THE CHICAGO NAACP AND THE RISE OF BLACK PROFESSIONAL LEADERSHIP, 1910-1966
By Christopher Robert Reed
Indiana University Press, 257 pages, $35
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is arguably the most important African-American organization of this century, and yet the full extent of its activities is not well known, even to scholars. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)–the shock troops of the civil rights movement in the 1960s–have found their historians, but a thorough history of the NAACP remains unwritten.
This absence reflects less a lack of interest by scholars than the age and complexity of the organization. The NAACP, unlike SCLC and SNCC, has been a force in American life for nearly a century since its founding in 1909. And, along with a powerful central office, the NAACP has developed hundreds of branches across the country.
“The Chicago NAACP and the Rise of Black Professional Leadership, 1910-1966,” by Christopher Robert Reed, a professor of history at Roosevelt University, will be an asset to future biographers of the NAACP. It’s not an easy read; thick with details, names and analysis, its story line unfolds slowly. But this study does present a candid portrait of the Chicago branch of the NAACP, one of the association’s most important chapters. It is a solid companion to Arvarh Strickland’s history of the Chicago Urban League, the other longstanding organization dedicated to black advancement in the city. It also offers a revealing window onto a half-century of race relations in Chicago.
The roots of the Chicago branch, one of the first local affiliates of the NAACP, stretch back to 1910 and to the work of a group of racial progressives, including such heavyweights as Jane Addams and Ida B. Wells. In its early years, the branch struggled to establish itself, but by 1914, on the eve of the Great Migration from Southern states, it had established a permanent South Side office, a concrete statement of its commitment to black Chicago.
Reed exhaustively chronicles the organizational history of the Chicago NAACP over the next 50 years. He covers the parade of its presidents, the activities of its committees and the shifting profile of its membership. Aside from the frequent internal feuding and the occasional near collapses of the branch, what is most striking is how the Chicago NAACP increasingly became a genuine part of black Chicago and not just a voice for racial justice. In 1925, with the end of the presidency of Harold Ickes, the well-known Chicago lawyer and future New Dealer, African-Americans assumed leadership of the branch. Moreover, the Chicago NAACP shed some of its elitist flavor over time. To be sure, Richard Wright highlighted a common complaint about the irrelevance of the branch to ordinary African-Americans in his novel “Native Son,” when Wright’s conflicted protagonist, Bigger Thomas, says he has never heard of the NAACP. But by the 1930s, in fact, women and members of the black working class had joined the branch, and in 1945 membership of the Chicago NAACP climbed over 18,000.
Reed does not directly answer an important question: What did the Chicago NAACP accomplish during these years?
At first glance, the record seems bleak. In the 1910s, Chicago public schools segregated white and black students; in the 1950s, such segregation persisted. In the 1910s, many employers refused to hire black workers; in the 1950s, a job ceiling for African-Americans remained. In 1919, blacks and whites squared off in a deadly race riot; in the mid-1950s, whites terrorized black families during the Trumbull Park Homes crisis.
But in fact, support for overt racial discrimination waned over time among both public officials and the citizenry at large. And the Chicago NAACP deserves some credit for this shift. Year after year, the branch issued statements, lobbied for legislation and sponsored legal challenges against racial caste and in support of equal opportunity. It would not allow its alternative vision to a society divided and ranked by race to be ignored.
It is this historic promotion of a vision of racial equality that makes the fate of the Chicago NAACP in the late 1950s and 1960s so distressing. In 1954, Willoughby Abner, a United Auto Workers activist, became the dominant force in the branch. His ascendancy was confirmed by his election as its president in 1956. With an activist philosophy reminiscent of A.C. MacNeal’s presidency during the 1930s, Abner energized the branch and expanded its membership. Never before had the Chicago NAACP been so militant.
But Abner’s militancy antagonized more conservative and cautious black Chicagoans, especially the political boss of the South Side, William L. Dawson. By 1958, Dawson had had enough of Abner’s sniping about his timidity on civil rights, and, in a stunning display of political muscle, he ensured that Abner would not serve another term as president by packing the annual election proceedings with anti-Abner members.
“I’m not interested in controlling the NAACP or its policy making body,” Dawson later commented. “However, I want to see the `right man’ as president.” To the relief of many longtime members and the national NAACP, moderates regained control of the branch. The Chicago NAACP continued to challenge racial injustice, especially segregation in public schools under Supt. Benjamin Willis, but other groups now led the civil rights charge in the city. Abner’s ouster continued to raise questions about the branch’s priorities, and these suspicions only mounted when it stood on the sidelines during the Chicago Freedom Movement, the joint venture of local activists and Martin Luther King Jr. from 1965 to 1967 to open opportunities in the city equally to blacks and whites.
Reed’s book, then, concludes on a depressing note, with the Chicago NAACP hamstrung and ineffective. Yet current well-wishers of the Chicago branch should take heed of this history. In many ways, the clash between Abner and Dawson 40 years ago helps explain the struggles of the Chicago NAACP in the 1990s.
