The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded in 1909 by black and white leaders including Mary White Ovington and W. E. B. Du Bois. Created as a civil rights organization, the NAACP has throughout its existence worked to improve the lives of African Americans by fighting segregation, discrimination, and racism, and by securing legal rights and social equality through court cases, legislation, and protest.
The Scottsboro Nine were nine African American men and boys who, in 1931, were tried and convicted of raping two white women on an Alabama freight train. Though there was no physical evidence of the crime and the women’s testimony proved questionable, the men were found guilty. All nine were free by 1950, through legal processes and escape.
W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963) was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. At fifteen, Du Bois became the local correspondent for the New York Globe. Du Bois attended Fisk College in Nashville, Tennessee, as well as Harvard University and the University of Berlin and received a BA, MA, and PhD. He worked as a teacher, writer, and social researcher. Considered the father of “social science,” he wrote the groundbreaking book The Souls of Black Folk. He was involved with the formation of the National Association for the...
Thurgood Marshall (1908–1993), an African American lawyer and US Supreme Court justice, was born in Baltimore, Maryland. Marshall attended a segregated high school in Baltimore and then went to Lincoln University, where the student body was all black and the faculty all white. Because the University of Maryland Law School refused to accept African Americans, Marshall’s mother pawned her engagement and wedding rings so he could attend Howard Law School. With the legislative and executive branches of government largely...
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The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, during the congressional Reconstruction era. The amendment’s most significant provision—“No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”—created the potential for two interpretations. It seemed to some that Congress...