NAACP

In July 1905 W. E. B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter convened the Niagara Movement at Niagara Falls; by 1907 it had about 300 members in 30 branches. In 1908 Mary White Ovington became its only white member.⁠[1]

On August 14, 1908, a race riot broke out in Springfield, IllinoisIllinoisIllinois is a state of the United States that borders Lake Michigan and the states of Wisconsin, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri and Iowa; its capital is Springfield and its largest city is Chicago. It was admitted to the Union on December 3, 1818, as the 21st state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 12,812,508.Open the full entry; it lasted two days and killed eight people.⁠[1]

After the Springfield riot, a group of white liberals and African American leaders issued a call for a meeting on racial justice; about 60 people signed it, seven of them African Americans. The NAACP dates its birth to February 12, 1909. Its founders included Mary White Ovington, Oswald Garrison Villard, William English Walling and Henry Moscowitz, and the African American signers included W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Mary Church Terrell.⁠[2]

Mary Church Terrell accepted Du Bois’s invitation to help form the organization.⁠[1]

In 1910 the organization established its national office in New York City, with Moorfield Storey, a white constitutional lawyer and former president of the American Bar Association, as its first president. That year Du Bois, the only African American among its original executives, founded The Crisis, its publication.⁠[2]

In 1910 the Niagara Movement disbanded, and Du Bois left academia to become the NAACP’s director of publicity and research.⁠[1]

Membership grew from about 9,000 in 1917 to about 90,000 in 1919, with more than 300 local branches.⁠[2]

The organization campaigned against lynching for about 30 years and backed the Dyer Bill, which would have punished participants in lynch mobs and those who failed to prosecute them; the bill passed the House of Representatives but was defeated for good by a Senate filibuster in 1922.⁠[2]

The 1930 Margold Report laid groundwork for ending the “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson. In 1934 Du Bois resigned from the NAACP. In 1935 Walter White recruited Charles H. Houston as chief counsel, and Houston shaped the litigation strategy against school segregation.⁠[2][1]

Rosa ParksRosa ParksRosa Parks (1913–2005) was an American civil rights activist. Her arrest in 1955 for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama, helped spark the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott, often seen as the start of the U.S. civil rights movement.Open the full entry’s husband, Raymond Parks, was a charter member of the NAACP’s Montgomery branch. Rosa Parks became the branch secretary in 1943 and its youth adviser in 1949; under her and E. D. Nixon the branch focused on voter registration and on cases of racial discrimination and violence.⁠[3]

From 1944 to 1948 Du Bois returned as the NAACP’s director of special research. By 1946 the organization recorded roughly 600,000 members.⁠[1][2]

Harry T. Moore, an NAACP field secretary in FloridaFloridaFlorida is a U.S. state occupying mainly the Florida peninsula, with its capital at Tallahassee; its most populous city is Jacksonville. It entered the Union on March 3, 1845, as the 27th state, and had a population of 21,538,187 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry, was killed when his home was bombed on Christmas night in 1951; the organization describes the murder as unsolved and as one of many retaliatory crimes against the NAACP.⁠[2]

The NAACP’s litigation campaign culminated in five cases gathered under the name Oliver Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, KansasKansasKansas is a state of the United States bordered by Nebraska to the north, Missouri to the east, Oklahoma to the south, and Colorado to the west; its capital is Topeka and its largest city is Wichita. It was admitted to the Union on January 29, 1861, as the 34th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 2,937,880.Open the full entry, among them Briggs v. Elliott (South CarolinaSouth CarolinaSouth Carolina (officially the State of South Carolina) is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Ocean bordering Georgia and North Carolina; its capital is Columbia and its most populous city is Charleston. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on May 23, 1788, the eighth state to do so. Its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 5,118,425.Open the full entry), Davis v. County School Board (VirginiaVirginiaVirginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a U.S. state whose capital is Richmond. It entered the Union on June 25, 1788, as the 10th state, and had a population of 8,631,393 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry), Bolling v. Sharpe (Washington, D.C.) and the Delaware cases Gebhart v. Belton and Gebhart v. Bulah. Thurgood MarshallThurgood MarshallThurgood Marshall (1908–1993) was an American civil rights lawyer and judge. He founded the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in 1940 and long directed its litigation, winning Brown v. Board of Education; he later served as a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and as Solicitor General, and from 1967 to 1991 as the first African American Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.Open the full entry, chief counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, led the lawyers, who also included Robert Carter, Jack Greenberg and Charles Bledsoe.⁠[4]

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court of the United StatesSupreme Court of the United StatesThe Supreme Court of the United States is the highest court of the U.S. federal judiciary. Established under the Constitution and the Judiciary Act of 1789, it has consisted since 1869 of a Chief Justice and eight Associate Justices and sits in Washington, D.C.Open the full entry announced its unanimous decision that school segregation violated the Equal Protection and Due Process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment; Chief Justice Earl Warren arranged the unanimity, avoiding dissents and separate concurrences. In Brown II in 1955 the Court ordered desegregation to proceed “with all deliberate speed.”⁠[4]

The NAACP’s Washington bureau, led by the lobbyist Clarence M. Mitchell Jr., helped advance the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1964 and 1968 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The organization worked with A. Philip Randolph and others on the 1963 March on Washington.⁠[2]

In 1962 the home of Medgar Evers, the NAACP’s MississippiMississippiMississippi is a state of the United States on the Gulf of Mexico; Jackson is both its capital and its largest city. It was admitted to the Union on December 10, 1817, as the 20th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 2,961,279.Open the full entry field secretary, was firebombed, and he was later assassinated by a sniper in front of his residence.⁠[2]

Du Bois died in Ghana on August 27, 1963, on the eve of the March on Washington.⁠[1]

Derrick Johnson, a former president of the NAACP’s Mississippi State Conference, was elected vice chairman of the national board in February 2017 and served as interim leader from July, before the board unanimously elected him to succeed Cornell William Brooks for a three-year term. He has been the organization’s 19th president and CEO since October 2017.⁠[5][6]

Johnson was born in Detroit, attended Tougaloo College in Mississippi and earned a J.D. from the South Texas College of Law.⁠[6]

As of November 2026 the NAACP’s president and CEO was Derrick Johnson and the chairman of its national board of directors was Leon W. Russell. The organization says it has 2,200 chapters and more than 2 million activists across the nation.⁠[2]

In 1964 the Library of Congress became the NAACP’s official repository; the NAACP Records it holds span 1909 to 2010 and comprise approximately five million items.⁠[7]

NAACP: Official website: https://naacp.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[2]

X: Public account: https://x.com/NAACP (opens in a new window).⁠[2]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/naacpvideos/videos (opens in a new window).⁠[2]