National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), one of the most influential and longest-lasting African American civil rights associations, was formed in 1909. A group of about sixty activists, most of them white, established the group. Among the founders, however, were some of the most famous African American reformers in history, including American journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862–1931) and writer and editor W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963). By 1917, the NAACP had nine thousand members, a number that grew to ninety thousand by 1919.

The organization promoted equality for African Americans and quickly established itself as a resource for legal aid against discrimination. It played a major role in the national antilynching (unlawful hanging by rope until death) campaign waged throughout the early decades of the twentieth century. By pressuring various presidents and lawmakers, the

NAACP also was a key factor in the passage of antidiscriminatory laws throughout the 1900s. Future U.S. Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall (1908–1993) served as the group's chief counsel from 1938 to 1961.

In 1955, NAACP member Rosa Parks (1913–2005) unknowingly started the civil rights movement when she refused to give up her seat to a white man on a segregated (racially separated) bus in Montgomery, Alabama . (See Montgomery Bus Boycott .) She was arrested for breaking a local ordinance, but her act of civil disobedience (refusal to obey rules or laws, usually in a nonviolent manner) sparked a boycott of the city buses, and what followed was a decades-long struggle for civil rights. The NAACP was one of several organizations leading the way.

By the end of the twentieth century, the NAACP focused its efforts on educational programs for youth as well as development of better economic conditions for African Americans. Its membership going into the twenty-first century was nearly five hundred thousand.