The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded on February 12, 1909, the centennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. A multi-racial group of activists answered ”The Call” for a national conference in response to a vicious episode of white racist violence against Black people in Mr. Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois. The racist attack came 10 years after the prototype of such attacks, the ugly racist coup d’etat in Wilmington, N.C. in 1898. The Wilmington terrorism had been condoned and covered over by racist histories, and no one was brought to justice for it. This set the stage, throughout the next decade for similar attacks across the South. When these pogroms reached Lincoln’s hometown, it sparked enough outrage among some white progressives to put out a call to action which said, in part:
“We call upon all the believers in democracy to join in a national conference for the discussion of present evils, the voicing of protests, and the renewal of the struggle for civil and political liberty.”
Many distinguished leaders responded to this Call, including Ida Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. DuBois, Henry Moscowitz, Mary White Ovington, Oswald Garrison Villiard, and William English Walling. With many years of hard work, they and hundreds of thousands of other members have built the NAACP into the oldest and largest civil rights organization in the United States.
