A white lawyer, Moorfield Storey, became the NAACP’s first president. Du Bois, the only Black person on the initial leadership team, served as director of publications and research.
The NAACP's most famous case was Brown v. Board of Education, which ended government-enforced racial segregation in the public school system.
Marshall, who founded the LDF in 1940, won a number of other important civil rights cases involving issues such as voting rights and discriminatory housing practices. In 1967, he became the first African American to serve as a Supreme Court justice.
The NAACP or National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was established in 1909 and is America’s oldest and largest civil rights organization.
Thoroughgood "Thurgood" MarshallThoroughgood "Thurgood" Marshall (July 2, 1908 – January 24, 1993) was an American lawyer and civil rights activist who served as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from October 1967 until October 1991. Marshall was the U.S. Supreme Court's first African American justice.
Clarence ThomasGeorge H.W. Bush replaced him with Clarence Thomas, a conservative Black justice. Marshall died in 1993 at age 84. Today, Marshall is remembered as one of the United States' greatest legal minds and an unwavering force for equality under the law.
Thurgood MarshallThurgood Marshall was the first African American to serve as a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. He joined the Court in 1967, the year this photo was taken.
Thurgood Marshall's Family Marshall was born to Norma A. Marshall and William Canfield on July 2, 1908. His parents were mulatottes, which are people classified as being at least half white. Norma and William were raised as “Negroes” and each taught their children to be proud of their ancestry.
Clarence ThomasClarence Thomas, (born June 23, 1948, Pinpoint, near Savannah, Georgia, U.S.), associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1991, the second African American to serve on the court.
Ketanji Brown Jackson has been confirmed as the first African-American woman to serve as a justice of the United States Supreme Court.
John JayThe First Supreme Court As stipulated by the Judiciary Act of 1789, there was one Chief Justice, John Jay, and five Associate Justices: James Wilson, William Cushing, John Blair, John Rutledge and James Iredell.
Johnson nominated distinguished civil rights lawyer Thurgood Marshall to be the first African American justice to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States. Marshall had already made his mark in American law, having won 29 of the 32 cases he argued before the Supreme Court, most notably the landmark case Brown v.
Thurgood Marshall is a famous NAACP lawyer who became the first African American Supreme Court justice.
Sandra Day O'ConnorAs the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States, Sandra Day O'Connor became an inspiration to millions.
Only two African American justices, Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas, have served on the court so far.
Here are some of his most powerful quotes: "Where you see wrong or inequality or injustice, speak out, because this is your country. This is your democracy. Make it.
How Thurgood Marshall became the first Black U.S. Supreme Court justice. As a civil rights attorney, he won a landmark case to end segregation in public schools—then fought to uphold those gains through dissent on a changing Court. Decades before Thurgood Marshall was sworn into the U.S. Supreme Court on October 2, 1967, ...
Thurgood Marshall poses in his New York residence on September 11, 1962 , after the Senate confirmation of his nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals. Five years later, Marshall would become the first Black man to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.
Marshall grew up during the so-called Jim Crow era, the century from the end of the Civil War until 1968 when state laws enshrined—and the Supreme Court upheld—racial discrimination and segregation in nearly every walk of life.
Marshall’s appointment also opened the door for women and other people of color to sit on the bench. Since he paved the way, there has been at least one person of color on the Supreme Court—although only three Supreme Court justices in history—Marshall, Thomas, and Sonia Sotomayor —have been non-white.
Over the years, Marshall became the face of civil rights litigation. He argued 32 cases before the Supreme Court, winning 29 of them, and participated in hundreds of other cases in lower courts nationwide.
In Murray v. Pearson, Marshall attacked the longstanding doctrine established in the Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling, which allowed states to exclude people from public facilities because of their race, provided they had access to a “separate but equal” facility.
In 1934, Houston joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as its first special counsel with a mission: To help end educational discrimination in the United States. He recruited Marshall, then a young attorney, to undertake the first test case under the strategy.
Charles Hamilton Houston. The first general counsel of NAACP, Charles Hamilton Houston exposed the hollowness of the "separate but equal" doctrine and paved the way for the Supreme Court ruling outlawing school segregation. The legal brilliance used to undercut the "separate but equal" principle and champion other civil rights cases earned Houston ...
In a 1938 Supreme Court case concerning the admission of a Black man to the University of Missouri, Houston argued that it was unconstitutional for the state to bar Blacks from admission since there was no "separate but equal" facility.
The NAACP played a pivotal role in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. One of the organization’s key victories was the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education that outlawed segregation in public schools.
During this era, the NAACP also successfully lobbied for the passage of landmark legislation including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibiting discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, barring racial discrimination in voting.
Also in 1915, the NAACP called for a boycott of Birth of a Nation, a movie that portrayed the Ku Klux Klan in a positive light and perpetrated racist stereotypes of Black people. The NAACP’s campaign was largely unsuccessful, but it helped raise the new group’s public profile.
In 1917, some 10,000 people in New York City participated in an NAACP-organized silent march to protest lynchings and other violence against Black people. The march was one of the first mass demonstrations in America against racial violence.
By 2021, the NAACP had more than 2,200 branches and more than half a million members worldwide.
During the civil rights era in the 1950s and 1960s, the group won major legal victories, and today the NAACP has more than 2,200 branches and some half a million members worldwide.
Today, the NAACP is focused on such issues as inequality in jobs, education, health care and the criminal justice system, as well as protecting voting rights.
The NAACP's most famous case was Brown v. Board of Education, which ended government-enforced racial segregation in the public school system. To this day, white nationalists complain that the ruling violated "state's rights" (beginning a trend in which the interests of states and corporations would be described as rights on par with individual civil liberties).
One of the intellectual forces behind the early NAACP was pioneering sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois, who edited its official magazine, The Crisis, for 25 years. In 1905, before the NAACP was founded, Du Bois co-founded the Niagara Movement, a radical Black civil rights organization that demanded both racial justice and women's suffrage.
In this case, the policy concern was the NAACP's successful first brief in Guinn v. United States, in which the Supreme Court ultimately ruled that states may not grant a "grandfather exemption" allowing whites to bypass voter literacy tests. The cultural concern was a powerful national protest against D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, a racist Hollywood blockbuster that portrayed the Ku Klux Klan as heroic and African Americans as anything but.
2006. The IRS ultimately cleared the NAACP of wrongdoing. Meanwhile, NAACP executive director Bruce Gordon began to promote a more conciliatory tone for the organization - ultimately persuading President Bush to speak at the NAACP convention in 2006.
1909. Concerned about the race riots and the future of Black civil rights in America, a group of 60 activists gathered in New York City on May 31st, 1909 to create the National Negro Committee. A year later, the NNC became the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
In this case, the policy concern was the NAACP's successful first brief in Guinn v. United States, in which the Supreme Court ultimately ruled that states may not grant a "grandfather exemption" allowing whites to bypass voter literacy tests.
Deep South state governments such as that of Alabama also cited the "state's rights" doctrine as a basis for restricting the personal freedom of association guaranteed by the First Amendment, banning the NAACP from legally operating within their jurisdiction.