By Lee A. Daniels

I am thankful that I am still alive and fighting for what is ours.

In the long purgatory from the end of the Civil War to the legislative victories of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, no words better express both the collective predicament black Americans endured and the responsibility they took upon themselves.

The words’ author, Butler Nance, leader in 1920 of the newly-organized Columbia, South Carolina branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and every black American alive then could be thankful that they were still alive. For black Americans everywhere were marooned in a vast sea of cruelty.

They were virtually completely deprived of any rights of citizenship in the South; and as black Southern migrants flooded into the North’s urban centers, those cities began passing ordinances that soon created the black ghettos that have characterized urban America ever since.

Worst of all, the horrific reign of terror in the Old Confederacy known as the Lynching Frenzy left any black man, women or child a potential victim on the slightest pretext or no pretext at all to a terrible death. These ritual murders, which sometimes occurred in the North and often involved ghastly tortures and burning at the stake, took the lives of at least 8,000 black men, women and children from 1880 to the mid-1960s. In 1920 blacks were being lynched at the rate of one a week.

But, then and now, Nance’s assertion in the sentence’s latter half is the pledge stalwarts in the NAACP – and among the masses of black Americans – continually made: still fighting for what is ours.

Patricia Sullivan cites Nance’s words relatively early in her important, and often poignantly-told, history of the NAACP, Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement, from its founding in 1909 to the watershed decade of the 1960s.

Writing with an easy command of a mountain of material that encompasses six decades of enormous changes in America, Sullivan shows how critical the NAACP, now celebrating its centennial, was to the Civil Rights Movement’s ultimate legal and legislative victories that made the United States a democracy in fact not just in rhetoric.

Bereft of financial resources, abandoned by the Supreme Court and a Congress which for nearly six decades could not bestir itself to pass a law against lynching, blacks kept at what was for many a physically perilous (until the 1950s half of all black Americans lived in the South), psychologically wearing struggle in a nation in which upwards of 90 percent of the white population supported racial apartheid.

Equally important, she shows in a wealth of stories that the twentieth-century black freedom struggle was actually not a “leader-driven” movement, as important as its varied leaders were. That truth applies to the NAACP and all the other organizations that were part of the struggle.  The list of the brilliant and dedicated “names-we-know,” black and white, who worked for or with the NAACP during this period is very long – from a W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary White Ovington, Joel Spingarn and James Weldon Johnson to Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, Ella Baker, Ruby Hurley and Roy Wilkins.

But, again and again, Sullivan weaves in stories which illustrate that ordinary black Americans were the foundation of the freedom struggle’s, and the NAACP’s, decades-long effort to overturn the nation’s racial caste system. Even those knowledgeable about the many episodes that mark America’s twentieth-century freedom trail will be astonished, and inspired, by the courage and determination of people who, in opposing Jim Crow, were literally putting their lives on the line to exercise their rights as American citizens.

One example she cites is when NAACP attorney Robert Carter (later a longtime federal judge) met with a group of black parents and activists in Clarendon County, South Carolina about the Briggs case, one of the simultaneous school-desegregation cases that were bundled into what became the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case that the U.S, Supreme Court decided in May, 1954.

Carter’s first order of duty, he explained, was to warn them “of the dangers that lay ahead. “Whites would do everything they could to stop it. All those named in the lawsuit who were employed locally should expect to lose their jobs; they and their families would be exposed to threats, violence and possibly loss of life. (my italics) Understanding that, Carter advised that anyone who wanted to withdraw from the case should do so, without any shame or embarrassment. To his surprise, only two parents decided not to continue with the litigation. He ended the meeting by saying that while he realized the dangers they faced, the NAACP felt that it was time to fight segregation head on. Carter recalled ‘a grey-headed sage sitting in the corner of the church, said [in response], “We wondered how long it would take you lawyers to reach that conclusion,” a remark greeted with laughter and applause.’ Several men and women who had signed the equalization petition the previous November, including Harry and Eliza Briggs, had already lost jobs and suffered other economic reprisals. ‘Our determination was hardened by this point,’ (Reverend) Joseph DeLaine (who helped found the NAACP branch there and was a leader of the school integration movement) recalled, and they were ready to ‘go for broke.’ ”

That kind of courage among the black masses often exacted a very high price. Both the DeLaine and Briggs families were forced to leave South Carolina for the North. Sullivan’s narrative is replete with instances in which blacks throughout the South who sought to vote or pressed for better economic conditions or tried to organize an NAACP chapter were murdered with the complicity, either before or after the act, of the state and local white establishment.

Sullivan doesn’t stint on the internal tensions, jealousies and rivalries that existed within the organization from the beginning. Du Bois and Walter White, who joined the organization in the 1920s and became its leader in the 1930s, disliked each other intensely from the moment they met, and White ultimately succeeded in pushing Du Bois out. Roy Wilkins, who signed up in the 1930s to work under White, eventually tired of White’s dominance. He wanted and got the top job in the 1950. And so on.

But neither does she make too much of this internecine strife nor of the episodes when the NAACP itself came under heavy criticism from blacks who felt it had lost its effectiveness in dealing with the needs of the black masses. Does that sound familiar?

Her focus is as it should be: on what can be called, with no exaggeration, America’s race war.  From 1900 to the late 1960s blacks and their small band of white allies were waging a War for Negro Freedom via the nonviolent mechanisms of legal petition and political reform.

By contrast, a majority of White America was waging a war to preserve White Supremacy. As late as the late 1940s, it seemed that the forces of racism were, as one NAACP lawyer put it, “impregnable.” They had enormous amounts of private and public funds at their disposal, they continued to have the weight of legal precedent, and they were willing to themselves use violence or tolerate its use by their fellow-travelers to maintain an all-encompassing white domination.

However, as Patricia Sullivan shows magnificently, what they did not have on their side, was what Martin Luther King, Jr. famously described as “the arc of the moral universe.”

“The arc of the moral universe is long,” King said during the years when he was the leading voice of the black freedom struggle, “but it bends toward justice.”

Beginning at the dawn of the twentieth century, the NAACP, in concert with the mass of black Americans, forged an extraordinary record of achievement in bending that arc toward justice and in making real the promise of America’s democratic ideals. There could be no more dramatic illustration of the depth of that record of achievement than to note that the celebration of the NAACP’s centennial also marks the inauguration of the first black president of the United States of America.