The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 103, July 1999 - April, 2000 Page: 56
554 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Southwestern Historical Quarterly
resistance against race and class domination. Organizations such as the
National Urban League, the Universal Negro Improvement Association
(UNIA), and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP) provided much of the leadership needed to improve
working conditions.9
The NAACP, particularly, emerged as an antisegregation body and a
link between the black working and middle classes. The NAACP worked
closely with prominent community figures, black labor leaders, and the
black proletariat to curtail workplace inequalities. Founded in 1909 in
New York City, the NAACP expanded its influence during the war years.
The number of branches grew from less than a hundred before World
War I to more than four hundred in cities and towns by 1921.o
NAACP national membership soared from around ten thousand in
1917 to nearly eighty thousand in 1919. In 1918 four local branches of
the NAACP in Texas joined the El Paso chapter, which was established
in 1915 to expand the influence of the organization throughout the
state. The NAACP recruited from within the middle- and working-class
ranks. The organization also pursued janitors, laborers, letter carriers,
housekeepers, laundresses, and seamstresses, and, as Steven Reich
argues, the black working class likely constituted the core of the mem-
bership. Dr. C. B. Charlton initiated the establishment of the Beaumont
branch of the NAACP in 1917. After receiving correspondence from sev-
eral Beaumont residents and following an organizing tour throughout
Texas by Mary B. Talbert, president of the National Association of
Colored Women's Clubs, the NAACP approved a charter for the
Beaumont chapter in 1918. At Galveston, black unionists from ILA
union Local 807 organized an NAACP branch of their own. When the
Houston NAACP staged a public "ILA Day" in October 1937 at the
Bethel Baptist Church to honor the community endeavors of black ILA
unions, it reflected not only the civil rights organization's support for
'Jim Crow here is defined as the racial discrimination that resulted from a system of laws that
segregated the races and sanctioned the social, political, and economic domination of whites
over blacks. For example, see James Martin Sorelle, "The Darker Side of Heaven: The Black
Community in Houston, Texas, 1917-1945," (Ph.D. diss., Kent State University, 1980). For
more on the origins and the nature ofJim Crow, see C. Vann Woodward, Orgmins of the New South,
1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951); George B. Tindall, The
Emergence of the New South, 19r3-1945 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967);
and Neil McMillen, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of fim Crow (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1989).
10 See Charles Flint Kellogg, NAACP: A Hstory of the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People, vol. I, 19gog9-192o (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967);John Hope
Franklin and Alfred A. Moss Jr., From Slavery to Freedom: A Hstory of Negro Americans (1947;
reprint, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 288-89; August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, From
Plantation to Ghetto (1966; reprint, New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), 87-89; Alan H. Spear, Black
Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 189o-192o (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967),
227-31.July
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 103, July 1999 - April, 2000, periodical, 2000; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101220/m1/82/: accessed May 2, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.