An interracial coalition founds the NAACP to advance Black civil rights in America

Story: 1909 C.E.  |  Last updated: February 12, 1909

On February 12, 1909 C.E. — the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth — a diverse coalition of activists, journalists, and scholars gathered in New York City to launch what would become the largest and most enduring civil rights organization in American history. The group they formed was born of urgency, grief, and a clear-eyed belief that law and public pressure together could dismantle racial injustice.

Key findings

• NAACP founding: The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was formally established on February 12, 1909 C.E., by an interracial group of more than 60 prominent Americans responding to a surge in racial violence and systemic disenfranchisement.
• Interracial coalition: Founders included African Americans W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, and Mary Church Terrell alongside white allies Mary White Ovington, Moorfield Storey, Henry Moskowitz, and journalist William English Walling — a deliberate break from the all-Black composition of the earlier Niagara Movement.
• Civil rights strategy: From its earliest days, the organization combined political lobbying, public education, and legal litigation — a three-track model that would prove influential in civil rights movements worldwide for more than a century.

What made 1909 C.E. the turning point

The immediate catalyst was the Race Riot of 1908 C.E. in Springfield, Illinois — Abraham Lincoln’s hometown. White mobs attacked Black residents and destroyed Black-owned property in a city that many assumed had moved beyond the worst of post-Reconstruction violence. The shock of it reached William English Walling, a white journalist who wrote about the riot and called for action.

But the crisis ran far deeper than one city. Across the U.S. South, state legislatures had spent nearly two decades systematically stripping Black citizens of the right to vote. Beginning with Mississippi’s constitution of 1890 C.E., Southern states erected poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and white primaries designed to exclude Black voters — men who had been casting ballots for thirty years were suddenly told they did not “qualify” to register. Lynch mobs operated with near-total impunity. The rate of lynchings of Black men had reached an all-time high around the turn of the century.

Into this moment stepped a coalition that understood the problem demanded both moral clarity and legal force. Mary White Ovington, a social worker who had spent years documenting conditions in Black New York neighborhoods, joined Walling and Henry Moskowitz — a Jewish social worker and associate leader of the New York Society for Ethical Culture — to begin organizing. They sent solicitations to more than 60 prominent Americans and set the February 12 meeting date deliberately, on Lincoln’s centennial, to frame the work as the unfinished business of emancipation.

The people who made it possible

The NAACP drew together threads from several earlier efforts. The Niagara Movement, founded in 1905 C.E. by thirty-two African American leaders — forced to meet in Fort Erie, Ontario, because U.S. hotels were segregated — had articulated a radical platform demanding full civil and political rights without compromise. Seven of its members joined the NAACP’s first board of directors.

W. E. B. Du Bois, the Harvard-trained sociologist and author of The Souls of Black Folk, became the organization’s director of publications and research. He edited The Crisis, the NAACP’s quarterly magazine, for 24 years — turning it into one of the most widely read Black periodicals in the country and a vehicle for both political argument and cultural affirmation during the Harlem Renaissance.

Ida B. Wells, the investigative journalist who had spent decades documenting and publicizing the epidemic of lynching at personal risk to her own life, was a founder. So was Moorfield Storey, a white Boston attorney and former president of the American Bar Association, who became the organization’s first president and brought a powerful legal voice to the cause.

The coalition was also shaped by traditions often overlooked in mainstream histories. Moskowitz brought the ethics of the Jewish social reform movement. Ovington had been influenced by the settlement house tradition pioneered in part by women reformers working in immigrant and Black communities. Du Bois brought a Pan-African lens that connected Black American struggles to colonial resistance movements across Africa and the Caribbean. The NAACP was, from its first day, a convergence of multiple intellectual and moral traditions.

Lasting impact

The organization’s legal strategy produced some of the most consequential rulings in U.S. constitutional history. Thurgood Marshall, who led the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, argued and won Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 C.E., the Supreme Court decision that declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. He later became the first Black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. The NAACP’s lobbying work shaped the Civil Rights Act of 1964 C.E. and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 C.E.

Beyond legislation, the NAACP established a durable model for how civil society organizations can pursue systemic change: through sustained legal challenge, public communication, coalition-building, and grassroots chapter organizing. That model has been studied and adapted by human rights organizations on every continent.

Its publishing arm, The Crisis, helped create the infrastructure for Black intellectual and cultural life in the early 20th century. The Harlem Renaissance — the extraordinary flowering of Black literature, music, and visual art in the 1920s C.E. — was supported and amplified by the platform the NAACP had built. James Weldon Johnson, who served as executive secretary from 1920 C.E., was himself one of its central literary figures, author of the poem that became known as the Black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”

The NAACP’s archives, held at the Library of Congress and comprising nearly five million items, constitute one of the most complete records of the African American freedom struggle in existence — a resource for historians, lawyers, and activists that continues to generate new scholarship more than a century after the organization’s founding.

Blindspots and limits

The NAACP’s early years were marked by genuine tension over strategy and leadership. The organization’s more moderate legal and lobbying approach drew criticism from figures like Ida B. Wells, who felt the NAACP moved too cautiously and that Black women were marginalized within its leadership structures — a charge with lasting resonance: the organization has never had a permanent woman president. The NAACP’s focus on legal reform also meant it was sometimes slower to engage with economic inequality, labor organizing, and the deeper structures of poverty that racial discrimination both created and sustained. And while it became the largest civil rights organization in the country, it was never the only one — and the broader freedom movement always included voices and strategies the NAACP did not fully represent.