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The Silent Protest

This resource is adapted from the New-York Historical Society’s Black Citizenship in the Age of Jim Crow curriculum.

Primary Source

Background

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was created in 1909 after an assault by whites on the Black community in Springfield, Illinois. The violence in Abraham Lincoln’s hometown convinced many that Jim Crow was not simply a Southern problem, and it provided a rare platform for interracial cooperation. The call for action came from New Yorker William English Walling. Walling and other white progressives, including suffragists and reformers Mary White Ovington and Florence Kellye, joined with Black activists, including W.E.B. Du Bois and Mary Church Terrell, to form the NAACP. They demanded that the civil and voting rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments be protected.

Images

Photograph
The Silent Protest

Underwood & Underwood, Silent protest parade in New York [City] against the East St. Louis riots, 1917. Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

Teaching Materials

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