NAACP, Chicago Branch letters

This collection consists primarily of correspondence, handwritten and typescript, from 1918 to 1937, written by Aldelbert H. Roberts, Robert W. Bagnall, Walter White, James Weldon Johnson, and Oscar De Priest; most of the letters are addressed to Morris Lewis of The Chicago Defender and the Chicago branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and concern NAACP business and branch activities, including a proposed 1926 reorganization of NAACP regional offices. Additionally, a 1926 letter from Mary E. McDowell to Lewis concerns the play “Black Velvet” and a 1925 letter from Robert R. Moton to Lewis discusses a visit of the Woodmen of Union of Arkansas to the Tuskegee Institute campus. 1918 letters to and from Oscar De Priest concern his People's Movement Club. Unidentified telegrams, some items of correspondence, and a 1927 memorandum from the Chicago Branch of the NAACP discuss the NAACP’s legal battle in the extradition case of Sam Kennedy from Illinois to Georgia, for fears that he might be lynched if relocated to the South. Letters from Walter White (1930) and Patrick J. Hurley (1929), Secretary of War, reflect the efforts of Oscar De Priest to clear the names of the soldiers of the 25th Infantry framed in the 1906 Brownsville Affair. White replies that due to the likelihood of such “an enormous and very expensive task” and that “in view of a multiplicity of other more timely and important jobs,” the NAACP will not involve itself in the exoneration of these men.