By DREW LINGINFELTER
A 4,500-image collection of photographs, prints, drawings, cartoons and posters that tell the story of the efforts of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is now available for research at the Library.
The archives, which date from about 1838 to 1969, provide a rich visual record of the history of the Association and African Americans' rights in the United States.
"Photographs of branch activities are interesting, said Mary Mundy, a cataloger in the Prints and Photographs Division. "Those unposed situations give a sense of the office environment and how NAACP staff interacted and worked within the larger community."
Portraits of NAACP staff, pictures from conferences and pictures of fund-raising and membership campaigns make up more than half of the collection.
The rest of the photographs represent the NAACP's promotion of civil rights legislation through litigation, public protest and sustained monitoring and reporting of injustices. Photographs of black lynching victims, defendants in civil rights cases, inferior school buildings, discriminatory signs ("white", "colored") and segregated public facilities provide haunting evidence of the need for their all-out efforts.
"Staff and field workers used images to publicize injustices and garner broader support for the organization's efforts. Many of these images were reproduced in NAACP publications - the Crisis and the Branch Bulletin - which increased their visibility among members living in the North and South," Ms. Mundy said.
Photographs from the World War II era document the Association's efforts to integrate the armed services. Included are pictures of the U.S. Army Air Force's all-black 99th Fighter Squadron and of black women contributing to the war effort on the homefront and abroad.
Cartoons in the collection provide commentary on issues of concern to the NAACP, and illustrations and posters advertise NAACP membership drives and social events.
From the first "call" issued by Oswald Garrison Villard in 1909, which formed the National Negro Committee or the Committee of the Forty - which later changed its name to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People - the association has sought equal treatment for African Americans before the courts, in the workplace and on the battlefield. If a picture is worth a thousand words, the collection now available has myriad stories to tell.
The collection documents visually how African Americans put their talents to work for the association. Thurgood Marshall served the NAACP for the first time in 1936 as special assistant counsel. In 1940, he became head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, an independent organization. During the next 20 years, he argued 32 cases before the Supreme Court and assisted in writing 11 other briefs sent to the court.
One picture in the collection shows Marshall addressing the annual NAACP conference in Dallas where, according to the caption on the photo, he "ripped faithless politicians." He delivered his speech just one week before going to the Supreme Court to argue Sweatt v. Painter in 1950. The decision in this University of Texas Law School segregation case made clear that separate-but-equal facilities in higher education were not attainable.
Four years later, the Legal Defense Fund turned its attention to elementary and secondary schools in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954. This case reversed the decision made in Plessy v. Furguson (1896) and set forth that separate-but-equal facilities at any level were not equitable.
Other photographs relate to African American performers. One shot shows Eleanor Roosevelt presenting the Spingarn Medal - an annual award for achievement - to Marian Anderson in 1939. Anderson was the first black to sing with the New York Metropolitan Opera.
In 1939, she was the center of a national controversy. Because of her race, the Daughters of the American Revolution refused Anderson the use of its Constitution Hall for a concert in Washington. As a result, Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the DAR and helped sponsor another concert for Anderson at the Lincoln Memorial. Later, Anderson served as alternate delegate to the General Assembly of the United Nations. In 1963 she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Ms. Mundy said most of the items in the collection were in good condition when they came to Prints and Photographs. What made the cataloging an interesting challenge was the absence of captions on many photographic images. "To augment the research value of the collection, we attempted to identify people and events depicted using the Crisis and Branch Bulletin which published many of the photographs. We were able to find captions for the majority of unidentified materials in this way," she said.
It took about a year to sort the photographs and other images into useful groups. The collection is divided into nine categories reflecting the NAACP's activities and interests. Within these broad categories, material is sorted into 49 subject groupings varying in size from six items to more than 900 and reflecting topics such as conferences, voter registration, women in the military, etc. Within these smaller groupings, items are arranged either chronologically - to follow the development of a subject over time - or alphabetically. To find specific items of interests, researchers can look through a folder-level finding aid or gain access to prominent subjects and find people depicted within 49 image groups through records available on the Library's online catalog.
The collection is available for use, primarily through a 19-reel microfilm surrogate, in the Prints and Photographs Division Reading Room in the Library's Madison Building. Copies of the microfilm can be purchased from the Photoduplication Service.
Because many of the photographs and other images originally came to the NAACP from a variety of sources, such as wire services and independent photographers, copyright restrictions may apply to the publication or duplication of some originals.
The finding aid is now available on the Library's World Wide Web site as part of an Encoded Archival Description Finding Aid Pilot Project (http://www.loc.gov/ead/). The Library has held off on digitizing the images because of copyright issues related to Internet distribution, but the availability of the online finding aid will permit increased access to the historic collection.
Drew Linginfelter, a student at Brigham Young University, worked in the Office of Communications.