National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

interracial American organization created to work for the abolition of segregation and discrimination in housing, education, employment, voting, and transportation; to oppose racism; and to ensure African Americans their constitutional rights. The NAACP was created in 1909 by an interracial group consisting of W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, Mary White Ovington, and others concerned with the challenges facing African Americans, especially in the wake of the 1908 Springfield (Illinois) Race Riot. Some of the founding members had been associated with the Niagara Movement, a civil rights group led by Du Bois.

African American students walking onto the campus of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, …
AP/Wide World Photos

Many of the NAACP's actions have focused on national issues; for example, the group helped persuade President Woodrow Wilson to denounce lynching in 1918. Other areas of activism have involved political action to secure enactment of civil rights laws, programs of education and public information to win popular support, and direct action to achieve specific goals. In 1939 the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund was established independently of the NAACP to act as the legal arm of the civil rights movement, and it was the NAACP's legal council that carried to the Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the case that resulted in the high court's landmark 1954 school-desegregation decision. The organization had also won a significant victory in 1946, with Morgan v. Virginia, which successfully barred segregation in interstate travel, setting the stage for the Freedom Rides of 1961.

The murder of NAACP field director Medgar Evers in 1963 gave the group national prominence, likely contributing to the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. In the 1980s the NAACP publicized opposition to apartheid policies in South Africa. The organization moved its headquarters from New York City to Baltimore, Maryland, in 1986. It also operates a bureau in Washington, D.C., and has branch offices in dozens of cities across the United States. At the turn of the 21st century, the NAACP sponsored campaigns against youth violence, encouraged economic enterprise among African Americans, and led voter drives to increase participation in the political process.