The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) became the oldest major U.S. civil rights organization founded in 1909.
The organization formed in response to racial violence, especially the 1908 Springfield race riot in Illinois. Its founders included W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary White Ovington, Moorfield Storey, Ida B. Wells, and others.
The NAACP combined legal challenges, investigative journalism, lobbying, and public campaigning. Its Legal Defense Fund, then part of the organization, helped develop the litigation strategy that led to Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
The NAACP is sometimes confused with later movement groups such as the Congress of Racial Equality, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Those organizations were founded in 1942, 1957, and 1960, respectively.