Fight for Freedom and Other Writings on Civil RightsUniversity of Missouri Press, 2001 - 272 pages Nearing the end of a distinguished literary career that spanned nearly fifty years, Langston Hughes took on the daunting task of writing the official history of the national Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Beginning with the social, political, and economic contexts that led to the founding of the NAACP in 1909 and ending with a summary of its targeted goals for 1963, Hughes attempted to write a history that would be comprehensive in scope and singular in its purpose of highlighting the ways in which the Association had a direct and positive influence on racial justice in the United States. Focusing on the individuals who had the greatest impact on the NAACP and the issues with which the organization was most concerned in its first fifty years of existence, Hughes produced the widely acclaimed Fight for Freedom, striking an exceptional balance between biography and cultural history. Long before the publication of Fight for Freedom, Hughes had begun writing nonfictional prose about these same issues as a regular columnist and essayist for the nation's most influential African American publications, including the Chicago Defender and Crisis. A selection of these popular columns and other essays & mdash;which reveal the extent to which Hughes's unique, varied, and sometimes Blues- tinged narrative voice shifted in tone over the course of his extensive career & mdash;is included in this volume. Hughes intersperses historical facts with compelling anecdotes that often frame subtly ironic commentaries on various themes. The result is history that provides a lens through which to view Hughes's attitudes in the early 1960s toward the ways the NAACP addressed the vital social, cultural, political, and economic issues central to its agenda. Fight for Freedom and Other Writings on Civil Rights makes a unique contribution to the oeuvre of an African American writer whose full significance to American literature, history, and culture will continue to be defined well into the twenty-first century. |
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Advancement of Colored African Alabama arrested Association’s Atlanta attorney Baltimore Board called Chicago Defender church City civil rights Committee Communist Conference Crisis death democracy desegregation Detroit discrimination editor equal federal Fight for Freedom funds Georgia Harlem jail James Weldon Johnson Jim Crow Joel Spingarn John justice Kivie Kaplan Klan Klux labor lawyers leaders live lynching Mary White Ovington membership Mississippi NAACP National Association Negro Negro citizens Negro schools Negro soldiers Negro students Negro workers never nigger North organization picket poems police president problems protest race racial reported riots Roy Wilkins Scottsboro Scottsboro boys secretary segregation Senate Shillady sit-in slave southern Spingarn Medal Street Supreme Court teachers Texas Thurgood Marshall train Tuskegee unions United States Supreme University vote W. E. B. Du Bois Walter White Washington William women writing York young Negro
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Page 27 - Organization where these purposes are set forth as: " '. . . voluntarily to promote equality of rights and eradicate caste or race prejudice among the citizens of the United States; to advance the interest of colored citizens; to secure for them impartial suffrage; and to increase their opportunities for securing justice in the courts, education for their children, employment according to their ability, and complete equality before the law.