On dozens of college campuses across the nation, where plenty of groups have taken on justice issues that for decades only the NAACP would touch, it is not uncommon to hear people question whether the NAACP is still relevant. The question is answering itself, however, as all discover there’s still more than enough work to be done and still not enough people to take it on.

“On our campus, we can get people excited, but continuity is a problem,” says Brittney Autry, president of the 45-member NAACP student chapter at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where student activism in the NAACP dates to the mid-1930s. That’s when Howard students marched on Capitol Hill to protest the lynching of Blacks across the South. “Our fight is the same as it was in the ’60s and ’70s,” says Autry. “It’s now more institutionalized and covert, so we have to find new techniques.”

Lynchings by racist, White mobs were the focal point of student protests in the 1930s. Racially segregated public schools, multiple barriers to voting, and segregation in interstate commerce were the focal point of the 1950s and 1960s. NAACP student chapters, most working in support of adult branches, played major roles in mobilizing students to protest all those social policies in their communities.

Collective Efforts

Claiming 23,000 members in its Youth and College Division, the NAACP says it has 300 college chapters including some, like Howard’s, that date back to the 1930s. Campus chapters are all over the country, at historically Black colleges and universities, at historically White institutions, public and private schools, both rural and urban.

Today, the Howard student chapter, and others like it, finds itself fighting new versions of old problems and, increasingly so since the 1960s, sharing the platform with a variety of groups, including Black Student Union groups that are more narrowly focused in their activities and have a heavier social agenda in many cases.