National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Collection
Noncurrent records and photographs of the NAACP
Since 1964 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP) has donated its noncurrent records to the Library
of Congress. Numbering over 2.5 million items, the records consist
of correspondence clippings, legal briefs, trial transcripts, speeches,
articles, memoranda, resolutions, reports, and other printed and
manuscript material which provided detailed documentation of the
association's growth and activities, particularly after 1919. The
greater portion of the collection in the Manuscript
Division is arranged in general office, administrative, financial,
legal, crisis, youth, and branch files. Among the many topics of
concern are discrimination and segregation in business, government,
and education; lynchings and the association's antilynching campaign;
mob violence; race riots; suppression of the black vote in the
South; labor disputes; the associations' efforts to assist government
agencies in combating discrimination in World War II; and problems
of returning World War II veterans. While focused on the welfare
of black Americans in the United States, the records include files
dealing with Haiti, the Virgin Islands, and the Pan-African Congress.
Represented are correspondence by four of the five founders of
the association,Mary White Ovington, Charles E. Russell, Oswald
Garrison Villard, and William English Walling; papers of James
Weldon Johnson and Walter White, the executive secretaries during
the 1920s and 1930s; letters from literary figures associated with
the Harlem Renaissance; records of the Scottsboro Defense Committee;
and material related to W.E.B. DuBois, A. Philip Randolph, and
Paul Robeson. Also included are correspondence and memoranda by
various staff members such as Robert Bagnall, Charles Houston,
Addie Hunton, Daisy Lampkin, Thurgood Marshall, E. Frederic Forrow,
Roy Nash, William Pickens, Herbert Seligmann, John R. Shillady,
Arthur and Joel Spingarn, Moorfield Storey, and Roy Wilkins. Records
dating from 1909 to 1970 are described in finding aids, and additions
to the collection are anticipated. The use of material from the
last thirty years is restricted. The NAACP records together with
the over five hundred thousand-item collection of National Urban
League records make up part of the division's growing resources
for the study of black history.
As the NAACP records are processed, pictorial material is transferred
to the Prints and Photographs
Division. As of September 1978 the Prints and Photographs Division
had received approximately five hundred black-and-white photographs
produced before 1940. The majority portray staff members or events
of interest to the NAACP. Many images relate to the association's
antilynching campaign. The photographs are arranged by subject.
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