Who would look foolish? In unadjusted dollars, the NAACP surely has made more money off race than any slave trader.
And in real terms?
Cite?
“Made more money” meaning there’s a profit?
Is it true to say that law enforcement “makes more money” from drugs than drug dealers?
When you talk of Jim Crow and segregation and the Civil Rights Era, even here in Montgomery where the Bus Boycott occurred, it seems as if you’re talking about an era as remote as the Civil War. For perspective, if Martin Luther King, Jr., the most famous man of the Civil Rights movement, were alive today he would only be 81 years old, years younger than a few of the senators and Congressmen in Congress, years younger than Betty White or Justice Stevens or James Lipton, a year older than Clint Eastwood and less than a decade older than half the Supreme Court or John McCain or dozens of Congressmen, and while he was young when he became involved with the Bus Boycott he wasn’t a kid. John Patterson, the notoriously racist Attorney General of Alabama who upheld the segregation laws and later served as governor during much of the Civil Rights unrest in Birmingham and who George Wallace defeated prior to the Selma-Montgomery march, is not only still alive but still works as a judge for arbitration companies and sometimes for the Alabama Supreme Court (when a regular justice must recuse himself or take a leave of absence). The point is that the fact most of the nation wasn’t born when it occurred doesn’t mean that it’s ancient history: many people are not only still alive who were alive then but are still in the work force.
A popular misconception about U.S. history is that the South went straight from slavery to Jim Crow- not true. There was a decade long window in which blacks- both free born and freed slaves- made great strides- were allowed to vote, hold office, serve on juries, attend some public colleges in the south, etc… Jim Crow came after these, when Reconstruction ended and the Federal troops withdrew from the South, and segregation became stronger in and spread outside the south. In Montgomery it wasn’t until 1900 that blacks were barred from riding in the same streetcar sections or train cars as whites, and of course by Rosa Parks two generations had grown up having known nothing else. The point is that rights can be taken away or eroded.
This is why there’s still a NAACP. It’s a watchdog to stop things from going backwards and to remind us of what’s back there, but it’s guarding the future and the present more than it’s a relic of the past. As with gay rights groups and Jewish groups and every other type of minority groups you do have the professional offenderati element, but the legitimate grievance spotters outweigh them in importance and are the reason they continue to exist.
Well said, Sampiro, as usual.
Probably 3/5 of what the slave traders made.
Well, I don’t have much to contribute, except…
When I first saw the thread title, I got NAACP, (which I don’t know too much about, to be honest,) confused with NASCAR.
As a result, I thought that the statement was actually witty and clever wordplay. (Race in terms of a competition, as opposed to race as in skin color.)
That is all… except that apparently I have similar impulses and less self control than Cheshire Human. I can live with that. 
Well played, sir.
Just a note of appreciation for enlightening me to a very interesting and telling fact about the history of racism in America .
It appears as if you were addressing your entire post to me. Am I the “you” in the quoted sentence?
I should be used to you being exactly 100% wrong by now, but I guess I’m not. You can still surprise me.
You have this exactly backwards. Conservatives trust people to make decisions for themselves. Liberals want to force results on society because they don’t think black people or poor people are really people capable of making their own decisions–they’re just pets.
Wow! If we weren’t in the pit already, that last comment will draw remarks that would pit this thread.
It’s a shame that Farrakhan’s “White Folks, You Owe Us the Whole Damn Country” speech has been taken down from YouTube. It’d give folks an idea of what a hard core racist really sounds like.
I’ll wager Farrakhan isn’t a Tea Bagger.
Why hold back? He’s absolutely correct. Conservatives are willing to ignore every quality you were born with and demand that you be a productive member of society. Liberals are the ones that separate people into racial categories and say “Blacks are poorer than Whites”. While liberals say “we should fix that,” the more intelligent conservatives say “so?”
The word “intelligent” does not mean what you apparently think it does.
No. Conservatives are eager to ignore every quality you are born with because, hey, it just so happens they usually possess the qualities to become a productive member of society. Why separate anyone when you can ride the status quo that is completely in your favor by “treating everyone equally”, when equally really means “I got mine. Fuck off.”?
This does not apply to all conservatives, because it would make me look like a goddamn idiot to paint everyone with that broad of a brush. Just clowns like you.
No, that’s what racists say. Conservatives consider the income disparity between blacks and whites to be just as troubling as liberals, they just have different ideas about how best to address it.
Tax cuts!
You can see the NAACP’s 2008 annual report here, which shows that its annual revenues are about $3 million per year. Slavery was outlawed in the US in 1865; according to this, that’s $216,000 in 1865 money.
Now, I’ve been researching the value of slaves (the things I do for you people), and according to this, the value of a slave in Cuba in 1855 was about 300 pesos. The price was artificially inflated over the next five years due to the US Civil War and ever-increasing British efforts to curb the Caribbean slave trade, hence the use of the 1855 figure. By 1881, the Spanish peso had been pegged to the dollar at a 1:1 exchange rate, so presumably its value in 1850 was broadly similar.
Thus, $300 seems a fair valuation for a slave. So, in order to match the NAACP in annual revenue, a slave trader would have to sell 720 slaves a year. The largest slave ships, like the Tecora, could carry 500 slaves alone, so it seems likely that the larger slave-trading operations could easily trade more than 720 slaves a year.
In other words, it’s possible, but unlikely, that the NAACP has made more money off race than any slave trader ever.
Anyway, so what? The NAACP is not a for-profit enterprise. It’s an advocacy organization. Its board members earn salaries in the high $200,000 range, but it’s not as though anyone is getting rich off it.