On this day in 1909… The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded. The organization’s mission is to achieve and maintain a society without racial discrimination. Currently the largest civil rights group in the United States, the NAACP was a driving force behind the end of lynching in the early-to-mid 1900s, the desegregation of schools in the 1950s, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and more!
Among the most famous of the NAACP’s original founders was W.E.B. DuBois. Five years after founding the NAACP, the organization expanded to fifty chapters nationwide. Today, the organization has more than half a million members! When the NAACP celebrated its 100th anniversary, they acknowledged that the group has made significant progress towards achieving their mission, but that there is still a lot of work to be done.
To learn more about the organization’s founding, check out W.E.B. DuBois Founds the NAACP [2:42].
You can find more about the Civil Rights movement in America in the 20th Century: The Civil Rights Movement [1:24:17], which contains the segment The NAACP and The Birth of a Nation [3:09].
Please screen these titles prior to sharing with your class as there may be sensitivities to some of the images.