Definition
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is the United States' oldest national civil rights organization, founded in New York City in February 1909 by a multiracial group of activists including W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Mary White Ovington, Moorfield Storey, and Henry Moskowitz, in response to the 1908 Springfield, Illinois race riot.
For more than a century it has been the primary legal and organizing engine of the African American civil rights effort — building branches in cities and small towns, lobbying federal and state legislatures, and litigating the cases that progressively dismantled the legal architecture of Jim Crow.
Why it matters
How it works
The organization grew out of the Niagara Movement (1905), a Du Bois-led network of Black intellectuals who rejected Booker T. Washington's accommodationist program. After the Springfield riot in 1908 — in which white mobs lynched Black residents and burned Black neighborhoods within sight of Abraham Lincoln's home — a coalition of Black activists and white progressives founded the NAACP in February 1909. Its initial program: legal protection against lynching, equal education, voting rights, and an end to legal segregation.
The legal arm became its defining instrument. Charles Hamilton Houston, dean of Howard Law School, trained a generation of Black lawyers (including Thurgood Marshall, who graduated first in his Howard class in 1933) and designed the multi-decade litigation strategy that would attack Jim Crow piece by piece. The strategy began with graduate education — the cases the NAACP could most easily win, because states could not credibly maintain "separate but equal" professional schools. Murray v. Pearson (1936), Gaines v. Canada (1938), Sweatt v. Painter (1950), and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents (1950) built the precedent for Brown (1954).
The branch structure complemented the legal strategy. By 1946 the NAACP had more than 1,000 branches with about 450,000 members; by the early 1960s, more than 500,000. Branches ran voter-registration drives, documented police violence, supported local desegregation lawsuits, lobbied state legislatures, and provided the institutional spine for federal-level organizing. Field secretaries — Moore in Florida, Evers in Mississippi, Roy Wilkins as national executive secretary from 1955 — became the public faces of the organization in their regions.
The NAACP's relationship to other civil-rights organizations was sometimes tense. SCLC (1957) under Martin Luther King Jr. and SNCC (1960) preferred mass nonviolent direct action; the NAACP under Wilkins preferred legal and electoral channels. The competition was generally productive — different tactics worked in different contexts — but the friction was real. The 1960s federal civil rights laws emerged from the work of all three traditions; the post-1968 movement returned the NAACP to its longstanding role as the organization that endures between cycles.