By Tananarive Due

The NAACP means much more to me than its landmark victories or a century of interracial social struggle—it is where I was raised.

My two sisters and I, all of us in pigtails, walked in a circle with protesters holding placards at the Dade County federal building in Miami: “Hey, hey, U.S.A.—stop supporting Duvalier!” I was 11, my sister Johnita was 9 and our baby sister Lydia was 7. Our family was protesting U.S. support for Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier. Another day, in Miami’s riot-scarred inner-city neighborhood of Liberty City, I put a megaphone to my lips and called, “Register to vote!”

As a family affair, the NAACP gave me and my sisters a way to put our hands on the plow, spend time with our parents, and savor the fellowship of hundreds of young people whose hopes and dreams mirrored our own.

As a young teen, I was president of the Greater Miami Youth Council of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—the NAACP, which celebrates its Centennial Convention July 11-16 in New York City. A century after the NAACP’s founding in 1909, the nation’s first black president will address the annual convention Thursday.

Teaching History

Our parents, John Due and Patricia Stephens Due, met as civil rights activists in Tallahassee, Fla., in the 1960s. In 1960, while she was a student at Florida A&M University, my mother was arrested and spent 49 days in jail for sitting-in at a Woolworth lunch counter. She became part of the nation’s first jail-in during the student sit-in movement. As a civil rights lawyer, my father once represented Dr. King in St. Augustine, Florida, and was the attorney of record in Miami-Dade County’s school desegregation case for fifteen years. As my mother explains: “The involvement with the NAACP was crucial in order to teach my daughters about their history and to give them the experience necessary to make changes in this state and nation.”

My family’s only summer trips were to NAACP conventions, where we heard great orators like former NAACP executive director Benjamin L. Hooks and Sen. Ted Kennedy, or saw celebrities like Michael Jackson. The melodic strains of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” became the anthem for our annual family reunion. When I was 13, we caught the eye of a reporter in Louisville who wrote a story about us: Family is committed to civil rights. In subsequent years, my sister Johnita won the Miss NAACP fundraising contest in Miami and led the South Dade Youth Council; my sister Lydia recruited one of her high school teachers to help her find students to make calls on phone banks for voter registration campaigns; and I confronted a business owner over a mural I thought was offensive.

In the summer of 1980, Miami was smoldering from riots after the acquittal of several police officers who had been charged in the beating death of a black motorcyclist Arthur McDuffie. Coincidentally, Miami was scheduled to host the NAACP convention weeks later. My father helped to consolidate the NAACP’s presence in Miami before the convention, and my mother served as that convention’s coordinator. My father later founded the South Dade Branch of the NAACP, where he concentrated on education issues. (One of his members was former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, then the Dade County State Attorney.)

Honoring and Inspiring Young People

NAACP youth gather around former NAACP executive director and ACT-SO co-founder, Benjamin L. Hooks. Back, from left, Craig Bell; Tananarive Due; and Hooks. Front, from left, Carey Hart; Lydia Due; and Johnita Due.

In 1980, I first competed in the NAACP’s competition for high school students: the Afro-Academic, Cultural, Technological and Scientific Olympics, or ACT-SO. The late Vernon Jarrett, a pioneering Chicago-based newspaper columnist, had launched ACT-SO and brought it to the NAACP’s Benjamin L. Hooks.

Jarrett believed that just as we celebrate our sports heroes, we should also honor young people’s achievement in the arts, humanities and sciences. In addition to cash prizes, winners receive bronze, silver and gold medals in regal ceremonies. The 26 categories span from sculpture to vocal classical to computer and space science. ACT-SO celebrated its 30th year in 2008, and past winners have gone on to thrive in the arts, science and business worlds.

The NAACP first hosted ACT-SO in Portland, Oregon, in 1978 with students from only seven cities. Now, there are at least 200 ACT-SO programs around the country, and an estimated 261,000 high school students have taken part in local and national ACT-SO competitions. In addition to the NAACP, ACT-SO relies on support from volunteers and donations from individuals, community organizations, churches and corporate sponsors. Famous winners include Kanye West, Jada Pinkett-Smith, John Singleton and Anthony Anderson.

Our local ACT-SO chairperson in Miami, a tireless volunteer and civil rights activist named Doris Hart, worked year-round to make sure that students heard about the program, recruit judges and raise funds year after year. Since 1980, the Miami-Dade branch has won 77 national medals. Many ACT-SO alum, like me, have been inspired to give back by mentoring students, or by judging at local or national competitions.

“Everyone can do a part in bringing a child to the next level,” Hart says.

My first year in ACT-SO, one of my fellow local winners from Miami, Ivan Yaeger, built a bionic arm! The gold medal winners from the local competitions are sent to the nationals, and competition at the nationals is rigorous. Opera sopranos warmed up in the hallways. Cellists, violinists and trumpeters hypnotized our ears. Singers formed instant choruses. Dancers leaped into the sky. Architects designed the future. Orators shook the walls. In every doorway, a new marvel from kids just like us; lessons on barriers and achievement we took home with us whether we lost or won.

ACT-SO’s breadth of categories is ambitious, with room for a variety of students: health and medicine, computer science, poetry, chemistry/biochemistry, entrepreneurship, filmmaking, dramatics, vocal and instrumental music, sculpture, painting, photography, and more. My favorite part of ACT-SO—beyond finishing my own categories so I could watch others compete—was the awards ceremony.

While trumpets pealed and timpani thundered from Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” we marched into the auditorium proudly carrying banners from our NAACP branches, swelling with pride from what we had seen more than what we had done. Through high school, I won seven national medals—in original essay, oratory and playwriting. Winning gave me the thrill of a meaningful ceremony, where I walked to the stage amidst the support of my peers to receive medals and meet luminaries like scholars Lerone Bennett, Jr. and Dr. Benjamin Mays. ACT-SO helped me believe I could do anything.

ACT-SO became my family within the NAACP family, and we all shared a grandfather: Vernon Jarrett, who died in 2004. Jarrett was a griot who walked the halls during competitions and beseeched us to strive and achieve, and to remember the trials of our elders.

“I’m just so proud of the NAACP, because Vernon Jarrett and Benjamin Hooks had the vision to say, ‘We can be a part of the community, we can fight for civil rights advocacy, but we can also be a springboard for building a better community by energizing and mobilizing our youth. And that’s what ACT-SO does,” says ACT-SO National Director Anana Kambon.

Thursday, July 9, 800 students met at the national competition, despite a tough economy that made it hard for local programs to raise funds. From now through July 16, as ACT-SO competitors from around the nation celebrate the NAACP’s centennial year, our nation’s past and the future stand side by side.

For more information, visit the NAACP and ACT-SO.

Tananarive Due is an American Book Award-winning novelist, and co-author of Freedom in the Family: a Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights, with Patricia Stephens Due. This year, Due and her husband, Steven Barnes, along with actor Blair Underwood, won an NAACP Image Award for their novel In the Night of the Heat.