HISTORY

The NAACP was established in February 1909 in New York City by an interracial group of activists, partially in response to the 1908 Springfield race riot in Illinois.

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The NAACP’s founding members included white progressives Mary White Ovington, Henry Moskowitz, William English Walling, and Oswald Garrison Villard, along with such African Americans as W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida Wells-Barnett, Archibald Grimke and Mary Church Terrell.