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NAACP @ 100 #1

On July 4, 1918, one hundred years ago this summer, the forms were filled out to found Arkansas’s first branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), based in the state capital of Little Rock. Fifty people signed the “Application for Charter,” and J. H. McConico, who lived at 2216 Cross Street and listed his occupation as an auditor, was nominated as branch president. The branch membership was dominated by Little Rock’s black middle-class including teachers, clergymen, lawyers, physicians, dentists, businessmen and publishers, who national NAACP leader W.E.B. Du Bois referred to as the “talented tenth” of the black population. Not until the 1940s did the NAACP become a mass organization, when World War II witnessed a tenfold nationwide growth in membership from 50,000 to 500,000 people.