To what extent was the NAACP responsible for the successes of the Civil Rights Campaign in the years 1945

  Additionally the NAACP used non-violent direct action as a successful means of tackling segregation. An example of this is the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955 – 56) in which the black people of Montgomery boycotted the local buses, following Rosa Parks’ arrest, to show the importance of black customers by financially crippling the bus companies. This, along with the Browder v. Gayle (1956) case, outlawed segregation on local buses, thereby demonstrating the power of uniting direct action with a legal campaign. Strong leadership in the form of local NAACP leader E.D Nixon and Martin Luther King was shown within events such as this, which provoked great media attention and conveyed the injustice of segregation to a national and international audience. The NAACP and its supporters used the media in this way as an opportunity to put pressure on the government for change.

  However, the NAACP was not responsible for the entirety of the achievements of the civil rights movement in the period of 1945-57. Importantly, not all of the de jure successes led to de facto implementation, such was with the outcome of the Morgan v. Virginia case; desegregation in interstate buses was not seen all over America. In response to this another civil rights organisation, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), sent a team of eight blacks and eight whites on ‘The Journey of Reconciliation’ from the northern states into the Deep South by bus to test the Supreme Court’s ruling. The protest drew public attention and successfully proved that bus companies in the southern states were ignoring the Supreme Court’s ruling. Though it failed to force the southern companies to desegregate their services, it was groundbreaking because it successfully linked legal campaigns to non-violent direct action much like the Montgomery bus boycott.

  In conclusion, having considered the inputs and achievements concerning the civil rights movement between the years 1945 - 1957, I believe that the NAACP was responsible for the successes of the civil rights movement to a large extent. It was the organisation that first opened the door for opportunities to successfully challenge segregation using the legal system and even managed to overturn previous unsuccessful cases, such as the Plessy v. Ferguson case of 1896. It served as an inspiration for other organisations, such as CORE and the later Southern Christian Leader Conference (SCLC), to protest segregation using new ways of non-violent, direct action. Furthermore the organisation itself, along with similar ones, had not yet perfected its methods by this point but would greatly contribute in seeing the new dawn of the civil rights movement beginning in the late 1950s.