NAACP

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People — the NAACP — is the oldest and largest civil rights organization in the United States. Founded on February 12, 1909, on the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth, the NAACP was created by a diverse coalition of Black activists and white progressives who were horrified by the racial violence sweeping the nation. Among its key founders were scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, journalist and anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells, and social reformers Mary White Ovington and Oswald Garrison Villard. For more than a century, the NAACP has fought racial injustice on every front. W.E.B. Du Bois founded and edited The Crisis, the NAACP's magazine, which became one of the most influential Black publications in American history. The organization filed more than 50 anti-lynching bills in Congress over decades — never passing one, but building relentless public pressure against racial terror. Thurgood Marshall led the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and argued the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case before the Supreme Court in 1954, which declared school segregation unconstitutional. The NAACP helped organize the 1963 March on Washington. Rosa Parks, one of the most celebrated figures in civil rights history, was the secretary of the Montgomery, Alabama NAACP chapter. Medgar Evers served as a key Mississippi NAACP leader before his assassination in 1963. Today, the NAACP continues its work through legal advocacy, legislation, community organizing, and education. Its record of persistence across more than 115 years makes it one of the most consequential organizations in the history of American democracy.