University of Arkansas Press Book Helps Celebrate NAACP’s 100th Anniversary this Year

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FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Celebrating its 100th anniversary in February 2009, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is the leading and best-known African American civil rights organization in the United States. It has played a major, and at times decisive, role in most of the important developments in the 20th century civil rights struggle.

Just published by the University of Arkansas Press, Long Is the Way and Hard: One Hundred Years of the NAACP, edited by Kevern Verney and Lee Sartain, with a Foreword by Adam Fairclough, (paper $29.95, hardback $70), offers new and invaluable insights into the work and achievements of this significant association. This groundbreaking collection of original essays draws on original and previously unpublished scholarship from leading researchers in the United States, Britain and Europe.

The first part of the book offers challenging reappraisals of two of the NAACP’s best-known national spokespersons, Walter White and Roy Wilkins. Also discussed are the association’s cultural initiatives and the key role played by its public-relations campaigns in the mid-1950s to counter segregationist propaganda and win over the hearts and minds of American public opinion in the wake of the NAACP’s landmark legal victory in Brown v. Board of Education. Other chapters provide thought-provoking accounts of the association’s complex and difficult relationship with Martin Luther King Jr., the post-World War II Civil Rights movement, and Black Power radicals of the 1960s.

The second part of the collection focuses on the work of the NAACP at state, city and local levels, examining its grassroots organization throughout the nation from Chicago, Cleveland and Detroit in the North, to California in the West, as well as states across the South including Virginia, Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas. Providing detailed and fascinating information on hitherto little explored aspects of the association’s work, these studies complement the previous essays by demonstrating the impact national initiatives had on local activists and analyzing the often-strained relations between the NAACP national office in New York and its regional branches.

Kevern Verney is associate head of the department of English and history at Edge Hill University, England, and the author of The Debate on Black Civil Rights in America. Lee Sartain is senior lecturer in American studies at the University of Portsmouth, England, and the author of Invisible Activists. The Foreword is by the noted British historian Adam Fairclough, the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Professor of American History at Leiden University and the author of many books, including To Redeem the Soul of America and Better Day Coming.

In his Foreword Fairclough describes the book as a “magnificent collection” reflecting “some of the best work on the NAACP written by a generation of historians who came of age after the heyday of the civil rights movement.” This “fascinating collection offers fresh insight into both the strengths and weaknesses of this hugely important organization.”