Naacp Famous Quotes

If Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer and others had been heard fifty years ago—if women had been half the speakers in 1963—we might have heard that the civil rights movement was partly a protest against the ritualistic rape and terrorizing of black women by white men.4 We might have known that Rosa Parks had been assigned by the NAACP to investigate the gang rape of a black woman by white men—who had left her for dead near a Montgomery bus stop—before that famous boycott.

Then, four years later, Du Bois, with white neo-abolitionist allies, launched the NAACP, recognizing that cultural constructions not built on or allied with political agency were destined to remain exactly what they’d started as: empty signifiers. In fact, Du Bois—though a participant himself—critiqued the premise of Locke’s New Negro Renaissance in a famous speech he delivered at the NAACP’s annual conference in 1926.10