The Arts Club and the NAACP
presented by
Derek Gray
This Event is canceled and will be rescheduled
The Arts Club of Washington and the NAACP: The Untold Story of Club Members’ Early Association with the Iconic Civil Rights Organization
Wednesday, March 30, 2022, at 6:00 pm
OPEN TO THE PUBLIC - FREE
This event includes a book signing reception after the program.
Woodrow Wilson’s election as President of the United States in 1912 led to a radical segregation of the federal government, whose pernicious effects were felt acutely by Washington’s African American communities. The Washington DC branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, formed the same year as Wilson’s election, galvanized Black Washingtonians and white progressives to fight Wilson’s racist policies. An early NAACP leader in the branch’s battles against segregation and racism was Arts Club of Washington member Charles Edward Russell. An original White founder of the national NAACP, Russell was a well-respected journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Archivist and historian Derek Gray tells the story of the NAACP’s advocacy on behalf of the city’s Black communities, and its development as the principal civil rights organization in the nation’s capital. Gray’s talk will also discuss the less sanguine role of another Arts Club member, sculptor George Julian Zolnay, in the controversial proposal to erect a national monument to honor the “Black Mammies of the Confederacy” in 1923.
Derek Gray is an archivist at The People’s Archive at the D.C. Public Library, and author of The NAACP in Washington, DC: From Jim Crow to Home Rule (The History Press/Arcadia Publishing, 2022). He has a passion for the preservation, documentation, and presentation of the African American experience in Washington. He has contributed several articles for Washington History, the scholarly journal of the D.C. History Center, and is one of four coauthors of Angels of Deliverance: The Underground Railroad in Queens, Long Island, and Beyond (Queens Historical Society, 1999).
Copies of The NAACP in Washington, DC will be available for purchase and signing by the author.
Dinner is available for members of the Arts Club after the event.
