NAACP Civil Rights Convention (1947)

NAACP Civil Rights Convention (1947)

AP African American Studies Guide

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Topic 4.3

Joe Schwartz, “NAACP Civil Rights Convention,” Cincinnati, Ohio (1947)

A black-and-white photograph of Benjamin O. Davis Jr. (a Black soldier in uniform), Joe Louis (a Black man wearing a light colored suit and a dark bowtie), Thurgood Marshall (a Black man wearing a dark suit and white shirt), and Daisy Lampkin (a Black woman wearing a light colored dress and dark hat) seated outside under an open-air tent.

A photograph from the 1947 NAACP Civil Rights Convention in Cincinnati, Ohio, taken by Joe Schwartz and published in Folk Photography: Poems I’ve Never Written (2000), p. 114. (Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.)

Left to right in the image are Benjamin O. Davis Jr. (commander of the Tuskegee Airmen and later a general in the US Air Force), Joe Louis (heavyweight champion boxer, who served as a sergeant in World War II), Thurgood Marshall (leader of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, architect of the Brown v. Board of Education case, and later Associate Justice of the Supreme Court), and Daisy Lampkin (suffragist and activist in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People).