Join millions of activists working to build an inclusive world! The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is the oldest, largest and most prominent civil rights organization in America. The NAACP is a not-for-profit and non-partisan Association. The international headquarters of the Association is located in Baltimore, Maryland. There are seven regional offices and some 2,200 local branch chapters. Our Mission
Our mission is to achieve equity, political rights, and social inclusion by advancing policies and practices that expand human and civil rights, eliminate discrimination, and accelerate the well-being, education, and economic security of Black people and all persons of color. Vision Statement
We envision an inclusive community rooted in liberation where all persons can exercise their civil and human rights without discrimination. Objectives
The following statement of objectives is found on the first page of the NAACP Constitution – the principal objectives shall be:
To ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of all citizens;
To achieve equality of rights and eliminate race and prejudice among the citizens of the United States;
To remove all barriers of racial discrimination through democratic processes;
To seek enactment and enforcement of federal, state, and local laws securing civil rights;
To inform the public of the adverse effects of racial discrimination and to seek its elimination;
To educate persons as to their constitutional rights and to take all lawful action to secure the exercise thereof; and
To take any other lawful action in furtherance of these objectives, consistent with the NAACP’s Articles of Incorporation and this Constitution. When the NAACP was founded in 1909, the crisis was unmistakable. Thirteen years earlier the Supreme Court had handed down Plessy v. The poll tax, the literacy test, the grandfather clause not to mention the burning cross - made sure the descendants of slaves "knew their place." In the summer of 1908 a race riot erupted in Springfield, Illinois, the hometown of Abraham Lincoln. Scores of Blacks were killed or wounded in the melee. The brutality of the event ignited a debate in the national press about the state of race relations. "Doesn't anyone care what happens to Blacks in America?”
As it happens, a wealthy young white woman named Mary White Ovington was deeply concerned about the plight of Blacks in her native New York City. In 1909, Ovington and William English Walling, a liberal Southern journalist agreed to convene a bi-racial conference to address "the Negro Question." It was out of this conference that the NAACP was born. Among the early leaders of the Association was Harvard intellectual W.E.B. DuBois, a prominent voice in an already established organization of influential Black thinkers known as the Niagara Movement. The initial 1905 Niagara Movement conference had to be moved to Niagara Falls, Canada because housing for an integrated group could not be found on the U.S. DuBois was instrumental in bringing the Niagara Movement into the orbit of the NAACP, and the two organizations were effectively merged.
