Interracial American organization created to work for the abolition of segregation and discrimination in housing, education, employment, voting, and transportation; to oppose racism; and to ensure blacks their constitutional rights. The NAACP was created in 1909 with the merging of the Niagara Movement, a group of young blacks led by W.E.B. Du Bois, and a group of concerned whites.
Since its founding, the NAACP has been most successful in the areas of legal redress. Other areas of activity have included political action to secure enactment of civil-rights laws, programs of education and public information to win popular support, and direct action to achieve specific goals. In 1939 the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund was es tablished independently of the NAACP to act as the legal arm of the Civil Rights Movement, and it was the NAACP's legal council that carried to the Supreme Court the case (Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka) that resulted in the high court's landmark 1954 school-desegregation decision. The organization moved its headquarters from New York City to Baltimore in 1986.
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