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Updated: July 29, 2009, 5:25 pm	Share    Print    Email

The NAACP Authors Pavilion held in New York City drew legendary authors from around the country. Photos by Douglas Harrington

New York City - Several events converged this week in America's greatest city that are seminal in the history of both the American and international civil rights movement. Most significantly, 2009 represents the centennial celebration of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which is the singularly most important organization in the history of the American civil rights movement. At its annual convention, held this year at the New York Hilton, it is traditional that the sitting President of the United States address the delegates. A convention unlike any held in its storied history, in its 100th year the NAACP will be addressed by America's first mixed race president, Barack Obama.

America's first African-American television star, Diahann Carroll.

It is also a pre-celebration of next year's 50th anniversary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a student organization founded at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina to coordinate youth led nonviolent, direct-action campaigns against segregation and other forms of racism during the turbulent and pivotal years of resistance in the 1960s. Collaterally at Radio City Music Hall, the world's most revered symbol of the African anti-apartheid movement, Nelson Mandela, was celebrated on the occasion of his 91st birthday.

As part of the week-long convention, Hamptons.com paid a visit to the NAACP's Centennial Authors Pavilion celebrating 100 authors and 100 years of writing relating to the African-American experience and the American civil rights movement. During its three-day schedule attendees had the opportunity to attend book signing by authors that included icons like Colin Powell and Julian Bond.

At the pavilion we first came across fellow Hamptonian Bob Zellner who was signing his book, "The Wrong Side Of Murder Creek: A White Southerner In The Freedom Movement." Along with attending as an author, Zellner is one of the principals of Miller-Zellner Production and Promotions, a marketing firm in the East End that had a booth as part of the NAACP Commerce and Industry Show. A white son of the south, both Zellner's father and grandfather were members of the Klu Klux Klan. Breaking from family tradition, Zellner was the first white southerner to serve as a field secretary for the SNCC.

David Levering Lewis with his Pulitzer Prize winning biography of W.E.B. Du Bois.

"The book is my memoir of growing up in lower Alabama and the civil rights movement. I joined the civil rights movement when I was a college student in Montgomery, Alabama where I met Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks." Referring to his early involvement in SNCC, Zellner expressed hope for a renewed youth movement in the NAACP, "I met Dr. King in 1959 right after the Montgomery bus boycott and at the beginning of the student movement. I joined SNCC along with Julian Bond, John Lewis and others. We were very fortunate to be in that youth movement, we are still growing today and we are hoping that there is going to be an upsurge of youth activity in the NAACP and in the country."

Zellner went on to explain that his father broke from the Klan when he was quite young and that his mother cut up her husband's KKK robes and made white shirts for her children to attend Sunday School. In referring to the election of Barack Obama and the civil rights struggle that made it possible, Zellner told us, "I gave a copy of my book to the president and in it I wrote, 'Mr. President, I joined your campaign 40 years ago.'" The forward to the book was written by his long-time friend and best man at his wedding, Julian Bond.

At the signing booth next to Zellner was the iconic African-American actress Diahann Carroll, who graciously sat for photographs as fans formed a long line to have their copies of Carroll's recently published memoir, "The Legs Are The Last To Go," autographed. A role model for women of all colors, Carroll was the first African-American woman to win a Tony Award in 1962 for her role in "No Strings," but she is probably best remembered as the first African-American woman to star in her own television series, "Julia," for which she won a Golden Globe in 1968 and was nominated for an Emmy in 1969.

In a private interview off the pavilion floor we asked Carroll to comment on her book, which she reluctantly described as a memoir, and asked if within the book there were nuggets of advice, "I suppose it can be called a memoir, they are stories about my life, but not chronological. There are some lessons learned and the fact that you put them on paper means you want to share them, so I suppose there may be some advice in there that may be beneficial to others."

Author Patricia Sullivan with her history of the NAACP, "Lift Every Voice."

As an international role model we asked Carroll how special it was to be signing her first book at the NAACP centennial celebration, "It is very special for many reasons. The NAACP is there to represent role models in everything they do, it has given us so many people to model our lives on. When I am here it makes me remember how many years it has been, what growth there has been in our country and still in some regards, has not been. It makes me feel very proud. I think it is a very long hard road, we are a very segregated world. We love to stay in our own little groups and don't want to learn about our fellow man until forced to, that is why I love the workplace. It makes us come out of our homes and interact with people of all walks of life. I think that is what this journey is really all about, to have our own families is wonderful, but the family of man is even more wonderful. I feel very fortunate that I have had a life like this."

When asked if she herself had a role model along the way Carroll said, "I think anyone you see that walks in front of a camera, who is not a white American, offers something to answer your curiosity about how it is done, why it was important, why it was important specifically to you. I remember the first time I saw that beautiful woman Lena Horne I said, 'Oh my God, this is extraordinary, this is how it is done.' To watch her develop over the years and her impact - it was wonderful. There were many role models and there are more today, which makes one feel that perhaps one did something that was helpful." Undoubtedly, Carroll's impact as a role model is more than palpable as her book, which will be released in paperback in December, completely sold out before the day's event even ended.

Among some of the other authors we spoke to at the pavilion were David Levering Lewis, whose seminal two volume biography of W.E.B. Du Bois each won Pulitzer Prizes in their years of publication (1994 and 2001). Lewis commented on Du Bois' impact on the founding of the NAACP in his newly released one volume condensed edition, "I can't think of anybody more instrumental in the founding of the NAACP. He was the creator and founding editor of The Crisis Magazine, that was for 20 years the voice of the association. When people thought of the NAACP they waited for Du Bois' editorial comments. He founded the antecedent movement of the NAACP, the Niagara Movement was the movement that joined with the white progressives to form, in 1909, the NAACP."

Author and civil rights activist Bob Zellner with his wife Linda Miller-Zellner.

For a complete understanding of the 100 year history and importance of the NAACP, we highly recommend Patrica Sullivan's "Lift Every Voice: The NAACP And The Making Of The Civil Rights Movement." Sullivan was a former fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University when she first undertook the daunting task of writing a biography of such a significant organization, "I knew it was a huge job, as the NAACP represents the largest archive in the Library of Congress. It has been fascinating, the book took 10 years to research and write." Fellow author and civil rights activist Zellner described the book as, "The definitive history of the NAACP."

In this seminal year of the NAACP, New York City and the world celebrates the single most important organization in the American struggle for civil rights. Amid the speeches, seminars and celebration are the books that will continue to tell the story long after the final gavel brings this historic convention to its conclusion. Books that speak to all of us of a great struggle for freedom, equality and a promise that may indeed be finally fulfilled.