| A Variety of Special Events, Activities And Publications Will Be Sponsored Including A Three Edition Centennial Calendar
July 11-16, 2009
NAACP 100th Annual Convention
Jacob K. Javits Convention Center
655 W. 34th Street
New York, NY 10001
The NAACP Annual Convention is the largest gathering of its kind in the country. An estimated 8,000 NAACP members, delegates and visitors will be in New York City for six days of informative workshops, compelling speakers, gathering information and enjoying stellar entertainers to mark the Association's success and nation's progress in race relations since its founding. Before the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909, the status of African Americans was our nation’s greatest tragedy. |
| The NAACP will celebrate its one-hundredth anniversary on February 1, 2009 and will convene the 100th Anniversary Convention in New York City July 11- 17, 2009.
As Reconstruction came to a close, many Southern and some Northern whites condoned, sanctioned or participated in mob violence–including murderous lynching–as a tool of intimidation, humiliation, and social control over the lives of black Americans. By the beginning of the twentieth century, mob violence was rampant in cities like Wilmington, North Carolina, Atlanta, Georgia, and as far north as New York City.
But a riot in Springfield, Illinois–the adopted hometown of Abraham Lincoln–would attract national attention. A white mob surged through the streets of Springfield for three days during August 1908, looting and setting fires to homes in the black community. An 84-year-old black man and a black barber were snatched from their homes and lynched without cause. Hundreds were maimed and more than two thousand were forced to flee the city. This environment of inter-racial subjugation was the established landscape that sparked the founding of the NAACP.
William English Walling, a white Southern journalist with liberal views on race, spoke out against the lawlessness in an essay entitled Race War in the North, published in the Independent. Walling’s article was read by Mary White Ovington, a New York activist and a descendant of abolitionists, who wrote Walling to share her desire to establish a national bi-racial organization to help right the wrongs perpetrated against African Americans. During the first week of January 1909, Ovington and New York social worker Henry Moskowitz joined Walling in his New York apartment. They soon enlisted Oswald Garrison Villard, grandson of the famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, to draft a mission statement.
The declaration would be signed by sixty prominent people of both races (including W. E. B.
Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Moorfield Storey, and Mary Church Terrell) and released on February 12, 1909, the one-hundredth anniversary of Lincoln’s birth. During the second annual meeting in May 1910, the name National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was chosen and was incorporated in New York State.
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