Founding of the NAACP

On February 12, 1909 — the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth — a group of Black and white activists came together to form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP. The organization was founded in direct response to the horrifying 1908 Springfield Race Riot in Illinois, where a white mob attacked the Black community in Abraham Lincoln's own hometown. The violence shocked the nation and proved that something had to be done. Among the founders were some of the most brilliant and courageous people of their time. Moorfield Storey, a white civil rights lawyer, became the NAACP's first president. W.E.B. Du Bois, a scholar and activist, became the organization's director of publicity and research. He launched The Crisis magazine, which became one of the most important publications in Black American history. Ida B. Wells, a fearless journalist, had been fighting against racial violence for years. Mary White Ovington, a white social worker, Henry Moskowitz, a social reformer, and Oswald Garrison Villard, the grandson of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, helped bring people of different backgrounds together for the cause. From the very beginning, the NAACP chose to fight injustice through the courts, through education, and through raising public awareness. Over the decades, the organization won landmark legal victories, including Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which ended school segregation. Today, the NAACP remains the oldest and largest civil rights organization in the United States, with hundreds of thousands of members continuing the fight for justice and equality.