At 100, NAACP Still Kicking: When leaders of the NAACP gather this month to formally begin a year-long recognition of 100 years of civil rights work, they’ll be talking as much about the organization’s future as they will be honoring its past.
On dozens of college campuses across the nation, where plenty of groups have taken on justice issues that for decades only the NAACP would touch, it is not uncommon to hear people question whether the NAACP is still relevant. The question is answering itself, however, as all discover there’s still more than enough work to be done and still not enough people to take it on.
“On our campus, we can get people excited, but continuity is a problem,” says Brittney Autry, president of the 45-member NAACP student chapter at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where student activism in the NAACP dates to the mid-1930s. That’s when Howard students marched on Capitol Hill to protest the lynching of Blacks across the South. “Our fight is the same as it was in the ’60s and ’70s,” says Autry. “It’s now more institutionalized and covert, so we have to find new techniques.”
