NAACP's 100th

February 12, 2009

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Profile America for the 12th day of Black History Month. One of the nation’s major civil rights organizations is 100 years old today — the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, much better known as the NAACP. The group has worked to combat lynching and the segregation of public facilities and transportation. One of its most telling moments came with the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education, which desegregated the nation’s schools. The lawyer who argued that case, Thurgood Marshall, became the first African-American Supreme Court justice. When the NAACP was founded, there were 9.8 million African- Americans in the U.S. Today, that number is nearly 41 million. This special edition of Profile America for Black History Month is a public service of the U.S. Census Bureau.

Sources: Chase's Calendar of Events 2009, p. 126
Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, p. 17 (1910)
Census Bureau, Facts for Features, CB09-FF.01
http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/013007.html