This article about the NAACP membership count, by George Curry, discusses the membership numbers for the NAACP. That's all I really care about in this article.
...In less than a year, Gordon has done something no other NAACP president or board chair has done in more than 50 years – he has told the truth about the organization’s anemic membership numbers.
When I began covering the NAACP in the early 1970s for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Executive Director Roy Wilkins and his successor, Benjamin L. Hooks, would boast that with 500,000 members, the NAACP was the oldest, largest and most powerful civil rights group in the world. But Hooks – and the chief executives that followed him – continued to lie about the size of the volunteer organization. Finally, Gordon has acknowledged that the venerable organization has a membership of less than 300,000. He won’t say how many members shy of 300,000, but other NAACP sources say the figure has fluctuated between 150,000 and 250,000 over the past three decades.
The NAACP has had various membership drives over the years and for some reason, they expected the public to believe they had a half-million members. When they weren’t having membership drives, they were claiming 500,000 members. At the end of each drive, the figure reported to the public would still mysteriously remain at 500,000. The Baltimore Sun did some research and discovered that the NAACP has been claiming 500,000 members since 1946. For 60 years, it has been telling the same lie.
It wasn’t like top officials didn’t know the actual numbers. My friend DeWayne Wickham, who has been researching a book on the NAACP, came across a memo written by Benjamin Hooks stating that as of November 30, 1982, there were 178,000 members. Hooks made a report to the executive committee of the board on December 17, 1982 citing those figures. Hooks and Board Chair Margaret Bush Wilson clashed over a number of items, including the low membership numbers and some questionable fiscal practices. While working in St. Louis, I broke the story in 1983 that she had suspended Hooks after a very heated board meeting at which Hooks had to be physically restrained. The board overturned Wilson’s action and later refused to re-elect her to the board. As leaders came and went, the membership lie remained a fixture.
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