NAACP Founded on Lincoln's Centennial

Context

In the decades after Reconstruction, Southern states enacted Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation and systematically stripped African Americans of voting rights through poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses. Lynchings reached record levels in the early twentieth century, often with little or no legal consequence. The 1908 race riot in Springfield, Illinois—Abraham Lincoln’s hometown—exposed the failure of existing institutions to protect Black citizens even outside the Deep South and prompted renewed calls for organized resistance.

What Happened

Following the Springfield violence, social workers Mary White Ovington and Henry Moskowitz, along with journalist William English Walling, met in New York in January 1909 to plan a national response. They circulated a call for support that was signed by more than sixty prominent Americans, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary Church Terrell, Oswald Garrison Villard, and Florence Kelley. The document was issued on February 12, 1909, the hundredth anniversary of Lincoln’s birth, and is widely regarded as the founding date of the NAACP.

Aftermath

The organization’s first national office opened in New York City in 1910. Moorfield Storey, a constitutional lawyer and former president of the American Bar Association, was named president, while Du Bois became director of publications and research and launched the monthly magazine The Crisis. Early efforts focused on publicizing lynchings, challenging discriminatory laws through the courts, and building local branches across the country.

Legacy

Over the following decades the NAACP became the nation’s leading civil-rights organization, securing landmark Supreme Court victories such as Guinn v. United States (1915) and Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and helping to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Its combination of litigation, legislation, and public advocacy established a durable model for interracial coalition-building and legal strategies that influenced subsequent movements for equality at home and abroad.