After the Movement and Moment: The NAACP and Human Rights in the 1980s

In the twentieth century United States, the movement for African American civil rights and the quest for human rights were deeply intertwined. One need look no further than W.E.B. DuBois’s eloquent calls for human rights. By the 1970s, the civil rights movement had succeeded on numerous counts and human rights principles had been enshrined in American political culture and discourse. 

This paper traces the historical relationship between civil rights groups and human rights activism and ideas from the late 1970s through the 1980s – the period after the civil rights and human rights revolutions of the third quarter of the twentieth century. It does so through a case study of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the most prominent African American rights organization. Human rights ideas filtered into both the NAACP’s foreign policy agenda and, to a lesser degree, its domestic policy rhetoric and goals. On the domestic front, the Association pointedly refused to use “human rights” – as opposed to civil rights – to define itself or its goals. Rather, “human rights” were mainly deployed as a rhetorical weapon against rising conservatism. In contrast, in foreign affairs, the NAACP outlined a goal of making human rights central to American foreign policy and world politics, decrying especially the failure to promote human rights in white-dominated southern Africa. 

This study, then, is significant for two reasons. First, it draws some conclusions on the relative strength and weakness of human rights culture and politics in the 1980s United States. Second, the NAACP’s deployment of human rights helped to externalize human rights concerns, making human rights something that occurred elsewhere, outside the United States. In this sense, the NAACP helped contribute to human rights being associated with the other – and a less than vital force in domestic politics and culture.