ABOUT US
Our Mission: The mission of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate racial hatred and racial discrimination.
Branch Leadership
Kojo Nantambu
President
Blanche Penn
Second Vice President
Stephane Berwald
Secretary
Mary Covington
Treasurer
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The NAACP was founded Feb. 12. 1909, the NAACP is the nation's oldest, largest and most widely recognized grassroots–based civil rights organization. Its more than half-million members and supporters throughout the United States and the world are the premier advocates for civil rights in their communities, conducting voter mobilization and monitoring equal opportunity in the public and private sectors.
Our Branch History
1919: The Charlotte branch of the NAACP is established, the first in the state.
1940: Kelly Alexander Sr. revives the Charlotte NAACP branch, which had been inactive for nine years. He begins building a black movement. Over the years, he brings to Charlotte most major black leaders of the era: Thurgood Marshall, Roy Wilkins, Adam Clayton Powell, Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King Jr.
1949: Black parents in Clarendon County, S.C., file a lawsuit challenging the state's concept of separate-but-equal schools after the white school board refuses to give them a bus so their children don't have to walk to school. NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall – who would become a U.S. Supreme Court Justice – represented the parents. The suit was combined with four others into Brown v. (Topeka, Kan.) Board of Education that led to a Supreme Court decision outlawing segregated schools.
1951: Sixteen black golfers, backed by the NAACP, sue Mecklenburg park commissioners for the right to tee off at Bonnie Brae Municipal Golf Course, now Revolution Park Golf Course. In 1956, a state judge orders the course to be opened up to anyone, and on Jan. 9, 1957, James Otis Williams is the first black to a play a round.
March 1957: Kelly Alexander Sr. leads a delegation of 26 black leaders to a meeting with public school officials to demand desegregation. The white officials agree to work with school officials in Greensboro and Winston-Salem to desegregate schools in all three cities.
Summer 1957: Alexander approaches Herman Counts, a Charlotte father of four, and asks him to volunteer his children as desegregation pioneers. That September, Counts' only daughter, 15-year-old Dorothy, walks through a mob of jeering white students and up the steps of Harding High School.
1960: NAACP leads a boycott of white-run stores that refuse to serve blacks.
1962: NAACP joins an effort to integrate Charlotte-region restaurants.
1965: Charlotte civil rights attorney Julius Chambers, with the backing of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, files a lawsuit on behalf of Darius and Vera Swann that ultimately forces the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board to desegregate schools.
1966: Chambers goes after job discrimination. He sues Duke Power on behalf of 13 black workers in Draper, N.C., challenging a requirement of a high school diploma or passing an intelligence test to get promoted or transfer within the company. Five years later, the U.S. Supreme Court rules the requirement violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when it disparately affected minorities. Chambers would become the defense fund's third director-counsel.
1968 : NAACP threatens court action after Charlotte City Council members vote 4-3 not to take down a fence separating two city-owned cemeteries near uptown, all-white Elmwood and all-black North Pinewood. The fence eventually comes down.
1983: Kelly Alexander is named chairman of the national NAACP board. A year later, he steps down as president of the state NAACP conference that he'd held for 36 years. His son, Kelly Jr., head of the Charlotte branch, is elected to the state post.
1999: NAACP organizes a national boycott against South Carolina's $14-billion-a-year tourism industry after state legislators refuse to remove a Confederate flag from atop the S.C. statehouse. A year later, legislators vote to take down the flag, but place it in front of the Capitol next to a Confederate monument – prompting the NAACP not to call off the boycott, which continues today.
2008: NAACP pushes N.C. legislators for a law that would require the SBI to investigate shootings involving police officers after five blacks are shot by Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officers in separate incidents.
