Rita Kramer, at The American Thinker, gives us a fascinating history lesson on the origins of the NAACP. Here are her opening paragraphs:
This is Black History Month, perhaps an appropriate time to call attention to an aspect of black history that has been papered over and all but forgotten in the official accounts and in what is taught in schools.
How many people today, black or white, know that the National Association for Colored People was founded by three white folks, two WASPS and a Jew, and that it was led and funded until well into the last century by whites, many of them Jews? It is understandable that after a hundred years some degree of historical Alzheimers may appear in the memory of the organization-as it does on its web-site-but perhaps it is time to remember the truth about how it all happened.
Exactly one hundred years ago, on the centenary of Abraham Lincoln's birth and just one hundred years before a man of color would be elected to the Presidency of the United States, the situation in the Southern states was dreadful for dark-skinned Americans. Most eked out a living as tenant farmers, exploited by the owners of the land they worked. They were prevented from voting and their children, if they attended school at all, went barefoot to ramshackle buildings with few books or other supplies. Negroes (the polite term then, which we will adopt for this article) were subject to arson, rape, and mob murder by lynching, with little or no interference by the elected authorities. In many places it was a crime for black and white to frequent the same place at the same time. The South was a society of complete and brutally enforced segregation.
Northern indignation was roused by a race riot at Springfield, Illinois in the summer of 1908. It began when the local newspaper ran a story about a white woman who claimed she had been raped by a black man. Police arrested the accused man and took him to the city jail. A crowd of angry white citizens gathered and demanded the prisoner, but the local Sheriff had been able to secretly transport him to safety. Enraged, the crowd trashed homes and businesses belonging to Jews downtown and to Negroes in black neighborhoods. A man who tried to defend himself was killed, his barber shop burned and his body hung from a tree. By this time an estimated crowd of 12,000 people had gathered to watch black-owned homes burning. Realizing that the local authorities were powerless in the face of the crowd, the governor called out the state militia. Order was restored, but not before an elderly black man married to a white woman had been lynched. The riots left 40 homes and 24 businesses in ruins. A grand jury indicted nearly 80 individuals for participation in the riots but only one man was convicted. He was a Russian Jew who peddled vegetables, and he was convicted of stealing a sword from a member of the militia. The woman whose story had started it all later admitted that her accusation was false.
Out of these and other injustices and atrocities the NAACP was born. Get the rest of the story at the link. It's a good read and an appropriate way to conclude Black History Month.
RLC
