U.S. Intellectual History Blog

CFP: NAACP Rhetoric and Reality

I am soliciting paper proposals for a panel on the NAACP for this year’s U.S. intellectual history conference, to be held in New York City on November 12 and 13, for this year’s Association for the Study of African American Life and History held in Cincinnati, Ohio Sept 30 through Oct 1, or the OAH (let me know which conference suits you most).

We are going into a celebration of the NAACP’s 100th anniversary. I would like to contribute an intellectual history panel to the many considerations of the NAACP’s legacy that will be in discussion this year. I write about young black intellectuals’ critique of the NAACP in the 1930s. I would love other panelists analyzing NAACP strategies and rhetoric at other points in its history and at the local or national levels. Also of interest would be the reception of their plans–the NAACP has been considered radical, moderate, and conservative throughout its life time, depending on how those terms, and civil rights activism, were construed in the period under scrutiny.