National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

Melanie Carter

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is America's most visible civil rights organization. Founded in 1909 by an interracial group of social activists, intellectuals, and descendants of abolitionists, the organization has consistently worked to socially and legally transform America from an exclusive to an inclusive democracy. Many of the NAACP founders were twentieth-century social luminaries, including distinguished scholar W. E. B. Du Bois, activist and journalist Ida WellsBarnett, social reformers Jane Addams and Mary White Ovington, noted education professor John Dewey, and publisher and philanthropist Oswald Garrison Villard. The impetus for the organization's founding has been traced to two events: the establishment of the Niagara Movement in 1905 and the race riot and lynching that occurred in the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln in August of 1908. The Niagara Movement, led by Du Bois, was an exclusively Black organization determined to secure the full rights of African ...

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