NAACP Leads Silent March Down Fifth Avenue to Protest Racist Violence
The NAACP organized a march in New York City on this day to protest the East St. Louis race riot that had erupted on July 2, 1917. Over 10,000 participants dressed in white marched silently down Fifth Avenue in New York City.
The East St. Louis riot was the worst urban race riot to that time, and was eclipsed in seriousness two years later by the Chicago race riot that began on July 27, 1919.
Among those in the front row, leading the march, were W.E.B. Dubois, the great African American intellectual and civil rights leader, and James Weldon Johnson, field secretary of the NAACP at the time, and the author of the African American anthem, Lift Every Voice and Sing.
Ninety-three years later, on June 17, 2012, the NAACP organized silent marches across the country to protest police stop-and-frisk practices directed at African-Americans. A year later, on August 12, 2013, a U.S. District Court judge ruled the New York City Police Department’s practice of stop-and-frisks to be unconstitutional.
Read: Eliott Rudwick, Race Riot at East St. Louis, July 2, 1917 (1964)
See a photograph of the march at the Library of Congress: http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/naacp/founding-and-early-years.html
Learn more about the East St. Louis Race Riot: http://www.blackpast.org/aah/east-st-louis-race-riot-july-2-1917
Read: Gilbert Jones, Freedom’s Sword: The NAACP and the Struggle Against Racism in America, 1909–1969 (2012)
Visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture here