This article traces the founding and historical development of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), from its origins in 1909 through the late twentieth century. For the organization's purpose, structure, and contemporary activities, see Naacp. For the legal strategy the organization employed in civil rights litigation, see NAACP Litigation Strategy - History. For progressive perspectives on the organization's role in American civil rights, see Civil Rights Act of 1964 - Progressive Viewpoint.

The NAACP was founded on February 12, 1909-the centennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth-in New York City, following a call issued by journalist Oswald Garrison Villard, the grandson of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. The immediate catalyst was the Springfield, Illinois race riot of August 1908, in which white mobs attacked black residents, killed at least two men, destroyed property, and drove hundreds from the city. Journalist William English Walling published an account of the riot calling for a revival of the abolitionist spirit, which prompted social worker Mary White Ovington and others to organize a national conference.

The founding conference, held in May 1909, brought together white progressives and black intellectuals. W.E.B. Du Bois, a sociologist and co-founder of the earlier Niagara Movement, was among the principal black participants. The organization incorporated formally in 1911. Its stated objectives included securing political, educational, social, and civil equality for black Americans and eliminating racial prejudice.

The organization established the Crisis magazine in 1910, with Du Bois as editor. The magazine served as the primary publication through which the NAACP communicated its agenda and documented racial violence, lynching statistics, and legal cases. Circulation reached approximately 100,000 by 1918.¹⁾

The NAACP's earliest legal campaigns focused on residential segregation and mob violence. In Guinn v. United States (1915), the organization supported a challenge to Oklahoma's grandfather clause for voter registration; the Supreme Court ruled the clause unconstitutional under the Fifteenth Amendment. In Buchanan v. Warley (1917), the NAACP successfully challenged a Louisville, Kentucky ordinance mandating residential segregation by block.²⁾

During the 1920s, the NAACP pursued a sustained anti-lynching campaign. James Weldon Johnson, who became executive secretary in 1920, lobbied Congress to pass the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill. The bill passed the House of Representatives in 1922 but was killed by filibuster in the Senate. Subsequent anti-lynching bills in 1934 and 1937-1938 suffered similar fates.³⁾

Walter White succeeded Johnson as executive secretary in 1931 and held the position until 1955. White, who could pass as white due to his light complexion, personally investigated lynchings and racial violence in the South, sometimes placing himself at considerable personal risk. Under White, the organization expanded its membership and broadened its legal program.

Charles Hamilton Houston, appointed as the NAACP's first special counsel in 1934, restructured the organization's litigation strategy. Houston, vice dean of Howard University School of Law, trained a cadre of lawyers-including Thurgood Marshall-in the use of constitutional litigation to attack the legal architecture of segregation. Houston's approach emphasized attacking the “separate but equal” doctrine established in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) incrementally, beginning with professional and graduate education where the absence of equal facilities was most demonstrable.⁴⁾

In Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938), the Supreme Court ruled that Missouri was required to provide legal education to black residents within the state rather than paying their tuition at out-of-state institutions.

NAACP membership grew substantially during World War II, rising from approximately 50,000 in 1940 to nearly 450,000 by 1946, as black servicemen and defense workers organized local branches.⁵⁾ The organization pressed the federal government on military segregation and discrimination in defense industries.

Thurgood Marshall, who became chief of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) when it separated as a distinct entity in 1940, won Smith v. Allwright (1944), in which the Supreme Court struck down the all-white primary in Texas as a violation of the Fifteenth Amendment. The LDF was formally incorporated separately from the NAACP in 1957, though the two organizations retained a close relationship for many years.

In 1948, the NAACP submitted an amicus brief supporting the Supreme Court's ruling in Shelley v. Kraemer, which held that racially restrictive covenants in real estate were judicially unenforceable under the Fourteenth Amendment.

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the organization faced pressure during the early Cold War period. Some branches were subjected to state-level investigations; officials in several southern states sought to compel disclosure of membership lists, and the NAACP resisted these demands in litigation that extended through the decade.⁶⁾

The NAACP LDF filed coordinated school desegregation cases in Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, and the District of Columbia in the early 1950s. These cases were consolidated before the Supreme Court as Brown v. Board of Education. On May 17, 1954, a unanimous Supreme Court held that racially segregated public schools were inherently unequal and thus unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.⁷⁾

The ruling provoked organized resistance in the South. In 1956, more than one hundred members of Congress signed the “Southern Manifesto,” which characterized Brown as a “clear abuse of judicial power” and pledged resistance to its implementation. Several southern states moved to suppress or ban the NAACP. Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Virginia all sought to compel the organization to disclose its membership lists or cease operations. In NAACP v. Alabama (1958), the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the state could not compel disclosure of the NAACP's membership lists, holding that freedom of association was protected under the Fourteenth Amendment.

The NAACP continued to press for implementation of Brown in federal courts throughout the late 1950s, while also supporting the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-1956) and other emerging direct-action campaigns. Rosa Parks, whose arrest in Montgomery triggered the boycott, had been active in the local NAACP chapter.

The emergence of direct-action organizations-the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)-created both collaboration and internal tensions within the broader civil rights coalition. The NAACP maintained its emphasis on litigation and legislative lobbying while supporting the broader movement.

Roy Wilkins succeeded Walter White as executive secretary in 1955 and led the organization through the central years of the civil rights era. Wilkins testified before Congress in support of civil rights legislation and coordinated the organization's participation in the 1963 March on Washington, at which Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” address.

The NAACP lobbied extensively for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination in employment, public accommodations, and federally assisted programs, and for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which authorized federal oversight of elections in states with histories of discriminatory practices.⁸⁾ See Civil Rights Act of 1964 - Progressive Viewpoint for a progressive perspective on the Act's significance.

Following the assassination of Medgar Evers-the NAACP's Mississippi field secretary-by Byron De La Beckwith on June 12, 1963, the organization continued its operations in Mississippi under heightened risk. Evers's murder and the subsequent failed prosecutions of De La Beckwith (who was not convicted until 1994) became a prominent episode in the history of racial violence and judicial failure in the South.

Following the passage of major federal civil rights legislation, the NAACP shifted increasing attention toward enforcement, economic equity, and continued voting rights protection. Benjamin Hooks succeeded Roy Wilkins as executive director in 1977 and held the position until 1992.

The organization filed litigation and engaged in lobbying around affirmative action policies, busing for school desegregation, and extension and renewal of the Voting Rights Act in 1975, 1982, and subsequent years.

During the 1980s, the NAACP opposed nominations to the federal judiciary that it judged adverse to civil rights, including the unsuccessful Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork in 1987.

Benjamin Chavis succeeded Hooks as executive director in 1993 but resigned in 1994 following controversy over the use of organizational funds. Myrlie Evers-Williams, widow of Medgar Evers, was elected board chair in 1995 and oversaw an institutional reorganization. Kweisi Mfume, a former congressman, became president and CEO in 1996 and presided over a period of financial stabilization.

Historians have debated the relative effectiveness of the NAACP's legalistic, incremental strategy compared to the mass direct-action approach associated with the SCLC and SNCC during the 1960s; some scholars argue the litigation model was indispensable to durable legal change, while others contend it slowed the movement's pace.⁹⁾

The relationship between the NAACP's largely integrationist framework and the separatist or nationalist positions held by figures such as Marcus Garvey in the 1920s and black power advocates in the 1960s has been characterized differently by historians, with some viewing the tensions as ideological divergence and others as reflecting class or strategic differences within black political thought.¹⁰⁾

The degree to which Cold War anti-communism shaped the NAACP's internal purges and public positioning in the late 1940s and 1950s-including its distance from figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson-is disputed among historians of the period.¹¹⁾

1. Du Bois, W.E.B. Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940.

2. Kellogg, Charles Flint. NAACP: A History of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Volume 1, 1909-1920. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967.

3. McNeil, Genna Rae. Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for Civil Rights. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983.

4. Sullivan, Patricia. Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement. New York: The New Press, 2009.

5. Zangrando, Robert L. The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909-1950. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980.

6. Dudziak, Mary L. Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

7. Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

8. NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Patterson, 357 U.S. 449 (1958).

9. Lawson, Steven F. Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944-1969. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976.

10. Berg, Manfred. “The Ticket to Freedom”: The NAACP and the Struggle for Black Political Integration. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005.