Long Is the Way and Hard: One Hundred Years of the NAACP (review)

T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 76 nated within a state that had so little experience with the concept of government serving as the steward of the citizen’s welfare” (pp. 185– 86). The Great War, however, revealed startling shortcomings in the physical health and educational status of Alabamians. Of the more than 400,000 males who registered with Selective Service, less than 14 percent were found fit for induction—the worst record in the nation. Charles Henderson, Alabama’s wartime governor, and Thomas Kilby, elected governor in 1918, proved sympathetic to reform. The Russell Sage Foundation, contracted by Governor Henderson to study social conditions in Alabama, produced a shocking document. Alabama, for example, spent more on cattle tick eradication than on public health. The report recommended funding for public health, education, reformatories, prisons, institutions for the feebleminded and disabled, and a dependable tax base. Governor Kilby took action on some of these issues, creating a Department of Public Health and a Department of Child Welfare, building a new correctional institution, obtaining increased funding for mental health, and doubling the state’s expenditure on public education. Saunders concludes the Great War and Alabama Progressivism brought profound, if not revolutionary, changes to Alabama. While The Great War in the Heart of Dixie is not a comprehensive treatment , its authors have produced a fresh and engaging examination of an important and generally overshadowed period in Alabama’s history. This volume inspires further research and writing about the Great War and its meaning for Alabama. ALLEN CRONENBERG Auburn University Long Is the Way and Hard: One Hundred Years of the NAACP. Edited by Kevern Verney and Lee Sartain. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2009. xxviii, 313 pp. $70.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-1-55728-908-7. $29.95 (paper). ISBN 978-1-55728-909-4. How does one even begin to capture the full history of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People? Like the story of the elephant and the blind man, the NAACP—a century-old civil rights organization that at one point had half a million members and more than a thousand local branches—looks dramatically different depending on one’s perspective. The work of the New York-based national office has J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 1 77 always defied easy generalization, with its lawyers engaged in ambitious and multifaceted litigation campaigns, while it pursued an eclectic agenda of lobbying, fund-raising, investigation, and educational outreach. Turning from the national office to the local branches exponentially increases the diversity of goals and tactics that fall under the NAACP umbrella. Not only was there considerable regional variation—a small branch in the rural South, for example, responded to very different circumstances than one in the urban North—but even within a particular local branch there were often tensions and divisions along class and gender lines. And over the course of the NAACP’s century-long history, there has been significant change in the organization’s goals, tactics, and membership. As a matter of historical precision, it hardly makes sense to speak of the NAACP. A recognition of the organization’s diversity and complexity has been at the heart of the recent scholarly revival of interest in the NAACP, a revival that has been further energized by the 2009 celebration of its onehundredth anniversary. The great value of Long Is the Way and Hard, a collection of historical essays on the NAACP, is that it fully embraces the organization’s contradictions. Taken as a whole, the contributions insistently resist any effort at generalizing about the NAACP, offering instead a mosaic of small-scale portraits of particular aspects of the association. If there is a central theme to this volume, it is the value of focusing on the tensions within the NAACP’s history. The NAACP that emerges is both dynamic and elusive—a far cry from the stereotypical portrayal of the organization as conservative, legalistic, hierarchical, and driven by middle-class interests. The collection is divided into two parts. The first looks at the NAACP at the national level. This...