Tuesday Open Line


One of the nation’s major civil rights organizations is 104 years old today — the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Founded to combat lynching and segregation, the NAACP continues to work towards greater opportunities for minorities. One of its most telling moments came with the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education, which desegregated the nation’s schools. The lawyer who argued that case, Thurgood Marshall, became the first African-American Supreme Court justice. When the NAACP was founded, there were 9.8 million African-Americans in the U.S. Today that number, including mixed-race blacks, is nearly 42 million. You can find more facts about America from the U.S. Census Bureau, online at <www.census.gov>.