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Birth of an organization

By David Ellington Wright

The year is 2005 and it has been 96 years since the birth of the NAACP. On Feb. 12, 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was created by a group that consisted of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. DuBois, Henry Moscowitz, Mary White Ovington, Oswald Garrison Villiard, and William English Walling. They came together to answer the call to rejuvenate the struggle for civil and political liberty. They initially called themselves the National Negro Committee.

The following year, W.E.B. DuBois founded The Crisis Magazine as the leading voice of the voiceless, and it remains the official publication of the NAACP. In 1913, the association organized a nationwide protest against the infamous silent film “Birth of a Nation.”  

In 1917, the NAACP fought the U.S. government to enable African Americans to be commissioned as officers in World War I. Six hundred officers were commissioned, and 700,000 Black Americans registered for the draft. The following year, President Woodrow Wilson conceded the NAACP’s demands and made a public statement against lynching.

In 1935, NAACP lawyers John Houston and Thurgood Marshall won the battle to admit a Black student to the University of Maryland. Almost 20 years later, Marshall, as special counsel, did it again with the Brown v. Board of Education decision.

Ten years later, with the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the NAACP registered more than 80,000 voters in the South.

At 96 years old, the NAACP doesn’t seem to be running out of gas anytime soon. At this years’ convention, Chairman Julian Bond called on Congress to renew key components of the Voting Rights Act.

Birth of an organization
Changing the world’s view