About Us
LaTanya Graves • President
+1 319-214-3434
waterloonaacp@gmail.com • contactus@waterloonaacp.org
THE HISTORY OF THE NAACP
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, was established in 1909 and is America’s oldest and largest civil rights organization. It was formed in New York City by white and black activists, partially in response to the ongoing violence against African Americans around the country. In the NAACP’s early decades, the anti-lynching campaign was central to its agenda. 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.
In 1908, a deadly race riot rocked the city of Springfield, the capital of Illinois and the resting place of President Abraham Lincoln. Such eruptions of anti-black violence – particularly lynching – were horrifically commonplace, but the Springfield riot was the final tipping point that led to the creation of the NAACP. Appalled at this rampant violence, a group of white liberals that included Mary White Ovington and Oswald Garrison Villard (both the descendants of famous abolitionists), William English Walling and Dr. Henry Moscowitz issued a call for a meeting to discuss racial justice. Some 60 people, seven of whom were African American (including W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Mary Church Terrell), signed the call, which was released on the centennial of Lincoln’s birth.
Echoing the focus of Du Bois’ Niagara Movement for civil rights, which began in 1905, the NAACP’s aimed to secure for all people the rights guaranteed in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution, which promised an end to slavery, the equal protection of the law, and universal adult male suffrage, respectively. Accordingly, the NAACP’s mission was and is to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of minority group citizens of the United States and eliminate racial prejudice. The NAACP seeks to remove all barriers of racial discrimination throughout democratic processes.
The NAACP established its national office in New York City in 1910 and named a board of directors as well as a president, Moorfield Storey, a white constitutional lawyer and former president of the American Bar Association. Despite a foundational commitment to multiracial membership, Du Bois was the only African American among the organization’s original executives. He was named Director of Publications and research and in 1910 established the official journal of the NAACP; The Crisis.
Learn more about the NAACP at https://naacp.org/nations-premier-civil-rights-organization/
2022-2024 Officers / Executive Committee
Officers:
President - LaTanya Graves
Vice President - Robert Tyson
Secretary - Valerie McDonald
Assist. Secretary - Carole Yates
Treasurer - Jeff Grell
Assist. Treasurer - Dave Kivett
Executive Committee:
Deborah Berry
Vikki Brown
Camarion Campbell
Wilfred Johnson
Chuck Lane
Willie Mae Wright
Carole Yates
