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Charles Hamilton Houston Research Paper

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Political advocacy organizations have historically played a big part in securing political rights for minority groups in Western Liberal Democracies. Whether we look to the now infamous Boston Tea Party to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, we observe the importance of political organizations in their quest to ensure equitable rights for the people whom they represent. In context of the early twentieth century, the most prominent group to represent African-American’s in the United States was that of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The NAACP, as it is more commonly called, was founded on February 12, 1909 by a mixed group of individuals including but not limited to Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. DuBois and Archibald Grimké with the goal of creating a civil rights organization that would help assist in organizing for civil rights for blacks. One of its most prominent members, Charles Hamilton Houston, who became a part of the organization around the mid-twentieth century, changed the trajectory of the organization for years to come. Hence this essay …show more content…

His influence on the organization manifested itself in three distinct ways. First, Houston persuaded NAACP to focus their attention to the advent of Jim Crow within the south. This action was particularly important as it made the organization much more active in the area of the United States where the majority of injustices were occurring against African-Americans. In doing so, it made the NAACP a more legitimate political interlocutor in quest for equal and equitable rights. Secondly, Hamilton is considered the chief architect of the what is now known as the NAACP legal strategy which carefully and steadily eroded the legal foundations of segregation within the South. In implementing this strategy Hamilton brilliantly and subversively used systems that were used to enforce white supremacy to destroy

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