"'Big Government, Big Minority, and Big Oil': Margaret Bush Wilson's NAACP during the 1970s Energy Crisis"

Grounded in research from the heretofore unavailable Margaret Bush Wilson Papers (800 Lin/ft), this paper examines what Laura Kalman describes as one of the “strange alliances” created around President Carter’s energy policy. In 1978, the NAACP stunned old liberal allies by breaking with Carter and urging the adoption of an energy policy that tracked closely with the oil industry's position. NAACP insiders rightly connected the organization’s new emphasis to the impact of attorney Margaret Bush Wilson (b. 1919 - 2009), the Association’s national board of director’s chairperson (1975-83) and the first black woman to hold this position. Shortly after taking office, Wilson called on the movement to “transform itself into the vanguard of the world struggle for human rights and economic parity” by creating “new platforms and forming new coalitions, both domestically and international.” Challenging the view of post-1965 declension, this paper examines Wilson’s unremitting efforts to engage the relationship between capitalism and democracy during ‘long 1970s’. Without a doubt, the NAACP’s new pivot toward the private sector reflected the constraints of a new era, one that witnessed the rise of the New Right and a recession that spurred a fundamental restructuring of capital, labor relations, and the welfare state. I argue that by linking the black quest for economic parity to energy and the nation's economic growth, Wilson’s NAACP sought to move African Americans further into the mainstream of the nation’s political economy while expanding the black freedom struggle beyond those issues traditionally regarded as civil rights.