In 1910, Oklahoma passed a constitutional amendment allowing people whose grandfathers had been eligible to vote in 1866 to register without passing a literacy test. Since its inception, the NAACP has worked to achieve its goals through the judicial system, lobbying and peaceful protests. In 1910, Du Bois started The Crisis, which became the leading publication for Black writers it remains in publication today. Du Bois, the only Black person on the initial leadership team, served as director of publications and research. In its charter, the NAACP promised to champion equal rights and eliminate racial prejudice, and to “advance the interest of colored citizens” in regard to voting rights, legal justice and educational and employment opportunities.Ī white lawyer, Moorfield Storey, became the NAACP’s first president. Some early members of the organization, which included suffragists, social workers, journalists, labor reformers, intellectuals and others, had been involved in the Niagara Movement, a civil rights group started in 1905 and led by Du Bois, a sociologist and writer. Wells, Archibald Grimke and Mary Church Terrell. 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. In that event, two Black men being held in a Springfield jail for alleged crimes against white people were surreptitiously transferred to a jail in another city, spurring a white mob to burn down 40 homes in Springfield’s Black residential district, ransack local businesses and murder two Blacks. 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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