as citizens of the United States. As an organization, however, the Niagara Movement could not sustain the kind of general support needed to continue past the few years it proved viable. Many individuals, white philanthropists in particular, were neither ready to accept nor support its radical message of protest and by 1908 it had collapsed .1 The NAACP became the next group to rise as an organizational force in the fight for civil equality. As an organization, the NAACP began in 1909 in response to the Springfield riots in Illinois the year before.2 Responding to a call for action by writer William English Walling, New York social worker Mary W. Ovington, working with Walling, Henry Moskowitz, and Oswald Garrison Villard, called for a conference with the purpose of organizing a body capable of standing against racial violence and injustice. Prominent African American leaders were asked to attend. These included influential clergymen such as Bishop Alexander Walters of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and Reverend William Henry Brooks of St. Mark’s Methodist Episcopal Church. Over the course of several meetings, organizers planned for a larger gathering , billed “A Conference on the Status of the Negro” and later the National Negro Conference, which met in New York on May 31 and June 1, 1909. The radical elements of the African American protest movement were also represented in the personages of W. E. B. Du Bois, antilynching advocate Ida B. Wells-Barnett, activist and women’s club movement organizer Mary Church Terrell, and Boston Guardian editor William Monroe Trotter.3 The NAACP, organized and controlled by whites in its early stages, developed out of the “National Negro Conference” and claimed as members many of those who had belonged to the radical Niagara Movement. W. E. B. Du Bois served as director of publications and research for the new organization as well as its only African American executive officer.4 The objectives of the new organization were clear and straightforward. Historians John Hope Franklin and Alfred Moss Jr. note that the “organization pledged itself to work for the abolition of all forced segregation, equal education for black and white children, the complete enfranchisement of male African Americans . . . , and the enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.”5 Programmatically, the NAACP sought to challenge inequality through active opposition to racial hatred and prejudice. Historian Manfred Berg argues that the association “hoped to accomplish its objectives primarily through ‘the argument of the printed and the spoken word,’ and ‘by individual relief of the wretched.’”6 Medgar Evers, some forty-five years later, embodied everything the NAACP had stood for 86 Medgar Evers Williams2RevisedPages:Layout 1 9/7/11 9:52 AM Page 86 throughout its brief history: dedication, sacrifice, perseverance, and a strong sense of fair play irrevocably intertwined with an intolerance for racial injustice. If the NAACP believed that it had found its “Mississippi man” in 1954, Medgar Evers also believed that he had found in the NAACP an organization best...