At the time of Martin Luther King, Jr.‘s birth in 1929, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was already the largest and most influential civil rights organization in the United States. King’s father, Martin Luther King, Sr., headed Atlanta’s NAACP branch; and in 1944, King, Jr. joined the Morehouse College chapter. While he maintained his NAACP affiliation throughout his life, King diverged from the organization’s preference for litigation and lobbying tactics rather than nonviolent direct action to end racial discrimination. The emergence of King as a national leader following the success of the Montgomery bus boycott and the burgeoning activism of young blacks challenged the dominance of the NAACP during the late 1950s and 1960s.
The NAACP was formed in 1909 when progressive whites joined forces with young blacks from the Niagara Movement, a group dedicated to full political and civil rights for African Americans. With a mission to ensure that black citizens are “physically free from peonage, mentally free from ignorance, politically free from disfranchisement, and socially free from insult,” the NAACP initially focused on ending the practice of lynching. Although lobbying efforts did not persuade Congress to pass anti-lynching laws, the 1919 publication of an NAACP report entitled Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States convinced President Woodrow Wilson and other politicians to condemn mob violence.
In 1939, the NAACP established the Legal Defense and Education Fund, an independent legal arm that went on to win court decisions invalidating the grandfather clause, restrictive housing covenants, white-only primaries, and white-only juries. The NAACP’s assault on segregation in public education culminated in 1954 when its legal counsel, under the leadership of Thurgood Marshall, successfully argued the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case before the Supreme Court.
Under the leadership of E. D. Nixon, the Montgomery branch of the NAACP helped launch the Montgomery buys boycott in 1955; and Nixon, Ralph Abernathy, and Rosa Parks were among the NAACP activists who joined with King to form the Montgomery Improvement Association. In 1956, local NAACP attorney Fred Grey, who defended Parks after her December 1955 arrest, represented the plaintiffs in Browder vs. Gayle, the case that eventually overturned Montgomery ’s bus segregation laws.
Throughout the 1960s, the NAACP as an organization maintained its focus on litigation and lobbying; but many of its members participated in direct action campaigns led by King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). At the same time, NAACP college and youth group activists—including Marion Barry, Diane Nash, and John Lewis—became affiliated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
As the southern protest movement gained momentum, the NAACP not only faced intimidation and retaliation from segregationist groups, but also criticism from many African Americans who opposed the organization’s moderate approach and its racially diverse composition. The NAACP did, however, provide legal counsel and financial aid to the more militant civil rights groups, while at the same time maintaining its image as a mainstream civil rights organization. In 1963, the NAACP helped organize the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom; and through wide-spread publicity campaigns and lobbying efforts, the organization contributed to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
For the past century, the NAACP has continuously been a national, multiracial voice for political, educational, social, and economic equality. Headquartered in Baltimore, the organization has 1,600 adult branches and 600 youth and college chapters. There are currently seven regional offices representing 49 states, the District of Columbia, and five countries.