Center for American Progress
John Halpin
Patricia Sullivan and NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous Discuss Lift Every Voice
March 25, 2010, 6:30pm – 7:30pm
Ten years in the making, Patricia Sullivan's 2009 book, Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement, is the first major history of America's oldest civil rights organization and destined to be a classic in the field. Founded in 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, got its start as an elite organization dominated by white reformers at a time when segregation had triumphed in the South and the color line was tightening its hold in the North. By the end of World War I the NAACP had become a mass-black membership organization reaching from Boston to Los Angeles and into the Mississippi Delta; after World War II it had become synonymous with the freedom movement itself.
Sullivan unearths the little-known early decades of the NAACP's activism, telling startling stories of personal bravery, legal brilliance, and political maneuvering by the likes of W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary White Ovington, Walter White, Charles Houston, Ella Baker, Thurgood Marshall, and Roy Wilkins. The book then moves into the critical postwar era when, with a string of legal victories culminating in Brown v. Board, the NAACP knocked out the legal underpinnings of the segregation system and set the stage for the final assault on Jim Crow. Lift Every Voice is an epic narrative of struggle against injustice and lays a new foundation for understanding the modern civil rights movement.
The Center for American Progress and the Progressive Book Club are pleased to discuss the NAACP's historic achievements and its vision for future civil rights activism with author Patricia Sullivan and current NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous.
Featured Speakers:
Patricia Sullivan, Author, Lift Every Voice; Associate Professor of History, University of South Carolina
Benjamin Todd Jealous, President and Chief Executive Officer, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
Moderated by:
John Halpin, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress
Ruy Teixeira, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress and The Century Foundation
PHOTO CREDIT:
Ralph Alswang
Photographer
202-487-5025
ralph@ralphphoto.com
John Halpin
Patricia Sullivan and NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous Discuss Lift Every Voice
March 25, 2010, 6:30pm – 7:30pm
Ten years in the making, Patricia Sullivan's 2009 book, Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement, is the first major history of America's oldest civil rights organization and destined to be a classic in the field. Founded in 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, got its start as an elite organization dominated by white reformers at a time when segregation had triumphed in the South and the color line was tightening its hold in the North. By the end of World War I the NAACP had become a mass-black membership organization reaching from Boston to Los Angeles and into the Mississippi Delta; after World War II it had become synonymous with the freedom movement itself.
Sullivan unearths the little-known early decades of the NAACP's activism, telling startling stories of personal bravery, legal brilliance, and political maneuvering by the likes of W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary White Ovington, Walter White, Charles Houston, Ella Baker, Thurgood Marshall, and Roy Wilkins. The book then moves into the critical postwar era when, with a string of legal victories culminating in Brown v. Board, the NAACP knocked out the legal underpinnings of the segregation system and set the stage for the final assault on Jim Crow. Lift Every Voice is an epic narrative of struggle against injustice and lays a new foundation for understanding the modern civil rights movement.
The Center for American Progress and the Progressive Book Club are pleased to discuss the NAACP's historic achievements and its vision for future civil rights activism with author Patricia Sullivan and current NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous.
Featured Speakers:
Patricia Sullivan, Author, Lift Every Voice; Associate Professor of History, University of South Carolina
Benjamin Todd Jealous, President and Chief Executive Officer, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
Moderated by:
John Halpin, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress
Ruy Teixeira, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress and The Century Foundation
PHOTO CREDIT:
Ralph Alswang
Photographer
202-487-5025
ralph@ralphphoto.com