NAACP Celebrates One Hundredth Birthday

This week we recognize and honor the 100th anniversary of our country’s foremost civil rights group, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. From the beginning, the NAACP recognized that law reform could be a powerful tool in the battle to obtain justice for all Americans, black and white, and that this important effort required concerted efforts by all Americans.  The NAACP, and especially its lawyers, played key roles on a number of fronts, including the integration of the armed forces, federal legislation to proscribe lynching, and the destruction of the heinous Jim Crow regime in the South, capped by the groundbreaking unanimous decision of the United States Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.  Learn more about the group by visiting the NAACP website where a focus on the work of its lawyers is also available.

For those of you in the building, please stop by the display mounted in our atrium and also check out the materials that we have in the Reading Room of the Law Library, on loan from the Thurgood Marshall Law Society of Rhode Island.

People waiting in line outside the Supreme Court to hear arguments on the constitutionality of segregation in public schools. [See Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954)]

Chief Counsel Thurgood Marshall walking down steps of the Supreme Court, flanked by co-counsel George E.C. Hayes (left) and James M. Nabrit.