One thought on “Spingarn Award 1950-1969”

1. Question for everyone: do you know who “Spingarn” is? For whom did the organization name its most prestigious award? Joel Spingarn and his brother Arthur were among the earliest leaders of the NAACP (1910s and 1920s). Joel Spingarn was a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University from 1899 to 1911, and, perhaps most interesting to people today, he was white (Jewish). He also helped found Harcourt, Brace, a major publishing company that is probably responsible for many of the books that you have read over the years.

   As the second president of the NAACP (not the power position that you might think it was; the “power” was the executive secretary) and as chairman of its board until his death in 1939, he was one of the most influential figures in what I believe was the most important organization of the twentieth century.

   My research led me to him because, when he was serving as a colonel in the US Army during World War I, he pushed to get a black officer training camp in Des Moines and to get a federal law against lynching (i.e., mob murder). Many blacks opposed going along in any way with segregation and so opposed a separate camp, but supporters of the black camp argued that it was a foot in the door, a way to show that black men were capable of leadership, and a way to get black officers commanding black soldiers. Also, the federal government NEVER enacted a law against lynching, leaving the murders to state enforcement. The numbers dropped into low double digits in the 1920s and then into the single digits (all of this down from 200 a year in the 1890s). Only in the 1950s did Tuskegee Institute, the Chicago Defender, and the NAACP stop keeping and publishing lynching stats.

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   June 9, 2016 at 9:18 pm