NAACP

The NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) is the United States’ oldest and largest organization devoted to ending racial discrimination in housing, education, employment, voting, and transportation and to guaranteeing Black Americans their constitutional rights. Its creation in 1909 was the result of outrage on the part of white and Black Americans in the aftermath of the 1908 Springfield Race Riot and represented a seminal decision by leaders of both races to work together to eradicate systemic racism.

(Read W.E.B. Du Bois’s Britannica essay on African American literature.)

Founding principles

The NAACP has its roots in the Niagara Movement, the at-the-time radical group of Black intellectuals who advocated for equal civil and political rights for Black Americans. Led by W.E.B. Du Bois, the group’s calls for political rights and college education stood in sharp contrast to Booker T. Washington’s more conciliatory and pragmatic approach toward white society, which focused on vocational training and economic gains. The shock waves caused by the 1908 Springfield riot—during which a white mob burned the homes and businesses of African Americans and lynched two Black men during a two-day siege of the Illinois capital—spurred liberal white activists to unite with Du Bois and other Black leaders.

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On February 12, 1909—the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth—the NAACP was founded. Among its initial group were activist Mary White Ovington and journalists William English Walling and Oswald Garrison Villard. While dominated by white activists, the group included seven Black Americans, including Du Bois, investigative journalist Ida B. Wells (who would leave the NAACP in a 1912 dispute), and activist Mary Church Terrell.

The mission of the NAACP is grounded in the Constitution, specifically the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments, which ended slavery and guaranteed equal protection and the right to vote, respectively. As such, many of the group’s victories in its first 50 years were won in the courts. But with the 1910 launch of The Crisis, the NAACP’s magazine, the group also guaranteed its place in the national conversation on politics and the arts. It also played a key role in supporting the Harlem Renaissance by giving a platform to the burgeoning African American literary scene, publishing the works of Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer. Despite its stated commitment to interracial leadership, Du Bois, as director of publications and research and editor of The Crisis, was the only Black member of the original executive team.

Early victories for the NAACP included a campaign to ban the showing of the 1915 racist film The Birth of a Nation, a movie that sparked protests in a number of U.S. cities. Although ultimately not successful, the action proved a harbinger for street protests later in the 20th century. The group also launched a campaign to ban lynching. Its advocacy on the matter led to Pres. Woodrow Wilson’s 1918 disavowal of the practice, and in 1919 the NAACP published the most comprehensive work on lynching in the country (Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1919) since Ida B. Wells’s 1895 landmark work The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States. From 1920 to 1938, whenever a lynching occurred, the NAACP flew a flag outside its New York City headquarters declaring, “A man was lynched yesterday.” Despite stalwart lobbying by the NAACP throughout the 1920s and 1930s for multiple pieces of anti-lynching legislation, lynching was not formally declared a hate crime in the United States until the 2022 passage of the Emmett Till Antilynching Act.

Legal victories

As noted, the NAACP saw some of its most landmark victories in the courts as part of its campaign to systematically dismantle the country’s Jim Crow laws. The NAACP filed its first “friend of the court” brief in the 1915 voting rights case Guinn v. United States, in which the Supreme Court struck down discriminatory voting rules in Oklahoma in an 8–1 decision. Then, in 1917, in Buchanan v. Warley the NAACP played a pivotal role in a case of race-based housing segregation that was struck down unanimously. In the 1946 case of Morgan v. Virginia, the NAACP won a 7–1 ruling from the Supreme Court to bar segregation on interstate buses. (That ruling would prove essential to the Freedom Rides of the 1960s.)

Perhaps the NAACP’s most enduring legacy is its systematic legal dismantling of the “separate but equal” doctrine established in the 1896 Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson. It was a victory decades in the making. In 1930 Walter F. White, the author of the lynching report, became NAACP executive secretary, and by 1935 he had recruited Charles H. Houston as NAACP general counsel. Houston, former law school vice-dean at Howard University, had a protégé in a young lawyer named Thurgood Marshall. Houston masterminded an incremental strategy for ending separate but equal that started in the world of higher education. Marshall, by then the head of the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund, successfully argued in the 1950 case of Sweatt v. Painter that state universities admitting white students to graduate programs while barring Black applicants violated the Fourteenth Amendment and was unconstitutional because no equivalent Black facilities existed. The decision created the case-law fissures that would have separate but equal come tumbling down four years later in Brown v. Board of Education.

The Brown case had its roots in the 1940s and was actually the consolidation of a number of cases involving segregated education in Kansas, Delaware, South Carolina, and Virginia. Central to the NAACP’s argument was that the Supreme Court’s 7–1 ruling in Plessy was flawed and that separate but equal violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. Although the case focused on education, NAACP leadership knew that if the court sided with them, the impact of the ruling would go far beyond schools. On May 17, 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing for a unanimous court, struck down Plessy.

Three years later the NAACP would be at the center of seeing Brown put into action when Arkansas NAACP chapter president Daisy Bates recruited nine Black students to integrate Little Rock Central High, an all-white high school. It wasn’t until Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered federal troops to intervene that the Little Rock Nine were allowed to attend the school.

Role in the civil rights era

When in 1955 Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy in Mississippi, was murdered at the hands of two white men, the NAACP declared it a lynching, in keeping with its decades-long work against the practice. A young NAACP leader, Medgar Evers, gathered evidence as Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, held an open-casket funeral for her son so that the world could see the brutality of his death.

Just months later, another young NAACP organizer, Rosa Parks, infuriated by Till’s murder and the acquittal of his killers, refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus to a white passenger.

As the American civil rights movement grew in the 1950s and 1960s, there was often disagreement among groups regarding strategy, leadership, and approach—in ways not dissimilar to the fissure between Du Bois and Washington. The NAACP continued to function as the movement’s legal and legislative backbone, providing bail assistance, legal defense, and federal lobbying muscle. However, strategic friction frequently arose between the NAACP’s institutional approach and the more direct, nonviolent tactics favored by grassroots groups including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”) and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Despite ideological differences, the groups united for the landmark 1963 March on Washington. Earlier that year, Evers was assassinated in his driveway after returning from an NAACP meeting. The events raised the national consciousness on race issues, leading to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In the last quarter of the 20th century, the organization faced challenges, even as it worked against apartheid policies in South Africa in the 1980s. In 1994, while the organization was struggling financially, executive director Benjamin Chavis used NAACP funds to pay off an organization employee who accused him of sexual harassment. At the turn of the 21st century, the NAACP sponsored campaigns against youth violence, encouraged economic enterprise among Black Americans, and led voter drives to increase participation in the political process.

21st century

Following the legal collapse of Jim Crow, the NAACP expanded its mission toward other issues including the defense of voting rights. But it also struggled to secure its place in the national discussion of race against newer, more upstart groups including Black Lives Matter. In 2020 the NAACP called out the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota as a lynching just as it had done more than half a century earlier with the death of Emmett Till, but it also drew criticism for its 2026 call to Black college athletes to not play for public schools in states where voting rights were under attack.

Learn more about NAACP leaders